This is the third and final entry in my short series on Michael J. Kramer’s Republic of Rock. In the first entry I reviewed Kramer’s Introduction, looking at his thesis, themes, and assumptions. The second entry took a long look at chapters 1-3, wherein Kramer applies his thesis to happenings and events San Francisco. Michael Kramer has commented on both posts, so I hope this one also proves engaging.
Part two of Republic of Rock moves the story to Vietnam. This is where Kramer’s story turns transnational, demonstrating that rock enabled the transfer of a certain critical and profane spirit of citizenship between Vietnam and San Francisco, the latter being “the reference point for making sense of the war” (p. 135).[1] LD Burnett has already previewed this section for USIH blog readers in writing on its first chapter (four in the book). She had assigned the chapter to students in a survey course for its excellent prose and first-rate use of pictures.[2]
I think the thesis for part two arises in chapter four: “In a war zone where, through music, the countercultural energies of San Francisco could suddenly erupt in the middle of Saigon, a churning, swirling, fragmented war culture emerged. …Rock became a means for feeling one’s way along the jagged edges of US imperial power. Within the jarring bricolage of the war, out of the new tactic of hip militarism, American GIs and others in Vietnam taped together their understandings of citizenship” (p. 141). This passage of argument encompasses everything in chapters four, five, and six. The dominant theme is hip militarism, the term Kramer gives to that strategy invoked by the US military that pushed discipline to the edge in order, paradoxically, to maintain some degree of morale and control within the war zone (pp. 135-36). As Kramer says, the military brought “home to the war” via rock, creating “a surreal collage of startling incongruities” in soldiers, entertainers, and even Vietnamese imitators of “Woodstock Nation”—who were actually fostering a “Woodstock Transnational” (pp. 137, 198, 211).
Chapter 4: A Soundtrack for the Entire Process
Despite a long personal history with rock music, I’m shockingly ignorant of the literature of criticism and analysis before, say, 1995. Since furthermore I’ve never loved, as a genre, the psychedelic music of the Vietnam era, my knowledge of its connections and implications is particularly deficient. Given my weaknesses, it’s no surprise that Kramer’s analysis of Jimi Hendrix—no matter the context—was new to me. So I’m going to dwell on it a bit longer than the other chapters in Part Two.
When Kramer claimed, in accordance with several veterans, that “Hendrix’s music…was the ‘melody of war'”—that it was “‘the fuckin’ soundtrack!”—and that Hendrix’s “All along Watchtower” was “‘the national anthem of America-in-Vietnam and Vietnam-in-America’,” I had no reason to dispute the argument, either before or after reading Kramer’s support (p. 144). Indeed, if rock music was “the soundtrack for the entire process” (the chapter’s title), then Hendrix was THE performer and musician, par excellance, for that album of despair, compromise, and dirty deeds.
Allow me to relay some of Kramer’s analytic narrative about Hendrix’s music—a particularly insightful portion where Paul Gilroy is brought into a passage that brings together several themes of the book:
“Machine Gun” took the sound and message of “All Along the Watchtower” to an extreme level: it was a kind of feeling-experiment, an uncertain inquiry into the meaning of war. It explored the power of an American GI and the terrible dehumanization of technological warfare. Because of this, musical and cultural theorists have often returned to both of these songs to make sense of Hendrix’s role as a kind of public intellectual for the counterculture: a rock star with a serious point and former GI who became a hippie. As cultural theorists Paul Gilroy argues, “we should always remember that Hendrix was a soldier and think of him as an ex-paratrooper who became a hippie in an act of profound and complete treason.” While this might not have been the case literally….Gilroy’s point is an important one: Hendrix drew upon militaristic references and sounds to evoke a psychedelically informed dream of peace. (p. 146)
And here’s another striking passage from Kramer’s analysis of Hendrix:
Hendrix’s music touched questions of democratic citizenship at another level as well: through the guitarist’s complex relationship to race. As a person of mixed ethnic background who was usually identified as African-American, Hendrix grappled with his relationship to the black nationalist turn in the civil rights movement during the late 1960s. At times, he identified with the turn away form an inclusive vision of American citizenship toward black separatism; in other moments, he developed a pluralistic theory of global social belonging in what he called the “electric sky church.” …To know about and like Jimi Hendrix was a means both of asserting blackness in Vietnam and connecting across racial affiliations. (p. 149)
And all of Hendrix’s music was approved on the official radio channels of the Armed Forces Vietnam Network (AFVN). The official network of hip militarism allowed Hendrix’s struggle with the war to permeate the soundscape of the soldiers themselves.
The rest of the chapter is not to be missed. Therein the so-called “bullshit band” is given attention. The bullshit band was not a rock act, but rather an unmonitored radio wavelength where wannabe soldier deejay’s spun a rock-laced version of their Vietnam—their longings, nightmares, and narrative opinions. Or, in Kramer’s words, it was “a sonic space for GIs to probe the war’s complex milieu of angst and pleasure, anxiety and camaraderie.” On the bullshit band soldiers “turned the technological infrastructure of the US war machine’s communications systems against the orderly waging of the war itself” (p. 152). The music of these bands was of course used for partying, but it also allowed for “a deepening consciousness of the war’s absurdities and fundamental injustices” (p. 154).
Near the end of the chapter Kramer takes a long look at a particular, short-lived underground radio program (it lasted only three weeks during January 1971) called “Radio First Termer.” Dave DeLay, Jr., working under the “Dave Rabbit” moniker, hosted the program that broadcast on “naughty frequency” of 69 FM (pp. 155-156). Large claims about listenership and effects are avoided. Rather, Kramer uses Dave Rabbit’s program as a kind of case study—albeit more sophisticated and technologically advanced—for the types of pirate broadcasts given on the bullshit band. With those pirate broadcasts, Radio First Termer undercut the official hip militarism of AFVN “with unauthorized messages and moods” (p. 157). The program was “raunchier” and “starker” than AFVN programs, often “using humor rather than sincerity” to relay Rabbit’s war mood (pp. 159, 161).
When you read this chapter, it’s easy to see why LD Burnett chose it for one of the few narratives she provided students in a syllabus filled with primary sources. The chapter is representative of a historian taking super “fun” material and amping its intellectuality—incorporating theory and historiographic trends to craft a narrative that captures the soldiers’ sensibility. I often screened Band of Brothers in my US survey courses for this purpose. But I might go this direction the next time I teach that course.
Chapter 5: Welcome to Entertainment Vietnam!
In this part of the book Kramer covers the hip militarism of the Command Military Touring Shows (CMTS). Those shows “organized GIs into music and theater groups and sent them out into the field on temporary duty to raise the spirits of fellow troops” (p. 167). As with the prior chapter, this one relays a great many representative images: pictures, posters, and other handbills from a CMTS scrapbook. The CMTS performances occurred in places where USO programs (the USO was a private, nonprofit organization) were denied access (p. 170). The CMTS was representatives of a countercultural ethos in that it “emphasized countercultural values of vernacular, do-it-yourself musical creation”—of “self-generated GI entertainment when it came to rock music” (p. 173-174).
Kramer’s argument in this chapter is that CMTS “was indicative of a larger turn in the military toward hip militarism at the end of the 1960s” (p. 174). “Hip militarism,” he continues, “marked the beginning of a story of highway salutes and flipped birds, an ethos of democratic anger and desperation rife with tensions and contradictions” (p. 176).
As with the prior chapter, the big point of this chapter—and this part of the book—is this: “Rock music was a kind of sonic measuring stick in Vietnam, a ruler by which Vietnam veterans calibrated their senses of the war zone and its relationship to the fast-changing culture of life ‘back in the world'” (p. 191). And, for the book generally, Kramer continues that “rock gave GIs access to the new kind of civilian life emerging in the domestic counterculture.” In a word, we’ve returned to citizenship (p. 192).
Chapter 6: A Little Peace Message, Like Straight From Saigon
Here Kramer gives us a biography of a band, CBC (short for Con Bà Cu, Vietnamese for “Mother’s Children”). They are a psychedelic rock cover band that began in the early sixties and, apparently, was still performing, in the United States, until the early 2000s. YouTube videos are available—even excerpts from a performance given just two years ago, embedded in a FOX newscast about a reunion with Vietnam veterans! Watching the videos made me feel like I was in a Quintin Tarantino film. (I don’t know what that says about me.)
The argument in this chapter is as follows:
The music…gave the members of CBC…access to what was becoming, by the end of the 1960s, a global counterculture. Performing [in Vietnam] for a mixed audience of Americans, nationals from other countries, and young Vietnamese, CBC reproduced rock’s aesthetics of hedonistic, individualistic personal expression. …The members of CBC combined Western culture with their own heritage to fashion something new and hybridized. …They were drawn to the countercultural ideals of togetherness and fellowship that they heard in rock. These values offered a way both to join the cosmopolitan modernity of the counterculture as individuals and, at the same time, to reaffirm the primary Vietnamese commitment to family as the building block of society. …It makes…sense to think of CBC as joining…the Woodstock Transnational. (pp. 195-198).
This passage gives you access to the major themes of the chapter: the global counterculture, reworking identity for Vietnamese youth (i.e. nhac tre), hybridized Western consumer culture, family, and the dream of peace. The passage above also shows that the importation of psychedelic sixties rock coincided with the importation of its paradoxes and contradictions—namely, the intense tension between personal expression and community.
Performing with Woodstock intensity, Kramer argues that CBC’s music helped “dull the pain and anxiety of living a war zone” while also providing “an atmosphere of connection in which the ‘one solid beat’ generated a proliferation of critical questions and ideas” (pp. 206-207). Every performance of CBC put on display the contradiction of those days: American imperialism was both the source of Vietnam’s misery and the homeland for a counterculture that inspired a dream of peace in Vietnamese youth—that inspired CBC’s “vision of a universal human family” (pp. 207, 210).
As noted above, CBC’s story eventually moved to America. As refugees the U.S. government assisted the family, in 1975, with resettlement that began in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Economic subsistence came from what they did best, performing music. The band toured until the mid 1980s, eventually settling permanently in Houston, where they remain today (pp. 215-218). Kramer’s knowledge of these events and the Vietnam period for the band, is first-hand. He interviewed CBC members by phone and in person from 2010 through 2011. As is the case in earlier chapters, the pictures of CBC put Kramer’s story on full display.
Final Reflections: The Epilogue and Beyond
In the Epilogue, Kramer briefly shows us a Woodstock Transnational that moved chronologically and geographically beyond Vietnam and San Francisco. He finds countercultural, pre-political CBC type bands in the former Czechoslavakia, Brazil, Mexico, Mali, and the former Soviet Union. In each instance, Kramer argues, “the logics of hip capitalism and militarism meant that even as rock brought civic energies of engagement to people around the world, it always did so in relation to the spread of American global hegemony” (p. 220). Soft power indeed.
Kramer does remind the reader of the downsides of this spread—of Thomas Frank’s “conquest of cool” as well as Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s “rebel sell,” both being the nefarious process in which “people purchased the feeling of not being sold a bill of goods and thus were sold a bill of goods.” As such “the puzzles of individual liberation and collective belonging…were never ultimately realized in this Woodstock Transnational” (p. 222). Even so, rock nevertheless resisted the “total domination” of Frank’s purported conquest. America’s “hegemonic control” was by no means perfected through psychedelic rock and the counterculture. So while rock could be a “compromised,” pre-packaged cultural form, the very human ability to refashion and remake could undermine other nefarious processes of capitalist consumption (p. 223).
It is here that Kramer delivers a poignant, optimistic observation to Frank and like-minded thinkers: “Consumer experiences that traded on heightened critical awareness could not be vacuum-sealed from actual critical awareness” (p. 223).
Although I offered certain critical observations of Kramer’s work in recounting part one of his story, I found it difficult, in part two, to make more of those criticisms or find new problems in the narrative. I see three reasons for this.
First, once the reader accepts Kramer’s powerful argument about the interplay of citizenship, the counterculture, and hip capitalism in part one, his extensions to Vietnam via hip militarism are almost irresistible. Kramer does not fail to note the contradictions and ironies of those connections, whether real or attempted. Because of this one’s confidence in his themes remains high despite the distance of Vietnam. Also, Kramer’s story in part two was new to me. My prior reading on the soldiers’ experience in Vietnam has been light. I didn’t feel that my multiple viewings of films like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket qualified me to critique Kramer’s arguments about the deeper elements of the counterculture and consumer culture in Vietnam.
Second, my criticisms were also limited by the larger fact that I wanted to underscore Kramer’s story—to relay its richness here. I usually try to balance criticism and summary, which is why my reviews of books are long.[3] But here I wanted to reword and therefore own Kramer’s story. I’m not teaching right now, but I plan on mimicking LD Burnett by incorporating parts of Republic of Rock in my future teaching endeavors. At the very least, this book will be on my “other readings” list for US survey book reviews.
Third, and I noted this at the outset, Michael Kramer is a friend. If I seriously had seen that I wouldn’t enjoy or appreciate his book, I most definitely would not have given it time here. I appreciate your indulgence on this point. In relation to Michael’s observation above, at USIH we trade on “heightened critical awareness,” so I’m sure this relatively positive review isn’t vacuum-sealed from the same. – TL
—————————————————-
Notes
[1] Numerous cautionary pieces have been offered on transnational history as a trend in field. I composed one (via a book review), but others exist.
[2] LD needs to write a post for us on how that worked out!
[3] For instance, my seven-part reviewof Jennifer Ratner Rosenhagen’s American Nietzsche.
4 Thoughts on this Post
S-USIH Comment Policy
We ask that those who participate in the discussions generated in the Comments section do so with the same decorum as they would in any other academic setting or context. Since the USIH bloggers write under our real names, we would prefer that our commenters also identify themselves by their real name. As our primary goal is to stimulate and engage in fruitful and productive discussion, ad hominem attacks (personal or professional), unnecessary insults, and/or mean-spiritedness have no place in the USIH Blog’s Comments section. Therefore, we reserve the right to remove any comments that contain any of the above and/or are not intended to further the discussion of the topic of the post. We welcome suggestions for corrections to any of our posts. As the official blog of the Society of US Intellectual History, we hope to foster a diverse community of scholars and readers who engage with one another in discussions of US intellectual history, broadly understood.
Tim —
Thanks again for your close and generous reading of The Republic of Rock. I am honored. And I do welcome critiques of the book (and as with all books, there are many critiques to be made of this one, I am sure of it).
Three thoughts here: the first particular to Vietnam, the second about genre (something that pop music scholars and literary scholars think a lot about; is there a place for more thinking about genre in intellectual history?), and the final thought is a more broad methodological musing about the study of “serious fun” in both intellectual and cultural history.
First, rock in Vietnam: to clarify, it was indeed a “soundtrack for the entire process” of the war, as veteran (and rock critic and political journalist) Lee Ballinger put it, but not because rock was the only music circulating through the war zone. Rock arrived as part of a jumble of genres, sounds, and styles. It was a “soundtrack for the entire process” because as a *niche* genre in Vietnam it both symbolized and enacted the deeper logics of hip militarism that emerged in the US military, particularly after 1968. So I should emphasize that rock was far from the *only* musical sound in the Vietnam War. It was certainly there, present and less censored than a film such as Good Morning Vietnam! would suggest. It became increasingly important to young GIs (and therefore to the military brass trying to keep their morale intact by importing the “latest mod sounds” from the home front to the theater of war). But it wasn’t as if everyone was listening to rock. Country, soul, easy listening, and more…they all made it to Vietnam.
You can see this in the surveys that the Armed Forces Radio Vietnam conducted in the late 60s and early 70s. “Acid rock,” as the military called it, was very much understood as a niche genre appealing to a certain type of soldier or, at times, to a cross-section of soldiers (young white GIs and young African-American GIs for instance). The emergence of and sensitivity to rock *as* a niche market both at home and abroad is key to situating rock within the larger transformations of mass culture away from Lizabeth Cohen’s “Consumers’ Republic” to Tom Frank’s “Conquest of Cool.” That this was occurring on the home front *and* within the apparatus of the military perhaps goes to show just how closely integrated the “military-industrial” complex of the Cold War was at the managerial and cultural levels (not to mention politically and economically). It wasn’t necessarily a power elite or some cabal directly linking together the new ways of selling rebellion domestically with the effort to raise morale through countercultural styles in Vietnam. Rather, the logics of consumerism and militarism were (and still are) fascinatingly intertwined in the workings of American empire. Just as World War II and the “consumers republic” have an important relation to each other, so too Vietnam and the “conquest of cool.”
This points to a bigger issue about music genres in the late 1960s, which is that rock was quite unstable as a sonic form during this period. It bled into and out of soul, country, folk, classical, avant-garde, pop, even the beginnings of what we now call “world” music. I think this causes quite a bit of interpretive trouble now that rock has receded from its strange equivalency to pop (80 percent of pop music marketed as “rock” by 1970 according to rock music historians) to being much more of a narrow sound and style (distorted electric guitar power chords, soaring Springsteen-ian authenticity, etc.) in the aftermath of hip-hop. We need to be historically-minded about how we think about genre when it comes to popular music. The same might be said of genre in general (I’ve been reading Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism lately, and she argues for taking genre far more seriously as a powerful shaper of culture and politics).
Finally, one of the most difficult aspects of grappling with rock and the sixties counterculture is, as you suggest, just how challenging it can be to take the “fun” of leisure culture seriously—to treat it as, in both senses of the phrase, “serious fun.” My hope is that intellectual historians are willing to engage deeply with the notion that the sixties counterculture was about more than just “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.” Or, better and even more challengingly said, that “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” are as much a part of intellectual history as anything else, that as they intersected with issues of citizenship (including issues of race, class, gender, nation, globalization, and more) sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll were as intellectually complex and worthy of study as more traditional arenas of thinking, policy-making, and the like. Cultural studies scholars have been far more willing to consider the blurred lines between pleasure and power. Can intellectual history benefit from more engagement with this kind of work?
In terms of my book, saying that we need to take the “serious fun” of the sixties counterculture and its rock music more seriously is not to argue that the ideas and practices of the counterculture were somehow the magic answer to problems of democratic culture and politics in the US and the world. I am no nostalgist for the counterculture. I am not a believer that “rock changed the world.” The failures of the counterculture and rock’s atmosphere of inquiry were there from the start, and many at the time knew this all too well. As Ken Kesey of the Merry Pranksters chanted at the end of Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, “We blew it!” So I do not join hands and dance with the most ardent supporters of the counterculture or the biggest fans of rock, who have argued that it was somehow an alternative, or an opposition to, all the problems of mass consumerism and US militarism that continue to plague the nation and the globe. But neither do I want to sing along with the shrill howls of those on both right and left who have made the counterculture and rock the cause of all that has gone wrong with the US in recent decades.
What’s most fascinating is precisely how the sixties counterculture, and especially rock music during that time, evade straightforward or dichotomized arguments about these and other claims, whether they be about the relationship between experience and ideology, between sensation, perception, and knowledge, between structure and agency, between the local and the global, between cooptation and rebellion, and even between such basic (yet confounding) historical issues as cause and effect and the assumptions that guide our claims about what happened and why it matters historically.
Paying attention to what actually happened “on the ground” and “in the air,” in the minds and bodies and souls of participants and the sound waves that flowed from and through them, that’s the part that has often (not always, but often) been missing from studies of the counterculture. Would it also be true to say that it has also been missing from the broader framework for researching and writing intellectual history? In other words, thinking seriously about “serious fun,” is as much a topic for intellectual history as it is for cultural study?
At least for me in writing this book, locating rock in powerfully shifting frameworks of consumer and military logics of control (through, paradoxically, the seeming liberation from control), and then listening carefully to how people themselves then listened and responded to rock in these contexts, this has been the underlying methodology. Might it serve well in continuing to extend the work of both cultural and intellectual history in tandem? I do not think I am the first to say that this might be so, or try to put it into practice in a historical study. Far from it. But my hope is that The Republic of Rock adds another voice to the anthemic chorus, and that maybe, just maybe, it provides one more instrument for any bandmates who might be trying to think about thinking in the broadest of ways.
— Michael
Hi again Michael,
I think your observations on genre are very pertinent, especially when it comes to understanding how aesthetic forms change historically (a gripe I often have with some work in intellectual and cultural history is precisely that it treats such forms as mere vessels for ideas, without taking into consideration the relevance of how the specificity of genre is constructed). Granted, this approach has its dangers, especially if it devolves into a form vs. content dichotomy. I also completely agree with what you say about pleasure and power, which also speaks to approaching affect (or aesthetics, thought it in its broader, pre-modern sense, a la Benjamin or Ranciere, as a complex of sensations) and politics. This goes back to our discussion on seizures of feeling, and how one could think of political seizures, or political shocks, in relation to feeling. You mentioned narcissism and Lasch, how could his ideas complement a historical approach to feelings, specially in regards to the rock counterculture? Last but not least, did you come up with any interesting connections between said counterculture and the emerging Latino counterpublic? And what are you working on now?
Cheers,
Kahlil
Great points, Michael. And I’m glad you took this opportunity to remind people that, even though your book points out some positives of sixties rock and its counterculture, that you’re neither a nostalgist nor cheerleader for either. Some of their ends were high-minded and admirable, and that too deserves to become part of the public memory.
And I do think that “thinking seriously about serious fun” is still an issue for some—though less and less as formerly involved Baby Boomers move out of the academy. It’s hard for some of the reactionaries to look past the superficial—to temporarily suspend disbelief (at least) in the rhetoric of enthusiasts and performers from the era. But reader/listener response studies, such as yours and Ratner-Rosenhagen’s (*American Nietzsche*)—and hopefully mine in relation to the great books idea—will convince readers to take seriously the experiences of consumer/readers/participants (i.e. their hopes, dreams, and goals). – TL
Kahlil,
Thanks for your engagement with the book and asking what are to me very rich questions about intellectual life and culture in the sixties counterculture moment. I’ve had to think them over quite a bit.
I’ve actually just been finishing up an essay on Lasch for The Point magazine, due out in the fall issue. As I am sure you know, Lasch was no fan of the counterculture in its 1960s form. But contrary to the typical use of him to dismiss the sixties New Left, whether political and cultural, I think his writing on narcissism (and even more so his writing a bit earlier, collected in Agony of the American Left and World of Nations) points to the continued relevance of the counterculture as, in part (emphasis on not entirely, but partially) a space where people were grappling with the same questions he confronted. In particular, counterculturalists were in their own way interested in what would be the basis of civic virtue in an increasingly technocratic and managerial mode of capitalism, one that encouraged consumers to obsess over self distinction even as this very obsession, commodified, seemed to undermine the basis for any chance to fulfill the desire to “achieve selfhood”?
I know it sounds funny to say that the counterculture was an atmosphere in which people were interested in a question as complex and vexing as this. Didn’t they all just want to “blow their minds” and enjoy “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.” Didn’t all you need was love? Yes, glib solutions were very much a part of the countercultural milieu. But in the evidence I examined for The Republic of Rock, the pleasures and curiosities rock enlivened kept leading back to more “serious” questions of democratic life too. I was as surprised by evidence of this as anyone! That among the hedonistic activities there was an engagement with questions of democratic freedom and belonging cuts against typical portrayals of the counterculture, whether celebratory or dismissive.
Did counterculturalists adopt the kind of populism that Lasch himself came to embrace? No. Scholars such as the late Dominick Cavallo made what are to me convincing connections between rock and work (no wonder everyone started dressing like 19th century farmers!), but overall the music was a way to raise questions, not to work them out in as thorough and rigorous a way as Lasch did.
Then again, people responding to rock did pursue many of the questions he posed about modern life. What could citizenship be in the modern world? That was the key intersection. My argument is that the story of rock and citizenship in San Francisco and Vietnam asks us to look and listen at how rock sparked this search for a different relationship between autonomy and commodified faux-autonomy within the wavelengths and logics of hip capitalism and hip militarism. It’s a reminder that popular culture and pleasure and seemingly “unintellectual” activities have their own mechanisms and modes of thoughtfulness. Thought-full-ness.
As to your final question, I did not see that much intersection between the counterculture and a Latino/a counterpublic except in the protests over the Wild West Festival, where the hippie opposition to the giant free rock concert planned for Golden Gate Park in summer of 1969 intersected with activism over Los Siete de la Raza controversy. Hmm, as for music, I think there was some overlap though I am no expert on this (great idea for an article). We know that bands such as Santana cut across various ethnic, musical, class divides when they crossed over to rock audiences under the quasi-management of Latin Music fan promoter Bill Graham. It might be worth digging deeper into the details of how someone such as Carlos Santana moved between life at Mission High School and going to the Fillmore and Fillmore West. The counterculture in SF made the lines between ethnic groups a bit more permeable, I suspect. This built upon the distinctive qualities of the Bay Area I would imagine. For instance, the bar that Jerry Garcia’s mother ran close to the SF docks was by all accounts full of all different kinds of people. None of this counterpublic mixing should be romanticized, to be sure. But it was perhaps there. It’s a great question. I would love to hear you riff more on the question of this intersection (or lack of it). One last thought: if we open up the story to Mexican counterculture, then I would say I learned an enormous amount from Eric Zolov’s book Refried Elvis. That presents questions of counterpublics and rock in a whole other cross-border context.
Thanks again for your comments!
Michael