Unlikely Amigos: Joe Ely, the Beat Poet & a British Diplomat's Son

I was listening to eTown, a live music & consciousness-raising program from Boulder (CO), on public radio last Saturday night when I learned something new about my favorite rock group.  It's the story of an unlikely collaboration between some gritty Brits & an odd couple of Americans.  I'm pleased to share it with you, dear readers, if only via blogpost. 

The special guest musician on last week's eTown was Joe Ely (pronounced "EE-lee"), a roots-rocker raised in west Texas (born 1947).  A few years ago I saw Ely perform, along with his old folk-country pals Jimmie Dale Gilmore & Butch Hancock, at Luther's Blues in Madison (WI) during a Flatlanders reunion tour.  In the late '80s, I had the pleasure of watching Ely play guitar & sing with his own band on two occasions, at hip venues in New Orleans (Tipitina's - Happy Mardi Gras, y'all) & Boston (The Rathskeller, I think, near Kenmore Square).  

Serendipitously, in March 1990, I caught Ely playing a solo acoustic gig at a bar in downtown Seattle.  After the show I met the friendly Texan outside, got his autograph & suggested that he consider booking a lucrative tour of Japan (I was headed to Tokyo to teach conversational English that April).  Joe Ely always puts on an entrancing show, mixing a honky-tonk sensibility with the rockabilly attitude of Buddy Holly, the musical pioneer from Lubbock (Joe's hometown).  

Check out Ely's early live albums, Musta Notta Gotta Lotta (1981) & Live at Liberty Lunch (1990), for the sound of his stagecraft & samples of his songwriting prowess.  Dig if you will the opening lyric of Joe's "Honky Tonk Masquerade" (1977) , a boozy masterpiece:  "You sure look fine tonight / in the beer sign light."  Or try this poetic opener from "Letter to Laredo" (1995):  "As I was rolling across the Mississippi / I stopped there and I cried / No use for a man to keep a mighty river / All dammed up inside."  Joe's also a member of the Tex-Mex side-project Los Super Seven, along with David Hidalgo (Los Lobos) & Freddy Fender ("Wasted Days and Wasted Nights").

Anyway, eTown host Nick Forster was interviewing him when Ely mentioned that his Nashville-produced records of the late '70s sold much better in the UK than they did in the USA.  Joe was touring England in 1978 when three guys crashed through the club's backdoor after a show in London.  It turned out to be some local fans named Mick Jones, Paul Simonon & Joe Strummer (nom de punk of John Mellor, a diplomat's son), a/k/a The Clash - minus a drummer.  The musicians hit it off so well that Joe Ely & the Clash ended up touring Texas & Mexico together not long afterwards.

Now here's the cool thing I did not know:  Ely said that's him doing the background vocals in Spanish on "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" - the first hit single from the Clash's Combat Rock (1982).  On that same album, the last songwriting & recording collaboration between Jones & Strummer, you can also hear Allen Ginsberg's impressive baritone.  That's the legendary Beat poet interjecting verses (on Rimbaud, the Paris Commune, addicts of metropolis, death squad Salvador, etc.) alongside Strummer's plaintive choruses on "Ghetto Defendant."  

Over 30 years later, Joe Ely remains as lively as his slinky "Cool Rockin' Loretta" down in Austin, Texas.  Clash fanatics still miss Joe Strummer, who died of a freak heart attack in London at age 50 just before Christmas 2002, when he moonlighted by presenting a BBC Radio world-music program.  Sadly, Strummer passed not long after he'd made two groovy albums with his comeback band, the Mescaleros; and he had plans to record with Ely & his band.  As for the prophet-bearded, om-chanting Allen Ginsberg, cancer dragged his spirit into the mystical realm of the dead in 1997 at age 70.  

In their weird transatlantic collaboration, Ely & Ginsberg & the Clash rocked the Casbah of culture by cross-pollinating poetry, languages & music.  

Pacifist Martyrs & Musical Poets: Sister Megan's Certainty, Patti Smith's Doubt

I've often wondered why so few artists use their talents to fight social injustice.  Recently I read something that sheds a ray of light on the issue.  Early in her moving memoir Just Kids (NY:  HarperCollins, 2010), the poet-musician & occasional activist Patti Smith is writing about a time in 1968, when she was 21 years old.  Dirt poor but glad to be living in Brooklyn with her soulmate, fellow ex-Catholic artist Robert Mapplethorpe, Smith expresses doubts about her vocation.

"In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art.  For whom?  Are we animating God?  Are we talking to ourselves?  And what was the ultimate goal?  To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?  I craved honesty, yet found dishonesty in myself.  Why commit to art?  For self-realization, or for itself?  It seemed indulgent to add to the glut unless one offered illumination. [ . . . ]  I could not identify with political movements.  In trying to join them I felt overwhelmed by yet another form of bureaucracy.  I wondered if anything I did mattered," she modestly admits.

Patti Smith, of course, carried on drawing & writing despite those doubts.  Eventually she composed songs & made illuminating records that helped other aspiring artists - especially misfit musicians - express themselves.  R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, for example, named Smith's 1975 debut album Horses a key influence on his gestation as a songwriter.  She came to be known as the Godmother of Punk.

During the restless struggles of her youth, Smith learned that there's a price to pay for being an imaginative person who challenges social norms.  Yet she could take comfort in knowing that lasting art raises important existential questions - even if making such art fails to answer the artist's economic needs.  Creative public protestors often face income deficiency, not to mention legal problems.  

Perhaps that's why so few citizens, artists or otherwise, have the guts to risk their freedom by openly addressing controversial issues.  Like intentionally funny politicians, courageous rebels with a cause are rare, but they do exist.  One of them appeared in a Knoxville, Tennessee, courtroom last Tuesday (February 18th):  an 84-year-old pacifist named Sister Megan Rice was sentenced to three years in federal prison for engaging in an act of civil disobedience.  

What was this elderly nun's specific crime?  Aided by a pair of fellow anti-war activists, Rice cut through three fences at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge (TN) in July 2012.  She & her accomplices (one of them a Vietnam vet) then defaced a bunker holding bomb-grade uranium by hanging protest banners, putting up crime-scene tape & hammering off a symbolic chunk of the $548-million fortress.  A devoted advocate for peace, Sister Megan expressed no remorse for her actions at the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility.  

In fact, during her final statement to US District Judge Amul Thapar, Rice rather cryptically requested a life sentence.  (The federal sentencing guidelines suggested six years in her case.)  "Please have no leniency with me," the bespectacled, white-haired felon said.  "To remain in prison for the rest of my life would be the greatest gift you could give me."  

Rice took her religious vows at age 18, so she'd spent her entire adult life as a member of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus.  The mature Rice explained her 2012 protest in surprisingly practical terms.  The US government was spending too much on the military & its weaponry, she told the court.  She also cited concern for the well-being of young people, from the Americas to Afghanistan:  "This is the next generation and it is for these people that we are willing to give our lives."  Her co-conspirators, Greg Boertje-Obed & Michael Walli, credited their religious faith for the "miraculous" break-in at the deadly weapons depot.  

"I was acting upon my God-given obligations as a follower of Jesus Christ," Walli told the judge, adding that he'd gladly do it again.  All three activists agreed that God was using them to raise awareness about the USA's stockpile of nuclear weapons.  Since the Cold War fizzled out circa 1992, people don't fret much about the prospect of nuclear war.  The vast, globally dispersed arsenal of hydrogen bombs have almost come to seem like a harmless abstraction.  The looming catastrophe that troubles most thinking people nowadays is human-generated climate change, which is precipitating ever more obvious eco-disasters.  

Skeptical about whether the protestors had caused any real harm, Judge Thapar nevertheless washed his hands of the affair, asserting that he had to deter other activists by sentencing Rice to three years & her co-defendants to over five years in prison.  The other antagonist in that Knoxville theater of the absurd, Assistant US Attorney Jeff Theodore, justified his zealous prosecution on flimsy grounds.  He told the court (presumably with a straight face) that, by committing a clever act of nonviolent resistance to the masters of war, the defendants had destroyed the "mystique" (i.e. false claims of security?) ascribed to this "Fort Knox of uranium."   

Despite their harsh treatment by the US Department of (irony alert:) Justice, the Knoxville Three should count their blessings.  After all, President Obama's remote-trigger-happy anti-terrorist enforcers refrained from sending an armed drone aircraft to pre-emptively kill them.  These naive believers had the gall to exercise their free-speech rights by staging a provocative demonstration on US government property.  Their de facto crime, it seems to me, was the un-American activity of mocking militarism by exposing the lie of so-called national security.  I guess Fort Knox ain't what it used to be, eh, Uncle Sam?  

This whole saga of the pacifist sister and her lay brothers strikes me as an allegory of cruel persecution worthy of Orwell or Kafka.  True martyrs probably don't expect justice, certainly not in a tragically flawed society like ours.  And compassion fatigue may be a natural response to the daily media parade of senseless violence that plagues contemporary civilization.  But that brave gentle trio - Rice, Walli & Boertje-Obed - deserved better treatment from our (nominally) democratic federal government, one based on Enlightenment ideas of individual freedom & responsibility.  

When thinking about the Knoxville Three, I'm reminded of the beatitudes:  Blessed are the peacemakers.  Mere incarceration cannot break their spirits.  Even so, this case cries out for a presidential pardon.  Cynics might remonstrate that it's not much of a sacrifice for a senior citizen, one who's already reached her life expectancy, to spend her remaining days on Earth as a political prisoner.  Anyway, I suspect that Sister Megan, who surely proved her bona fides as a wise moral force, had good reason for requesting a life term.  

Lesson learned?  Rice reportedly taught science for 40 years as a Catholic missionary serving the poor in western Africa.  Now she's been given the chance to educate her fellow Americans, including the miserable masses who (like her) live behind razor-wire-crowned walls, if only by serving as an example of human dignity.  Long live the Knoxville Nun!  Patti Smith should write a song about her.

This Face for Lease: Putin's Olympics & Some New Political Ad Platforms

I've been limiting my exposure to NBC's saturation coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics.  It's not that I don't appreciate sports played on snow & ice.  As a matter of fact, I'm captivated by the traditional Nordic facsimile of flight called ski jumping.  I applaud the International Olympic Committee (IOC), somewhat sarcastically, for finally letting women compete in that daredevil event.  

Rather, my reluctance to watch the Sochi games - as with the 2008 Beijing Olympiad - stems from the inconvenient truth that they serve as a vast advertising platform for a loathsome tyrannical regime.  Sadly, every flash of the IOC's interlocking-rings logo now reminds me of the ambitious bully who brought the winter games to subtropical Sochi, Russian President Vladimir Putin.  

Conniving with his plutocratic cronies, Putin spent billions of stolen rubles for this chance to strut his ugly ego on a global stage.  Nevertheless, I have witnessed a few amusing moments amidst all the bullshit extolling the Olympian ideal.  Last weekend, for example, I caught that baldpate Putin's creepy deadpan perma-scowl polluting my TV screen.  

As NBC's cameras lingered on his soulless Mussolini-like visage, I noticed no less than four brand logos sewn onto Putin's turtleneck top & tight fleece jacket.  That's about as many product placements as the money-grubbing IOC now permits the athletes to wear.  I know that Vlad the Huckster fancies himself a supreme sportsman, but surely this ad ploy is taking things too far.  

After a shudder of revulsion at the Russian host's display of personal commercialism, I realized the brilliance of the idea.  What a triumph of economic opportunism!  It takes an ex-KGB comrade to dream up such an outrageous advertising scheme.  Putin's self-sponsorship at Sochi makes American politicians seem like a bunch of pikers when it comes to generating wealth.  

Upon further reflection, I had a brainstorm of my own:  if properly adapted, what a breakthrough in American political fundraising this could become.  Before dismissing Putin's promotional innovation as a gimmick befitting only undemocratic leaders, consider the possibilities for the USA's money-driven two-party system.  

The U.S. Senate could sell the naming rights to its legislative chamber.  The "Citibank Senate" has a nice alliterative ring to it.  Our cash-strapped House of Representatives could offer a Seattle-based coffee company a publicity coup simply by declaring the capitol a Starbucks-only, foreign-tea-free zone - for a generous fee, of course.  

For his part, our Commander-in-Chief could reduce the federal deficit by taking bids on a new moniker for the Pentagon.  Even the "Boeing Building" might seem appropriate now that the 9/11 attacks are receding from national memory.  While we're at it, how about replacing that lame official name "White House" with the cooler "Apple iPad"?  It appeals more to the digital generation, assuming that today's dumbed-down young folks get the joke - "pad" being an old hipster term for residence, you see.  

From the Great Free-market Beyond, the ghosts of Steve Jobs & Ronald Reagan gaze upon our work & beam.  Freedom never comes at no cost & neither should the Olympics.  Once upon a time Barack Obama raised millions of campaign dollars by embodying the generic Audacity of Hope.  More in step with the march of hyper-capitalism, President-for-life Putin shamelessly embodies the Effrontery of Exploitation.  By adorning his sporty outfit with various corporate logos while being photographed at an Olympic venue, Putin even out-hustled that notoriously crafty dictator of yore, Adolf Hitler.  

The Führer, after all, merely used the 1936 Berlin Olympics to promote his own political brand.  Worse yet, it was legally a nonprofit brand.  Hitler's henchmen covered the German capital in patriotic red-white-black bunting & an omnipresent swarm of swastikas, the (IOC-approved) Nazi logo.  Then a modest African-American athlete appeared & singlehandedly spoiled the Nazis' coming-out party.  Amazingly, Jesse Owens exposed Joseph Goebbels's racist Aryan-superiority propaganda as nonsense by simply running faster & jumping farther than anyone else.  

Let's hope that the homophobic dissident-oppressor Putin gets a similar comeuppance on his home turf.  I'd love to see an international alliance of ice dancers & hockey players use their muscular bodies to form a giant human protest sign in the Fisht Olympic Stadium during the closing ceremony at Sochi:  "PUSSY RIOT LIVES!"  

It's a rare photo-op for human rights.  Why not use it to display the humane, cooperative spirit that the modern Olympic games are supposed to represent?   If the IOC says a Tongan luge-slider can compete as "Bruno Banani" (the name of his German-underwear sponsor), then maybe we really shall overcome someday.  At least until the next commercial.

[For Kimman Harmon, former hockey player, downhill skier extraordinaire & far-out lesbian, of Boulder, CO (USA).]

"Spies of Mississippi" - Beyond the Beatles in 1964

You might not know it if you're only paying attention to mainstream media this week, but 2014 is not merely the 50th anniversary of the  Beatles' ballyhooed arrival in America.  The beloved Fab Four may have met boxer Cassius Clay (soon to become Muhammad Ali) for publicity purposes in Miami in February 1964, but there was a whole lot more going on in the segregated South at the time.

This year also marks the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, when hundreds of brave college students (mostly white Northerners) - as well as a cadre of legal & medical support staff - traveled to bloody Mississippi to register black voters, thereby hastening the demise of Jim Crow.  As part of its Independent Lens series, PBS is broadcasting Dawn Porter's documentary "Spies of Mississippi" on Monday, February 10.  Check your local listings & set your DVRs.

Based on journalist Rick Bowers's book "Spies of Mississippi:  The True Story of the Spy Network That Tried to Destroy the Civil Rights Movement" (2010), the new film details efforts by that benighted state's so-called Sovereignty Commission (& its local White Citizens Councils) to suppress democracy.  They tried terrorizing anyone who dared to challenge the disenfranchisement of African-Americans - or any other manifestation of Mississippi's strict racist system of segregation & subordination.  

State-sponsored counter-measures included infiltrating the NAACP, SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which had spearheaded the Freedom Summer project) & other civil-rights groups with both "Negro"  & white informants.  Peaceful activists were being murdered with impunity in Mississippi while LBJ & RFK dragged their feet.  Public pressure finally forced the president & attorney general to send a team of FBI investigators to the Ku Klux Klan-infested Magnolia State.   

Watch & learn why jazz singer/pianist Nina Simone wrote & recorded the angry "Mississippi Goddamn" in 1964, when American apartheid was finally on the wane.  For a literary take on the civil rights revolution, read Alice Walker's novel Meridian (1976), partially based on her experiences as a black activist-writer married to a Jewish lawyer in Jackson (MS) in the 1960s.  Walker makes history seem less a remote mystery & more a vital story of individuals through the power of intense prose.  

You see, pop music's British Invasion was paralleled in 1964 by a Southern invasion of civil-rights workers armed only with righteous courage.  Yeah, yeah, yeah!

Philip Seymour Hoffman & Billie Holiday: addiction then & now

The lonesome death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman at age 46 in New York last weekend put me in mind of another great artist's untimely demise.  Jazz singer Billie Holiday was also a heroin user (but mostly an alcoholic).  She died in July 1959, at age 44, of heart failure while in police custody at a New York hospital.  The circumstances of Lady Day's struggle with addiction in the 1940s & '50s contrast starkly with Hoffman's over the past year or so.  The differences between them reveal the progress society has made in dealing with narcotic dependence - at least when it comes to celebrities.

In Julia Blackburn's unconventional biography of Holiday, With Billie (NY:  Pantheon Books, 2005), it's clear that the jazz icon was not so much driven to an early grave by her own demons as she was hounded there by zealous agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.  Billie was awaiting trial on drug charges at the time of her death.  She'd already endured ten months of incarceration at a federal prison in West Virginia (1947-48), worried that jazz fans might forget her.  

The publicity that followed Holidays' various drug arrests, spread by a merciless tabloid press, broke the proud singer's heart.  The loss of Holiday's NYPD-issued cabaret performer's license, one consequence of her criminal record, hindered her ability to earn a living.  Tragically, the government's draconian war on drugs - as embodied by federal agents who advanced their careers by harassing this famous (black) woman - hastened her passing.  Billie Holiday was perhaps the most emotionally evocative jazz vocalist of all time.  If only she had been treated with more compassion.

In the case of Philip Seymour Hoffman, police & prosecutors were not interested in the (white) actor's heroin habit until after his death.  Although it's small comfort to his grieving friends & family, Hoffman had the luxury of dying at his Greenwich Village home, a wealthy & respected man.  His relapse after two decades of self-proclaimed sobriety might have remained a private matter - had he not chosen to discuss it publicly in the year preceding his sad end.  Like Holiday, Hoffman tried & failed at rehab.  Unlike her, he was not subjected to condemnation by the press for his substance abuse.  

In fact, the news coverage of Hoffman's fatal overdose has been mostly sympathetic.  The media have seized this opportunity to discuss constructively the recent resurgence of heroin abuse in the US.  Hoffman's passing has mainly been reported as a loss to the world of stage & cinema.  Broadway even dimmed its lights in tribute to the gifted actor/director, despite the fact that he died (like Lenny Bruce) with a syringe in his arm.  Fortunately, addiction is now recognized as a complicated illness.        

But just when it seems that our society - albeit not necessarily our government - is becoming more compassionate, up pops some sign of a trend in the opposite direction.  On public radio yesterday I heard a Missouri legislator proposing that the Show Me state substitute a firing squad for lethal injection as the official means of execution.  Wyoming is considering a similar execution-by-riflemen bill.  There's reportedly a shortage of the toxic chemicals used on Death Row by those 35 American states that still kill prisoners (3 recently abolished the death penalty, but not retroactively).  

The whole mess makes me proud to be from Wisconsin, which abolished capital punishment in 1853.  Meanwhile, the ghost of Gary Gilmore (executed by firing squad in Utah, at his own insistence, in 1977) grins.  As W.C. Fields used to say, "I have mixed feelings:  despair and disgust."

Rest in peace, Philip Seymour Hoffman, who so convincingly portrayed on film that alcoholic misfit Truman Capote, whose "nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood so eloquently describes the emotionally complex killer Perry Smith (executed by hanging in Kansas, 1965). 

Thank you, Billie Holiday, whose moving performance of the anti-lynching anthem "Strange Fruit" at NY's integrated Café Society circa 1940 inspired the FBI to start investigating her as a subversive.  She was a fiercely loving, tormented artist who refused to inform on others.

2014 Grammy Awards, "Okie from Muskogee" (a backstory) & RIP, Pete Seeger

The American pop-music establishment has sunk to a weird new nadir of escapism.  The evidence was broadcast Sunday night on CBS.  A pair of French dance-music DJs who pretend to be cyborgs, the helmet-human hybrid Daft Punk, won the Grammy Awards for Record & Album of the Year.  Those pretentious pranksters refused to show their faces or even speak a single word (in any language) as they accepted the trophies.  Fortunately, there were a couple moments that almost redeemed this alienating Hypefest.  And both of them featured country artists.

The first saving grace:  Kacey Musgraves's lovely performance of "Follow Your Arrow," a country-pop song that actually has some substance & bite to it.  I'm glad she won the Best Country Album (for Same Trailer Different Park) & Best Country Song ("Merry Go Round") awards.  Musgraves's gentle composure was a welcome contrast to, say, Pink's strained aerial acrobat act.  And don't get me started on that bizarre group wedding, conducted by ex-rapper Queen Latifah & blessed by a cane-wielding Madonna.  Look, I too support marriage equality.  But I cannot endorse using cult gimmicks to score political points on national TV.  I mean, are these the Grammies or the Moonies?

The second act of contrition:  the appearance of 76-year-old Merle Haggard during a medley of "outlaw country" songs.  That nostalgic detour into humane musical territory opened with sage-angel Willie Nelson dueting with the atonal Kris Kristofferson on "The Highwaymen."  They were soon joined by Mr. Haggard & Blake Shelton, a bland young stand-in for the late Johnny Cash, whom Hag first heard onstage at San Quentin prison (New Year's Day 1959).  How touching to see the grizzled Merle play guitar while singing his 1969 classic "Okie from Muskogee"!  The opening lines - "We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee / We don't take our trips on LSD" - included the first street-drug references ever in a chart-topping country song (aside from amphetamine pills, the trucker's little helper).  

To witness joy on the jaded faces of several stars in the audience as they sang along with Merle ("like the hippies out in San Francisco do") was a refreshing bonus.  But I wonder how many people at the show in LA - let alone viewers at home across the USA - knew that Merle's Okie paean is actually a shit-kicking satire?  In what music critic David Cantwell calls the Muskogee Moment (see his insightful book Merle Haggard: The Running Kind, University of Texas Press, 2013), Hag's "Okie from Muskogee" ignited a firestorm of controversy.  It was a sociopolitical phenomenon in the fall of '69, arguably the first shot in the culture wars that still divide the United States.  But the whole mess started as a harmless joke.  It's a good story, so bear with me.

The genesis of Merle's bestselling composition occurred on a tour bus in eastern Oklahoma in the spring of '69.  Haggard & the Strangers, his Californina-based backing band, were passing around a joint when the bus approached a sign saying Muskogee 30 miles.  "I bet they don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee," one of the guys quipped.  Stoned & giddy, the bandmates proceeded to riff on this theme, tossing out other taboos that small-town folks of that era wouldn't dare break:  dropping acid, organizing orgies, protesting anything.  "I bet they don't do that in Muskogee neither."  Since they all had working-class roots in hick towns, the jokes bore no malice.  

But Hag had an epiphany.  The Haggard family had migrated from Oklahoma to Merle's birthplace - Bakersfield, California - during the 1930s Dust Bowl disaster.  Now he - along with co-writer Roy Burris - turned his band's cannabis-fueled highway gag into a song that simultaneously managed (1) to express his pride in being kin to those once maligned migrants (signs in WWII-era Bakersfield cinemas directed "Negroes & Okies" to the balcony), while (2) poking fun at the patriotic provincialism of small towns.  Adding to the irony, Haggard told a reporter in the early '70s, Muskogee was about the only place he hadn't smoked dope.   

A gifted artist whose best early hits (from "Hungry Eyes" to "Workin' Man Blues" & "Mama Tried") exude a poetic pessimism, Haggard was able to craft deceptively simple lines.  For "Okie from Muskogee" he wrote:  "We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse" & "We like living right and being free."  In the recording studio he sang those lines in such a sincere baritone that only careful listeners could get the subversive subtext.  Radical folkie Phil Ochs was hip to the trick.  On his live Gunfight at Carnegie Hall album (1970), Ochs praises Haggard to a sceptical crowd before launching into a raucous electric interpretation of "Okie from Muskogee".  The lyrics' clever ambiguity makes you stop and think:  Wait a second, how can you be free when you're concerned about living right in the eyes of your neighbors?  

The song insinuates that hippies & anti-war demonstrators might, in fact, not be the enemies of decency & democracy.  The threat might actually come from the intolerant, sanctimonious citizens of Muskogee - those for whom "white lightning's still the biggest thrill of all."  Dick Nixon called them the Silent Majority, his racist ticket to the White House.  It took a restless ex-felon like Haggard to damn Muskogee with fake praise, offering a wise-ass backhanded compliment to "a place where even squares can have a ball."  

Nevertheless, the yokels - including Hooterville chambers of commerce, backslapping Rotarians & pro-Vietnam War diehards - ate up the cornpone part of the message.  But many others, including some of the emerging country rockers (e.g. Gram Parsons) who idolized Hag, were either confused or angered by it.  "Okie from Muskogee" was a minor crossover pop hit, nearly making Haggard a household name.  He'd suddenly become a populist folk hero to right-wingers.  The song even paid legal dividends:  Gov. Ronald Reagan pardoned Merle, a convicted burglar & car thief, in 1972.  

To his shame, Haggard engaged in some verbal hippie-bashing during press interviews in the wake of this career breakthrough.  He mainly objected to barefooted, longhaired freaks' allegedly poor hygiene.  Merle was understandably reluctant to bite the (square) hands that were feeding him.  Yet, to his credit, he never denied that the song was essentially a joke set to music.  He just wasn't forthcoming about its primary target.  Was it really the hippies or the rednecks?  Subsequent events indicate that Merle sympathized with the rednecks, more out of class loyalty than respect.  

By 2003, however, he had switched sides, publicly backing the Dixie Chicks in the media furor over Natalie Maine's comments blasting fellow Texan George W. Bush for his ill-advised decision to invade Iraq.  In any event, most country music fans back in 1969 missed the double-edged humor of "Okie from Muskogee."  They felt empowered by the surface sentiments, embracing the song as a celebration of small-town values, a conservative slam on the counterculture.  They responded with wild enthusiasm whenever Haggard & the Strangers played it during those days of rage when Sixties fervor was yielding to Seventies malaise.  

Hag was handsome, described in one magazine article as a cross between Audie Murphy & Warren Beatty.  In the '60's & '70s he made frequent guest appearances singing on mainstream television shows.  Like his friend & mentor Johnny Cash, Haggard also acted in a few TV shows & films.  Yet his music gradually fell out of fashion.  It was dropped from most country-radio playlists by the late '80s.  Merle is a proud loner who hated currying favor in Nashville.  Preferring to live in rural California, he continued to tour extensively as the decades passed.  Hag's catalog has long inspired other songwriters.  He has become an icon to (mostly middle-class) fans of the music variously labeled alt-country, roots & Americana.  The official national stamp of approval came in 2010, when Pres. Barack Obama bestowed the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors award on Merle Haggard.

On a lighter note, the massive popularity of "Okie from Muskogee" spawned a throng of less accomplished rhyming imitators.  Among them was Rusty Adams, whose ripoff "Hippie from Mississippi" posits parents so ashamed of their rebel son that they change the family name.  Hag's hit also led some musical liberals to answer him via song.  The best title of that bunch has to be "Asshole from El Paso" by Chinga Chavin, an obscure 1976 parody.  I'm guessing that it got little airplay during the USA's bicentennial.

Finally, breaking news of the death of Pete Seeger, folk-music master & giant among progressive activists, helps me see "Okie from Muskogee" in a new light.  It more or less fits in the tradition of witty American protest songs, beginning with the Swedish immigrant & radical-union bard Joe Hill.  Executed in Utah in 1913, Hill's irreverent "The Preacher & the Slave" promises "we'll all get pie in the sky when we die."  In the 1940s the prolific folksinger & songwriter Woody Guthrie, an Oklahoma native who inscribed This Machine Kills Fascists onto his guitar during the war, answered Irving Berlin's smarmy "God Bless America" with his generous "This Land Is Your Land."  In one verse - usually deleted in most published versions - Guthrie sings about trespassing in defiance of a Private Property sign because "on the other side, it didn't say nothin' / That side was made for you and me."

Woody begat Pete Seeger, followed by Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie & countless others during the postwar folk music revival.  The circle came full with the career of Arlo Guthrie (Woody's genetic son), whose draft-dodger masterpiece "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" (1967) was a long comical protest song, surpassed only by Country Joe & the Fish's "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag" for popularity among hippies & Vietnam vets alike.  

The sharpest songs by the Sixties generation were frequently tongue in cheek.  At the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, for example, an ebullient Ochs performed his deadly playful "Talking Vietnam Blues."  And the contrarian Dylan declined an invitation to appear on Ed Sullivan's top-rated TV variety show in '63 because CBS wouldn't let him play "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues," a crazy sendup of anti-Commie witch-hunters.  Back in JFK's heyday the media blacklist (i.e. corporate censorship) kept people like Pete Seeger & fellow civil rights activist Nina Simone, a jazz singer, songwriter & pianist ("Mississippi Goddam," 1964), off network TV altogether.  

Smart artists know that nothing undermines tyranny, injustice, hypocrisy & pomposity as effectively as critical humor set to a catchy melody (Exhibit A:  Tom Lehrer's "Vatican Rag," 1965).  Songwriters who are both politically committed & musically talented are hardly extinct.  Tom Morello, Ani DiFranco, Billy Bragg & Steve Earle epitomize those who still dare to take on important social issues in song.  

I just wish they were more widely heard.  The World Wide Web, a medium cluttered with content & demographically fragmented, seems unlikely to launch a benign cultural revolution.  The chances of human survival would surely be enhanced by the popularization of songs saying something that truly matters.  All the better if those songs make us laugh to keep from crying along our troubled journey into the future.  

"Where have all the flowers gone?  Long time passing."  Rest in peace, Pete Seeger, who hoped that the pen is mightier than the Bomb & proved it.

Jefferson, USA - a mythical West Coast state of mind

Dig this tidbit 

of PacCoast history:

a separatist US "state"

straddling the Beaver State /

Golden State border, capital in Yreka,

California - (where Maria is terminating 

Arnold's access to her bedchamber),

a marital property state of mind . . .

Now cast yours back to 1941 -

The bad Japs attacked &

Jefferson folded fast

for national unity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(Pacific_state)

I kept tuning into Jefferson Public Radio while driving through southern Oregon & northern California last week.  Then, this morning in the Hood, I hear a novelist on Oregon Public Broadcasting talk about the state of Jefferson - as it was in '41 & stills exists in anarchist/crank imagination.