The Explosion of Deferred Dreams: Musical Renaissance and Social Revolution in San Francisco, 1965–1975 - Softcover

Callahan, Mat

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1629632317 ISBN 13: 9781629632315

Publisher: PM Press, 2017

Synopsis

As the fiftieth anniversary of the Summer of Love floods the media with debates over morals, music, and political movements; celebrations of “flower power,” “acid rock,” and “hippies;” The Explosion of Deferred Dreams offers a critical re-examination of the interwoven political and musical happenings in San Francisco in the Sixties. Author, musician, and native San Franciscan Mat Callahan explores the dynamic links between the Black Panthers and Sly and the Family Stone, the United Farmworkers and Santana, the Indian Occupation of Alcatraz and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and the New Left and the counterculture. Callahan’s meticulous, impassioned arguments both expose and reframe the political and social context for the San Francisco Sound and the vibrant subcultural uprisings with which it is associated. Using dozens of original interviews, primary sources, and personal experiences, the author shows how the intense interplay of artistic and political movements put San Francisco, briefly, in the forefront of a worldwide revolutionary upsurge. A must-read for any musician, historian, or person who "was there" (or longed to have been), this book is substantive and provocative, inviting us to reinvigorate our historical sense-making of an era that assumes a mythic role in the contemporary American zeitgeist.

About this title

About the Author

Mat Callahan is a musician and author originally from San Francisco, where he founded Komotion International. He is the author of Sex, Death & the Angry Young Man, Testimony, and The Trouble with Music as well as the editor of Songs of Freedom: The James Connolly Songbook. He currently resides in Bern, Switzerland

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Explosion of Deferred Dreams

Musical Renaissance and Social Revolution in San Francisco, 1965-1975

By Mat Callahan

PM Press

Copyright © 2017 PM Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-62963-231-5

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
PERSONAL INTRODUCTION, 
FOREWORD, 
CHAPTER 1 Portals of the Past, or "Why San Francisco?", 
CHAPTER 2 Children of the Future, 
CHAPTER 3 Making Music to Change the World: Diversity, Unity, and Liberation, 
CHAPTER 4 Making Music to Change the World: Authority and Authenticity, 
CHAPTER 5 If You're Going to San Francisco: What One Song Tried to Usurp, 
CHAPTER 6 Songs of Innocence and Experience: Music's Rivalry with the State, 
CHAPTER 7 The Underground Is on the Air: Radio, Recording, Innovation, and Co-ptation, 
CHAPTER 8 1968 and Beyond: Culture, Counterculture, and Revolution, 
CHAPTER 9 Power to the People: Nations, Classes, and Listening to the People, 
CHAPTER 10 Humanhood Is the Ultimate: Women, Music, and Liberation, 
CHAPTER 11 The Future Foreclosed: Counterrevolution and Defeat, 
APPENDICES, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
NOTES, 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

Portals of the Past, or "Why San Francisco?"

While it is always desirable to separate the fabulous from the factual, it is indispensable to do so in the case of San Francisco and the worldwide notoriety it acquired during the tumultuous Sixties. It is certainly not the case that good weather, low rents, and tolerant authorities were what attracted youthful adventurers to Haight Street. For one thing, as we shall see, the authorities were never so tolerant as they have often been portrayed. For another, there were other cities on the West Coast that offered good weather and low rent (Los Angeles being a prime example). Key to San Francisco's reputation was that local residents coalesced there around artistic and political movements that were both disproportionately large in comparison to their counterparts in other cities and were often more radical. Running battles waged in the courts, workplaces, schools, and streets all attest to the size and influence of an aroused populace. An underlying continuity connected people and movements over the span of three generations and included as many people born or raised in the region as those coming to it from other places.

Prevailing notions of white middle-class dropouts from elsewhere suddenly appearing en masse to create a utopia in Golden Gate Park are misleading on several counts. First and most significantly, they ignore the powerful civil rights movement in the Bay Area, which mobilized a large number of people of all ethnicities in the battle to end discrimination in employment and housing. This movement quickly linked with the farmworkers organizing in the Central Valley of California and established bases of popular opposition in the Fillmore, Hunters Point, and Mission districts of San Francisco. This connection led to the April 1965 launch of The Movement newspaper in San Francisco by "Friends of SNCC" (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), a forerunner of what came to be known as the underground press. Second, the corresponding artistic movements, especially music, theater, and graphic art (posters and murals), were never confined to any single constituency or neighborhood. One has only to recall Santana, Teatro Campesino, and the murals that still grace the walls of the Mission District to realize that any account of the period that fails to acknowledge these developments is at best incomplete. Finally, it is important to distinguish between the image of tolerant liberality cultivated by San Francisco's elites from the city's inception and the creative expression and radical resistance that formed the real basis of San Francisco's attraction for poets, artists, intellectuals, and revolutionaries. The City Fathers were never enlightened champions of social progress. Indeed, the rulers of the Golden West were robber barons and purveyors of "yellow journalism," bent on Empire. William Randolph Hearst, who started his newspaper chain in San Francisco, was an arch-reactionary, a champion of U.S. imperialism, and a determined enemy of labor.

What we will explore, therefore, are key figures, organizations, and struggles that were responsible for the attention paid to San Francisco long before the Sixties. None of this had been forgotten in San Francisco; in some cases, it directly influenced the course events took after 1964.

The Port

The heart of San Francisco was its port. From the Gold Rush of 1849 to the 1960s, everything revolved around one of the world's great natural harbors. Though, by 1965, a slow, almost imperceptible decline had begun, the waterfront and maritime trade remained the foundation of social life. This included more than the immediate area around the docks. Extending inland to occupy almost a quarter of the area within the city's boundaries were warehouses, coffee roasters, breweries, slaughterhouses, and tanneries. An industrial zone occupied by American Can, Best Foods, Planters Peanuts, Armour Meats, and the Lucky, Hamm's, and Burgermeister breweries, as well as the Hunters Point shipyards and Schlage Lock, stretched from the Embarcadero south to Daly City. Closer to the waterfront itself were the Hills Brothers and MJB coffee roasters, as well as innumerable ice houses (cold storage facilities for fish and other perishable goods), ship chandlers, and stevedoring companies. North Beach, well known as the center of the city's nightlife and home to its bohemian subculture, was surrounded by and dotted with warehouses and small factories. The residents of North Beach included a large number of longshoremen, warehousemen, sailors, and teamsters. Until very recently, the area had numerous hotels that provided single rooms on a weekly, monthly, or ongoing basis, catering mainly to single men. Just across Broadway, Chinatown was far from the quaint tourist attraction it is today. Hidden in its narrow alleys, in basements and back rooms, were the sweatshops where hundreds of Chinese women worked in illegal or semilegal conditions. Companies like Esprit were founded in San Francisco largely on the basis of this labor. Other parts of the city, from South of Market and Potrero Hill to Dogpatch and the Mission District, were populated by people employed in the city's various industries, all of which directly or indirectly depended on the port.

This was not simply the bequest of nature but rested on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the discovery of gold nine days before its signing on February 2, 1848. The annexation of half of Mexico by the United States and the Gold Rush of 1849 transformed a small agricultural, Catholic, and Spanish-speaking community into a roaring port based on the export of gold and the import of manufactured goods. Within less than a decade, the city's population had expanded from two thousand to thirty-four thousand; its name had been changed from Yerba Buena to San Francisco; and it had already delivered an extraordinary percentage of the world's gold reserves into the vaults of U.S. and British banks.

Corresponding to this sudden economic clout of global importance were attempts by San Francisco's elites to extend their reach to political and cultural affairs as well. The robber barons whose names still grace Nob Hill hotels and Stanford University therefore invested in great promotional efforts that included financing the arts and sciences while reaping unprecedented profits from logging, railroads, and the control of trade. By the turn of the century, a pattern had been established that continues to the present day. Its most prominent feature was fostering an image of a quasi-European, liberal sophistication capable of competing with New York or Los Angeles while committing grand larceny and brutally suppressing dissent.

Though San Francisco itself was never a major manufacturing center like Chicago or Detroit, its population was overwhelmingly engaged in fishing, transportation, light manufacturing, and construction as well as office and clerical work. Notwithstanding its bohemian reputation and the early establishment (1868) of the University of California in Berkeley, the fact remains that until the deindustrialization that occurred after the Sixties, a significant percentage of the population of the Bay Area was working class. Indeed, contrary to the common notion of affluent college dropouts composing the armies of the counterculture or that these kids were an invasion from somewhere else, the social forces unleashed in the Sixties reflected the composition and legacy of the city's origins and early development. While certainly multifaceted and contradictory, this would always remain connected to the waterfront, North Beach, Chinatown, the Mission District, and the Fillmore as much if not more than the Haight-Ashbury. When one considers the euphoric hype that surrounded the "Summer of Love," one hears echoes of past "Eurekas!," of "California, Here I Come," and, of course, the fate that awaited the vast majority who came seeking riches from the goldfields.

Modern Dance and the Labor Movement

San Francisco's reputation as a haven for lunacy and a hotbed of radicalism was established in the early years of the twentieth century. Literary figures such as the native San Franciscan and socialist Jack London, master satirist Ambrose Bierce, and the irreverent anti-imperialist, Mark Twain, enjoyed popularity writing about a West they intimately knew. The Call of the Wild was more than the title of a book set in the Klondike Gold Rush, it was a metaphoric appeal to the adventurous, youthful spirit abroad at the dawn of a new century. London in particular was active in the Socialist Labor Party and later the Socialist Party of America delivering agitational speeches in Oakland (for which he was arrested) and writing and lecturing on socialism the better part of his life. Such enduring works as The Iron Heel and Bierce's Devil's Dictionary provide a sense of the social milieu in which they were written, including the first sparks of working-class militancy and opposition to imperialism, not to mention heavy doses of mocking anti-clericalism. As influential as these writers undoubtedly were, they never constituted a literary movement or constellation of writers greater than the sum of its parts or one so closely identified with San Francisco as the Beats would be decades later.

What ultimately made the greatest impression on the cultural life of the Bay Area itself and fostered its enduring image in the eyes of the world was the life and work of Isadora Duncan. In a speech entitled "The Dance of the Future" delivered in Berlin in 1903, Duncan said:

The dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul will have become the movement of the body. The dancer will not belong to a nation but to all humanity. She will dance not in the form of nymph, nor fairy, nor coquette but in the form of woman in its greatest and purest expression. She will realize the mission of woman's body and the holiness of all its parts. She will dance the changing life of nature, showing how each part is transformed into the other. From all parts of her body shall shine radiant intelligence, bringing to the world the message of the thoughts and aspirations of thousands of women. She shall dance the freedom of woman. ... This is the mission of the dancer of the future. ... She is coming the dancer of the future: the free spirit, who will inhabit the body of new women; more glorious than any woman that has yet been; more beautiful than ... all woman in past centuries: The highest intelligence in the freest body!

Though her training, creative work, and subsequent reputation were made far away from San Francisco, Duncan always insisted on the intimate connection between her innovations and her birthplace; for that, she will forever be associated with San Francisco. More importantly, the movement she inspired took root and gained widespread influence in the Bay Area from its very inception. This was evident by the time the Panama-Pacific International Exposition celebrating the opening of the Panama Canal was held at the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts in 1915. The new form, called at the time "classic dance," was already being performed by local dance companies. Joining Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn (from Los Angeles) and Loie Fuller and Anna Pavlova (from Europe), the California Dancing Girls led by San Francisco native Anita Peters Wright began performing "classically free" dancing modeled after Duncan's work as early as 1912.

It is noteworthy that in its early stages what became modern dance was called "classic." This turn toward a remote past is characteristic of many artistic and social movements that are in fact directed toward the future. Certainly, ever since Rousseau, and influenced by his writing, virtually every movement, be it literary, musical, theatrical, or otherwise, has sought authority and authenticity from a more or less utopian past. Revolt against established hierarchies of dominance demandsjustification and the support of a precedent that supersedes the claims to legitimacy of current regimes. This was certainly the case with Isadora Duncan in particular and modern dance in general, for it was the challenge that the new dance deliberately posed to ballet, artistically and institutionally, that gave it both onus and impetus.

In the first place it was not just a matter of bare feet and scanty costumes versus toe shoes and tutus, though such "undignified" attire worn by "ladies" did scandalize the bourgeois art patron around the turn of the century. As articulated by its earliest practitioners, modern dance sought dignity and recognition as true art, not mere theatrical entertainment. This necessitated a double-edged critique directed at the rigid limits placed on bodily expression, whether it be Swan Lake at the Opera House or the can-can at the dance hall. The refined and dainty as well as the sexually prurient were its targets. Isadora Duncan's performances were the literal embodiment of this critique. One San Francisco dancer recalled her performance there in 1917: "And Isadora in The Marseillaise! [one of Duncan's most famous pieces]. No slender flower but an aroused Valkyrie ... in her passionate fervor she rent her garments, revealing her bare breasts to public view. In a day when her appearance in bare feet and filmy chiffon was something of a shock, this was a daring feat. As I watched spellbound, I felt that I was seeing the human spirit released from bondage, never having seen anything like it before."

This explains a special characteristic distinguishing modern dance from other art forms. Its foundation rests on the liberation of the body, most importantly the female body. Both institutionally and aesthetically, women were its leading creative force, and modern dance was, by its very nature, a challenge to patriarchy, male chauvinism, and the like. In other words, the actual dance companies were founded and led by women who consistently rejected the view of women promulgated by ballet and other accepted forms of dance. While this certainly did not exclude or limit the participation of men, it can truly be said that men were never numerically or creatively dominant.

Duncan explicitly fused this contentious artistic and aesthetic dimension with social revolution from the outset. In Isadora Speaks, editor Franklin Rosemont notes: "In My Life [Isadora's autobiography] she asserts she was 'already a dancer and a revolutionist' at the age of five!" Furthermore, she acted upon her widely expressed convictions by directly supporting the Russian Revolution of 1917. Though her views were not shared by all her colleagues, and certainly much of modern dance was never overtly political, the fact that it was initiated by women and to a large extent practiced and developed by them made modern dance a singular expression of something profoundly novel in the world. As she vividly expressed it, Duncan's "dancer of the future" had two interdependent significations. The obvious one is that dancers in the future will be of a different type than today. The second is of the dancer bringing the future into being: "she is coming the dancer of the future: the free spirit." This was, in fact, how many artists in the first decades of the twentieth century viewed what they were doing, but for modern dance it was its raison d'être. The human body, after all, is both the corporeal being of every individual and a universal form shared by all. Exposing it to free it, particularly by a woman, was a radical rupture with the past.

A second spectacular event took place at the same time, which, combined with Isadora Duncan's exploits, focused the world's attention on San Francisco. This was the Preparedness Day bombing and the case of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings. Mooney was a socialist labor leader who, along with Billings, was convicted and sentenced to death for planting a bomb that exploded killing ten people at San Francisco's Preparedness Day Parade, on July 22, 1916. This notorious frame-up inspired an international campaign for the two men's release. Millions of people from many parts of the world marched in countless demonstrations under the banner of "Free Tom Mooney." By the time Mooney was released and pardoned in 1938 (Billings was pardoned a year later), a generation of San Franciscans had come to view him as a hero and symbol of labor's struggle against capital.

Almost immediately upon his release, Mooney led a triumphant march up Market Street from the Embarcadero, stopping at Third and Market to thumb his nose at the Hearst Building, headquarters of the hated Hearst newspaper empire, which had not only led the chorus calling for Mooney's execution but was also a champion of U.S. imperialism and dedicated to crushing the labor movement. Both the public outcry and the enduring memory of this case would continue to identify San Francisco with radical politics for generations.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: PM Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1629632317
• ISBN 13: 9781629632315
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352