punk - Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth

Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth
David Browne
Da Capo Press
2008
422 pp

Goodbye 20th Centiury is a very detailed band history of Sonic Youth from their 70s No Wave origins through to 2008. Author David Browne has also written books about James Taylor, Grateful Dead, and the Buckley bros. This book is not only highly detailed, but it is evenly detailed, where there author wrote as much about the production of albums like A Thousand Leaves and Rather Ripped as he does about Daydream Nation, the band's most revered album.

This is a book detailing a then still-unfolding story that has since, we all assume, concluded. The end-phase of marital dissolution that ended the band comes after 2008 and is therefore not a part of this story. At the time of publication the band was 30 years old and aside from some drummer changes a long time ago, had the same lineup for that whole time - they seemed permanent.

punk - Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, The Early Years

Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, The Early Years

Alex Ogg

2014

PM Press

204 pages

With all of the punk literature coming out in recent years and with all of the band histories and bios, there’s been nothing about Dead Kennedys until 2014. Now there are two books about the band’s debut album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables; there's a 2015 book in the 33/3 series and this one that started as liner notes for the album’s 2009 25th anniversary commemorate reissue. I’m happy about this because Dead Kennedys were, and still are, my favorite of the American hardcore punk bands. When I was in my mid to late teens I listened mostly to electronic music when a friend gave me a cassette mix of songs from Dead Kennedy’s Plastic Surgery Disasters and Lard’s Pure Chewing Satisfaction. I didn’t mind Lard, DK singer Jello Biafra’s industrial rock collaboration with Al Jourgensen, but I by far preferred the Dead Kennedys songs. A short time later I purchased Frankenchrist on cassette during the same trip to Spinables (now Vertigo Records, a record store in Ottawa) that I also picked up the Kevin Martin curated compilation Macro Dub Infection II. Not long after that I had most of the DK discography.  Now that I have a particular interest in books about counterculture I find myself reading books about bands and musicians whose work I have no interest in so I find the publication of books about the Dead Kennedys to be a happy occasion.

The book itself has a tight focus on the band’s formation and earliest performances through to the recording and release of their first album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, with a detailed discussion of each individual song. The book’s content is largely derived of interviews conducted with each band member and, as is well known, the majority of the band is in a long war over the band’s legacy with their former lead singer and songwriter, Jello Biafra. They hate each other and the things they disagree over in this book are the things I heard them fighting about when I first heard about their disputes: songwriting credits. Unfortunately these arguments make up a lot of this book’s content. Biafra, of course, has been able to continue his career in music without calling himself the Dead Kennedys, and anything his ex-bandmates say about Biafra’s ability to write a song has to be balanced against that. Like most Punk icons, Biafra’s talent for songwriting has waned over a 30 year period, but some of his collaborations from the early post DK years, the recordings with DOA and NoMeansNo especially, were top-notch. Even though his recent work might not stand with the classics, they can be considered “good”. My point is, the attribution of all those Dead Kennedys songs is contested territory, and this book is a battleground, but at least we can observe Biafra’s career as a songwriter beyond the Dead Kennedys legacy.

There’s more to the book than the arguments between old friends and the history of how they came to be. There’s also a lot of history of the practical business end of investing in, recording, manufacturing, promoting, and distributing the album. Ogg’s book includes some photos of the band that I haven’t seen anywhere else as well as some original artwork by Winston Smith, the great photomontage artist who produced a lot of album artwork for Biafra’s recordings and designed the iconic DK logo. The book ends with a series of statements from rockers and other types about how important Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables is to them, confirming the album’s status as a cannonical punk album. The one thing I was looking for but never found was the meaning of the album’s title. Maybe I skimmed over such a discussion but I find that after reading the book I still don’t know what Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables means. Anyways, I hope there are more books about Dead Kennedys are in the works out there. I just found out that DH Peligro, the drummer for the Dead Kennedys for most of their original run, published a book in 2013 so maybe there are more DK related books than I thought.

Students for a Democratic Society - 1969 - Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis

Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis

Jerry L. Avorn

Atheneum Press

1969

307 pages

Up Against the Ivy Wall is a detailed account of the April-May 1968 student uprising at Columbia University. This brief and highly concentrated event involved, most dramatically, the occupation of administration offices and other campus spaces by dissident students led by Mark Rudd and his chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, a national organization for leftist students. The uprising had many different dimensions to it, but it largely stemmed from student opposition to Columbia’s contributions to military research, and the expansion of the wealthy university’s campus into impoverished Harlem by dispossessing poor nearby residents of their homes for the purpose of building a new gymnasium.

The main thing that interests me about this book is that it appears to be an example of a book that’s no longer published. Up Against the Ivy Wall is a scholarly and densely detailed account of a brief moment in time, 307 pages describing four weeks of life in a tiny section of New York City. This was published in 1969, months after the events themselves, which almost indicates an urgency in publishing a clear account of the events in question. This book, in the density and quality of the detail it provides of a short period of time in the life of a social movement, is similar to Donn Teal’s The Gay Militants, which, in similar depth tells the story of year one of the gay liberation movement in America shortly after it concluded. I know that other such events, including the Occupy Movement and the 1999 Seattle WTO protests inspired books which were published quickly, but I haven’t read any such book that reaches the level of detail found in the two older texts.

utopian communities - book - 1870 - History of American Socialisms

History of American Socialisms
John Humphrey Noyes
JB Lippencott & Company
1870
678 pages

John Humphrey Noyes was the founder of the Oneida Community, one of the most successful utopian-socialist societies of the United States. Founded in 1848, the community thrived until 1881 upon principles of communal sharing of property and the belief that Christ’s return had already occurred and therefore the heavenly kingdom may then be built upon earth. The journalist Charles Nordhoff, in his 1875 book The Communistic Societies of the United States referred to Noyes group as the perfectionists and he devoted a chapter to describing their customs and lifestyle.

Noyes

Noyes wrote his history of other utopian communities, originally published in 1870, in response to an unpublished book of a history of such groups written by an A. J. MacDonald who was a great admirer of these societies and their philosophical inspirations such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. According to Noyes introduction, MacDonald died some time in the 1850s and Noyes and his associates had found MacDonalds research notes and from those materials he constructed this text in combination with his own views and some additional research. Yale University, in their rare books and manuscripts collection, actually has MacDonald’s research papers and notes, which were given to Yale by Noyes as a gift.

History of American Socialisms is a long and comprehensive book about the phenomena of Utopian societies in 19th century America. Over the course of 48 chapters, Noyes gives the details of virtually every aspect of utopian communities, from their philosophical influences, to the aspect of religion, to the individual and specific communities, and in rare cases, the specific effect of certain influences on certain communities (such as the chapter on Swedenborgianism on the venerable Brook Farm community). The longest chapter in Noyes history was on the Wisconsin Phalanx (the phalanxes were societies specifically based on the utopian socialist ideas of French idealist philosopher, Charles Fourier) and Noyes’ own Oneida Community, which was one of the longest lasting of these societies, and the one which the author could speak about at length with great authority.  

Noyes also inserts many of his own views, and in particular, the importance of religion to these societies was often stated by the author. Noyes himself was a theologian who “discovered” that Christ had made his second coming in 70 ad, a peculiar perspective that provided the ground for the beliefs of his society.  Furthermore, the author notes that most of the utopian societies barely survived a year, and he believes that those societies that had cleaved themselves to religious principles were more successful. 

Noyes view that a mix of socialist politics and millenarian religion keeps a group together has a truth to it that, I'm sure, most contemporary activists who admire socialistic communities would like to dismiss. At the time of this book's publication, Noyes own community was in its second decade, and most of the other groups he describes were long gone. The Oneida Community is now long gone too but some communities continue, and are hardly acknowledged as countercultural by current activists, who would love to establish long-term socialist communities, because they cannot conceive of spiritual belief as anything other than a strategy deployed by authorities for the purpose of deceiving unsophisticated adherents into obedience. Noyes history reveals that people can successfully and sincerely combine socialist politics and religion into the theoretical foundation for a new way of life.

bandits - book - 1969 - Bandits

Bandits
E.J. (Eric) Hobsbawm
Weidenfeld and Nicolson
1969
126 pages

Bandits by Eric Hobsbawm is probably one of the most significant scholarly works in the field of countercultural studies. Hobsbawm, who died on October 1, 2012, takes a structuralist approach to history and proposes a pattern to the tradition of the bandit, and to the support a bandit might find within its community, much like how Joseph Campbell, in his Hero with A Thousand Faces claims to identify a pattern to hero stories in myth and literature. Hobsbawm is perceiving his pattern in the popular discourse surrounding the figures of banditry, noting not simply the actual bandit, but also the socially constructed bandit figure. My copy, that I am discussing here, is the original 1969 edition that runs a mere 126 pages in length. My understanding is that the most recent edition contains more than 100 new pages of text.

The active bandit, according to Hobsbawm, can gain popular support via banditry when the establishment is perceived as hopelessly corrupt in the eyes of the populace. Then a bandit may even victimize members of the population that they draw support from as long as they also antagonize the dominant system. Hobsbawm also argues that the stories of bandits often involve an absent sovereign, which is the case in the Robin Hood stories, where the king is away and a despotic prince and his gooney sheriff strictly enforce taxation rules. This allows a populace who invests in the bandits glory to still believe in the dominant system, as the current state of society is a temporary aberration.  

Hobsbawm does not only discuss the structure of the Bandit story as it lives in folklore, he investigates the concrete historical bandits that inspired the trope of bandit folklore. He uses a variety of examples from history including Robin Hood (who, he speculates, may never have actually existed), but also figures such as the Australian Ned Kelly, Sandor Roza of Hungary, Gaetano Meomartino of Italy, and many others. The book includes a lot of images taken from popular sources throughout history, ranging from 17th century circulars featuring woodcuts of Robin Hood, to 19th century photographs and even 20th century film stills.

Irish nationalism - Official IRA - book - 2009 - The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers' Party

The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers' Party
Brian Hanley and Scott Millair
Penguin Books
2009
688 pages

The Lost Revolution is a book that covers a largely neglected aspect of the Republican politics during the period of recent Irish history referred to as ‘the troubles’. That aspect being the activities of the Official IRA, the ideological opponents of the British Crown, the Irish-Protestant paramilitary groups and also the Provisional IRA. The Officials emerged as the IRA split in 1969 at the beginning of the troubles, and occasionally shed the blood of their Provo rivals into that recent period of Northern Irish conflict.

This book serves as a history of a lesser component of the IRA history. The Official IRA was less intensely invested in violence than the Provos were, although they did engage in gun battles when necessary, and fund their movement through violent crime. Also their Marxist analysis of the situation in Ulster held less appeal than the more moderate socialist views of the Provos and their Sinn Fein political associates. Much of this long book is about the maneuverings of the Officials against their Provo rivals to gain an edge in the greater republican movement, and also about the emergence from the Official IRA (who gave up armed struggle long before the Provos had) of the Workers’ Party of Ireland, a political party with strong Marxist leanings and also strong opposition to sectarian violence .

organized labour - book - 1931 - Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence In America

Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America
Louis Adamic
Peter Smith
1931 (Revised Edition - 1963)
495 pages

Louis Adamic, the author of Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America, was not an academically trained historian.  He was rather one of the working class intellectuals that Antonio Gramsci theorized in his essay The Formation of the Intellectuals published in the Selections from the Prison Notebooks.  That is, an individual who emerged from his or her specific form of class consciousness to act as philosopher from their social situation.  Adamic was, as a young man, an unemployed and unskilled worker, a member of the radical Industrial Workers of the World, the international radical labour union, to become a speaker and historian of that movement.  He lacked formal education but possessed a will to compile the history of a movement that, in his time, no academic historian was likely to produce. That is, the history of fighting labour in the United States from the mid-19th century through to the 1920s.  

Adamic’s history begins with the Molly Maguires, or “Mollies”, a group of ruthlessly aggressive Irish immigrant miners who would kill any mining bosses that created unfavourable conditions.  This history then progresses into early wildcat strikes which led to the organization of labour unions.  Adamic has a fondness for the more radical unions (such as his own IWW) and opposes them to the more bureaucratic and conservative unions like the American Federation of Labor (AFL) formed under the boss-like cigarmaker Samuel L. Gompers.  The heroes of Dynamite are probably Bill Haywood, the brawling Miners Union leader, and Eugene V. Debs, the radical leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, who personally led their rank and file into street battles with police and strikebreakers.  Adamic appears to have a fondness, as well, for the users of dynamite, as the statement “Dynamite!  That’s the stuff!” appears throughout his text as an affirmation of radical labour’s fighting spirit. Woven into Ademic’s historical narrative of violent labour activity are the stories of anarchists who have taken up the cause, or of related persecution of anarchists of this period, including the episode of Alexander Berkman’s attempted assassination of mine boss Henry Clay Frick, Louis Lingg and the Haymarket Explosion, and the Sacco and Vanzetti trial and execution, which occurred while Ademic was researching and writing this text.

Adamic seems to adore the fighting spirit, even the willingness to use dynamite to advance the interests of working people. Conversely, he speaks with derision of Gomper’s willingness to compromise, negotiate with bosses, which he portrays as the behavior of one who was essentially a career politician. Furthermore, when Adamic speaks of Miner and IWW leader “Big” Bill Haywood’s willingness to leap into combat with only his fists as weapons, he discusses with loathing the AFL’s alliances with Mafia ‘protection’ men, and hired brutes who fought against the bosses’ Pinkerton (for-hire strikebreaking muscle) bullies. Thus Adamic identifies a rift in the American labor movement and firmly priviledges one side over another in his narration of the history of labor-centered violence.

english revolution - book - 1996 - Liberty Against the Law: Some Seventeenth Century Controversies

Liberty Against the Law: Some Seventeenth Century Controversies
Christopher Hill
Allen Lane
1996
354 pages

Christopher Hill was a major British historian whose specializes in the history of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century.  This history consists of a study of the transition from a full monarchical, feudal society towards a parliamentary government constitutional monarchy where power was shared between various sectors of society.  Probably Hill’s best known work is The World Turned Upside Down, a book about the revolutionary movements of that period (including The Diggers, The Ranters, and The Levellers as well as Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army) although he had written over twenty other books, edited a number of volumes (including an anthology of Digger texts), textbooks, and books about subjects such as the Russian Revolution of 1917.  

Liberty Against the Law is a book published well after Hill retired from academia in 1978.  It is essentially a series of historical sketches of subversive activity in England during the seventeenth century.  The book starts with discussions of issues and controversies surrounding things like the closing off of the commons and its effects on normal people, and the methods by which normal people may supplement the lacks in their life through the use of the forests and progress into brief historical discussions of groups of people who may be identified as subcultures or countercultures, such as pirates or vagabonds.  

Woodcut depicting the Diggers being forced off the common land they're cultivating

Woodcut depicting the Ranters

Woodcut depicting the Levellers' Putney Debates where the constitutional future of England was discussed.

The book is quite large although each chapter is fairly short and provides the reader with a succinct discussion of its topic in regards to its subversive qualities as well as its social value and import to the class which gives rise to it (which, when discussing things like piracy, smuggling, and poaching, is itself subversive).  It should be mentioned that Christopher Hill was an avowed Marxist, and his analysis of historical movements and features of the English underclass (such as vagabondia or a pervasive admiration for the folklore of Robin Hood) is driven by Marxian dialectics.

black power - book - 2006 - Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America

Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America
Peniel E. Joseph
Henry Holt & Company
2006
399 pages

Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour is a historical survey of ‘black power’, an umbrella term applicable to social movements dedicated to empowering black communities in 20th century United States.  The book charts a path from figures such as the pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey to the millenarian Nation of Islam, through to the American Civil Rights movement (and the specific organizations that constituted it) up to the Black Panthers.  Author Peniel E. Joseph (a professor of history working at Tufts University in Massachusetts) is as thorough as possible with his material charting the splintered path each leader and organization takes to their conclusion.  His narrative peters out as it moves into the 80s when it focused mostly on mainstream political figures such as Jesse Jackson (who was, himself, a civil rights activist as a young man), as a kind of apotheosis to the far more radical past that allowed figures such as him to move closer to the moderate centre.

Of course, the narrative is dominated by all of the figures that would be expected: Malcom X, Martin Luther King Jr, Stokely Charmical, and finally the Black Panther leadership (Cleaver, Seale, Newton, etc).  There are, of course, a large number of other important figures but these are the names that drive Joseph’s (and possibly any) narrative of American black activism.  There are also a number of binaries at play in Joseph’s narrative: Marxist vs protestant influence, separatist vs integrationist, non-violent civil disobedieance vs armed resistance/violent struggle.  One thing that I hadn’t quite noticed until after completing the book is that it is primarily focused on the radical edge of black social movements.  Figures such as W.E.B. DuBois and organizations like his NAACP are discussed, of course, but are given far less attention than groups like the SNCC or the Black Panthers.  Also, the book has a detailed bibliography subdivided into publication type and the index is structured so that subtopics of major topics are indexed.

black panther party - book - 2007 - Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party

Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party
Judson L. Jeffries (ed.)
Indiana University Press
2007
310 pages

The Black Panther Party for Self Defense was founded in late 1966 in Oakland California by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale as a means of providing protection to that city’s impoverished black population from police abuse and harassment.  The Oakland Panthers, including Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, quickly became celebrities of the American radical left, and their Aantics formed the image of the BPP that lived in the national imagination.  The Black Panther Party were not strictly local to Oakland, however, and charters in numerous large and midsized cities across the US were founded by black radicals in similar social settings. It’s these other BPP chapters that Judson L. Jeffries’  book Comrades focuses on.  

Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party is a collection of seven essays, each detailing the history of a different, non-Oakland, chapter of the Black Panthers.  Cities include Baltimore, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Winston-Salem N.C.  These chapters are contributed by a number of different scholars from a variety of institutions, although the editor dominates the book as one chapter is wholly written by Jeffries and he co-wrote three others.  These essays are quite detailed in their discussions although they combine to describe an overall pattern of external harassment that contributed heavily to the fall of each the individual Black Panther Party chapters. That is the pattern of stems from something Jefferies reveals in the introduction, that the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had named the Black Panthers the most significant threat to the well being of the United States despite the fact that there were likely less than 400 members nationwide.  Each chapter discusses a specific Black Panthers chapter forming out of a need to organize for the black communities in those cities in the face of unchecked and rampant poverty.  In each city, the Panthers organize breakfast programs for children, testing programs for sickle-cell anemia and other forms of illness, and other community oriented programs.  Then, the local police department and judicial apparatus harasses the chapter out of existence, sometimes in a hail of gunfire (as occured in Los Angeles), sometimes simply through repeated raids and arrests on minor charges, as in Winston-Salem, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.



Comrades shows the Black Panthers, not as the purveyors of armed black power theatre they were often represented as (discussed in detail in Jane Rhodes excellent book Framing the Black Panthers), but as a radical group that showed a genuine concern for their local communities.  The histories of the various local chapters of the Black Panther Party as presented in Comrades display a side to the Party’s story that is, in fact, often washed away by a riptide of stories about police shootouts.  Converse to that, Comrades also investigates how those dramatic episodes at the heart of the BPP were used as justification by local police for the neutralization of the peripheral chapters (which were also prone to their own episodes of violence, albiet often in the face of relentless harassment by law enforcement).  Comrades tells the stories of these other, peripheral, chapters and in so doing, returns the organization’s image as one with the needs of its immediate community back to the centre of how the Panther’s representation.  

lgbt liberation - book - 1971 - The Gay Militants

The Gay Militants
Donn Teal
Stein and Day
1971
355 pages

I purchased The Gay Militants for two dollars from the man who sells books on the street at the corner of Bloor St. West and Brunswick Ave. in the Annex neighborhood of Toronto.  The small number of street-bound booksellers who set up within a one kilometer radius of the University of Toronto St. George campus have some good books.  In addition to The Gay Militants, I have also found books by Herbert Marcuse and Henri Lefebvre from either the man in the Annex or the man who sells books just outside of St. George subway station.  Don’t ignore these guys!

The Gay Militants is a comprehensive (300+ pages) history of a then new radical homosexual activism, starting in June 1969 with the Stonewall Riots, and ending with discussions of the event of Christopher Street Liberation Day (essentially the first NYC pride parade), on July 27, 1970.  Barely over a year of action is chronicled, in great depth, by Teal - and this book can be read almost as a survey of the underground (and overground) press coverage of the burgeoning gay liberation movement, as each chapter contains dozens of article excerpts.

Teal, who died in 2009, was an insider to the gay liberation movement, and he wrote his text in the voice of someone who was present at many of the events he described.  He was a founding member of the Gay Activist Alliance, an organization that is also one of the primary subjects of his text, and therefore was at the heart of these matters as an active participant, and not just their historian.  The book is an incredibly dense look at all of the events from that first year, from battles with police, to the management of dances, to the establishment of an underground press (as well as commentary on items in both the activist and popular press that showed difficulty in accepting that there was any such need for gay liberation).  The Gay Militants also, towards its end, quotes statements of support for  from members of The Black Panther Party as well as critique of other (macho-man) radicals who ignored their cause or didn’t see it as valid.