Student Life ArchivesIf music is truly the soundtrack to our lives, then in college our lives must be musicals. In college one is exposed to new music more than ever before. Music is shared on freshman floors and discussed over lunches and in the Quad. It is digested in on-campus concerts and reported on by campus newspapers. The Performing Arts Department’s production of “Hair,” which began this past weekend, is just one demonstration of the power music has, particularly in young people’s lives. But what, exactly, has been the role of music at Washington University? What is its history?
This is the second article in a series on the history of music at Wash. U. Today’s focus is the relationship between music and protests on campus in the 1960s.
Music and protest have had a close relationship at Washington University. In the last 50 years, stretching from the antiwar protests of the 1960s to the living wage campaign of this decade, music has gone hand-in-hand with many student-initiated protest movements.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, marches, sit-ins and speeches were daily, not monthly or semesterly occurrences. Occasionally, though, there were major protest events. In 1968, 40 African-American students occupied the police headquarters in response to allegations of police brutality. In 1970, students rioted and burned down the Air Force ROTC building in response to the Kent State shootings.
The escalation of the Vietnam War, and the resulting draft, soon became the focus of protest and music. Folk singer Joan Baez came to campus in April of 1969 with her husband, David Harris, an antiwar protest leader. Baez gave a lecture in Graham Chapel on war and violence and then played in the Field House, concluding her performance with the quintessential pacifist tunes “Kumbaya” and “We Shall Overcome.”
The war loomed over everything, even non-war related musical demonstrations. In February of 1968, the Madrigal Singers, a Wash. U. a cappella group, sang for President Lyndon Johnson. The group planned to sing three songs, but shortly after a rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” the serenade was disrupted when, as a Student Life article explained, “LBJ explained to the group that he was leaving immediately for the West Coast to talk to paratroopers who were leaving for Vietnam that day.” The group was startled by the quick departure. “He looked sad, tired, weary and anxious,” one Madrigal said. “I was very concerned and felt sorry for him.”
Michael Friedlander, a professor of physics who came to the University in 1956, remembers the 1960s and early 1970s as a time of tumult and youthful energy. The protest movements of the Vietnam War era were pregnant with a sense of immediacy that is lacking today. “There was a strong personal interest,” Friedlander said. “When you graduated there was a good chance you would get drafted and end up in Vietnam.” Faced with this risk, there was a “much greater climate of activism on campus.”
Much of this activism did manifest itself musically. “In the Quad, I know there were people bringing in guitars,” he recalled. Regarding Baez, Friedlander mentioned that there were numerous professionals during the period who were “willing to use their popularity to draw attention to their protest.”
“If people came to hear the music,” Friedlander said, “obviously the hope was that people would be persuaded.” After retrieving a scrapbook from the period, he found other musical elements as well, including a Post-Dispatch photograph of a graduate student entertaining protestors with a harmonica and guitar in Graham Chapel. The photograph was printed on March 28, 1970, less than two weeks before protests culminated in the incineration of the ROTC building.
The decade’s stereotype of protest, drugs and rock and roll did not apply to everyone at Wash. U., however. Lawrence Katzenstein, the music editor for Student Life in 1968 and 1969, remembers his career at the University as one easily removed from any war protest music, especially music that resembled rock and roll or pop. “I had no interest in [rock music],” he said. Rather than Wash. U. being a scene reminiscent of a 24/7 Woodstock, Katzenstein recalls a less activist musical climate at the University. “It certainly wasn’t everyone,” he said. “I had a big group of friends who loved the same music I did. There were a lot of us who only loved classical music.”
There is no question, though, that rock and roll was allied with activist concerns. The stronger the protest climate grew, the more rock and roll music there was to be found. Also, weeks before the ROTC building was burned down, school groups organized a large-scale environmental teach-in called Project Survival. On April 25, The Motor City Five (MC5), a foundational proto-punk rock band, came to play in the Field House and raise money for the environmentalist cause.
Professor Friedlander’s assessment of the period coincides with the trajectory of protests in the following decades. As the war came to an end, the immediate threat of being drafted disappeared and with it the intensity of protest. As the protests of the period were not wholly centered on the war, though, other changes were needed as well. The late 1960s and 1970s also saw the University’s establishment of academic programs in Women’s Studies and Black Studies. These changes, amongst others, helped to ease student unrest.
With the exception of what Friedlander described as “isolated protests,” the 1980s and 1990s were periods of relative conservatism on campus. With the decline of political activity among students, the music of protest also declined. The next articles in the series will explore whether the current decade has resembled a renaissance.