 Please welcome to the stage Mr. Peter Yaro, singer-songwriter and political activist and Mr. Bob Santelli, Executive Director of the Grammy Museum at LA Live, joining Mr. Country Joe McDonald for our next panel. Well, Joe, on behalf of everyone here, I want to thank you for exercising your freedom of expression and freedom of speech. Thank you very much, right? Fifty years. And boy, for those of us who were live back then and remember that song and remember those days, that was one song that could always get a call-and-response going and it did even here. Interesting, huh? Look, every generation has a soundtrack, every historical era has a soundtrack, every historical moment, every movement. Music has played a vital part in America's history. It's been there from the Revolutionary times and it goes right through our history even today. And almost always the music was creative, expressive and sometimes controversial. And certainly in the 1960s the music was controversial because for the very first time American pop music embraced the idea that a song could act as an agent of social and political conquest. It could do something that allowed change in our world and in our time. It could do something to rally people to a particular point of view. And when in the 1960s this became something of import, many, many artists from Country Joe and Peter Paul and Mary on down took to the microphone, picked up guitars and began to present a point of view. And sometimes that point of view was positive for some people and negative for others and sometimes it was just a different. However, what happens is by the late 1960s it's very clear that rock and roll, pop music, folk music, soul music, funk music, all kinds of music have embraced a political point of view thanks in large measure to Vietnam. So I'd like to discuss with my colleagues today and really begin with Peter, if you will, since you go back to the early 1960s with this we said on an earlier panel, I believe it was yesterday or the day before, that many of the ideas of the anti-war movement sprouted from the civil rights movement. And you of course were very much involved in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. Is that an accurate statement? And if so, how did that happen? Yes, that is the case. And I'm not sure that my microphone is on. All right. Yes, there we are. OK. Can you hear me? All right, good. The the civil rights movement was very important in terms of the anti-war movement in many ways. Number one, we were looking at what we, we who were a part of the civil rights movement. Peter Paul and Mary sang at the March in Washington in 1963, where Martin Luther King delivered his Eye of a Dream speech. And we sang two songs at that gathering. One of them was If I Had a Hammer and the other was Blowing in the Wind. And if I Had a Hammer had become a very big hit, everybody knew it. And Blowing in the Wind, it was the first exposure of America to the work of Bob Dylan. And that song peaked on the charts the week before the August 28th, March on Washington in 1963. And so we sang it, but we didn't sing it alone. We were not singing to people, just as you just sang with Joe. The people held hands and what they said together with that expression of singing together was our hearts are united. And we are united in doing something that is considered by many to be un-American, by many to be un-patriotic. We were not following the rule of law. The rule of law supported at that time lynchings for which there was no possibility of some kind of legal recourse, no prosecutions that we were supporting. You go to Washington, D.C., if you were a person of color, you could not use a bathroom or a public bathroom or a public water fountain unless it's said for colored only. What we were supporting was a point of view that challenged the law. It challenged what doing, you do your duty, you follow this law. No, for the first time we said as moral citizens we have to do what is right for our country. Our country is not always right. Our country is, but our job as citizens is to be engaged in that dialogue. So that set the stage for saying what our country is, if you're patriotic to us, you have to stop a war that we all felt was killing our young men. Peter Paul Mayer sang in the VA hospitals. We honored the troops. We prayed for the troops. We loved the troops. We loved that they did what they could and put their lives on the line for us. But we opposed the war and ultimately we did what we felt was a patriotic thing which was to contravene a policy that was being pursued that was faulted extraordinarily on many levels. Number one, it was based on a tissue of lies. We know that from the Pentagon Papers. We know that now from McNamara's, the Westmoreland, but at the time we also knew it. And we said, how can, as John Kerry said, and I worked with John Kerry, Vietnam veterans against the war, and I saw them suffer, suffer not only for what they experienced, but for their being excoriated when they opposed the war. What we learned, what we could do was, as Americans, love America by opposing what we felt was a war that, as I said, did not, did not have a legitimate purpose. And today, as I speak of this, and now I'm throwing it back to you, had we really fully embraced what you're trying to do here today at the center, which is to form the basis of healing, is exactly what was said in the last discussion, panel discussion, which is we have to have a clear purpose, know that we are in jeopardy. We have to know that that's the case, or we go on and do it again as we did from my point of view when we went into Iraq. And if we can heal and hate the war, and not divide between those who say you were unpatriotic, no, you were unpatriotic, and say we love those who put their lives, and there were people who resisted the war, went to jail, left their lives, we have to honor them, we have to honor those who put their lives on the line for the country in the service of trying to do what they could in their patriotic view. And if we can do that, there can be some healing. That's what we need to do. Joe, fixing to die rag has become one of the signature songs of the anti-war movement, and it's an interesting story, A, how you wrote it, and then also its incredible spontaneous role in the Woodstock Music Festival. Can you tell us how, first, you came to write it, and then second, how you came to perform it at Woodstock? Well, I was in the Navy during the civil rights stuff pretty much, and I came back out, went to college. They didn't tell me about the GI Bill. I dropped out. My parents were radical leftists, so I grew up with Communism, but I didn't like Communism. They didn't help us in any way, but I didn't hate Communists. My parents were Communists. And I had a good time in the military. And because of the personal experience with my parents and my father losing his job, it's another thing. I didn't trust the left wing. I didn't like civilians. I think that's when you're in the military. God bless civilians, but really, they don't know what's going on. And that song just popped into my head because it was about the military industrial complex. The unique thing about that song is that it doesn't blame soldiers, and it traveled so many places. I mean, I could not believe where that song went, but I worked with Vietnam veterans against the war. I just loved those guys. Man, they were so good. I learned so much about the war. Coming here this summer has freaked me out because I just opened up that wound, and it was just horrible, horrible stuff. But I was telling you earlier today, about 15 years ago, I attended a Veterans for Peace Conference in San Francisco. I live in Berkeley, California, and one of the speakers there was Phil Butler, who spent seven years in Hanoi, Hilton. And he came up to me and he said, Joe, when we were in Hanoi, Hilton, and I had read James Bond Stockdale's book about him and his wife, that wonderful book called Love and War, is it? About when he was a prisoner and his wife struggles to communicate with him and everything. I knew all about Hanoi, Hilton. And he came over to me and he said, when we were in the compound, they used to play Hanoi, Hilton, Hanna, they would play American music to us to demoralize us, you know, and make us homesick and everything. But every time we heard Fixing to Die Rag, they boosted our morale. And I thought, those goddamn French educated Vietnamese commanders could probably not understand American humor that whoopee were all going to die would make them feel good. But you know, Americans were unique people. But anyway, so he said, I never dreamed that I would live long enough to hear you sing that song in person. And we just started crying and hugged each other. I mean, I get so emotional just thinking about it right now. And the songs you play at Woodstock? And I played at Woodstock, yeah. I wasn't supposed to play at Woodstock. Well, I mean, it wasn't a big deal. But they wanted me to fill in time for the audience because Santana Band couldn't get there. And I hadn't been playing acoustic music. And they told me, you've got to save us. You got to do something. And I told them, I don't want to do it. And they said, well, I don't have a guitar. So they grabbed a cheap Yamaha guitar and they handed it to me. I said, I don't have a guitar strap. So they cut a piece of rope and tied it to the guitar. And they pushed me out there. And I sang for about a half an hour. Nobody knew who the hell I was. And they were just talking. It was like, Woodstock was like a giant family picnic. Really. People were just talking, schmoozing and laughing and stuff. And I walked off stage and I said to my partner who was moonlighting there on the staff, I said, what if, can I do fixing the diorag and the cheer? Because, I mean, I was saving it for the band later on when the band played. And he said, nobody's paying any attention to you. What difference does it make? What you do? So I said, okay. And I walked out there and I yelled, give me an F. And they all stopped talking and looked at me and yelled F. And I thought, oh, my God. Here we go. There we go. And Gunner made a movie and made my career enable me to pay the rent. And maybe, maybe made some people feel good. I'm so glad. But you know I had a guy tell me his, his buddy died and led to death in his arms. And the last words he said was, well, we were going to die. I mean, this is serious stuff. When I first learned I was coming to the summit, I got so sad. Then I got angry. And here I am. One of the interesting things about the war is that there were pop songs that were written that really didn't do or say anything about the war itself. They weren't meant to be anti-war or this or that or anything. And I'm thinking about a song like Leaving on a Jet Plane, which then became a song that you and Peter Paul Mayer is your number one hit song in, I believe, 1970. And that was embraced by a lot of soldiers simply because of the fact it was Leaving on a Jet Plane. When you, when you heard that, that this was a popular song over in Vietnam, what did you think? Well, let me respond in this way. Over the years with Peter Paul Mayer, when we would perform this song, it was not unusual for a Vietnam vet who at that point was significantly older to come over to us and said, you know, that song was my link to home. I know you opposed the war, but it meant so much to me. And then they'd break down in tears and we'd hold them and hug them and thank them for their service because they put their lives on the line for us. And so the songs, that was a link to their home, but when we sang at the VA hospital, they wanted not only to hear that, they wanted to hear where of all the flowers gone, which is a, which calls not for the commitment to disagree with somebody with a different point of view. It calls for an end to the real evil here, which is the war itself. Now, I would have fought in the Second World War. I'm not a bottom line pacifist. So I'm not saying, I don't know, would he got three fought in the Second World War? But the music, what the music did in the case of leaving on a jet plane, it was, it certainly was a link. And when somebody would say, I'm leaving on a jet plane, I don't know when I'll be, it was very painful. And, and I still sing it now with that. But the songs that united the people who said, we have to stop the war. We're not trying to, we do not think this is a legitimate war, as John Kerry said. How can you ask somebody to be the last person to die for a war nobody wants? When we would sing those songs, and I would sing the great Mandela, which was a, an anthem of sorts about a young man, and this is an interesting story, a young man who goes to jail, rather than serve in a war. He cannot serve in this war. And then he goes on a hunger strike. And then he dies, and outside the people who are opposing him say, okay, he's dead. We don't have to endure his, his accusations. We can kill now. We can ate now. We can, now we can end the world. And then it's cautions. Take your place on the great Mandela, on the prayer wheel of life, as it moves through your brief moment of time, win or lose. Now, you must choose. And if you lose, you're only losing your life. Now, when I was at the Washington Cathedral, with Pete Seeger, and we were pointed in four different directions, acknowledging the individuals in the war. These was not a body count. These each human life was sacred. Indeed, on both sides. When I did that, after I sang that song, they played tabs. And during tabs, there was the sound of a woman wailing. And that juxtaposition was overwhelming and painful beyond painful. We didn't know what it was about, but she was brought to me. She said, my son was serving in Vietnam. And when he said, if I am to die there, I want the words to that song engraved on my tombstone. And I did so. I engraved the words to that song. So you have to understand how deeply these songs permeated the culture then. Unlike today, when it's the nature of music has become so superficial for compared to that era, when that was the real heart and soul of our conscience that was being expressed in the way that you just experienced it when Joe talked about it, when you sang his song. Joe, you, of course, are in the Bay Area during the mid and late 1960s at a time when America experiences a counterculture, the rise of the hippie. As a matter of fact, next year will be the 50th anniversary of something we call the summer of love. And by and large, that movement, that countercultural movement, was a social movement. And even some degree, a philosophical movement, certainly a musical movement, but not so much a political movement except for one band that truly stood out amongst all the other ones. And that was Country Joe and the Fish, which basically, I remember reading someone saying it provided the political aspects of what the counterculture should be doing in the way it should be acting. Yet sometimes, when I look back, it seemed like Country Joe and the Fish basically stood out all by itself that the rest of the bands, The Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival to a certain degree, but Quicksilver, any of these great bands from that period, they didn't get so involved politically, not like you did. How come? I don't know, Bob. But when I was coming to the conference, so I thought, well, nobody knew what to do with this, and people don't know what to do with me. I thought I was counting up the Vietnam songs. I have 22 songs about the Vietnam War, from Welcome Home to Agent Orange to Combat, just all kinds of songs. And I wanted to tell a story. I'm changing the subject, but anyway. You are. Go ahead. So Country Joe and the Fish were on The David Frost Show a long, long time ago. And we sang Fixing to Die Rag on The David Frost Show. And Charles Robb and Linda Johnson were on that show also, because they were engaged to be married. And people wrote in to The David Frost Show a lot of letters saying those bearded filthy creeps should be sent back to Russia and stuff like that. That was about us. None of us had beard, though. But anyway, I had this one letter that said, Dear Mr. Frost, why did you have to have that horrible rock band on there singing that horrible song about Vietnam when those lovely people, Linda Johnson and Charles Robb were on there talking about that? I don't think I'm ever going to watch your show again. And I've saved those letters all these years and I thought, how weird life is that here I am at the LBJ Library. Thanks to you. I hope I haven't disappointed you. You didn't answer my question, but that's okay. Well, all kidding aside, you were. I mean, let's face it, there were some other bands like the MC5 and the Fugs in New York that were doing some pretty radical things musically and politically as well. But in the end, I think too many people get the left or the anti-war movement confused with the hippie movement when oftentimes they went parallel, occasionally overlapped. Peter, when you are in the midst of this in 1966-67, there was, I'm sure, a crossroads in your career where you were folk stars and pop stars as well. And by committing to a political platform in your music that you were certainly going to alienate a sizable number perhaps of your audience and people thinking less of you, not buying your records. How did you handle that in terms of your career? How did you endure and say, you know what, we're going to be above this and we're going to push on? Well, in the civil rights movement, as I said, that was the first time that we stepped out and became proponents of a point of view that was highly, highly controversial. Although in the north there was not a lot of controversy about it. But when we did sing at the Selma Montgomery March, that was the end of our selling records in the southern states. And we had been warned by Warner Brothers that that would happen. But we were, as Mary would have called us, Seager's Raiders. We were Pete Seager's children in a way. He had paved the way to say, if you use your music to express your ethical perspective and you unite that, then you're giving a great gift to yourself. And following in the tradition of these songs, that many of them certainly came from the labor union movement. But when we were in the anti-war movement itself, for me, I was a musician on one hand, and you're quite right, there was the hippie point of view, which was about the spirit and love and caring. And then there were the consequences that we were dealing with. My other part of my life was as an organizer in the anti-war movement. And we kept a low profile because there was an X in the enemy's list. And I organized with a woman by the name of Cora Weiss, a march on Washington in 69, that march coupled with the march against death, and it was called the celebration of life, was attended by a half a million people. And that is generally credited as the moment where the public sentiment turned against the war. Now, in that gathering, my job was to mobilize the performers, which included Pete Seeger and wanted a real, really diverse kind of music to express that sense, not anti-war so much as let us bring peas. And we had John Denver singing last night, I had the Stranger Stream, and Mitch Miller, and the Cast of Hair, and a string quartet from the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, and Earl Scruggs from Country Music, and of course Peter Paul and Mary, and on and on. And that event was 90% music, and yet it is credited. Now, it followed the march against death where all night in a candlelight procession, people with their candles put the name of an American soldier who was killed into a coffin, and then those coffins were born to the Pentagon. That was the march against death, and it was followed by the celebration of life, which as I said was, I mean, that's true that folk music, but other kinds of music, I later, in 72, organized something at Shea Stadium where we did have Janis Joplin, where we did have Credence, where we did have Steppenwolf, where we did have, and I called and mobilized by talking to them, whether it was Paul Butterberg, and at Madison Square Garden, I organized something with Jimi Hendrix, and with Blood, Sweat, and Tears. So there was an involvement, but not in the sense of there picking up the banner the way Country Joe did, and writing songs, and walking the walk in that particular way, they simply got on stage. But before they did, in all cases, as was true in the Civil Rights Movement, we got together, and I said, you know, we're not here to knock people out with our songs and perform. We're here to make a statement that will help us to move society to a place where we're going to have greater equity and peace. So whatever you do, that has to be your intention, and you need to say some words that let people know that that's where you are standing. And when people have it in their hearts, and I don't care if they're singing lemon tree or whatever, if the message is we are going to live in peace, people feel that. And that was true at all of these events. You know, for the sake of truth and the reality of it all, the anti-war movement certainly embraced popular music to get its messes across. But if truth be told, there was also many, many country artists, Tom T. Hall, Sergeant Barry Sadler, and others, who were expressing the other side of the viewpoint of the war. Many of us remember the Ballad of the Green Berets, for instance, which came out in like 1966, 67, which told a completely different heroic story or song narrative. And many in the country world had written songs. It's just that those songs back then in the late 1960s, country music hadn't isn't what it is today. It was pretty much here, Texas and the South, Southwest, et cetera. It didn't infiltrate as much up north into cities like Berkeley or New York as it does now. But there were other songs. There were other artists taking other positions and using song as the vehicle to express those opinions. I have to underscore that that is the case. But it was the most minute group of did that. Whereas categorically, throughout folk music and the Beatles and all we are saying is give peace a chance, the massive thrust of the music business embraced the civil rights movement, embraced the peace movement. Not to say that there weren't others who have a different point of view. But we have to, if we're going to be accurate, we have to know that the scale was minute in the country. Yeah, exactly. I'm conscious of our time and I want to make sure that since we began with a song and Joe, that I leave time for you to take us out in song. So I'm going to end it here and thank you for coming and thank you all for the opportunity to do this. I'm going to turn it over to you. I'm going to stand in front of these but you can hear me from this microphone too if you like. This is a song that I sing now. My, my prayer, my hope. And I thank Linda and Lucy and Chuck and all of you here. Okay, that's good. My prayer is that by gathering together and expressing what we feel, we find that there are ways for us to love each other and embrace those who feel differently from the way we did. I left my cape on over there. Chalk it up to the years, folks. Here it is. I went to Vietnam three times focused around the issue of, of, of Agent Orange and, and the damage that it did. And I have a lot of footage and I helped you. I made an hour piece on it, but I'm going to extend it. And the day that I arrived there, I went to the friendship house where half of the kids there were, we knew were, had the kind of thalidomide-like disabilities that were almost impossible to, to endure and see. That, you know, I don't want to describe it because it's, it's so terrible. And it gets in the blood, it gets in the genetic system and it's inherited. And so the, because after you can't identify if somebody got it, the disability from, from Agent Orange or not, because after eight years, it's no longer there. And I was singing with these kids and holding these kids with, you know, not with eyes that I can't even say. And I went to the Hanoi Opera House where I was singing, it's just like the Paris Opera House. I was singing a concert and, and I was so troubled by what I saw and realized what we had done. It, it didn't matter at that moment, the kind of discussion about whether or not we, we, we, you know, President Carter is saying you can come back and you, that's not the issue. We have to love each other and accept each other and let that pain, and not try and justify our pain by saying we were right or wrong, because if we don't look at what we've done and, and accept that we did terrible things, notwithstanding whatever was done to us, notwithstanding the pain of our friends and comrades who died or lived in misery and as POWs. Yes, but how do we get beyond that? Well, one of the ways we can do it is by having this kind of symposium. And, and one of the ways is by singing a song together that affirms something that's important no matter what position you took. In this song, when I came to the point of singing this in at the, at the, at the Hanoi Opera House, I said I want to sing this song, but I can't. I can't do it until I tell you how I feel. I saw those kids. I saw those kids. I can't, I have to let you know as one American, and I'm not saying things weren't done back and forth as one American, how deeply sorry I am for what we did to your country. Three million dead. Yes, we lost 58,000 men and more than that committed suicide because of the pain they endured after they came home. And my heart breaks for them. And afterwards, you know what the Vietnamese said to me, and they will say this to anybody, they said, you don't have to apologize. We just want to have our country and live in peace. And now, we're their major ally and trading partner. How do we build peace? We build it by taking down those walls. I'd like everybody to sing this song that was a great anthem. And it's not about the soldiers or the protesters. It's about properly putting our commitment into ending war and particularly not going into war, unless it's a just war and then with the heaviest of hearts. So I'd like you to please stand up. I know for some of you, it's difficult to stand up. For me too, it comes with the years. And just join our hands, put our arms around each other, all hands, and sing for all of us and for our children's children. God, young girls have picked them every one. When will, when will, where have all the young girls gone? Where have all the young, long time passing? Where have all the young girls gone? Long time ago, where have all the young, they've gone for young men. Where have all the young men gone? Let me hear you now. Where have all the young men, long time, long time passing? Long for so will they end. Very solemnly and prayerfully, for all those who were injured and killed and wounded and maimed, where have all the soldiers gone? Many not to the graveyards, but to lives of great, great despair and difficulty. Where have all the soldiers gone with solemnity? Where have all the soldiers gone? The gold is gone. Gone to graveyards every when will. Where have all the graveyards gone? Long time, where have all gone? Gone to flower When will, and then we sing where have all the flowers gone? In the irony and the pain of the endless cycle, when will we ever learn? We do know that when we can love each other and say we're sorry and we forgive each other, we're taking the right step. I'm so sorry for anything that I did, that brought the war or any war, unjust war forward. Where have all the flowers gone together softly? Where have all the flowers gone? Young girls have picked them every we ever learned last time.