The endless summer

The summer of 1966 was ugly and violent.

James Meredith, the first black student enrolled into the University of Mississippi, began walking across the south to encourage voter registration. He was shot three times in full view of the police and FBI for his troubles. He survived the attack. 

In July Richard Speck was arrested four days after killing eight student nurses in their Chicago dormitory. 

On August 1, 25-year-old engineering student Charles Whitman killed his wife and mother, carried five rifles to the top of the observation tower on the University of Texas campus and in just 90 minutes shot 31 people, killing 13. Later that month, Martin Luther King led a march through Chicago and met a hostile mob numbering at least 5,000. Once a thrown rock hit King, it signaled a hail of bottles, rocks and firecrackers. Two days later a race riot broke out in East Lansing, Michigan, and three days later, the American Nazi Party held a Chicago rally with 3,000 in attendance, swastikas and white power signs fully visible.

In Vietnam, the U.S. began digging itself a hole in earnest as monthly troop casualties increased exponentially: 268 Americans in June, 277 in July and 297 in August.

The U.S. experienced an intense heat wave as New York City recorded a mean daily temperature of 90.3 degrees for July, with a high of 101. Some 2,250 deaths nationwide were attributed to the heat.

Yeah, the headlines were grim, but the Top 40 caught a glimpse of a much different summer, a celebration of an upbeat, idyllic season.

Happy Summer Days – Ronnie Dove (highest chart position #27): A strumming banjo and Ray Conniff-styled background singers gave this a Mitch Miller feel, one of those records probably purchased mostly by parents.

Summer In the City – Lovin’ Spoonful (#1): Their only number one. There’s so much to like about this record, from John Sebastian’s committed vocals to the car horn and jackhammer sound effects to the racket of guitars and drums – like a summer thunderstorm – before the fadeout.

Sunny – Bobby Hebb (#2): Born in Nashville to blind musicians, the day after JFK was assassinated, Hebb’s older brother was killed in a knife fight outside a nightclub. Overcome by back-to-back tragedies, Hebb wrote the optimistic Sunny, today a pop standard with hundreds of recorded cover versions.

Sunshine Superman – Donovan (#1): Outright psychedelia, from lyrics that kinda sorta reference LSD to Jimmy Page's guitar. Green Lantern always seemed like an odd choice in the lyric, given his secondary status in the DC universe.

Summertime – Billy Stewart (#10): Gershwin song made memorable by Stewart’s trademark scatting and trilling, the calls of a weird summer bird.

Sunny Afternoon – Kinks (#14): A “fallen aristocrat,” as described by Ray Davies, bemoans his fate: paying taxes, having his yacht taken away and a girlfriend who complains about his “drunkenness and cruelty.” Heady stuff for the Top 40.

Summer Wind – Frank Sinatra (#25): Speaking of super-heroes, 11-year-old me misheard the reference to a “piper man” as “Spider-Man,” confusing me to no end.

See You in September – The Happenings (#3): 313 American troops died in Vietnam in September 1966.

The Ballad of the Green Berets

Sixty years ago this month, the most popular record in America was The Ballad of the Green Berets, written and sung by Sgt. Barry Sadler. It was the #1 record on Billboard’s Hot 100 for an astounding five weeks, at a time when there was still a wave of patriotism over U.S. involvement in Vietnam – the idea that the war was an immoral quicksand pit sucking up American lives had yet to hit home.

Lyndon Johnson’s approval rating was 67 percent in early ’66; it would drop steadily from there, as would the 48 percent of American college students in favor of the war.

Sadler was a Green Beret medic wounded in Vietnam, so there was a whiff of authenticity about The Ballad of the Green Berets, which he wrote during his convalescence. Performing the song on The Ed Sullivan Show launch pad, the record took off, selling nine million copies and becoming the top-selling record of the year. Sadler also recorded what amounted to a concept album, Ballads of the Green Berets, that sold a million copies during the first five weeks of its release.

The record’s success was a reminder that while the Top 40 was mostly reflective of the musical tastes of teenagers, occasionally adults flexed their wallets and had some say. Some other examples: Everybody Loves Somebody and Hello Dolly in the middle of 1964’s Beatlemania, and later in 1966, Strangers in the Night. All #1 records.

Younger kids may have helped with The Ballad of the Green Berets as well, the eight- and nine-year olds pretending to be Vic Morrow and Rick Jason in their backyards playing with toy guns.

The irony of The Ballad of the Green Berets at the top of the charts is that it created a logjam of songs in the top ten that, at least in their titles and universal themes, spoke more powerfully about the emotional churn of soldiers trapped overseas and their families: California Dreamin’, My World Is Empty Without You, Homeward Bound, Nowhere Man, Daydream.

The song didn’t sit well with on the British pop charts. Mick Jagger called it “terribly sick,” and various Beatles offered up words like “crap” and “propaganda.” Paul Jones, of Manfred Mann, said, “The main point is that the American State Department is clearly annoyed because they cannot get people to volunteer to fight in Vietnam.”

Emotionally manipulative and jingoistic, The Ballad of the Green Berets, coupled with the moronic Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., whose run as one of the top three network shows pretty much ran parallel to the war and was filmed with the cooperation of the Marines, were a low-key recruitment effort that missed the mark badly.

After The Ballad of the Green Berets, Sadler did some television acting, wrote a series of men’s adventure paperbacks, then was found guilty of manslaughter when he shot an unarmed man in an argument over a woman. He met up with more violence after moving to Guatemala and was shot in the head while sitting in a cab. Left with brain damage and quadriplegic, he died in 1989.

On Spotify, The Ballad of the Green Berets has more than 9.7 million total plays and songs by Sadler are played more than 53,000 times a month.

"The war is over"

Fifty-three years tonight I attended my first “real” rock concert, Neil Young at Madison Square Garden. I’d been to two Rock and Roll Revival shows but I don’t count them as authentic rock experiences – seeing legendary elders Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Bo Diddley was exciting, but at that point they were essentially oldies acts.

The logistics around Young’s 1973 tour are amazing in retrospect. Today, major tours tend to occur in the summer or fall when travel is easy. For this tour, Young played 61 shows between the first week of January and the first week of April, with nearly all the January concerts played in cold weather cities. And some strange bookings. Two shows in Alabama – Tuscaloosa and Mobile – maybe because the song Alabama was on his last album, Harvest? Shows in Roanoke, Virginia, and Des Moines, Iowa. Overall, a promoter’s dream and a performer’s nightmare.

Not my ticket

The unannounced opening act that night at the Garden was Linda Ronstadt, her first time opening the tour and, after years of playing clubs like the Bitter End in New York City and the Troubadour in Los Angeles, the largest audience she’d ever faced. “She didn’t really want to do it,” said her manager. “She was scared.”

Throughout the Young shows she often played to indifferent crowds, but the shows served as a crucible of sorts and by September Ronstadt had her first gold album as her career took off (and overtook Neil Young possibly in popularity and certainly record sales).

There was no announcement when Ronstadt came on stage and I don’t recall her introducing herself or her band. Nerves, I guess. What I remember mostly was a lot of people milling around during her set looking for their seats, their friends or someone selling joints. And there were lots of joints. As soon as the lights came down for Young, the smell of marijuana was overwhelming; naïve me, it was my first experience being around it and reminiscent of the smell of chicken grilling outdoors, it only made me hungry.

Young played most of the stuff you'd want to hear, like Cinnamon Girl and Southern Man, but in the 1970s it was a badge of coolness and authenticity and honoring one's muse if artists insisted on spending a good part of their onstage time playing some newer stuff, so part of Young's setlist was dedicated to songs that wouldn't appear on record until Time Fades Away. But he also sang the obligatory Heart of Gold, a #1 hit a year ago, and Old Man so folks left the show happy.

This was also the night when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger reached the Paris Peace Accord, officially ending U.S. participation in the Vietnam War. Someone came onstage and handed Young a note as he announced, “The war was over.” It was rumored that both sides were close to an expected agreement, but to hear the official word from Neil Young is a little cooler – and much more memorable – than getting it from Walter Cronkite.

Fail Safe

October 15, 1962, was a Monday and I sat in the kitchen of our apartment on Main Street waiting for an astronaut. Signaled by a racket of distant police sirens, we got to the front porch in time to see a waving Wally Schirra seated on the back of a convertible.

Only days earlier, Schirra, one of the seven original NASA astronauts, orbited earth six times. Born in my hometown Hackensack, his motorcade was headed for a day of celebration and dedications in the town of Oradell, where Schirra grew up.

Wally Schirra in Hackensack

(In the Oradell native son pantheon, Schirra was number one until he was displaced by Bill Parcells. Nobody remembers that Nelson Riddle also grew up there).

Seeing Schirra ride past my house made perfect sense to eight-year-old me, further acknowledgement that Hackensack was the center of the universe.

Later that week, as my mother ironed with the television on, there was an afternoon news broadcast, strangely out of place when Truth or Consequences should have been on instead. If it didn’t interfere with Yogi Bear or Snagglepuss cartoons it didn’t concern me. Mom said we might be headed for a war with Russia, something about Cuba.

It didn’t seem like a big deal. I’d read enough children’s American history books from our public library to know that “we” always won: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World Wars I and II. And Cuba? My Boys’ Adventure Story background told me that Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders led the charge there up San Juan Hill. We’d won that war too.

War was something that happened in other places, at other times, to other people.

Suddenly, a shelter sign was posted on the wall of our school. Then, one Saturday while we were shopping on Main Street, there was a wailing siren unlike anything I’d heard. It was loud, it was everywhere and it didn’t feel like the good-natured noon whistle reminding that it was time for lunch. We stood under a store awning until it passed.

(Decades later, I came across several cartons marked, Property U.S. Govt Canned Drinking Water, in the basement of an old apartment house in Hackensack, no doubt a public bomb shelter at one point).

If an astronaut could ride past my house, why couldn’t a nuclear bomb be dropped here as well? Was that the fate of my center of the universe? And there was no Teddy Roosevelt to lead the charge this time.

With the warning that Soviet ships were not to come within 500 miles of America’s blockade of Cuban waters, the crisis ended abruptly on October 24 when Khrushchev ordered a Soviet fleet to turn around. Said Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “We were eyeball to eyeball and I think the other guy just blinked.”

Yogi Bear might have said Khrushchev was smarter than the average bear for ordering the ships back. And if the Russians hadn’t blinked, the fate of our world would have been captured in Snagglepuss’ catchphrase: “Exit, stage left.”