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ABSTRACT
This personal essay begins with a discussion of the Festival for Peace, an all-day rock show at Shea Stadium, NYC, August 1970. After a brief discussion of my impressions of the Festival for Peace, I discuss how the music of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in particular, shaped my identity and thinking for years to come, including my openness to various civil rights and political movements and my decisions to major in English, to work in education and not corporate America, to shift my research focus from American literature to popular music, and to develop courses in popular culture.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Other performers included Paul Simon, John Sebastian, the Rascals, Johnny Winter, Pacific Gas & Electric, Dionne Warwick, Ten Wheel Drive with Genya Ravan, Herbie Hancock, and Miles Davis.
2. Some of these memories have been confirmed by posts on the Internet. “Dee,” another attendee, quoted Janis in a post: “I ain’t singing unless you turn off those f**king lights!” Mild53 wrote, “At one point [during CCR’s set] they stopped the show and asked the crowd to stop dancing as the 2nd tier was bouncing up and down in rhythm.”
3. CitationAlthusser writes that it is through Ideological State Apparatuses “that [the state’s] ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called intepellation” (86).
4. Mick Jagger once told Melody Maker that “those who listen to groups like ours, and think we are originators … [d]on’t listen to us. Listen to the men who inspire us. Buy their records” (Citation“Rolling Stones”).
5. I have written about the counterculture, Romanticism, and music in “The Romantic Protest of Mid to Late 1960s Rock Music.”
6. At the University of Georgia on Law Day, Carter cited Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “Like A Rolling Stone,” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (CitationCochran).
7. When the Beatles first arrived in America in 1964, a reporter asked them whom they would like to meet. McCartney replied Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters, names the reporter did not recognize. McCartney replied with words to the effect, “Don’t you know your own famous people here?” (CitationYamin 150). … B.B. King once declared that Jagger and Richards were “scholars of black music” (230). … Eric CitationBurdon wrote, “If it hadn’t been for [black blues musicians] I wouldn’t have been interested in this country in the first place. I started collecting things – photographs, newspaper articles, magazine clippings – to find out why Negroes were being mistreated and often brutally so” (168).
8. By the “experience of music,” I mean the visceral and emotional response to both recorded and live music as well as the thoughtful contemplation of music’s sounds and words.
9. For a list of some of the “best” Anti-Trump songs see CitationBrunner; CitationDolan, Shteamer, and Exposito; CitationO’Connor; CitationRyan.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Thomas M. Kitts
Thomas M. Kitts, Professor of English at St. John’s University, NY, is the author of John Fogerty: An American Son, Ray Davies: Not Like Everybody Else, The Theatrical Life of George Henry Boker, and a play, Gypsies: An East Village Opera. He has edited the anthology, Literature and Work, and essay collections on John Fogerty and Ray Davies. He is the area chair of music for the Popular Culture Association’s annual conference and, with Gary Burns, he is the editor of both Rock Music Studies and Popular Music and Society. With Nick Baxter-Moore, he edited The Routledge Companion to Popular Music and Humor. He is currently working on a critical biography of Richie Furay.