March 1, 2016
The Animals to Hendrix: Authors discuss soundtrack of Vietnam War at March 7 event
For soldiers serving in the Vietnam War, music was a salve, a connection to home and a temporary respite from the horrors of combat. In “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” Rolling Stone’s #1 Best Music Book of 2015, Doug Bradley and Craig Werner explore the importance of music to U.S. troops in Vietnam, relaying powerful, intimate stories told by veterans themselves.
Bradley, a Vietnam veteran, teaches a course on the war with Werner, a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The pair will be at Intellectual House on the University of Washington campus from 4 to 6 p.m. Monday, March 7 for “From Survival to Healing: The Multicultural Music of the Vietnam War.”
Sponsored by the UW Department of American Indian Studies and UW Ethnomusicology, the public event will include music, stories and a Q&A. Bradley and Werner answered a few questions about their book for UW Today.
How and why did this book come about?
CW: We met at a Christmas party at the Madison Vet Center. Both of Doug’s kids had taken my classes and he knew we shared a love of music. As we talked, other vets started gathering around, sharing their stories about music in Vietnam. A few weeks later, we got together and said, “Hey, there’s something going on here, we should think about writing a book.” Eleven years later, here we are.
On a deeper level, we wrote it out of a deep belief that the vets’ stories needed to be heard, that the U.S. still hasn’t come to terms with the human reality of what the war was about. As we wrote, it became clear that what we most wanted was to get ourselves out of the way and let the voices of the men and women who shared their stories take center stage.
Wartime music is often political, but you write that the songs that resonated most with veterans were ones that reflected their loneliness. What did music offer them?
CW: The soldiers didn’t need to be told about the war; they were living it. And the majority of them were very, very young. So they did what young guys do; they thought about girls. Songs like “My Girl,” any song with a woman’s name in the title — “Gloria,” “To Susan on the West Coast Waiting”— struck a chord. So did songs about longing — Otis Redding’s “Dock of the Bay,” Bobby Vinton’s “Mr. Lonely.”
Music basically provided a lifeline to the home front, provided the glue that bound units together, helped them make sense of experiences that mostly didn’t make sense and helped them survive and heal once they’d come back home.
DB: For those of us who served, the politics were real, not abstract. We didn’t need to be reminded where we were or what we were up against. Many of us knew the protest songs — enjoyed and played them — but we were all about survival. Everyone in Vietnam had a song, and those songs provide the key to unlocking the human story at the heart of the Vietnam War. That music has stayed with us for decades because it connects us, it speaks to us and it differentiates us as a generation. The music was honest and authentic, and it was everywhere.
How did popular music reflect shifting public sentiment about the war over time?
CW: As it became more and more clear that the war was a mess, a perception that was fueled in part by the return of the vets who’d seen it firsthand, the feeling of confusion and chaos is much, much stronger. Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion,” Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools.” Whatever clarity there might have been earlier went up in smoke.
DB: Change was occurring at a dizzying rate and music was central to a lot of that. The Beatles went from “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” to “Sgt. Pepper,” the Beach Boys from “I Get Around” to “Good Vibrations.” Those of us in the military weren’t immune to this — in fact, the army was a microcosm for the changes happening in the greater society regarding drugs, authority, race, peace, protest and more. The music was embedded in everything that was happening.
One veteran you interviewed said that (Seattle native) Jimi Hendrix “gave us the melody of war, raw and off-key, the first ragged voices of guys who’d been shot in the field.” How important was his music to veterans, and was there a particular demographic who liked it?
CW: Hendrix was the prophet or the high priest, probably the most frequently mentioned musician, though it wasn’t one particular song. We heard about “Purple Haze,” “All Along the Watchtower,” “Hey Joe,” the Woodstock “Star-Spangled Banner.” A line like “’Scuse me while I kiss the sky” takes on all sorts of new dimensions; he knew that the smoke grenades that guided choppers into landing zones let out purple smoke. But the most important thing was that if you listen to his guitar, it sounds like helicopters, explosions.
DB: Sonically, Hendrix was Vietnam. When I was there (1970-71), we used to have arguments about whether he was the only musician who got what Vietnam was all about. Being black and growing up poor and being in the military gave Hendrix cachet that most other artists didn’t have.
Is music as important a part of war today as it was during the Vietnam War, do you think?
CW: It’s different. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the men and women have iTunes, headphones, their own music. And the music scene is niche-marketed in such different ways. Soldiers in Vietnam might not have liked the Stones or Johnny Cash or James Brown, but everyone knew who they all were. Our teaching assistants in the Vietnam class we teach are younger vets, and it’s interesting that both of them connect about as strongly with the music of Vietnam as they do with their music.
Music was clearly an integral part of helping veterans cope with the complexities and difficulties of the war. Is that music still therapeutic for veterans?
CW: Absolutely, the last chapter of our book is all about that. For some, it was a matter of making music, but for many it was hearing the music that helped them break out of depression or self-medication and come back home in different ways.
DB: There are so many powerful, personal examples of this recounted in our book that make it special. Eventually, we decided that we just needed to get out of the way and let these veterans and their epiphanies speak for themselves, which is why we have so many “solo” pieces in the book where we did just that.
