1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (26 page)

After a lull, the authorities left at 5 a.m., so Friday the thirteenth’s looting, per
After the Mayflower
, “was leisurely and orderly. Some looters went through the stock to find the right size; others hired rental trailers to haul away refrigerators, stoves and air-conditioners … Unharmed, for the most part, were black-owned establishments with hand-lettered signs in the window: ‘Blood Brother,’ ‘Negro-owned,’ ‘We Own This One’ … One band of rebels went from store to store smashing windows and taking what they wanted. All of the men were armed with pistols and rifles, and the group was led by a black woman armed with two bricks.”

Deejay Magnificent Montague had been shouting his catchphrase “Burn, baby, burn!” for two years, whenever he played a record he thought was great. But as it became the slogan of the rioters, the mayor and police chief pressured the station’s general manager to get Montague to stop saying it, claiming it was inciting the crowds. In his 2003 autobiography
Burn, Baby! Burn
, Montague recounted his soul-searching for the first few days of the disturbance. He didn’t want to be “an Uncle Tom” and continued using the phrase. “But it was a white-owned station, managed by whites, under pressure from the government, under pressure from the FCC. I didn’t own the license, and they would have put me off the air—I knew it.”
13
After his Friday shift he signed off for the weekend, unsure what he would say Monday morning.

At 5 p.m. Friday, twenty-three hundred National Guardsmen arrived and started digging foxholes and setting up machine guns at intersections. Guardsman Hipolito said, “People that we talked to were innocent civilians that were just terrified. They were happy we were there.”
14

At 6:30 p.m. Friday, local resident Leon Posey and his friend Emerson Lashley went to a barbershop. While Lashley watched from the barber’s chair, Posey stepped outside to see what was going on down the street. Lashley recalled, “The next thing I knew, then I heard some shots. Then I just saw him fall.”
15
Posey’s was the first death. A crowd had been throwing rocks at the LAPD, believing the police had orders not to shoot, and the police had panicked. Charles Fizer, a member of the R&B group the Olympics, which had recently released the original “Good Lovin’,” was shot to death on his way to rehearsal. Using guns stolen from gun shops, rioters shot sniper-style at officers and helicopters.

Comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory wrote in his memoir
Callus on My Soul
that he

decided to head up to Watts and try to help in any way I could. The first thing I saw when I got there was a little Black boy standing over a body, crying. As I got closer to the scene, I found out that the little boy was crying over the headless body of his father … I don’t know exactly how it happened, but at some point I found myself right between riot-helmeted police and a group of very angry, armed Black men. This confrontation was happening in a housing project; clearly, innocent people were going to die in this standoff if someone did not stop them. I walked between the two groups and tried to calm things down, but after I’d walked about one hundred feet, bullets started to fly. I kept walking, even when I felt a burning pain in my leg. It took me a few more minutes to realize that I had been shot. I couldn’t believe it! After all the marching I’d done in the South, after all the times I’d been arrested by redneck deputies in the past four years, here I was shot by a Black man in California! But the face of that little boy crying over his father’s corpse, and the faces of all the little children of Watts who were in the line of fire, overshadowed any physical pain. I kept walking. Either side could have easily killed me, but I think the brothers were as shocked as I was that I’d been hit. When I yelled at them, “Alright, goddamn it. You shot me, now go home!” they turned and started going back into their homes.
16

At 12:55 a.m. Friday night/Saturday morning, a car drove into the Guardsmen, at which point they were instructed to load their weapons and affix bayonets to their rifles. Looters were now shot, and the cases against the Guardsmen later ruled as justifiable homicide. A hundred fire engine companies entered the area. By 3:00 a.m., the Guardsmen numbered more than three thousand, but the bedlam continued. The riot had spread to fifty square miles.

By 11:30 p.m. Saturday night, there were 13,900 National Guardsmen present. On Sunday, August 15, the Guardsmen, LAPD, and Sheriff’s Office secured the area. That day, Governor Pat Brown walked through the neighborhood rubble. On Monday morning Magnificent Montague switched his catchphrase to “Have mercy, baby!”

Over the course of six days, thirty-one thousand to thirty-five thousand adults had, at some point, engaged in the riots. Thirty-four people were dead, twenty-five of them black. A thousand were hospitalized and four thousand arrested. Six hundred buildings were damaged or destroyed, the equivalent of more than forty million dollars in property damage. The governor’s McCone Commission report said the causes of the riots had included high unemployment, bad schools, poverty, inequality, bad housing, housing discrimination, and “a deep and longstanding schism between a substantial portion of the Negro community and the Police Department.”
17

Watching the riot on TV, Frank Zappa wrote “Trouble Every Day,” in which he sings that it happened because all Watts residents could hope for was to grow up to be a janitor. Phil Ochs sings in “In the Heat of the Summer” that anger, greed, drink, and police brutality all played a part, and the community had been down so long that they had to make somebody listen.

Watts resident Tommy Jacquette said,

People keep calling it a riot, but we call it a revolt because it had a legitimate purpose. It was a response to police brutality and social exploitation of a community and of a people … People said that we burned down our community. No, we didn’t. We had a revolt in our community against those people who were in here trying to exploit and oppress us. We did not own this community. We did not own the businesses in this community. We did not own the majority of the housing in this community. Some people want to know if I think it was really worth it. I think any time people stand up for their rights, it’s worth it.
18

Victoria Brown Davis, an eighteen-year-old Watts resident at the time, said, “The mood of the people after the riots? Some of them were still angry, wondering what was it all for. Because now they didn’t have the stores they had frequented or the facilities they needed.”
19

On his ranch in Texas, a stunned and demoralized LBJ didn’t answer the phone for the first two days of the riots. “How is it possible? After all we’ve accomplished? How can it be?” he said to aide Joseph Califano.
20
He told another aide, “I have moved the Negro from D
+
to C
−
. He’s still nowhere. He knows it. And that’s why he’s out on the streets. Hell, I’d be there, too.”
21
To Martin Luther King Jr., Johnson said, “There’s no use giving lectures on the law as long as you’ve got rats eating on people’s children and unemployed and no roof over their head and no job to go to and maybe with a dope needle in one side and the cancer in the other.”
22

The following September, Johnson made the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) a Cabinet-level agency, but he knew his Great Society had been dealt a devastating blow. About two weeks before the riots, on July 30, he had signed the Medicare bill; and the following week, on August 6, MLK was there with him when he signed the Voting Rights Act, which finally ensured black electoral power in the South. But within the very same week that the most powerful civil rights legislation in the country’s history had been enacted, the riots frightened many white voters and sent them in droves out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican camp for the next generation. The many riots that followed over the rest of the decade would transform numerous inner cities into burned-out war zones that would never recover.

16

Help!

Lennon records his theme song for the Beatles’ second film, released July 29, and the group has two very different visits, with the Byrds and Elvis, in Los Angeles, on August 24 and 27.

The Beatles held
their place at the “toppermost of the poppermost,” as they called it, by maintaining the same staggering output they had the year before—another two albums, another movie, more huge tours, a second book of short humor pieces by Lennon. Lennon-McCartney’s songwriting company, Northern Songs, was floated on the British stock exchange. “Let’s write a swimming pool today,” they’d say.
1
“I always liken songwriting to a conjurer pulling a rabbit out of a hat,” McCartney later commented. “We’d be amazed to see what kind of rabbit we’d pulled out that day.”
2
Their self-titled Saturday morning cartoon debuted, and while the Beatles initially detested it—Starr was painted as a big-nosed buffoon—it would drum their music into the heads of subsequent generations through syndication over the next couple of decades.

On their tours, police barricades had to be set up at the hotels the band was staying in, to keep the throngs at bay; some kids tried to climb the sides of the buildings. The hotels were besieged with fan mail; sheets and doorknobs were stolen as mementos. Evenings might start with a helicopter ride descending into a sea of exploding flashbulbs. After the concert was the daily escape in delivery truck, armored car, or ambulance. Then, after the flight to a new city, perhaps they’d take it easy by playing Monopoly or watching TV. Or maybe it’d be time for “Satyricon,” as Lennon would later dub their escapades, referencing Fellini’s surreal film about debauchery in ancient Rome.
3

A Hard Day’s Night
contains just the barest hint of what went on backstage. Lennon offhandedly sniffs a bottle of Coca-Cola on a train, a gag presumably no Beatlemaniac of the era understood. When McCartney berates Starr for allowing his grandfather to go to a gambling casino, he rues, “He’s probably in the middle of some orgy by now!” to which the other Beatles cry, “Orgy? Oh yeah!” and run out the door. In real life, Ronnie Spector, lead singer of the Ronettes, relates in her memoir the night Lennon brought her into the back of the group’s hotel suite, where a crowd had gathered around a member of the Beatles’ entourage having sex with a woman on a bed. “This was 1964, when you couldn’t even get films with that stuff in them—and here was an actual girl having naked sex in every different position!” When the innocent Spector gasped “Oh my God” in a mixture of disgust and fascination, Lennon quickly escorted her out.
4
Whenever reporters witnessed improprieties, the Beatles kept them quiet by giving them exclusives—or free hookers, as they did one time in Atlantic City.
5

But as success became commonplace it lost its thrill, leaving just the exhaustion of relentless touring and record deadlines. Fame also prompted the return of Lennon’s father, who had disappeared on him when he was five. Freddie Lennon looked a lot like his son, if his son had lived sixty years with one foot in the gutter and had lost his teeth. On June 24, Lennon released his second volume of writing,
A Spaniard in the Works
, which includes the poem “Our Dad,” in which Lennon throws his father out, calling him a clown and a ponce, and his father in turn calls John’s mother a whore. On December 31, Freddie tried to make some money by issuing a single on Pye Records (the Kinks’ label) called “That’s My Life (My Love and My Home),” perhaps in response to Lennon’s “In My Life.” Freddie’s B side seemed to be a reprimand to his boy: “The Next Time You Feel Important” asserted that kings come and go and glory fades away, but only God remains.

Beyond his father, the daily crush of people Lennon had to navigate was maddening, from government officials who threatened to leak Beatles scandals to the press unless they met with the officials’ kids, to darker sycophants lurking in the wings. Richard Lester recalled, “I saw it happen to Paul McCartney once—the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, trying to persuade him to take heroin. It was an absolutely chilling exercise in controlled evil.”
6

Former groupie-author Pamela Des Barres writes in her memoir about seeing Lennon that year, when she was a teenage Beatlemaniac. “We had to get past the Beatle Barricade and onto someone’s personal property so we could prowl the Bel Air [Calif.] hills and FIND THE BEATLES!!!… On the way down the hill, a limousine passed by, and I saw John Lennon for an instant. He was wearing his John Lennon cap, and he looked right at me. If I close my eyes this minute, I can still see the look he had on his face. It was full of sorrow and contempt. The other girls were pooling tears in their eyes and didn’t notice, but that look on John Lennon’s face stopped my heart, and I never said a word … The look on John’s face made me grow up a little, and I worked hard in school and decided to get a part-time job.”
7

*   *   *

In the Beatles’ second movie,
the sacrificial ring from a bloodthirsty cult lands on Starr’s finger, and the sect resolves to kill him. Most of the screen time features the boys trying to escape the villains in what was intended as a parody of the James Bond series. Originally the film was to be entitled
Eight Arms to Hold You
, a pun both on the number of Beatle arms and the arms of Kali, the Hindu goddess. But while many Beatlemaniacs may not have minded being held by all four Beatles simultaneously, some wise soul came up with the less creepy title
Help!
The release of “Help Me, Rhonda” on March 8 may have subliminally contributed. Another “help” song, “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch),” was released on April 23.

John banged out the theme in one night that April, just as he had written the theme to
A Hard Day’s Night
in one evening a year earlier. At the time, Lennon didn’t think much about it. But a comparison of the two tracks shows him feeling galvanized in the earlier song and desperate twelve months later.