If a blogh is not a place to reveal ones deepest shame I don’t know what is. So I am going to confess that for a number of years in high school I was that most shameful thing of all, a Deadhead. I listened to Grateful Dead albums obsessively, I read books about them and about Haight Ashbury, I traveled to their shows (by rail, bus, car and hitchhiking) and took lots of acid. Discovering their records one by one was an odyssey into the past, into the utopian sixties, a decade I idealized. I did listen to other music: Led Zeppelin 4, all of Jimi Hendrix, The Allman Brothers, Joni Mitchell, Leo Kottke, Hot Tuna to name a few. But all took a back seat to the Dead. By 1975 I was that most dreaded thing of all, a seventies hippie (but I never wore Tie Dye or batik!). How I became one, and how I got out of it, is the subject of this post.

Like most oldest children I had to find my way through the musical wasteland on my own, there was no older sibling steering my taste. My parents listened to classical music and musical theatre. I owned The Monkees and before that Little Alvin and the Chipmunks and Peter Paul and Mommy. Playing the trumpet in the dance band gave me a taste for standards like Tenderly and Stella by Starlight, as well as Burt Bacharach tunes. Even at that age I was given to the obsessive playing of single songs, exhausting them and everyone around me until a new compulsion seized hold of me. Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell (I told you I would spare no shame), followed. In 1970 or so I started listening to AM radio and naturally progressed into a love of bubble gum pop. I’m not sure when I migrated over to FM. But this was the situation when I entered 7^th grade. That was the era of great soul music, and under the influence of new friends I started to by soul 45s with the money that would, a year later, go to cigarettes. Someone gave me Carly Simon’s album with You’re So Vain on it, and the blue and the red Beatles Greatest Hits records. I had a friend, Burt B. who owned 3 records, Aqualung, Led Zeppelin 2, and Firesign Theatre. We listened to these late at night, while his divorced mother was out on dates, on his little sister’s plastic portable record player. There was also a proto-schizophrenic girlfriend, Joanne L. (she later hanged herself in an insane asylum), who introduced me to something she called ‘hard rock’, in mockery of my bubble gum taste. These bands recorded on the Warner Brother’s label (distinctive logo) and all I remember was Uriah Heep, Mott the Hoople and T Rex. The names intrigued me, but the sound not all, at least, the sound couldn’t complete with Joanne’s big beautiful tits and bewitching tongue.

Mark P. gave me my first Grateful Dead record in 1973. His house was the epicenter of our pubescent decadence. He had parties with soul music and booze. His mother laughed when we mixed every color of liquor in her cabinet and poured it over ice. I watched the network premier of Planet of the Apes there, which was cut short by a blackout. It seems I spent every Friday and Saturday night at his Larchmont Manor house. He had a cousin, Josh, who lived on the Upper West Side and turned us onto pot. Josh also recommended that Mark buy me Working Man’s Dead for my birthday. Puzzled, I looked at the Warner Bros label and concluded it must be ‘hard rock’. Proudly I showed it to Joanne, who laughed at me, because The Dead weren’t hard rock, apparently. I put the record on and was upset to discover a mix of country, folk and rock. Like a lot of music I came to love obsessively I put it away after one listen.

But the Dead have deadly hooks. The invisible insinuation of Jerry Garcia’s voice and beguiling guitar had done its work and a year or so later I started to listen again, this time falling in love. I don’t know what appeal the Dead has, it is a mystery. Surely few other rock bands become cults. Pink Floyd? The Beatles? Maybe. But the Dead were less media driven. They remained apostles of the hippie bohemia they helped create. They seemed to actually like each other. Their fans couldn’t hear their music on the radio. (They had only two FM hits that I know of, Truckin’ and Casey Jones, but there may have been others on American Beauty…maybe Sugar Magnolia? But I am too depressed by all of this to even Google it!). The next record I got was The Greatest Hits, and this revealed something astonishing: there were indeed ‘hard rock’ Grateful Dead Songs, and it was something called Acid Rock. There was a whole corpus of Sixties music that exploded in my nascent psychedelic brain. I was now all Tao de Ch’ing, Grateful Dead, hippie nation, and I found a group of friends who shared the tribal aspirations farting along the surface of a decade that began in despair and ended in total despair. Because the seventies, as opposed to the sixties, were cynical, introverted and apolitical. In retrospect there is an engagement and intensity and theatrical innocence that wasn’t evident at the time. Movies like When We Were Kings reveals that what seemed like a disgusting big money media event was actually a quaint expression of a good time, compared to our time of total wall to wall delusion.

I also had a different group of friends, or rather, an overlapping one, and they came out of Bowie, the Tubes, and Lou Reed. I didn’t like this music (except for Walk on the Wild Side, which I knew from my AM radio days). But the gateway drug to punk for me was The Velvet Underground. What finally cured me of the Dead in fact (after a transitional period of some years) were bands like The Modern Lovers, Television and the Velvets. These bands had an expansive, energetic, improvisational drive to them that was familiar to me, it continued the rock of the sixties into the seventies without becoming fatuous. The seventies horror was Yes and ELP and the Dead’s 25 minute jams with their faux jazz and reggae feel, sixties Muzak. The fact is I was young and insane and the music of the Dead from around the time I started to listen to them to the time I stopped was becoming the music of old men, or 30 year old bong hitters anyway. A Dead show as an amazing event, but going to CB’s or Max’s or Club 57 at Irving Plaza was the real deal. There was no retrospect involved. It may not have been the 60’s, but by the late 70’s it seems we had our own decade. The drugs of choice became speed and alcohol. I didn’t cut my hair or change my clothes, and I still listened to the Dead, alone, late at night, but the songs I was listening to were all from the sixties, bootleg recordings collected obsessively by my fellow-traveler Deadhead and best friend, Mike.

The punk revolution in music explicitly was pitched against the Dead. They were the symbol of musical flatulence. Iggy Pop, David Bowie, The Talking Heads, Roxie Music, John Cale, The Sex Pistols each in their way were a refutation of the mellow sincerity of the Dead, of CSNY, of Jackson Browne and James Taylor and Carol King, or the corporate synthesizers of English super groups. I am happy to say that by 1978 I never listened to another Dead record and changed my wardrobe to black. The hair stayed long (until I got it cut heading off to Southeast Asia, in 1983), but now it was henna’d burgundy, to go with the two earrings in my left ear and smeared sluttish eyeliner and mascara and chipped nail polish I wore.

The bands I loved best in retrospect were much more like the Grateful Dead than I then imagined. The Velvet Underground were the anti-Dead (their first albums came out in the same year) in almost every way. But opposites are quite alike. The Velvet Underground were both avant-garde and counter-cultural, like the Dead. The Dead were connected to Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy (whom Garcia loved more than anyone else besides Pig Pen) and the whole beatnik demimonde, and Phil Lesh had been a jazz trumpeter. They were seriously into avant-garde music and incorporated the spirit of free jazz improvisation into their music, including feedback and noise. The Velvet Underground came out of the New York Andy Warhol scene and John Cale had been Lamont Young’s student. They also incorporated free form improvisation with noise and feedback and long songs (the average length of Sister Ray was 25 minutes!), only their music was rooted in drone and rhythm, not the blues. Neither band was ever commercially successful in the big sense of the word though the Dead, by dint of staying together, were able to make money. The Velvets, true to form, were an anti-tribe and went the way of most Rock’n’Roll collaborations, mutual contempt. But the amazing thing is, at this point, both bands are best documented by live recordings. And it was these live recording (especially Bob Quine’s Velvet Underground recordings, many from San Francisco, when the Dead ruled that roost), that slowly brought me back to the Dead, albeit not as a Deadhead. But that will have to be a different post.

“I see the old men, all twisted and torn
The forgotten heroes of a forgotten war
And the young people ask me, what are they
Marching for?
And I ask myself the same question”
Shane McGowan, “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda”

The Vietnam Project has broad horizons and contains multitudes. One part stretches into the remote paleolithic in the lands surrounding the Red River Delta, the beginnings of agriculture, the state and trade. But another part radiates into the present, in America, where everyone who remembers the American War with Vietnam continues to live with its legacy. I’m not a TV news watcher, except on Sunday mornings in the winter, when I am sometimes motivated to fold laundry. Fareed Zakaria yesterday morning on CNN was discussing Richard Holbrook with Leslie Gelb and a couple of other yackers. Holbrook’s last words according to them were, ‘Get out of Afghanistan.’ This prompted Zakaria to ask if Holbrook’s experience in Vietnam had shaped his perceptions of Afganistan. Yes! Yes! was the reply. Every generation that lives through war carries the war in their head with them forever after. Robert Graves as an old man whose mind was in twilight replied to a question about his life, “I killed a lot of people”. That would be in the trenches of WWI 60 or 70 years earlier.
Last week, Franklin Crawford, an Ithaca writer and chronicler of what he calls Tiny Town sent me an email about his experience of the American War with Vietnam. I reproduce it here exactly as he sent it. It inaugurates that part of the Vietnam Project that includes The War at Home (thank you Craig MacDonald), and that includes writings as opposed to book reviews and discussions of arcane books.

i got a heap of Vietnam-related family stories — all regarding my brother who was killed in a raid on the artillery base where he was stationed in the Tay Ninh Province in South Vietnam (big place of course — the base was close to the Cambodian border, to be more specific, not knowing coordinates) … his dog tags were missing for 35 years. well. not missing, really. they were in a file in Washington, D.C.

background: my father dropped my brother off at a LIRR train station one december morning in 1970 and he never saw the boy again. dad was a decorated soldier and served in the Battle of the Bulge and a brutal mopping up campaign that followed all to protect the Rohr Valley from the retreating germans who were sabotaging every bridge they crossed out of Belgium back home. the record of his first six months after landing remain one of the worst war stories i have yet read, and i like reading about the american “civil” war.

my brother’s death (caused by AK-47 crossfire and shrapnel from satchel explosives, loss of blood, etc. crushed my father, already a ruined man pretty much at

47. he was institutionalized in his 50s and never led a normal life on the outside again. well. that’s not fair: hospitals and institutions have their norms and life in there runs according to laws beyond most people’s ken.

brother’s death crushed mom, too. both my folks were very damaged and on a downward trajectory when the tragedy hit, spread and got all cozy with the alcoholism and serious mental illness, etc., which run their chaotic routs in my family. at times it is tempting to think there was a poxes [sic] upon us, but i don’t believe in poxes except for that which comes from poultry and a man named small. plus, i am too lucky. i’ve ruined any evil genie’s experiment by producing positive outcomes despite the fact i’ve been warehoused in nine rehabs. true. that’s a cat’s worth of lucky evidence right there. anyway. dad died in 2005. an army genealogist who’d been looking for him for 10 years or more saw the obituary. the tags were returned. dad was dead. with him went his belief my brother was not dead. because there were no tags. even though dad had forced a terrified mortician to show him my brother’s naked dead body. naked!

the wounds were quite horrible. i have all the paperwork. that’s enough to convince me. then again i was never a soldier, so there’s a lot i don’t know.

my father died after a rather simple surgery, in the brooklyn hospital, pretty far from home, alone. he left his own mystery that will never be solved: there is no death certificate for my father. that’s because no one knows why he died. he was recovering well in the ICU for five days and was released to his room. he was dead before sun-up. i had promised to be there when he was returned to his room but i was in spain. he was ashes when i got back.

it is my opinion that Vietnam was an american proxy war that never ended. not for me, anyway. today, the russians and chinese have found a better way to take us to the cleaners. these latest efforts are kind of a draw.

vonnegut considered Vietnam a war we lost. too bad for him. my once beloved author died a disappointed man, i think, because the world did not end in his time.

hope this does something for “the Vietnam project.”

yours,

franklin crawford

ps links: it was a very slow news week in our region. the following rec’d a lot of attention. it freaked me b/c i helped write some of the stories and starred in them (worked at the Cornell Chronicle at the time).

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Feb06/dogtag.dea.html

http://www.pressoffice.cornell.edu/releases/release.cfm?r=16585&y=2006&m=2

there was tv and radio and print media that even made its way to troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. ha~! sad world Mr. Frankel. but to have good luck in it — ah. there’s the gravy for your biscuit.

1. The brief re-conquest of Vietnam by China under the MIng and Vietnam’s successful rebellion in 1428, leading to the establishment of the Le Dynasty and a meritocratic, bureaucratic state rooted in Neo-Confucianist doctrine. This ideology existed often and mostly as an ideal, competing with the realities of land-based, aristocratic military rule.
2. The Ha Tien, or Vietnamese March South. The Vietnamese government began the practice, which would continue into the late 20th century, of settling demobilized soldiers and criminals as well as outlaws and people looking to escape from the villages of the north on ‘frontier’ lands of the south. The Le dynasty became a shell, behind which two families contended for power, the Trinh and the Nguyen. The Cham retreated farther and farther south, losing one battle after another. Eventually there are two Vietnamese courts, one in Hanoi, controlled by the Trinh, and one in Hue, established by Nguyen Anh, who feigned madness to avoid being murdered by his uncle. In elicits punning (to be exploited later, and shamelessly) on Strategic Hamlets.
3. The Tayson Rebellion of 1771, when the Tayson brothers rose up to defeat both the Trinh and the Nguyen. The rebellion lasted 30 years and ended in defeat for the Taysons, but many events and ideas of the time provide tantalizing glimpses of the future. The Taysons were commoners and nationalists and conceived of modernizing schemes. One of them was to make Chu Nom, the Vietnamese invented alphabet, based on Chinese characters, the national language. They also employed Chinese pirates to be their official navy, about which one of the most fascinating studies I have ever read was written, by Diane H. Murray, Pirates of the South China Sea.
4. With the defeat of the Taysons begins the Nguyen Dynasty, based in Hue, which for the first time rules over not just a united Vietnam, but a Vietnam that includes the Mekong Delta. This area had before the Taysons been dominated by the Khmers and the Cham, though it was sparsely populated. (Li Tana has several books about the 18th and 19th centuries in the southern part of Vietnam). It’s at this point, in 1834, that Vietnam becomes a genuine colonial power in its own right, invading Cambodia and imposing upon it Vietnamese customs, using the same language of cultural superiority the Chinese (and later, the French) used of them. In 1851 the Cambodians overthrew the Vietnamese with French assistance. Had the French not intervened Cambodia most likely would have been divided between Thailand and Vietnam.

The second panel is a book I thought about writing maybe 5 years ago. This book is less likely ever to be written, but you never know. This book is a materialist cultural history of the United States and the UK in the years 1960-1974, as told through the biographies of 6 rock bands or performers: Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead and The Velvet Underground. The book is structured to begin with Bob Dylan’s life and narrate it up to his first record, at which point it would pick up the story of The Beatles with biographies of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, up to 1963. Next it tells the story of the Rolling Stones with biographies of Mick Jagger, Brian Jones and Keith Richards. From here the history will focus on how these three groups evolved and influenced each other, and those around them, including especially the next three groups, whose story the book will pick up in 1966, again narrating in succession the lives of Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, Pig Pen, Lou Reed, John Cale and Nico. The final part will be a history of the world as seen through the eyes of these 6 rock bands and associated subcultures and counter cultures. A main theme of the book is the influence of and interaction with avant-garde and countercultural movements; the role they played in shaping the character and creativity of these pop artists. In other words, the increasing influence of high modernist art upon pop culture, especially that strain of decadent romanticism that begins with Baudelaire and arrives at the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and the Plastic Ono Band. Andy Warhol designing the Sticky Fingers cover and promoting The Velvets. The Dead’s involvement with Ken Kesey and Neil Cassidy. Bob Dylan and the Beats. The similarities and differences between the Beats and the Warhol Factory as avant-garde movements and as subcultures. Etc. The bulk of this book will be a thick, total history of the period, but in the biographies I want to explore in detail the various cultural milieus in which the subjects were born and raised in the 40’s and 50’s. Whom they knew, what music they listened to, what they read, what art they saw. Why did these people become what they became? And finally, in the period of their success, I want to examine in detail the evolution of technology, television, amplifiers, electronic instruments, LPs, multi-track recording, and of the business end of art, who were the producers and engineers, the agents, the managers, the session players, back up singers, lovers, friends, promoters, DJs, the drug dealers, secretaries and chauffeurs. Most important of all, who was the audience?

The third panel I will certainly not write, but I will research it because I think it needs to be written, is screaming to be written. This is a work of historical fiction called Three Reigns, after a famous Thai novel, Si Phaendin (4 Reigns). It will be a Shakespearean treatment of the presidencies of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. It again covers the years 1960-1974. I am fascinated by the fact that this odd, tumultuous, violent and entertaining period of our history brought 3 men of the senate and their rivals to power, and that these three men had extreme personality disorders that seem to both reflect and create the larger culture. This is a book about the role of personality in history, of mad presidents, rampant executive power, secret wars, underground plots, messianic hopes aroused by charismatic speech, revolutionary rhetoric, and politics as show biz. It is a world that flickers in and of reality and symbolism. It is about ambitious individuals, defiance and rebellion as fashion. And the reality of liberation, how a generation enriched and educated by New Deal policies (good union jobs, free colleges) demands its rights under the constitution and politicians attempt to manipulate and ride this wave of liberation until finally everyone is overwhelmed by the forces unleashed. My compositional model would be the drama, Shakespeare’s second tetralogy, which covers the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V.

There are two things that unite these three projects. One is the Vietnam War. I was born in 1960 and all of my conscious life I have felt the need to understand why this war happened. I felt from a very early age moral repugnance and horror at what America was perpetrating in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. This led me to start reading about first the war itself and then the history of the nation where it was fought. It merged with a life-long interest in fallen monumental civilizations, sparked by reading a coffee table book on Angkor Wat my parents bought after visiting Cambodia in 1967. When I began working at Cornell University as a book shelver in 1991, my first assigned area to shelve was the Wason-Echols collection, the world’s premier collection of East and Southeast Asian materials. Here I discovered two things. One, some of the finest historical and related writing has been done about this region and two, almost none of the writing in English (alas, my only language) is about Vietnam. What I wanted to know about Vietnam, and which I could pretty easily read about Thailand, Indonesia, India, China, Burma and Malaysia, was only available in obscure monographs and journals or in French or Vietnamese. There was no satisfactory single volume history of Vietnam in English, and most of the best contemporary scholarship in English was confined to the colonial period. The historical discovery that caused the click to go off in my mind was that not only was Vietnam a country that had been colonized, it was a country that had conquered and colonized others. Two historical periods in particular would not let me alone: the period of active southern expansion out of northern and central Vietnam into the remnants of the Cham lands to the south, and their ultimate conquest (1300’s-1600’s), and the Tay Son rebellion of the late 18th Century. This expanded considerably the scope of my project, such that it was and is in danger of going off the rails. For now it was not enough to know the history of Vietnam, but also of fallen civilizations and peoples and of the behemoth to the north, China. And so the Vietnam novel slowly assembled in my mind. Which brings me to the second thing these panels have in common: the obsession with total history. These books aim to be thick with detail and monumental in scope. What I am subject to here I am afraid is the epic impulse, not an uncommon situation for a poet to find himself in.