>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. ^M00:00:06 [silence] ^M00:00:18 >> KAREN LLOYD: Good afternoon, and welcome to the most beautiful building in Washington, DC, especially to the Whittall Pavilion, which I absolutely adore. I'm not ... I look at music and I see lines and dots, and others hear tunes, so I ... While I appreciate the Stradivarius instruments, they don't sing for me, but I will tell you what does, is the two Rodin statues, both Spring Awakening to your rear and The Kiss to your front. So, please, this is your Library, and I ask that you enjoy it. As the director of the Veterans History Project and as a retired Army Aviation Colonel, the widow, sibling, and child of veterans, I'm so pleased to welcome you, our honored guests, and particularly veterans that are in the room, to the Library of Congress. I so appreciate every opportunity I'm given to showcase the Library's assets, both people - like Nicholas Brown, who's also a veteran, and who will be moderating today's discussion - along with our unparalleled collections. As you might know, the Veterans History Project is a part of the American Folklife Center, and I would be remiss, given today's fascinating topic, if I didn't point to their Lansdale collections, acquired through the efforts of respected folklorist Lydia Fish. Amongst other extensive items, the Lansdale collections cover - and I'm going to read this so I get it right - 160 songs about the Vietnam War sung by American military personnel, recorded primarily in Thailand, Vietnam, and Virginia by General Edward G. Lansdale from 1962 to 1972, and the home recording scripted by General Lansdale of both various Vietnamese and US folk songs of the time. While you're here in the home of our archives in your Library, I would also like to encourage you to visit the acclaimed and recently opened exhibit, "The Echoes of the Great War." It's up on the second level, the mezzanine level. While it is worlds away from the disco heyday that we're celebrating this week, the themes in the exhibit, The Great War, and the very human documentation of it, transcend and speak so much to how we understand our nation at conflict today. The Veterans History Project is honored to have played a role in bringing you this program today, as well as comprehensive collections from the Great War. What we do in the Veterans History Project is help volunteers - perhaps you - across the nation to gather the stories of our veterans, to ensure their firsthand personal reminisces, personal philosophies, and creativity are preserved, so that we all better understand our history. These collections of narratives of lived experience do not just sit on the dusty shelves here in the Library, but are used by researchers every day. My last task for you is to think of the veteran in your life, and consider how, together, you'll make a mark on history by preserving their story with us. If you need details, they're in the back. Thank you again for joining us on this auspicious occasion, and your ongoing use of contributions to our collections here at the Library. So without further ado, Nicholas. ^M00:03:40 >> NICHOLAS BROWN: Thank you, Karen, appreciate it. Welcome, everyone. My name is Nick Brown, and I am a music specialist here at the Library of Congress. I've been here for about five years, and I'm involved in programming the Library's concert series, and also doing various special projects around, with various wonderful colleagues who are here supporting us today. ^M00:03:58 The goal with this panel today is to contextualize some of the things that happened in the disco era with the topics that came out of the Vietnam War, and the way that popular music was being leveraged in society, both in the civilian side and also in the military side. And a lot of the musical tropes from the Vietnam era specifically influenced the development of disco music, and there's a lot about reception history that we're going to get into, and manipulations of how things are marketed and positioned, that kind of business. ^M00:04:30 So we have a very exciting discussion ahead for you. We're going to do sort of a formal presentation for the first portion of the afternoon, and then we'll go into a Q&A, which we hope is a really great opportunity for you to go back and forth with these distinguished speakers who are joining us. Before I introduce them, I'd just like to give a shout-out to the Department of Defense Vietnam 50th Anniversary Commission, which is co-presenting this event, so we really appreciate their support and the work that they're doing on behalf of all the American people to recognize the sacrifices that were made in Vietnam by our servicemen and women. ^M00:05:06 At the conclusion of the event, there will be a book signing out front there, and you'll also have a chance to talk to Hugo about his publications, which are really fascinating. And, just also like to invite you to join our livestream of the Bibliodiscotheque Symposium, which will be tomorrow from 1:00 to 5:00 PM, and that program features Gloria Gaynor, Robin Roberts from Good Morning America, Alice Echols, who's one of the experts on the legacy of disco music forward in popular culture, Martin Scherzinger from New York University, and also Bill Bernstein, who is a legendary photographer who actually was a staff photographer at Village Voice during disco's heyday, and was at Studio 54 all the time, capturing some really amazing and provocative images. We also have Yolanda Baker, who is the only American to continually be making disco balls in this country. As the national library, we go for, like, the big iconic symbols of cultural movements, and there is nothing as powerful about the ... Well, there's been things, but visually, the disco ball is such an iconic element from the disco era that is still in the middle of the dance culture in popular culture now. ^M00:06:22 So, some brief introductions here. You can read everyone's full bios in the program, and perhaps I should say one little item about myself. I was an Army bandsman in the 215th Army Band in the Massachusetts Army National Guard. My dad served in the Marine Corps for a little bit during the Vietnam era, and there's some other interesting military characters going back in my family lineage. ^M00:06:44 And about the music collections here at the Library, we are the largest music library in the world, so we have loads of everything. We have over 22 million items just in sort of paper-based music collections. There are also enormous audio collections and film collections that are curated by other divisions, and also really spectacular folklife collection, which has amazing ethnographic recordings, and Woody Guthrie materials, et cetera, et cetera. ^M00:07:15 In our Music Division collections, we actually document the way that music is disseminated during wartime, so with the World War I exhibit, if you go upstairs, you'll see sheet music and the visual propaganda that the government was putting out in the marketplace. Well, not necessarily government, but ... You know, the government influences things sometimes. And then we get into the World War II era, we have documentation from a subcommittee that was put together to analyze what music was going to be disseminated to the troops in the European theater. ^M00:07:47 It was kind of really spectacular research materials that can be a trove for some discovery. Then we go back to the Civil War with things like the Port Royal Band Books, which are military band march books that were used back then. We have the largest collection of Confederate sheet music in the world, which is an important resource so that we can see what was going on on the other side. You can trace, for example, the way The Battle Hymn of the Republic was just completely transformed by everyone and their mother, for every different political purpose. ^M00:08:23 Enough about all that. To my right and your left, there's some wonderful colleagues who I'm glad to now know and be working with. We have Doug Bradley, who has written extensively about his Vietnam and post-Vietnam experiences. He was in the US Army during the Vietnam era as a journalist, and he then relocated to Wisconsin and helped establish an organization called Vets House, which is a storefront ... Still in service, correct? ^M00:08:50 >> DOUG BRADLEY: Yes. >> NICHOLAS BROWN: Storefront community-based service organization, and he is the co-author of We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War. Then to his right, we have Hugo Keesing, who is a distinguished scholar in this area as well. He taught at the University of Maryland for various years and incorporated a lot of the topics into his coursework that we're going to hear about today, which was a bit of a trailblazing effort for him, I think. And he, among various publications, is the producer and author of Next Stop is Vietnam: The War on Record, 1961-2008, which is a 13-CD anthology, and that's the one out front, correct? So you'll have a chance to look at this book. It is a book and CD set. It's really a remarkable publication that is probably at the pinnacle of that kind of work for this era. And then we have Craig, down the end, who's going to be our DJ of sort, as well as giving his scholarly insights. He is also co-author of We Gotta Get Out of This Place, and still chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And for those who are in the library world, we know that institution for their phenomenal Library and Information Science program, and we have some dear friends here who graduated from there, so yay, Wisconsin. And without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to them. The first topical area that we're going to get into is what was going on with music in the Vietnam era, and then we'll kind of start working our way forward in time, and jump around a bit as well. ^M00:10:25 >> CRAIG WERNER: Yeah, and to frame this, when we talked to people and said we were going to DC to talk about disco in Vietnam and veterans' music, we got blank looks. It was a [inaudible] "Oh, what's the connection?" Well, the connection is pretty simple: it's the chronology here, it's the time period, it's that the period of disco's ascendancy and, ultimately, its decline is the same period that the Vietnam War is winding down, and the veterans are coming back to the United States. And if you listen to Gloria Gaynor's song "I Will Survive" with Vietnam vets in mind, it sounds like a very direct statement of what's at the center of Vietnam vet culture when they returned, as I said, back to the world. And then, in pursuing that, I'm on the nominating committee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I've been fighting for disco for quite some while. The problem is that people have reduced disco to the poster for Saturday Night Fever - not even, the movie, the poster - and the fact is, is that they bury the complexity, they bury the realities of dance culture. Because disco, prior to the latter part of the '60s, is black dance music, and it's not making any distinctions between soul and R&B and funk and disco. It's all part of the same mix. But when it goes mainstream, you know, Studio 54, what happens is the myth of it and the image of it replaces the reality. Something parallel is happening with Vietnam vets, that the Vietnam experience in the latter part of the '70s is buried, that we are at a period, a point, as Doug will talk about, I'm sure, that vets found it very difficult to talk to anything about their experience. But the music continued to be there, the music continued to play a role, and one way to think about this is as a manifestation of what the African American novelist Ralph Ellison called "the blues impulse." Ellison defined the blues as "an impulse to finger the jagged grain of a brutal experience, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism." It's the voice that says, "I'm still here, I'm still alive. You haven't succeeded in killing me or erasing me from the world." And so, to a large extent, what music does with veterans' culture during the Vietnam era is that it provides a way for unburying the blues, for veterans' voices to emerge, their perspectives to emerge, and with other musicians to respond to their stories. We're going to mix in a little bit of all of this in the presentation today. When Doug and I were putting together We Gotta Get Out of This Place, it's basically oral-history-based work; we certainly worked with Lydia Fish's work, and the Lansdale Collection is in there quite some bit, but it's mostly oral history based. And what we did was collect stories from vets, and we come up ... The take-home message is that music did basically four things in Vietnam vet culture. Number one, it provided a link back to the world when the guys were over there. Men and women were over there, we have a lot of women's voices in the book. Number two is it helped veterans form communities, groups within that. That plays out in the fact that Chicago veterans, Native American veterans, Puerto Rican veterans, black veterans, white veterans, Southern, [inaudible], they had different soundtracks, frequently, were within units on that. And then thirdly, it provided a way of making sense of experiences that mostly didn't make sense, being one of the major themes today. And fourth, and most important for what we're going to talk about today, for the men and women when they came back to the world, it provided a way to heal themselves. And we're going to start with a story built around, usually ... We did like a hundred events on our PR tour for the book, and we almost always ended with Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, and we usually played the first song from that album. Today, we're going to play a little bit of the last song from the album, and then Doug will talk about it. ^M00:14:52 >> [Marvin Gaye music] ^M00:16:06 >> DOUG BRADLEY: "Inner City Blues Makes Me Wanna Holler." Wow. I just want to start out by saying welcome home to my fellow veterans. Glad you're with us. Marvin Gaye was essential to the Vietnam soundtrack, and as Craig said, really, really at the heart of a lot of the healing that went on. The amazing thing is that it's the entire album. Like Craig said, we always end with What's Going On because we had more than one veteran - different races, different genders, different geographies - tell us about the power of that song, and how that, in many ways, really transformed them as people, and enabled them to get their lives back together post-Vietnam. And the wonderful story about that is that Marvin Gaye, you know, highly successful, could not make a bad record, he did duets, he sang solo, I mean, he was, like, the king of Motown. His brother Frankie was a little less fortunate. Frankie Gaye was in Vietnam, and what we did when we were in Vietnam was, we couldn't text, we couldn't email, we wrote letters. I mean, letters saved us, and helped us to sort of do a little bit of processing for our own little therapy. And so Frankie Gaye in Vietnam, '67-'68, radio operator, weren't great times to be there ... Never a great time in Vietnam, but those were some of the harder years, some of the tougher fighting, and things were changing. Attitudes were changing, morale was changing, Martin Luther King was assassinated, on and on, Tet. So Frankie's, you know, he's having his therapy, he's doing this in his letters home to mom and dad, not thinking that big important brother Marvin is even reading, but Marvin is reading Frankie's letters. He cares about what's happening with his brother. His brother's being honest about what's going on, particularly about race in Vietnam. We know it was race in America; in Vietnam, it was that and then some, because we were all in sort of a microcosm. So when Frankie gets out of Vietnam and comes home, there's Marvin. Cancels a tour, there to greet his brother, welcome him home, and did what a lot of people didn't do for Vietnam vets, and said, "I'm going to listen. I'm here to listen. I'm not going to judge you, I'm not going to probe, interrogate, blame. When you're ready to talk, I'm going to listen." Oh, Frankie wanted to talk. They spent a couple days, pretty much no sleep, Frankie talking about Vietnam, Marvin asking him questions. When they got done, Marvin says to Frankie, "You know, I'm not a politician, I'm not going to run for office; I'm not a painter, I can't paint pictures. I'm a musician, I'm an artist that way. I'm going to write about this." And what he did was he wrote that entire album, What's Going On. Don't listen to the remix they did of that where they start and end every song so you can do it easier in your iPod. Listen to the entire album; it only runs about 36, 37 minutes. Every song segues into the next song, so no song ends, it just goes into the next song. So "What's Going On" goes into "What's Happening Brother," which goes into "Save the Children," "Wholy Holy," "Fly the Friendly Skies," and it's a gospel, blues, jazz sort of fusion, as you can hear on that song. It ends with "Inner City Blues," which is like a punch in the mouth. Like, "Come on, this is a mess, you know? Can't pay my taxes, can't get a job." And the last note of "Inner City Blues" is the first note of "What's Going On," so it's this loop. This is Frankie Gaye, Vietnam vet's odyssey back to America, and trying to figure out, "Am I going to get a job, am I going to stay off drugs, am I going to stop drinking, am I going to get my life together? Is this country going to get its act together relative to me, and get me back home?" So, enormous, enormous power in that, and that's just one example of what happens musically. I never knew ... I mean, that song spoke to me, especially as a Vietnam vet, and some of the Vietnam vets I knew and worked and counseled, but when I got the Frankie Gaye story associated with that, and his telling that to Marvin, and Marvin creating the album this way, that you ... You don't get off that. That's the thing for Vietnam vets. We didn't get off that loop. Nobody pulled us back in, you know, we kept going. And that's why we did the book. We thought, "Man, if we can do something, can't still talk about the war, they can talk about a song, in the telling of that song, maybe heal and get home," and that's the best thing we could do, and we were glad we were able to do it. ^M00:20:50 >> CRAIG WERNER: Yeah, and we were teaching our Vietnam class at Madison, and I remember talking about What's Going On, and watching our two teaching assistants, a white guy ... Both Marines, white guy from Minnesota, black guy from Brooklyn, and just watching them say, "Man, I hope this cycle doesn't continue like it did back then." Well, the thing we did with the book is we ... A certain number of people we talked to just said, "Look, we'd like to write our own story. We'd like to turn into" ... What we call a solo. So we've got about 30 solos sprinkled through the book, and one of them, about What's Going On, talks about the power that that music had in helping the vets get home. And sometimes, they made music, and sometimes, it was specific songs. And for Art Flowers, veteran, now up in Syracuse, came from Memphis, he got home from Vietnam, and he said he was wasting his life. He said he was stoned all the time, he was hustling women, just dissipating his energy, and he was at a dorm room at the University of Tennessee, where he had a girlfriend at the time, and it was the first time he heard What's Going On, and Art wrote a lovely solo for us. I'm going to read the last bit of it. He said: "And, far as I'm concerned, it's still that confused Viet vet without a mission, laying on that college dorm floor in Knoxville, listening to Marvin Gaye hitting one magical note after the other, and weaving the spell on my soul. And sometime, I look at the world and it still fills me with sorrow, but I know those of us who care will make a difference in this world, that we will save the children, because this is a fight we cannot afford to use. One time, I saw a sign on Fulton in Brooklyn say that I will never quit a fight nor die a loser, in some part thanks to Marvin Gaye and What's Going On, I considered the generations, black folk and all humanity, to be in my special care. But we gon' find a way to bring some lovin' here today. Good looking out, my brother. You did your part, I'll do mine." Well, some people who did their parts were the musicians who helped bring the guys home. And during the disco era, people don't really associate many of the disco musicians of the '70s, the black musicians, with Vietnam, but there's a presence there. Both Earth, Wind & Fire and Funkadelic had people in the band who had served in Vietnam, and everybody had relatives who had been there in the African American community, and it resonates through the music. There's several songs that we could play here. Curtis Mayfield wrote a beautiful, beautiful album called Back to the World, which, if Marvin Gaye hadn't done What's Going On, would be What's Going On, in a kind of way. And then Funkadelic, George Clinton's weird, psychedelic soul empire, had several vets in it, and one of the songs that they wrote speaks directly to the vets coming home. This is "March to the Witch's Castle." ^M00:24:07 >> [Funkadelic music] ^M00:25:20 >> DOUG BRADLEY: The dance part doesn't come in on this song. Again, this whole notion of ... Especially if you're a Vietnam vet, and music sort of becomes your way to get back home and do your therapy, something like this is just right there. You know, this was a tough time to celebrate. Not saying there wasn't smooth transitions for some folks; I mean, there were almost three million of us that served there, you know, a lot of us came back and were able to get our lives back together, but there was still something that ... It wasn't right. It wasn't right here, it wasn't right over there, it wasn't right in our lives, and music became that way to sort of articulate that. I mean, a song like this, this is a happy day, the war's over, the prisoners of war are coming home. We've all seen the pictures. The kids run to their dads, you know, one young boy saluting his dad, didn't know if he should hug him or salute him. You know, that powerful moment. But hey, there were already about, you know, almost three million of us home, and not everybody was getting a parade, not everybody was getting a welcome, not everybody was a hero, and that was tough. The music started to reflect that, and as Craig said, the further away we got from that, the less we paid attention to it, the more we trivialized it, and the more we made a myth out of that, including not just the veteran experience, but also the music that was essential to the vet. ^M00:26:50 >> CRAIG WERNER: Yeah, and in the years immediately after Vietnam ... I grew up in Colorado Springs, a military town, spent a lot of time ... The band I played with played for vets a lot. And I took a job, my first job out of graduate school was at the University of Mississippi in northern Mississippi, and ... Had a lot of vets, had a lot of Vietnam vets amongst the student body at that point, and what they ... They had a soundtrack, they had a very distinct soundtrack, and it was cuts like ... Groups like the Radiators, I don't know if you know them, but they have this album called Zig-Zaggin' Through Ghostland, which is totally Vietnam vernacular. And Little Feat, the song "Mercenary Territory," you know, "Fool that I am, I'd do it again," you know, this is mercenary territory, and the vets embraced that. Many of them expressed that to us. If we asked, "Well, do you regret it?" they say, "Well, that's impossible to answer." It was a mess, it was chaos, but some of the most closely bound parts of your life. ^M00:27:54 >> DOUG BRADLEY: Well, and the incredible thing is that, you know, people forget that radio was our Internet then, and we all listened to the same music, so whether you stayed or served, whether you protested or participated, you listened to the same songs. That wasn't on the Vietnam soundtrack, that happens later, but Creedence is there, and Hendrix is there, and the Doors are there, and the Temptations are there, and Aretha, and Marvin. And that song could have a different meaning for me, if I'm in Vietnam and in the situation I'm in, than it would for you if you're listening in your dorm room at college, but we're sharing the same soundtrack, which made for some very powerful connections, which is great. You know, you're listening to what I'm listening to, right? You're into Cream and the Doors now; so am I. But it also made for a different experience because of where you were, and what you were doing, and when you were serving. ^M00:28:46 >> CRAIG WERNER: One of the most important musicians for Vietnam vets is Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen was very active with Vietnam vet communities, and wrote songs from the very beginning of his career: "Lost in the Flood," "Brothers Under the Bridge" later on. Probably the best known of those is "Born in the USA," and "Born in the USA" became the most misunderstood song of all time, probably. But the original version that Springsteen wrote, which you may or may not have heard, is a little harder to misunderstand. ^M00:29:18 >> [Bruce Springsteen music] ^M00:30:20 >> DOUG BRADLEY: I think we got the message. Yeah, I mean, a whole different take on that, and the hit song is great too, it's absolutely amazing. And, you know, Springsteen was like the rest of us. He could've gone to Vietnam. He flunked his physical because he had been in a motorcycle accident. He could've passed his physical. He might have never come back. His first drummer, Bart Haynes, was killed in Vietnam. So Bruce, you know, he cared ... That was the thing. We all had to make a decision every day about Vietnam. What were we going to do about it? Because it was the deciding factor of who we were and what we were doing, what our lives were revolving around at the time. And he understood that, but he sort of musically stayed away from it until he had this moment. And he had the Haynes moment, he'd written some stuff, but in 1981, he did a thing called the Concert for the Vietnam Vet in Los Angeles, and he invited paralyzed vets in wheelchairs to surround the stage. One of them was Bobby Muller, who was a wounded Marine. He was very influential in Vietnam Veterans of America, which he helped start. It'd been essential in a lot of Vietnam vet efforts. And Muller was one of those guys, and this was the night when Bruce really came out from behind the curtain. He's a great performer, he said a few things, but that night, he talked, and he talked about Vietnam, and he talked about America's denying what had happened in Vietnam and the treatment of Vietnam vets, and then brought Bobby Muller up in his wheelchair to address the crowd. And then, because of Ron Kovic, who he had met - he had read Born on the Fourth of July, Ron's searing memoir about his Vietnam experience - and he met Bobby Muller, he wrote this song. And he gave it to Muller before Muller was leaving ... And the acoustic version is what he heard, and he said, "Did I get it right?" And Bobby Muller said to Bruce, "Yeah, man, you got it." ^M00:32:17 >> CRAIG WERNER: Yeah, and you don't usually think about Springsteen as disco era, but he wrote songs with the Pointer Sisters, he wrote songs for Donna Summer, and he did dance remixes for quite some time. I think he wanted to be a little bit more of that scene than he was. But anyway, with that, we're going to turn over to Hugo, who's going to present a couple ... Sequence of songs that have to do with the racial aspect of Vietnam, inseparable from disco. ^M00:32:50 >> HUGO KEESING: There are always two sides to a record, the A side and the B side, and there are two sides to music and the Vietnam War. I think what Craig and Doug have done is to play the soundtrack for the veterans, for the ones who were in Vietnam. My approach to this body of music was more as a historian, to see if we could track the war, attitudes toward war, the fate of soldiers, et cetera, through the popular music of the time. So it's Vietnam War and music, but in sort of a different way. So, my soundtrack of the war really begins in the early '60s, when you have the Shirelles singing about a soldier boy. These are songs about soldiers before the war had really started, and even our friend Marvin Gaye wrote and sang a song called, "A Soldier's Plea," but it's about ... It's asking his girl to be true while he serves as a soldier. Those were the kinds of songs that were there early on. William Bell, "Marching Off to War," someone who identifies as a soldier and is about to go to war himself. In 1965, or actually Christmas '66, the first song in my collection of Vietnam War-related songs, which sits at around 6,000 - 6,000 - is by someone called Private Charles Bowen, who sings about Christmas in Vietnam. That's the first time it happens, and Christmas in Vietnam, he describes as "out in some foxhole, fighting the Viet Cong." This is 1966. But I see the congruence, the coming together of music and the Vietnam War, especially in soul music, R&B, whatever we want to call it, as happening not because of something that took place in the musical sphere. Go back 50 years to April 28, 1967. Craig, if you will give them this 30 seconds' worth of speech, because I think this is extremely important. ^M00:34:50 >> MUHAMMED ALI [recording]: My conscience won't let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn't put no dogs on me, they didn't rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. Well, shoot them for what? How am I going to shoot them? They're little ... Poor little black people, little babies and children and women. How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail. ^M00:35:20 >> HUGO KEESING: That, of course, is Muhammad Ali, who is refusing induction 50 years ago. Now, remember what happened to Ali. He was the world heavyweight champion, he was stripped of his title, he was stripped of his ability to work in his profession, he was fined $10,000, he was threatened with jail, although he never served in jail. But I think as a black American, there was a pretty strong message that you don't do things like this. You don't protest the war or anything of that nature. Ali's words were put into a song by a young man named Matt Jones. He was part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, part of the Freedom Singers, and this song was written very shortly after Ali's speech. ^M00:36:06 >> [Matt Jones music] ^M00:36:41 >> HUGO KEESING: Do you think this record stood any chance of hitting AM radio in 1967? And the answer, of course, is "hell no." What happened, though, is that the notion of black self-awareness did become an important part of the charts in 1968. We have Aretha Franklin singing about R-E-S-P-E-C-T, we have Sam & Dave singing about being a soul man, we have James Brown a year later singing "Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud," but none of those songs mention anything about Vietnam and the war which had been going on for a number of years. A couple of blues artists who had recorded songs relating to the draft and their own fate, John Lee Hooker and J.B. Lenoir, released - or, I would say re-released - Korean War songs as Vietnam songs, about having to go, and being drafted and having to serve. Now, in '68, to me, a transition group is Sly and the Family Stone. Very popular with both the R&B audience and the pop audience, but as you look at their releases from '68 to '70, they begin with "Dance to the Music," and then they go over to "Everyday People," and then finally to "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)." I think that the message of self-empowerment becomes stronger as they move into the 1970s. A transition point, December 1st, 1969. Doug will remember it, I'll remember it: the draft lottery. And suddenly, a whole new audience, those in college, et cetera, become concerned that their number might be next. And it's about a year later after ... In 1970, that one of the two people who I think had a huge impact on what soul music or R&B music would say about the war makes a decision. In 1970, Berry Gordy, a businessman who was very, very concerned about his brand of Motown music, finally lets one of his groups, Martha and the Vandellas, record what could be considered an anti-war song. It's called "I Should Be Proud," and Martha sings, why should she be proud? Because - we're not sure if it's her husband or her boyfriend - "Why should I be proud that he died?" Because she doesn't feel that that was worth the effort. What Motown also does ... In fact, I think it's interesting that Martha and the Vandellas' song was four releases prior to Edwin Starr recording "War, What is it Good For? Absolutely Nothing." I think everyone will have heard that. But Berry Gordy was a smart man, a businessman. He saw that the follow-up to "War" was "Stop the War Now" by Edwin Starr. It didn't go to number one, it peaked, I think, at number 25. And he had another group that followed its first number one with its second number one, and then its third number one, and that group was The Jackson 5. So where did Gordy put his efforts? Not in anti-war songs, as far as I'm concerned, but he put it behind groups like The Jackson 5. Gordy controlled much of what came out of Motown in the first half of the Vietnam War, to about 1970, but people like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder had enough clout so that they could sort of break out of his very conservative pattern. But there was another entrepreneur, another businessman named Don Cornelius. You may remember a show that ran for 35 years called Soul Train. Cornelius was also aware of brands, and his Soul Train show was branded. He himself was extremely conservative. He signed off every show with ... His sign-off was "We wish you love, peace, and soul," but he was really not interested in hearing songs about the Vietnam War. One of the few non-Motown songs that related directly to the war at that point was Freda Payne singing "Bring the Boys Home." But what happens is Marvin Gaye, you already heard, I find it interesting that his sequence of hits from 1970 forward starts with "What's Going On," and then you heard a little bit of "Inner City," but his biggest hit, at least on the R&B charts, was the next one in line, which was "Let's Get It On." We have moved from war to sex, and from that point on, his career is less focused on the issues of the day as on things like "Sexual Healing," which is another huge hit for him. Now, in 1972, Motown released an album on its Black Forum label by the journalist Wallace Terry called Guess Who's Coming Home, and it is the oral history of black soldiers in Vietnam describing what's happening to them and what might be going on. I want to play a song that may capture some of this, but it's a song that went nowhere. This is Bill Withers, who was very popular with "Lean On Me," but in '73, he wrote a song called "I Can't Write Left-Handed." It goes for a minute or two, but I think it tells a story of a musician trying to deal with the war. >> DOUG BRADLEY: We play this song in our class every Veterans Day, and students are just blown away. ^M00:42:24 >> Bill WITHERS [recording]: We recorded this song on October the 6th. Since then, the war has been declared over. In '73, you remember it like anybody remembers any war, one big drag. A lot of people write songs about wars and government, various social things, but I think about young guys who were like I was when I was young. I had no more idea about any government or political things or anything. And I think about those kind of young guys now, who all of a sudden, somebody comes up, and they're very law-abiding, so if somebody says "go," they don't ask any questions, they just go. And I can remember, not too long ago, seeing a young guy with his right arm gone. Just got back. And I asked him how he was doing. He said he was doing all right now, but he had thought he was going to die. He said getting shot at didn't bother him; it was getting shot that shook him up. And I tried to put myself in his position. Maybe he cried. Maybe he's sad. [BILL WITHERS singing] ^M00:44:53 >> HUGO KEESING: "Trying to get a deferment for my younger brother." The experience of a Vietnam veteran, although it was not Withers's own song. Again, a song that never even reached the charts. I don't think that the country was ready for this kind of music in 1973. Music, disco, I think, starts, in many ways, on the pop charts with a song that went to number one on both the R&B and the pop charts. It was called "TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)," by Fathers, Mothers, Brothers, and Sisters. It was the theme song for Soul Train, and that really kicked off four or five years that were very, very big on the dance music. Interestingly enough, the first song to reach Billboard's charts that uses the word "disco" is by a British group called Hot Chocolate: "Disco Queen" in 1975. So the term "disco," at least in song titles, came from England. Biggest thing that happened for disco is kind of interesting, because I think Saturday Night Fever in December of 1977 moved the music from wherever it was to become a white, middle-class, urban-suburban type of music, and those four characteristics don't necessarily take in many of the Vietnam veterans who were returning: white, middle-class, urban and suburban. Many more of them were certainly rural, and probably not middle-class. '79, we have Gloria Gaynor, "I Will Survive." Number one for three weeks on the pop charts, but it only made number four on the R&B charts. Those charts were beginning ... Or actually had been diverging for quite a while. It was now the Bee Gees who were defining disco, and I thought a little bit, if the character played by John Travolta had been a black service member returning - or even a white service member, kind of like The Deer Hunter - then songs with titles like "Stayin' Alive" and "Night Fever" would have had very different meanings. They would have ... "Night Fever" would have been post-traumatic stress, as opposed to what it was. So they didn't quite fit. '81, another important aspect in the whole disco scene was the realization of something called AIDS, and I think AIDS and its impact on club life ... It certainly had an impact on where disco would go. "Disco" was almost an arbitrary term, I think both Doug and Craig have said. It began maybe as R&B, it included soul, it went into funk, it went into house music, it was all of those things. Stevie Wonder recorded "Front Line" in 1982. It's a little bit like Bill Withers's soldier who gets his right arm shot off. "Front Line," for Stevie Wonder, has a man who loses his leg in Vietnam. Wonder had a huge string of chart hits; "Front Line" didn't make it. Didn't even break the top 100. One of the most important, I think, in the veterans' healing occurred on November 13th, 1982, when the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated over by the Lincoln Memorial. And it's following that dedication, I think, that the attitude toward veterans begins to change, that veterans themselves begin to look at themselves differently. It's helped by artists such as Billy Joel, writing "Goodnight Saigon," it's helped by Springsteen's "Born in the USA," it's helped by Charlie Daniels Band, which sings "Still in Saigon," introducing us to flashbacks. But it's also the time, in about 1985, when veterans themselves first begin writing their own stories. I think it was Doug and Jim who ... Doug and Craig, excuse me, who introduced me to Jim Wachtendonk, a Madison, or at least a Wisconsin veteran who began writing about his experiences in 1985. And they're searing; he writes about his children inheriting from him his maladies, I guess, from exposure to Agent Orange, and he puts those in song, and he expresses his anger. For him, it's extremely therapeutic. And then a name I think that all of you are familiar with, Country Joe begins putting the Vietnam experience on record. And more than just putting his own experience on record - because Joe, while a veteran, didn't serve in Vietnam - Joe begins collecting these tapes, mostly cassette tapes and occasional records, that veterans are sending him. And one of the great things that happened to me is that Joe shared all of that with me, and that was an important part, I think, of what I was able to do, is to get the veterans' voices on CD so that they, too, could be heard. There's the ... To my mind, the soundtracks of the Vietnam War become popular as a result of another sort of touchstone, and that is Good Morning, Vietnam, the film about ... With Robin Williams, of course, is really the first that uses the soundtrack of the '60s and '70s. Other Vietnam War films, whether it's Apocalypse Now, whether it was Full Metal Jacket, et cetera, did not really make much use of that music, and I think the Robin Williams film is a realization of how important that music was for the people there. I'm going to finish with a very short segment of one of the few black veterans writing about his own experience. Listen to what Jim Logsdon had to say about the impact of the Vietnam War on him and his family. ^M00:50:49 [Jim Logsdon music] ^M00:51:33 >> HUGO KEESING: "Thanks, Secret Agent," of course, was about Agent Orange, and not only was Jimmy himself affected, but the cancers were passed on to his daughter, and so he sings about her seizures. It's a different approach. I think it's another way of listening to the soundtrack of the war, and then ... Craig, back to you. ^M00:52:00 >> CRAIG WERNER: We're going to finish up here with just a little bit ... There's not a lot of explicit presence of Vietnam in the disco dance soundtrack of the late '70s and early '80s, but there's some, and I'm going to start by playing a snippet of a song by Paul Hardcastle. Doug will talk about it. ^M00:52:20 [Paul Hardcastle music] ^M00:52:46 >> DOUG BRADLEY: Wow, that's a different sound. Yeah, I mean, taking the reality of that, and ... You know, people still argue about this, because of median age, mean age, et cetera, but a lot of the young men who were in Vietnam were under 20, especially if you were in combat, and so Hardcastle took this issue, many, many years later, and he took that notion- >> HUGO KEESING: '85. >> DOUG BRADLEY: ... that concept, but, I mean, this is like ... You can see him holding his ... You know, he's John Travolta. >> HUGO KEESING: Right. I have a slightly different take on that, because it was 10 years after the war ended, and probably 15 years after most of the veterans had come back. I have the feeling that if he had ... Well, let me put it this way. Back in ... When I was a teenager, we had a guy on television named Dick Clark, and one of the ways that records would be judged is that he would invite a couple of people from the audience to come up, listen to a new tune, and ask them to rate it, and it was usually a kind of interesting song, but "It's got a good beat, you can dance to it, and I'll give it an 87." So from very early on, there was a clear distinction between song lyrics and "the beat." I think what we find, certainly for disco, is the beat was the important thing; the lyrics were secondary. For me, "19" is sort of a return to where music was before the war. I would, in my own mind, think that if Paul Hardcastle had said, "In 1955, the average age of first incarceration in England for car theft was 25; in 1966, it was 19," he could still stutter through "19," but it would have nothing to do with the war. For me, the Vietnam War is secondary. People going to clubs and dancing to Paul Hardcastle, I don't think were connecting that song with the war at all; they were responding to the music, the beat. And Vietnam, while mentioned in the song, to me, is incidental, and ... Yeah. ^M00:55:07 >> CRAIG WERNER: Hugo and I are going to have some disagreements about DJs. One of the things that DJs do ... And you very rarely would have heard that song as a record. You wouldn't play it through as a record. You would have heard bits of it mixed into other cuts on the dance floor. We had grad students that we interviewed DJs about it. Certainly some of them were aware of Vietnam, but that's not ... The point being here that Vietnam is not particularly present in the dance music world explicitly, and one of the responses, the most common response we got in our interviews to "19" was kind of a "Paul Hardcastle isn't a vet, what the hell does he know about it" kind of a thing, which is why we were going to end with the next song, which is one that was very familiar in Chicago dance clubs, at any rate, by a group called Cybotron, and it's called "Clear." I want to read something from the co-writer, a paragraph from a book here about "Clear," where it came from. Rick Davis, who was one of the guys who crafted this song, the primary writer, had been in Vietnam, and he says, quote: "'Clear' has a military value. I'd seen too much death. Destruction is something I've dwelt with in all my existence. My motivations - what would be the use or sense in trying to explain these things? I'm only trying to tell you now as a post-mortem, remembering the snakes, the leeches, the artillery pop, the swamps, the bugs, the elephant grass. It was the worst mistake of my life. Politically, I wasn't pro or antiwar. A chance to escape the ghetto became more important than anything else. You're not going to believe this, but I joined the Marines to sail the Seven Seas with Captain Sinbad. Adventure and thrills." And his collaborator, Juan Atkins, one of the best-known figures in both Detroit and Chicago house music, talks about making it with Rick Davis, and Juan Atkins said: "He'd be on guard duty in the middle of the night, aiming the rifle around, cocked," Atkins said. "Doing maneuvers. I never felt he was crazy or anything. We were best friends. It was something that just caught me off guard. That'd be a different studio experience." So I'm going to play a little bit of "Clear" to wipe up, and then we'll open it up to questions. ^M00:57:35 [Cybotron music] ^M00:58:48 >> CRAIG WERNER: Imagine that as what they played in the witch's castle that Funkadelic is heading towards. ^M00:58:57 >> NICHOLAS BROWN: Cool. Well, thank you, gentlemen. I'm going to ask you a few questions before we turn it over to the audience Q&A. The sort of ... And maybe we're going to work backwards from where we just were. I know for the LGBT community, the sort of club experience, starting especially in the disco era, that was a place that was safe, and it was a place you could go and forget about the worries of identity and that kind of business. Is there any sense from the folks that you've interviewed or from yourselves that the disco music and the club experience in the disco era was an opportunity for veterans to forget about that thing, if they wanted to, for a little bit? And how much did their identity as a veteran play into their experience in that era? Like in terms of, were they identifying as veterans, or were they hiding it? ^M00:59:43 >> CRAIG WERNER: Well, if I was going to follow up in depth on that, where I'd go is I'd go to the oral histories on Stonewall, which was absolutely interracial moment and movement, and there were ... A lot of the guys down there were Vietnam vets at that point. And exactly what they were going through, the music for it was partially ... It was partially blues, it was partially escape, it was partially community. ^M01:00:09 >> NICHOLAS BROWN: One of the questions I have is sort of going back to specifically the music that was being played in theater. What were the different ways that music was being consumed beyond just listening to the official radio broadcast, or beyond having recordings? When we were discussing in advance, there was sort of this sense of bootlegging, and different folks bringing in recordings differently. ^M01:00:33 >> DOUG BRADLEY: Well, you know, the ... What the Army tried to do ... As you know, the war was getting less and less popular. I mean, public opinion had turned against it. We were trying ... Nixon had won the election with a secret plan to end the war, but there were still hundreds of thousands of us in Vietnam, and by the time I got there, we ... He announced a program called Vietnamization, which was turning the ground war over to the South Vietnamese, escalating the air war that would bring them to the negotiating table. So, I mean, we're kind of reluctant GIs now. I'm not saying there weren't still a few gung-ho guys, but by '70 and '71, when I'm there, the mantra was "Nobody wanted to be the last GI killed in Vietnam, so don't do anything crazy or stupid. Don't make me do anything crazy or stupid that's going to get me killed." So how are we going to keep our morale up? Well, they gave us creature comforts, as best they could. Music was paramount among them. They knew we were the music generation, we loved our music, we identified with it, we connected with it, and so in addition to Armed Forces Radio, which, you know, we had people in the book say it was the worst thing that was ever invented, other people say "it saved my life," you can get everything in between ... And I'll tell you, by the time I was there, the DJs had gotten pretty good. There were guys that sounded like some of the ... You know, the FM guys, you know, "Oh." >> HUGO KEESING: "This is the American Forces Vietnam Network, where the hits just keep on coming." >> DOUG BRADLEY: Yeah. That's what we had during the day, but at night, they would get a little funky. So we had ... But we also had cassettes. We had reel-to-reel tape decks. We had, usually, a musician in the hooch. We had live bands that could cover everything from "Detroit City" by Bobby Bare, you had to play "We Gotta Get Out of This Place," everything in between. James Brown, you know, Janis Joplin. They were good. And we had Bob Hope, we had people touring, James Brown was in Vietnam, Nancy Sinatra, Johnny Cash. My point being, they gave us music in as much ... Because they thought it would boost our morale, and those of us supporting the troops in the field would boost their morale as a result. But there were also bootlegs, and there was a guy named Dave Rabbit who had this three weeks on the air, a thing called Radio First Termer, that was the most ... The greatest pirate radio you've ever heard in your life. You can get the tapes, you can go online. This guy, they couldn't find him. He was on a bandwidth right next to AFVN, and they couldn't find this guy for three weeks, and he was doing ... He was playing all of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida," 17 1/2 minutes, the whole thing. ^M01:03:11 >> HUGO KEESING: Doug, he was at Phan Rang Air Base when I was teaching over there for the University of Maryland, and he was a well-kept secret, because if I had known that he was in the same place that I was, I certainly would have gone and looked him up. >> DOUG BRADLEY: So my point, back to the point, Nick, there was a ... We had so many different was to access the music, and you could have your ... You could have different... It was, again, we were sharing all of this stuff. If you go to the clubs, or you hear somebody perform, or even when you're playing your cassette or your tape, your reel-to-reel tape decks, we were all listening to that stuff. >> HUGO KEESING: Nick, I think what's important is that technology's changed so much that there isn't this shared music for today's military. It's now all your own line-up that you download, and you hear it through your earbuds or your headphones. It was very, very different then, because it was boom boxes, and it was reel-to-reel tape decks and stuff like that. ^M01:04:08 >> NICHOLAS BROWN: What were the military bands playing, and what was the difference between their official capacity and then when they'd be jamming for you guys after hours? >> HUGO KEESING: I never heard a military band play in Vietnam. >> DOUG BRADLEY: Me neither. >> HUGO KEESING: I heard Filipino bands and- >> DOUG BRADLEY: Korean. >> HUGO KEESING: ... yeah, Korean, doing covers of the popular songs, but never heard a military band. >> NICHOLAS BROWN: Interesting. They tell us band folk [inaudible]. >> CRAIG WERNER: We have interviews with people who did play in those bands. >> DOUG BRADLEY: That's right. >> CRAIG WERNER: Yeah, Kimo Williams, particularly, who's now a very accomplished composer, wrote a symphony, [inaudible] Vietnam [inaudible] talked about a lot. It's called Symphony for the Sons of Nam, and it was premiered by the Saint Petersburg Orchestra. It's really a wonderful piece. But he was with [inaudible] Soul Coordinators? >> DOUG BRADLEY: Yup. >> CRAIG WERNER: Soul Coordinators, played with in Nam, and ... Yeah. ^M01:05:03 >> NICHOLAS BROWN: So my last question before we go to Q&A is ... We've talked about a lot of really amazing insights into this period, and the disco period, and afterwards, and such. How does this whole era with the music compare to Global War on Terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, World War II, Korea? Is it the same types of things going on with different music, or is there something about this Vietnam era that is so unique that it merits more attention? ^M01:05:33 >> HUGO KEESING: Can I try it? You've asked me about ... Or, you've asked about a lot of wars, and I'm happy to go back to World War II or Korea. Neither of those were ... The music of those eras, the 1940s and early '50s, was not aimed at a young audience. I think one of the key differences is that by 1960, youth had taken over popular music. Perry Como was gone, Dean Martin was gone, Rosemary Clooney was gone, and so you had new artists who aimed their music at the age group which was now consuming that music. And I think that makes the Vietnam-era music very, very different from anything that preceded it. I'm less familiar with what's happening now, except that I don't think it's shared anymore. ^M01:06:20 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc dot gov.