I've never gotten those Dylan songs out of my head,” explains Professor of English Jim McCord, commenting on one reason for designing Union's first junior seminar, “Dead Heads, Talking Heads, and Singing Heads: America's Countercultural Revolution, 1955-75.”
The seminar, which explored a period of extraordinary social and artistic ferment in America, was a team-taught course in cultural history. Participating faculty included Andy Feffer, and Bob Wells, of the History Department, and Peter Heinegg, Hugh Jenkins, Bonney MacDonald, Harry Marten, Carolyn Mitchell, Ed Pavlic, Jordan Smith, and Ruth Stevenson, all of the English Department.
On the first day of class, McCord asked students to write for five or ten minutes about why they had signed up. Some admitted to being just curious, some were fascinated, some had heard about the period from their parents, their high school teachers, films, and, not surprisingly, music.
The interdisciplinary seminar looked at American and British literature, film, and music from what came to be called the Beat Generation through the Nixon Presidency and the Vietnam War.
There were personal, social, and political texts on artistic, racial, economic, governmental, and international affairs.
The students read Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe, Martin Luther King, Eldridge Cleaver, Joseph Conrad, Gary Snyder, and Robert Pirsig.
They listened to John Prine, Phil Ochs, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, The Doors, the Who, and, of course, Bob Dylan.
And they viewed films such as Rebel Without a Cause, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Woodstock, Easy Rider, and Apocalypse Now.
“It's fascinating to look back now and see how that moment of history holds up,” says McCord, who lived through it. “It was such a dynamic time-so animating and energizing, so wonderful and so frightening. Time has kind of validated this. The country seems ready to look at this period again, which inevitably happens after twenty or thirty years go by.”
Around the time Ferlinghetti and Rexroth were hanging out with Ginsberg and Kerouac at City Lights bookshop and bars in San Francisco, McCord was working the graveyard shift on the truck docks in the same city. It was summer teamster work that paid well and that he thought of as gritty urban Romantic. He remembers driving his convertible around the city during his lunch break, at four in the morning. He'd been across the country three times by the age of nineteen, traveling just for the sake of doing it-by freight train, by bus, by car, by bicycle, by thumb, by plane. He reflects, “Unlike today, when kids worry about getting jobs, I felt I could do anything.”
McCord was a student at the University of California at Santa Barbara in the 1960s when the local Bank of America branch was burned down. “No police or firefighters were on the scene-they'd been taken by surprise, so there were vicious recriminations later, a lot of face to save. I remember walking by the bank afterwards
-it was gutted. UC Santa Barbara was a very mellow, easygoing place. I don't remember a disturbance on campus, but I do remember that classes were suspended for two or three days. And I remember seeing riot police with those depersonalizing helmets-you couldn't see their eyes.
“Nothing in today's students' experience can approach the dissatisfactions we felt,” he says. “They acknowledge this and say they shouldn't be as apathetic as they are. They know they're protected, privileged-that, in a way, the powers that be have muted or managed to diffuse a lot of their discontent. But down the line, they believe things will change, that conditions are getting worse.”
McCord's style of teaching is well suited to the spirit of the seminar format, with its emphasis on independent discovery. “My notion of teaching is exchange,” he says, “not presenting myself as an authority. This is my attempt to make class a community exploration; the real challenge is to engage, engage, engage.”
The students worked in small groups, selecting, for example, a handful of scenes for discussion from a movie. They were charged not with summarizing but with thinking about, interpreting, and criticizing. As the seminar went on, some of the major themes that emerged were freedom and repression, conventions and myths about the West and machismo, conformity and the marketplace, and styles of writing, moviemaking, and music.
Jack Cole '04 talked about the West as “more than just a landscape; it's idealized as a place of endless possibilities.” Added Jason Tucciarone '05, “Our vision of the West is embedded in our social consciousness-we were all brought up with this.”
Rebecca Bonelli '03 pointed out how widespread cars had become (“They represented escape-a private space outside the home”) as the federal highway system and the rise of suburbs distributed people across the countryside.
Justin Gray '03 asked the students what they thought about the impact of Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness writing in On the Road: “Do you think the message of
the book would have been different if it had been written more traditionally?”
Krystalle Campo '03 responded, “The book breaks from the set ways of society. Writing in another style would have taken away from the message.” To Cole, the book was like a moving car-“like you're literally on the road as you read. Picking up the book in the middle is like getting back in the car.” And Tucciarone said that the style gives a “sincerity and truthfulness to the message. Finely tuned prose, like Scott Fitzgerald's, wouldn't give the same feel.”
The writing style was undoubtedly influenced by jazz, McCord said. “The philosophy of the Beats paralleled that of jazz-free-flowing spontaneity, going with the flow, seeing where the music, or the road, takes you.”
The key concept for the Beat Generation, observed Tucciarone, was detachment
-detachment from a society that had become conformist, fear-ridden, intimidated by the Red Scare, the Cold War, McCarthyism. There was a huge feeling of threat beneath a conformist 'Ozzie-and-Harriet' life.” Religions experienced increased membership, “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1956, and “In God We Trust” was added to U.S. currency.
Added Gray, “America became transfixed by the 'large blue eye' in their living rooms-as Kerouac referred to television.” Gray, an English major, says he's always been interested in the Beat Generation, and is planning to do his thesis on it. For him, finding this course “was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
McCord pointed out parallels between the 50s and the past six months in American history-“a renewed emphasis on family values, and imagining the evil of those who don't live the way you do. These preoccupations are to some extent cyclical.”
Acting outside the box, and the price of waking up, were themes as the class moved into the 60s and 70s and a discussion of the movie version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And freedom was the central topic in the discussion of Easy Rider.
In one session, Professor
of History Andy Feffer gave students a sense of the evolution of folk music, particularly in the 60s. “It was very context dependent, and very dependent on folkloric transmission
-from different people,
different settings, and so on. Listeners were not just consumers of music but participants in an event. Folk music was used to persuade, make an event into a ritual, give people a sense of belonging.”
Students had to write a
final essay from among a list of categories, most proposed by the students themselves, including Freedom: Ideal, Possible, Illusion, Delusion, Joke?; Depiction of Women in Books, Films, Songs; The Passion to be Different; Rebellion vs. Conformity; Influences of the Civil Rights Movement; Drugs in Films, Books, Music; The Highway as Opened and Closed Road; Bob Dylan's/
The Beatles'/The Grateful Dead's Impact on Society and Music; Psychotherapy in the 50s and 60s.
To cap the seminar, the
students put together an exhibit, titled “Countering Culture: The Beat Generation and Beyond,” which was featured in Schaffer Library in May and June. The artifacts came from Special Collections, with commentary provided by the students. One day in June, a youngster with a skateboard under his arm stopped by and lingered over the cases filled with Beat Generation memorabilia. “Wow,” he said, “this is great stuff!”
Proof of William Faulkner's observation: “The past isn't over. It isn't even past.”