The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture by Michael J. Kramer (review)

In 1971, a year that saw a dramatic reduction in the number of US troops deployed in the Vietnam War, the Entertainment Division of the US Army booked its inaugural Original Magnificent Special Services Entertainment Showband Contest, a battle-of-the-bands style competition whose winners would go on to receive a studio session and limited LP pressing. The contest took place in Germany, and one of the winners, a seven-piece mixed-race group that went by the name East of Underground, cut their first (and only) self-titled LP in the Frankfurt studios of the Armed Forces Network later that year. Although the session was produced many thousands of miles away from the nearest US military facility in Vietnam, historian Robert J. Kodosky argues that several of the album’s songs—which included covers of politically tinged hits such as the Impressions’s “People Get Ready” and Curtis Mayfield’s “If There’s a Hell Below, We’re All Going to Go”—functioned as “musical indictments” of both the war and “racial disparity in the United States” (“Musical Mêlée: Twentieth-Century America’s Contested Wartime Soundtrack,” in The Routledge History of Social Protest in Popular Music, ed. Jonathan C. Friedman [New York: Routledge, 2013], 81). Although one of the musicians in the group claimed that East of Underground was “never politically active,” he also admitted that, “considering the political time, how unpopular the Vietnam War was, and the mistrust of government—those songs just are definitely a part of that time” (East of Underground, directed by David Hollander [Brooklyn, NY: Wax Poetics, 2011]). Ironically, the US Army apparently used the LP as a recruiting tool stateside (Kodosky, 80).

The US military’s recruitment of soldiers using a soul-rock album recorded in Europe that doubled as a covert political indictment of the conflict in Vietnam is a perfect distillation of “hip militarism,” one of the core concepts at the heart of Michael J. Kramer’s provocative study, The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture. Drawing on new interview material as well as oral sources housed in the Vietnam Veterans Project at Columbia University’s Center for Oral History and the Texas Tech Vietnam Center and Archive, Kramer, a visiting professor of history at Northwestern University, takes a fresh look at the counterculture of the 1960s in order to understand how “rock music became a crucial cultural form” that “sustained a hyper-charged interplay of identity and community, personal experience and public participation, self-expression and collective scrutiny, cultural exploration and political engagement” (5, 8).

The book is divided into two parts, each focusing on a particular countercultural cradle: San Francisco and Vietnam. Readers are introduced to an eccentric cast of characters in the first half of the book, beginning with novelist Ken Kesey and his ragtag band of Merry Pranksters, a bohemian collective whose Acid Tests—psychedelic Bay Area parties propelled by rock, multimedia performances, and, of course, LSD—appropriated signifiers associated with the US armed forces (namely, the image of Uncle Sam) “to transform what social belonging, individual identity, and collective interaction meant in the United States during the 1960s” (31). In chapter 2, Kramer turns his attention from the more episodic interventions of the Acid Tests to the mediated broadcasts of KMPX, a free-form community FM radio station whose experimental ethos exemplifies what Kramer calls “hip capitalism,” where “revolt against mass consumerism could be packaged and sold as a new market segment within consumerism itself” (69). A case study in the tensions between a hip subcultural community and the capitalist system in which it operated, Kramer’s analysis deftly navigates the systemic challenges that the station’s staff (and, by extension, the larger counterculture to which they belonged) attempted to overcome when they went on strike in 1968. The inherent contradictions that define hip capitalism come to a head in the...