Thursday is the anniversary of one of the greatest live recordings in the popular music canon. On January 13, 1968, Johnny Cash took his band, his father, and a couple of opening acts to California’s Folsom State Prison to record two shows.  They had rehearsed for two solid days in a Sacramento motel, where–astoundingly–they were visited by then-Governor Ronald Reagan, who offered his encouragement and good wishes.

Few people realize that Carl Perkins added his wicked guitar licks to the standard sound of the Tennessee Three backing Cash that day. Even fewer know that the both the morning and afternoon shows actually began with Perkins performing his own songs.

Picture it:

Six minutes before the Man in Black walked out for the first show with his trademark opening “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash” and the definitive take on “Folsom Prison Blues,” Perkins got the prisoners into gear with a rocking “Blue Suede Shoes.” The Statler Brothers then took one song (“This Ole House”) before the emcee, radio newsman Hugh Cherry, introduced Cash.

The resulting album—edited down from the two shows (though mostly from the first)—is a respected piece of art in its own right, but as this post makes clear, it is not the full artistic creation– rock concert– that the prisoners heard that day. If this intrigues you, check out the 2008 2 CD / 1 DVD Legacy Edition of At Folsom Prison, which contains both shows in full. Unfortunately, the DVD doesn’t contain much original footage, but it fills in the backstory quite well.

For a video of Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes,” check out this YouTube video (taken from Johnny Cash’s 1971 TV show, where everybody looks a little overdressed, certainly not in prison-concert wear).

For a music link, check out music historian John Vanek’s blog post. Thanks again, John!

Today marks the 43rd anniversary of the first adult human-to-human heart transplant in the United States, at Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California, under the direction of Dr. Norman Shumway.  The unidentified 54-year-old patient, who received the heart of a 43-year-old man, died 15 days later of multiple systemic complications.  The very first human-to-human heart transplant operation had been performed just a few weeks earlier, in South Africa, by Dr. Christiaan Barnard, who had consequently become an international celebrity.  The operations launched a virtual “space race” in risky heart operations, with doctors on several continents one-upping each other.

The frenzy over (and frequency of) heart transplants only intensified during the period 1968-70, before backing off for some years.  In this early, “heroic” period, however, the focus on the heart reflected larger cultural preoccupations with the human body– with knowing about it, visualizing it, exposing it, really seeing it in new and sometimes shocking ways.

One of the most vivid reflections of this new obsession with the body and its “mysteries” was to be found in the startling images made by Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson (born 1922).    His series of photographs of living human fetuses, published in 1965 in LIFE magazine, had an extraordinary–and probably still unmeasured–impact on public consciousness about reproduction and contraception.  LIFE sold millions of copies of its issue with the Nilsson photos, and may have hoped to have a similar effect with this issue, from January 19, 1968, with a ten-page spread of still amazing photos of the inside of a beating human heart.  Eerily lit and enlarged to fit on LIFE-sized pages, the photos are stunningly reminiscent of the 1966 science-fiction film Fantastic Voyage, about a nano-journey by scientists through the human body.  There is, in this January 1968 issue, barely a glimmer of the horrors of the year to come: not a single mention about the war, or civil rights, and only a few bouyant pieces about the emerging presidential race.  There’s an article about the boys in the cast of Oliver!, then in production, and critic Richard Schickel’s review (lukewarm) of The Graduate.

Trumping all the news and reviews are those blood-red photos of a beating heart.  It’s hard to overstate the extent to which Nilsson’s photographs changed the way we saw the world.  In the article that accompanies the photos, LIFE’s staff writer Loudon Wainwright, Jr. (the singer/songwriter’s father) writes:  ”The heart. Before, when it wore out, that was the end.  Death.  But just in the past month, a new operation–taking a healthy heart from a newly dead person and planting it in a person whose heart was failing–has stirred the world.  It is a wondrous beginning, but in that beginning failure is almost certain.”

1968 was unquestionably a crucial year in the spread of Indian classical music to the West. In February, George Harrison—who had experimented with Indian instruments and composition techniques as early as 1965 with “Norwegian Wood”—and the rest of The Beatles traveled to India to study under the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Their presence in India shone the spotlight directly on Indian culture and music. It is no coincidence that Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma, Hari Prasad Chaurasia and Brij Bhusan Kabra’s LP Call of the Valley, a “concept album” about a shepherd from Kashmir, began to infiltrate markets worldwide in ‘68, eventually attaining platinum status.

The same year, sitar master Ravi Shankar, whose music David Crosby had introduced to Harrison three years earlier, took advantage of rising Western interest in all things Indian by releasing an album, The Sounds of India, targeted at speakers of English. As the opening track makes plain, Shankar interspersed explanations of Indian classical music to provide basic context to otherwise lost Western listeners. The rest of the album contains more playing and less talking, but still introduces the unique rhythms and instruments effectively. Highly recommended, whether you are obsessed with 1968 or not.

Listen to the track and read other entries by music historian John Vanek on his blog, from which the above entry has been shamelessly lifted.  Thanks for the post, John!

As you probably know–those of you, that is, who have not been sleeping under a rock recently–there’s a new version of John Wayne’s Oscar-winning True Grit opening this week, here in 2010.  It’s directed by the Cohen Brothers, and stars Jeff Bridges as eye-patched Rooster Cogburn, and, like the 1969 original, is based on the 1968 novel by Charles Portis.

In spite of my political leanings, I am an unrepentant John Wayne fan, and although True Grit is far from his greatest movie, or even the greatest “late-Wayne” movie (The Shootist takes that honor), it’s still enjoyable, especially when the (bad) child-actress protagonist is off-screen.  True Grit was a real western, and so were most (not all, unfortunately) of Wayne’s last movies; he died in 1979.

But in 1968, Wayne was not fighting any Far West personal vendettas; he was fighting the Commies in Vietnam.  John Wayne felt so strongly about filming the story of “The Green Berets” (based on a popular, violent 1965 book by Robin Moore, and Barry Sadler’s pop anthem of the same name, a huge hit from 1966) that he chose to produce, direct, and star in his version.  Wayne had been fuming for years about the leftward tilt of American opinion about the Vietnam War, and was determined to throw his enormous Hollywood resources into telling “the other side” of the story–the one about vicious, sub-human Vietcong, about the domino effect, about the need for America to be in Vietnam to save the world.

The movie (available for Instant Viewing on Netflix, by the way) begins delivering these messages in the first few minutes.  Skeptical newspaper reporter, played by the huge TV star (”The Fugitive”) David Janssen, along with dozens of other newsfolks and visitors, are taking a tour of the Special Forces (i.e., Greet Berets) base in Georgia.  At a demonstration of Beret capabilities, Janssen and others ask tough questions:  ”Why is the United States waging this ruthless war?”  and “Do you mean you do what you’re told to do, without any personal feelings or opinions?”  and “Terrible things happen in war; that doesn’t mean the South Vietnamese need us, or even want us.”  ”How do you know we should be fighting for this present government? They’ve had no free elections, no constitution. . . . There are a lot of people believe that this is simply a war between the Vietnamese people; it’s their war, let them handle it.”  And the answer from the Green Berets officer: “What’s involved here is Communist domination of the world.”

Janssen tells the men’s colonel:  ”Your brainwashed sergeant didn’t sell me . . . on the idea that we should be involved in Southeast Asia.”  Predictably, the journalist ends up going with Wayne’s bunch to Vietnam, and ends up seeing the light.   The truth, as revealed in the rest of the movie (filmed in Georgia), is about the animal-like viciousness of the Vietcong, their hideous traps and tortures and atrocities.  South Vietnamese people (played by a boatload of mixed-Asian actors, none of them actually Vietnamese) are innocent and timid and immensely grateful for the chocolate and health care provided by the Americans.  There’s a cute orphan-mascot subplot.   There are many scenes with helicopters (the U.S. military gave an enormous amount of free assistance to Wayne and his “Batjac” film company.)  There are borrowings from hardened-commando movies (The Dirty Dozen, released a year earlier), hopeless assault movies, clever caper movies, even a little musical number thrown in (a sexy Vietnamese singer in a nightclub).  There’s a little comedy (Jim Hutton as a wacky misfit, doomed to die a hideous death by the end), some gruesome struggles (with some odd neon-red blood), a bit of the Tet Offensive, and the chance to see two Asian-American actors better known for TV roles–Star Trek’s George Takei and Barney Miller’s Jack Soo (both Japanese) on the big screen.

For Vietnam-movie “completists,” The Green Berets is a must-see, because of its stridently conservative, “patriotic” point of view, and because of the all-consuming involvement of John Wayne (though he gives an oddly detached, if self-directed, walkthrough of a performance).  It’s also useful for historians of the 1960s because it was released on the 4th of July, 1968–just a few weeks before the two presidential nominating conventions, and dead-center in the single worst year for American casualties in the Vietnam War, the year that public opinion on the homefront was turning decisively away from support for the war.

The editors and publishers of Ramparts–one of the most important voices of the American left in the 1960s–spent much of the first months of 1968 preparing for the Big Event of the summer, namely the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in late August.  Tom Hayden, who would later stand trial as part of the “Chicago Eight” (later, Seven) for conspiracy to incite violence at the Convention, wrote several essays on the antiwar movement for Ramparts leading up to the August debacle, in one of which he wrote: “The peace movement should catch up with the worldwide feeling that the Vietcong are the heroes of this war.”

Ramparts fielded a impressive lineup of reporters and contributors for its coverage of the convention, including Hayden, Adam Hochschild, Pete Hamill, Sidney Schanberg, and Hunter S. Thompson.  Later, Thompson wrote about his reactions to the bloody conflicts on the streets of Chicago:  ”I went from a state of Cold Shock on Monday, to Fear on Tuesday, then Rage, and finally hysteria, which lasted for nearly a month.”

The Hayden quote (from the July 1968 issue of Ramparts) comes from the wonderful history of the magazine by Peter Richardson, A Bomb in Every Issue:  How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America (New York: The New Press, 2009).  Richardson devotes almost an entire chapter to the Chicago story, which begins:

“If 1968 was the year that America had a nervous breakdown, Ramparts was its most reliable fever chart.  The national crisis had complex and interlocking causes, including policy failures, mounting frustrations, social ruptures, and political violence.  Most of these developments were reflected–and in some cases, aggravated–by Ramparts and its coverage that years.  As the nation plunged into crisis, so did the magazine.  Ramparts began 1968 in the coils of conspiracy theories, became embroiled in the nation’s most controversial and violent domestic conflicts, and finished the year in fractious, chaotic collapse.”

The September issue–pictured here–contains the magazine’s reporting on the convention, and is necessarily somewhat anti-climactic.  By the time the magazine hit the streets, the tear-gas had long dissipated, the wreckage had been cleared from Grant Park, the damage to the Democrats’ reputations had been done–and Hubert Humphrey’s promises had ended up in the trash, literally and figuratively.

This issue sports one of 1968’s most popular cover girls, Debbie Reynolds.  Ever since the Cleopatra/Liz-and-Dick/Eddie-and-Debbie brouhaha, this perky actress (was she ever NOT described as “perky”?) was always in the public eye.  In the aforementioned scandal, she came out looking pretty good– the put-upon, jilted good girl vs. the predatory, house-wrecking temptress.  And it didn’t hurt that she was blonde, attractive in a wholesome mid-American way, and actually quite talented.

Debbie’s face–if it wasn’t going to exactly launch a thousand ships–was going to sell a lot of magazines.  So here, in Coronet, is a little puff piece about her latest movie, a mild sex farce with James Garner called How Sweet it Is.  In just a few pages of this tiny magazine, there are 12 photos of Debbie in various states of undress– the theme being that this movie marked a daring departure from her more innocent days.

The rest of the issue has an almost predictable lineup of stories:  the how-are-we-going-to-get-out-of-Vietnam article (this one by Irving Kristol); an article about the “new Negro” on TV in the fall (Diahann Carroll as Julia); an article about “our kids” (protesting college students) and how they are being pushed too hard (by pushy parents); an article about the new fad of jogging; and a story about the wit and humor of presidential candidates (”hilarious stories about American politics”).   Another sign of the times:  a full-page ad for L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, the Bible for Scientologists.  (”Here you will find an easy route to follow which will lead you to TOTAL FREEDOM!”)   1968 was the year that Scientology took off — its “Freedom” magazine was published for the first time– and it will be worth revisiting them in a future post.

“Purpose”:   What is it All About?

The cover of Purpose, “a contemporary musical for youth,” flaunts a 1960s vibe, from the big bubble letters that make up the title, to the dull yellows and bright red-orange colors that make it pop. Printed in Nashville in 1968, this musical score seems to fit right in with the hippie culture of 1968. That is, until you open it. The purpose of Purpose, the Preface Notes explain, is “To guide youth in discovering a meaningful life in Christ.” Purpose does anything but embrace the carefree, anti-establishment mentality that is so often associated with the era.  Here are the titles of some of the numbers: “What is it all About?”  ”Peace on Earth”;  ”Trouble Me, Lord;” “What Does It Mean to be a Christian?”  ”To Someone the Savior’s Love.”  And so on.   (By the way, Purpose the Christian musical is not to be confused with “Purpose,” one of the numbers from the famously profane “puppet musical,” Avenue Q.)

So what purpose does Purpose serve today? It reminds us that, while our memories of the year may be dominated by sex, drugs, draft evaders, and mainstream society drop-outs, there were many other sides to the 1968 American prism.  Although Evangelical Christians were no more representative of American culture as a whole than hippies or Monkees fans or segregationists, they help us understand how complex the events and reactions of 1968 were for Americans.  It’s also a useful reminder that the roots of the born-again Christian movement–so dominant and headline-grabbing in the 1970s–were firmly planted in the “hedonistic” 1960s.

I’m sure that Christian schools and church groups mounted productions of Purpose in 1968, but if they did, there are no remnants preserved on the Internet, that great attic of memory.  (One song, “Just As I Am,”  the last in the show’s lineup, seems to have outlasted the others, at least to judge by the number of covers by Christian groups and singers visible on YouTube.)

It’s hard to look at any 1968 musical without thinking of Hair, and Purpose contrasts especially well. Take their approaches to religion, for example. Purpose is an overtly religious score intended to be performed by church youth groups. With lyrics such as “For the Christian way must be walked every day,” the music emphasizes the importance of structured, institutional religion. Hair, on the other hand, relies on subtle references that emphasize spirituality outside the church. The song “Looking for My Donna” is a prime example of this approach. Even though their answers are different, both musicals are asking the same kind of questions. Purpose asks, “What shall I do with my life?” Hair implores, “Where is the something/where is the someone/that tells me why I live and die?”

Together, these musicals show how multitudinous the opinions and practices of Americans were in 1968 and yet how they were connected by similar threads of a search for meaning, relevance, and… purpose in their lives.

THANKS to 1968 Exhibit Intern Katie Bates

This week’s 2010 Congressional elections –even though it was a non-presidential year– got me to thinking about 1968, when Richard Nixon came to power, finally.  It was exactly 42 years ago today that the American electorate, battered and battle-weary from the violence of 1968, went to the polls.  But the numbers were so close that everyone went to bed on election night without a concession from the loser or a victory speech from the winner.  In the end, Republican Richard Nixon prevailed over Democratic nominee Hubert H. Humphrey by 512,000 votes–about one percent of the total popular vote.  The balance went to independent and Southern segregationist governor George Wallace.   Wallace, in fact, prevailed in five Southern states–the last third-party presidential candidate to carry any states in the Electoral College.  On the Congressional side, things didn’t look so good for the new president, either:  Nixon entered the White House as the first president in more than a century to start off without a majority of his own party in both houses of Congress.

“The Nixon Era”:  Isn’t that ALL of the 1960s?  Richard Nixon would probably have thought so.  He had run — and lost– for president in 1960, and despite his well-publicized subsequent failures–especially the humiliating loss for California governor in 1962 (”You’re not going to have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore”)–Nixon was always THERE, always plotting and scheming and politicking, and making himself the inevitable nominee at the convention in Miami in August 1968.

LIFE reminded readers in this post-election issue that the campaign had been marked by “rousing unenthusiasm” for the candidates, that “the overworked word charisma dropped from the political vocabulary, because there was no one to apply it to.”  Still, LIFE thought that Nixon was the better of the two major candidates, and they hoped that — even in a “year of such shock and cleavage”– that the new president would do as he had promised:  ”Bring us together.”

“The future of television is no longer a question of what we can invent. It is a question of what we want.”

I know what you’re thinking, but no, this was not said by Mad Men’s Don Draper. Instead, it’s a quote from Nicolas Johnson of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from the November 30, 1968 Saturday Evening Post. The special television issue focused on new technological innovations set to hit the market, and highlighted the anxieties of a looming couch potato culture.

Motorola’s future television would be the “electronic heart of the home, dispensing a wide range of goods and services” – essentially an anticipation of personal computers and the Internet. RCA boasted it could build a television with an eight-foot picture, with “the quality of a travel poster and a three-dimensional effect.” Other companies promised future televisions that would be color, or battery-operated, or flat-screened.  (Nobody said anything about future televisions being built in Asia.)

In his article “Tomorrow’s Many-Splendored Tune-In,” Sandford Brown pointed out that these companies shared one common goal: “the re-creation of reality in the living room,” with a picture so clear and information so instantaneous you would never have to leave your house.  With riots, assassinations, and war in Vietnam–not to mention the ever-present fear of mushroom cloud–staying inside may have sounded pretty good to 1968’s Americans.

Yet what would a cutting-edge television be without top-notch programming? The so-called “Golden Age of Television” was quickly dying out as the Boomers came of age looking for more than family sitcoms, Westerns, or other escapist fare. By providing edgier, niche-oriented entertainment, it was forecast that Community Antenna Television (read: cable TV) would quickly fill the “entertainment vacuum” of the networks.

As you can imagine, the networks, who had been an oligarchy for two decades, were none too happy about this development, and neither were other more conservative Americans who feared that the advent of more sophisticated technology and programming would become the new “opiate of the masses.” Of course, backlashes against technology – even television – were nothing new, but the seemingly high-speed rate of new innovations was particularly troubling.

Wallace Markfield addressed these fears in his self-ironic essay, “Oh, mass man! Oh lumpen lug! Why Do You Watch TV?” His essay humorously recounts his fall from a culturally literate (okay, pretentious) intellectual to a lowly mass consumer who writes postcards to try to save Star Trek.

At first Markfield defends his obsession because of the “democratic potential” of television. Everyone could be there to witness the birth of little Ricky, and everyone could mourn the deaths of beloved national heroes. Indeed, everyone could experience everything together, but remain (conveniently) physically apart.

Yet on the rare occasions when Markfield leaves his comfortable abode, he finds himself unable to escape TV Land. He speculates about the thirty-minute sitcom that could be made about every person on the street, and he sees Walter Cronkite everywhere, watching over him like Big Brother, jumping for the chance to interpret reality in the comfortable nightly news package with a beginning, middle, and end.

Feeling himself being almost literally sucked into TV Land, he swears:  “I would become my own man again, a vertical man. I would cut no more conversations to the length of a station break and pick up a phone even if it rang during prime time.”

With thanks to guest blogger Jen Kalaidis

Fairly soon into the calendar year 1968, things began to feel a little rocky, but here, in the first week of the year, there is still an odd kind of stasis.

The cover of this Newsweek, headlined “Politics ‘68,” features only Republicans.

Of course.

Lyndon B. Johnson was still ruling the White House and the country, and although support for LBJ had been eroding steadily since his 1964 landslide–especially since the worsening news from Vietnam and the gruesome race riots of summer 1967–there was every reason to believe he would not only be the Democrats’ candidate, but also be re-elected.  So the scrappy business of “politics” was going to be left to the band of GOP hopefuls depicted here (in a cartoon instantly recognizable as David Levine’s, actually rather tame by Levine’s later, savage standards) astride an elephant’s trunk:  Nixon in the lead, as he already was in the polls, and as he would remain all the way through his victory in November, followed by three Republican governors: George Romney (MI), Nelson Rockefeller (NY), and Ronald Reagan (CA); and way at the back, Illinois senator Chuck Percy, one of the last of the dying breed of centrist, patrician Republicans.   Inside the magazine, “Dixiecrat” George Wallace’s “backlashy third-party crusade” is swatted away as “more black-humor caricature than campaign.”  (He would go on in November to carry eight states outright.)

In January 1968, this magazine could feature an article headed: “The Assassination” without causing any confusion:   The news here was about New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison’s investigation into the “conspiracy” surrounding JFK’s murder, barely four years in the past.  In January 1968, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., were still alive.

The big news–besides the upcoming election–was “the mighty U.S. economy, churning into its eighth straight year of unbroken prosperity.”   As The 1968 Project recalls the year’s horrors and turbulence, the inequalities and violence, it’s instructive to remember that all of this occurred against a backdrop of increasing affluence for vast numbers of Americans.  Given the recession miseries since 2008, it’s astonishing to read this statement about the country in 1968:  ”In a world of want, the booming economy had created no fewer than 3 million new jobs; those who had jobs made more money than they ever had in their lives.  With rare unanimity, economists looking to 1968 predicted . . . another flood of riches from the cornucopia.”