For Feb 21

Compare the views of the 2 documents below with your earlier reading by John Sinclair (Rock and Roll is the Weapon of the Cultural Revolution) and Tim Robbins (To Dance)

Air Pollution? Newsweek, August 16, 1965

When Newsweek first tried to assess the new music in 1965, it focused on the sexual innuendo and drug references in song lyrics.

I can't get no satisfaction,

I can't get no girlie action

... Ah try and ah try and ah try

And I'm tryin' to make some girl.

Panted rather than sung by a leering quintet called the Rolling Stones, "Satisfaction" has dominated teen-age record sales and radio's Top Forty sound in the U.S. for the last six weeks. If these explicit lyrics dismay adults, they ought to hear the flip side, "The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man," which has a line sufficiently indecent to get it banned on some rock-'n'-roll stations.

Sexual innuendo, of course, is nothing new in popular music. It lent an added glitter to such old standards as Cole Porter's "Let's Do It" and "All of You." But the suggestive songs of today's commercial rock-'n'-roll groups are something different: they have no wit, for one thing, but more important they are frankly aimed at adolescents rather than the sophisticated Broadway audiences who first heard Porter.

Digging the Dirt: "Porter and Lorenz Hart did it with such class and taste that it sounded mature," contends disk jockey William B. Williams of WNEW in New York, who plays the standards. "Now there isn't any taste involved." "The average 14-year-old," adds Atlanta's Pat Hughes, "digs all the dirt."

Unhappily, too, there's more dirt to dig, for a kind of Gresham's law is at work today in pop music, and the tasteless themes of the Rolling Stones have begun to displace the innocently exuberant sounds of the Beatles (who only pleaded "I Want to Hold Your Hand"). The Stones continue to grind out visceral stuff like "King Bee" (Buzzin' 'round your hive, together we can make honey ... let me come inside...") and "I'm All Right," a crescendo of do you feel it, do you FEEL it and cmon, cmon, cmon, C'MON BABY

But dirty lyrics are sometimes hard to pin down. The words of the songs are teen argot to begin with, and they are inundated by an artillery of yeah yeah yeahs, then run through a battery of echo and "dubbing over" chambers and topped off by a pulsating, drown-'em- out percussionist. "It seems like the harder they are to understand, the dirtier you can bet they are," said a teen-age girl in Atlanta, who has given up on deciphering rock 'n' roll. Chicago disk jockeys refer to slurred-lyric songs as "mumblies"-"you can hear anything you want to in them," says one DJ.

The Kingsmen's "Louie Louie" is a particularly blatant recent example. A group of Princeton students heard that spinning the 45 version at 33 rpm furnished quite a shock even to strong stomachs. When the FCC looked into complaints, its investigators found the chant unintelligible at any speed. Some listeners discerned the same slurring technique to disguise the words in the Elchords' "Peppermint Stick."

Double Entendre: Knowing teenagers also listen for euphemisms in such alleged underground songs as Lee Dorsey's "Ride Your Pony," Ian Whitcomb's "You Turn Me On," and Tom Jones's smash, "What's New Pussycat?" Yet a new hit with suggestive credentials, "I Want Candy"-sung by the Strangeloves on the Bang label-proves, after careful scrutiny, innocent enough.

Songs with multiple meanings are not all based on sex: the Rooftop Singers' "Walk Right In" sounds to some ears, like an illusion to drug addiction; and the Byrds' hit of several weeks ago, "Mr. Tambourine Man," is reputedly about a pusher in New York's Greenwich Village-although Bob Dylan's original lyrics were tamed down some- what for the pop version. "Puff," a whimsical fairy tune on the surface, which doting fathers bought for their 6-year-olds, sounded to some like a narcotics cryptogram:

Puff [smoke], the magic dragon, [drag-in=inhalel

Lived by the sea ["C"=cocaine],

And frolicked in the autumn mist

In a land called Honah Lee [argot for being high on heroin].

Little Jackie Paper [ in which marijuana is wrapped) loved

that rascal Puff.

Although Federal criminal status make it a crime to broadcast obscene, indecent or profane material, and the FCC can revoke a license for violation of that statute, radio stations are supposed to police their own content. "The record studios know they won't get onto the big stations with off-color songs," said Gene Williams, pro- gram director of WLS in Chicago. "We screen all the music up here before we play it, and we're pretty careful."

True, most stations hold reviewing sessions where officials and diskjockeys are supposed to toss out songs deemed in questionable taste; but apparently standards have been relaxed recently more and more. (DJ taste is not impeccable: in New York last week WABC fired Bob Dayton after he reported the anniversary of Hiroshima and then played a record of "Happy Birthday.") The stations feel they must be with it-and if the Rolling Stones' songs are not always decorous, they are in demand. "Unfortunately, the Stones now are hot. They could hum something and it would sell-that might be an improvement," says WLS's Clark Weber.

Lyric Agonies: Yet there are the stirrings of audience unease. The PTA Magazine, which tries to act as a guide for parents who still have some control over their children's entertainment, recently criticized ABC's " Shindig, " which put the Stones' gyrations on TV. The rnagazine also will blast NBC's "Hullabaloo" in its September issue. "Soloists, male and female, moan, groan and grimace in the sick songs, and lyric agonies of frustrated love," the guide complains. "Whatever this program may represent psychologically, sociologically and economically, esthetically it is ugly, grotesque and revolting."

Some DJ's, however, suggest that commercial rock 'n' roll is full of sound and fury-signifying nothing. Boston's Arnie ("Woo Woo") Ginsberg of WMEX claims that "a popular song is only successful because of the total sound. Words aren't that important." And a Cleveland teenager confirms this opinion. Asked about a “suggestive word,” she replied: “Words? What words?”

Rhythm, Riots and Revolution

REV DAVID A. NOEBEL

As the power of rock music grew within the counterculture and the movements, so, too, did the concern it evoked in traditional circles. An extreme reaction came in 1966 from Chtistian crusader David Noebel who found Communist political menace and Pavlovian manipulations embedded in rock 'n'roll.

America's very young are not the only targets of the Communists. Also included in their ingeniously conceived master music plan are America's teenagers. Since rhythmic activity music ceases to be effective by early adolescence, the music designed for high school students is extremely effective in aiding and abetting demoralization among teenagers, effective in producing degrees of artificial neurosis and in preparing them for riot and ultimately revolution to destroy our American form of government and the basic Christian principles governing our way of life.

The music has been called a number of things, but today it is best known as rock 'n' roll, beat music or simply Beatle-music. Even Time magazine admitted that "there was obviously something visceral" about the music since it has -caused riots in countless communities. Riot-causing it is, but it is also a noise which causes teenagers to experience countless side-effects, detrimental not only to the community, but also to the individual and the country. We contend that it was so planned....

Today all major record companies are flooding our teenagers with that is basically sexual, unchristian, mentally unsettling and riot-producing. The consequences of this type of "music" are staggering. In Jacksonville, Florida, 6,700 rock 'n' roll fans were sent into a "screaming, fighting frenzy in the Jacksonville coliseum.... Twenty police officers on duty at the show were swamped and called for reinforcements ... they (according to one police officer) were like a herd of cows stampeding."...

Four young men, noted for their tonsils and tonsure, are also helping to overwhelm our youth with this destructive type of "music." When the Beatles presented their "concert" in Vancouver, British Columbia, a hundred persons were stomped, gouged, elbowed and otherwise assaulted during the twenty-nine minutes performance. Nearly 1,000 were injured in Melbourne, Australia. In Beirut, Lebanon, fire hoses were needed to disperse hysterical fans. In the grip of Beatle fever, we are told, the teenagers weep, wail and experience ecstasy-ridden hysteria that has to be seen to be believed. Also, we are told, teenagers "bite their lips until they bleed and they even get overexcited and take off their clothes." To understand what rock 'n' roll in general and the Beatles in particular are doing to our teenagers, it is necessary to return to Pavlov's laboratory. The Beatles' ability to make teenagers weep and wail, become uncontrollable and unruly, and take off their clothes and riot is laboratory tested and approved. It is scientifically induced artificial or experimental neurosis.

Ivan P. Pavlov, the eminent Russian physiologist, was invited to Moscow as the personal house guest of Nikolai Lenin, the father of the Bolshevik revolution. Pavlov expressed confidence that his findings on conditioned reflexes and inhibitions would be a blessing to man- kind someday in its struggle against human ailments. Lenin had other plans....

Pavlov, in his many experiments with animals and human beings, discovered specific scientific procedures to produce artificial neuroses in dogs and men. In studying and relating these experiments, one is immediately impressed with the almost perfect analogy between what our youngsters experience under Beatlemania and the technique inflicted on Pavlov's dogs to develop "artificial neurosis.". . .

We contend that rock 'n' roll, certainly a strong external stimulus, is producing this artificial type of neurosis in our teenagers, and causing teenage mental breakdowns to reach an all time high.... Rock 'n' roll, with its perverted music form, dulls the capacity for attention and creates a kind of hypnotic monotony which blurs and makes unreal the external world. "Earthly worries are submerged in a tide of rising exaltation ... the whole universe is compressed into the medium of the beat, where all things unite and pound forward, rhythmic, and regular." In the area of morals, "rock 'n' roll treats the concept of love with a characteristic doubleness.... The lyrics generally capitulate to the concept [of true love], but the music itself expresses the unspoken desire to smash it to pieces and run amuck. "This was precisely what Dr. Ronald Sprenger, chief school medical officer of Nottingham, England, had in mind when he referred to rock 'n' roll as the cause of sexual delinquency among teenagers. He also said, "Mass hysteria affects many to the stage of loss of consciousness and lack of thought for their immediate welfare."

With the previously instilled inhibitions prohibiting the teenager from committing acts of sexual and other delinquency, the external excitatory music creates exactly the opposite desires. The ensuing internal conflict causes a severe clash or collision of the two forces and the teenager breaks down with a mental condition identifiable as artificial neurosis.

And, the frightening-even terrifying-aspect of this mentally conditioned process is the fact that the young people, in this highly excited, hypnotic state, can be told to do practically anything-and they will.

The Beatles were in Seattle, Washington, for a “concert" in August 1964. According to the Intelligencer, the show began at 8:07. "First came the Bill Black-Combo, then the Exciters, and after them the Righteous Brothers. Next on the program was Jackie de Shannon, who sang 'Needles and Pins'-and several other songs, as well as having the audience sing 'Happy Birthday' to her."

Burt McMurtrie, a radio personality in the Northwest and a pro- Beatle fan, had the following to say about those "entertainers": ... "That entire evening seemed designed to arouse every animal and sex instinct in the audience up to uncontrollable pitch and just such did it accomplish.

"It was the old, down-by-the-river religious pitch a thousand times magnified. The sort of emotional lack of control, out-of-control found in a savage jungle. And it is not healthy."

Dr. Bernard Saibel, child guidance expert for the Washington State division of community services, attended the Seattle performance of England's Beatles at the request of the Seattle Times. The following is Dr. Saibel's report.

"The experience of being with 14,000 teenagers to see the Beatles is unbelievable and frightening.

"And believe me, it is not at all funny, as I first thought when I accepted this assignment.

"The hysteria and loss of control go far beyond the impact of the music. Many of those present became frantic, hostile, uncontrolled, screaming, unrecognizable beings.

"If this is possible-and it is-parents and adults have a lot to account for to allow this to go on.

" This is not simply a release, as I at first thought it would be, but a very destructive process in which adults allow the children to be involved-allowing the children a mad, erotic world of their own without the reassuring safeguards of protection from themselves.

"The music is loud, primitive, insistent, strongly rhythmic, and releases in a disguised way (can it be called sublimation?) the all too tenuously controlled, newly acquired physical impulses of the teenager.

"Mix this up with the phenomena of mass hypnosis, contagious hysteria, and the blissful feeling of being mixed up in an all-embracing, orgiastic experience, and every kid can become 'Lord of the Flies' or the Beatles.

"Why do the kids scream, faint, gyrate and in general look like a primeval, protoplasmic upheaval and go into ecstatic convulsions when certain identifiable and expected trade-marks come forth, such as 'O yeah!' a twist of the hips or the thrusting out of an electric guitar?

"Regardless of the causes or reasons for the behavior of these youngsters, it had the impact of an unholy bedlam, the like of which I have never seen. It caused me to feel that such should not be allowed again, if only for the good of the youngsters.

"It was an orgy for teenagers."