An excerpt from:
The Covert War Against Rock
Alex Constantine©2000
All Rights Reserved
Feral House
2554 Lincoln Blvd. #1059
Venice, California 90291
ISBN 0-922915-61-X
179 pps. -- First Edition -- In-Print
--[2]--
CHAPTER ONE
A (Killing) Field Day for the Heat
TIME MACHINE: THE SWING KIDS
SWING KIDS INVOLVES A VERY SMALL FOOTNOTE TO A VERY LARGE HISTORICAL EVENT.
IN NAZI GERMANY IN 1939, WE LEARN, WHILE HITLER WAS ROUNDING UP JEWS AND
LAUNCHING WORLD WAR II, A SMALL GROUP OF KIDS WORE THEIR HAIR LONG AND DANCED
TO THE SWING MUSIC OF SUCH BANNED MUSICIANS As BENNY GOODMAN AND COUNT BASIE.
OCCASIONALLY THEY GOT INTO FIGHTS WITH THE BROWNSHIRTS OF THE HITLER YOPTH
BRIGADES.
IF THE SWING KIDS HAD EVOLVED INTO AN UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT DEDICATED TO THE
OVERTHROW OF NAZISM, WE MIGHT BE ONTO SOMETHING HERE. BUT No. A TITLE CARD AT
THE END OF THE FILM INFORMS US THAT SOME OF THE KIDS DIED AT THE HANDS OF THE
NAZIS, AND OTHERS WERE FORCED INTO THE GERMAN ARMY AND KILLED IN BATTLE . . .
[1]
ROGER EBERT, FILM REVIEW, MARCH 5, 1993
In 1967, an increasingly subversive form of music melded with politics in San
Francisco. Still eclipsed by federal classification are the tactics of the
intelligence sector in the destabilization of the lives of politically-tuned
musicians on the fringe of the anti-war movement, as revealed before the
Senate Intelligence Committee in a leaked intelligence memorandum submitted
for the record on April 26, 1976:
Show them as scurrilous and depraved. Call attention to their habits and
living conditions, explore every possible embarrassment. Send in women and
sex, break up marriages. Have members arrested on marijuana charges.
Investigate personal conflicts or animosities between them. Send articles to
the newspapers showing their depravity. Use narcotics and free sex to entrap.
Use misinformation to confuse and disrupt. Get records of their bank
accounts. Obtain specimens of handwriting. Provoke target groups into
rivalries that may result in death. ["Intelligence Activities and Rights of
Americans," Book. II, April 26 1976, Senate Committee with Respect to
Intelligence Report]
For the first time since its creation, the warfare state meticulously erected
by the Dulles brothers, J. Edgar Hoover, Dean Acheson General Douglas
MacArthur, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon and an army of anti-Communist cold
warriors was threatened by an increasingly militant segment of the
population. "Fascists" and "Pigs" burned in effigy on campus from sea to
psychedelic sea.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation rose to the challenge. Many rock
musicians of the day struggled for a place in the American pantheon of
stardom only to experience ferocious political repression. "That's what
killed us," recollects Roger McGuinn, lead guitarist for the Byrds. "We got
blackballed after drug allegations in 'Eight Miles High,"' and Hoover's spies
never seemed far away. "They'd been chasing after us because somebody left
some hashish in the airplane coming back from England. So they came down on
us in a recording studio and said, 'Whose is this?' Of course nobody claimed
it." On one occasion, on tour in Iowa, David Crosby, lounging on the balcony
of a Holiday Inn, whiled away the time before a concert firing .22 caliber
blanks with a slingshot at a brick wall about thirty feet down. A group of
"Rednecks" staying at the Motel played poker at the ground level, and riled
by the tiny explosions, "started climbing over the balcony, fuming, 'Guys
died in Iwo Jima for punks like you,"' McGuinn recalls. "They were pounding
on Crosby, when suddenly the FBI appeared. You know, 'FBI, son. Break it up!'
They took these guys out and sent them off to their room. I don't know if it
was just a coincidence, but what were [the FBI] doing in the middle of Iowa?
>From then on I used to be looking over my shoulder, thinking the government
was after me."[2]
The deaths of Byrds' guitarists Clarence White in July, 1973, and Gram
Parsons two months later, have long been grist for speculation. Clarence
White and his brothers were packing the car after a show in Palmdale,
California-the home of Lockheed (military contractor and CIA haunt)—when
Clarence was struck by a drunk driver named Yoko Ito. Alan Munde, a banjo
player for the White Brothers when they toured England and Sweden in the
spring of 1973, recalled in an interview taped at the Tennessee Banjo
Institute that White then lived "near Lancaster, California, where his mother
and dad had lived.... But that's where Edwards Air Force Base was, and that's
where there was a lot of aircraft industry up there, and Poland [White's dad]
worked there ... and then Clarence bought a house ... and [performed] at a
club, you know, that Clarence had played many many times before he was with
the Byrds, to pick, and was just comin' out loadin' up the stuff, and had put
the stuff in the trunk and walked around to get into the car, and the lady
came by and sideswiped the car and hit him, and knocked him on down the road,
and Poland had just walked around to the front . . . and he was-you know,
they don't know that, but he was hit also and knocked over the hood of the
car, by the lady ... and you know, Clarence was, you know, 150 feet down the
road."[3]
"The driver of the car, Yoko Ito," according to a brief in Nasbville Babylon
(1988) by Randall Riese, "was booked on suspicion of felony drunk driving and
manslaughter." The glassy-eyed Ms. Ito was reportedly pregnant, yet had gone
on an alcoholic binge, picked a fight in a bar and capped off the evening by
running over a popular musician and dragging him down the road, completely
unaware of the fatality. Clarence White came tumbling over the hood of her
car, and yet she didn't know that she'd even struck a pedestrian.
White's close friend Gram Parsons, a sometime Byrd with his own band, the
Flying Burrito Brothers, was laid low at the Joshua Tree Inn shortly after
midnight, September 19, 1973 (one day before singer Jim Croce was killed in
an airplane crash, resulting, according to press reports, in the filing of a
$2.5-million lawsuit against the FAA by the singer's widow—the tree that
killed him was not indicated in the map of the airport runway prepared for
Croce). "The circumstances of Gram's death were shrouded in mystery," writes R
olling Stone corre-spondent Ben Fong -Torres.[4] Initially, the press
reported that Parsons died of "heart failure," like Jim Morrison before him,
"due to natural causes." His death certificate, however, signed by Dr. Irving
Root, states that Parsons was claimed by drug toxicity over a period of
weeks. Traces of cocaine and amphetamine were detected in his urine, and a
high concentration of morphine. The latter was found in his bile and liver.
Convincing on the surface-until it is considered that mor-phine toxicity
requires that the drug be found in the blood. It wasn't. Forensic tests did
detect alcohol, but no drugs were found in his bloodstream, so the cause of
death was not an overdose, as many have since claimed, and drug toxicity is
still possible but highly unlikely.
Dr. Root noted that Parsons had reached "toxic levels of drug intake" and
sustained them for weeks. (The source of supply has never been publicly
identified. A rumor has it that Gram had been buying drugs from a woman, now
deceased.) Dr. Margaret Greenwald, a San Francisco coroner, told Fong-Torres
that narcotics accumulate over time in the liver and urine. The morphine and
trace deposits indicate not that they killed him, but that "he'd been using
[those drugs] for a long period of time," she explained.[5] So the exact
cause of death remains a mystery and there is no hope of exhumation to
resolve critical inconsistencies because Parson's cadaver was stolen at the
Los Angeles International Airport in transit to New Orleans for burial and
burned at Joshua Tree.
The coffin heist was perpetrated by Phil Kaufman, road manager for the Flying
Burrito Brothers. Kaufman was a fledgling Hollywood actor before he met
Parsons. In the meantime, he'd been arrested on drug charges and sentenced to
Terminal Island Correctional Institute in San Pedro, California. It was here
that Kaufman met Charles Manson, then an aspiring rock musician. Kaufman
wrote about his first contact with Manson in an autobiography, "there was a
guy playing guitar in the yard one day at Terminal Island. And it was
Charlie, singing his ass off." When Manson was released, Kaufman, from
prison, put him in touch with contacts in the Los Angeles music industry.
Kaufman was released from prison in 1968. He moved in with Manson and lived
with him for a couple of months, met and befriended the Rolling Stones that
summer, and in August was introduced to Parsons.[6] Gram Parsons was one of
many unexplained casualties on the periphery of Manson's cult.
Many musicians of note shared McGuinn's suspicion that Big Brother was
stalking them. Evidence that they were not suffering from paranoid delusions
was deposited in the 1980s at the FBI's reading room in Washington, D.C.,
scores of declassified files. This collection included seven pages of notes
on Jimi Hendrix, 89 on Jim Morrison, and, oddly, 663 documents about Elvis
Presley. (Presley's file opens early in his career, when "concerned"
conservatives petitioned J. Edgar Hoover to "do something" about this
swivel-hipped, slack-jawed, decadent despoiler of American adolescents. A
former spy ripped off a letter to the FBI in 1956 to complain that Presley
had masturbated on stage with his microphone to "arouse the sexual passions
of teenage youth." The complainant confessed: "I feel an obligation to pass
on to you my conviction that Presley is a definite danger to the security of
the United States."[7])
But the attentions of Hoover's agents were lavished not only on Top 40 pop
idols. Even a celebrated conductor of Leonard Bernstein's caliber could be
stalked by the Feds—the FBI monitored his every move for more than thirty
years.
On July 30, 1994, the London Times reported: "Intelligence files on [Leonard
Bernstein] reveal that the bureau spent countless hours examining his links
with associations deemed either Communist or subversive." Bernstein swore
under oath in 1953 that he was not affiliated with the Communist Party in any
way, and three decades of unrelenting spying by the Bureau, beginning in the
mid-'40s, failed to produce a scrap of evidence to the contrary. "it also
observed his support for the civil rights and anti-war movements, in
particular the Black Panthers. . . . Bernstein, however, was known by both
his friends and family as a man who espoused liberal causes in a totally
arbitrary manner."[8] Bernstein was a liberal with an audience that respected
his beliefs, and Hoover's secret police watched him as closely as they would
any anarchistic, dope-addled rock idol.
One agent provocateur on the FBI payroll, Sarah Jane Moore, the would-be
assassin of President Gerald Ford, observed the Bureau's counter-revolution
from the inside. She described an atmosphere of cynical acrimony in a note to
reporters curious about her motive in the assassination attempt:
"The FBI directed me to people and organizations seriously working for
radical change....
"There was no coordination not even any communication between these groups.
The whole left as a matter of fact seemed disorganized, strife-ridden and
weak. And I realized the reason for this was the FBI whose tool I was who
clearly and correctly saw the strength and power of the idea of socialism,
realized it represented a very real danger to our profit- motivated corporate
state and who had declared total covert war against not only denim-clad
revolutionaries but also against all progressive forces, even those working
for the most acceptable 'American' reforms." She explained:
I listened with horror once to a bright young agent as he bragged about his
abilities in the area of anonymous letter writing and other forms of
character assassination, not of big important leaders, but of little people
as soon as they showed any leadership potential. The Bureau's tactic is to
cut them down or burn them out before they realize their potential.
I remember Worthington (my Bureau control) saying: "You don't seem to realize
that this is war!" He thought the next two or three years would be the most
crucial in our nation's history. His greatest fear at that time was that the
left would rediscover the documents and ideas from the first and second
American revolutions and use them to spark a new revolution.
He said that these words are as powerful today as ever and that properly used
(actually he said "cleverly" used) the people could be aroused by these ideas
and would fight again to achieve them ....
That explains my political beliefs. It does not explain why in the name of a
dream whose essence is a deep love for people and a belief in the essential
beauty and worth of each individual I picked up a gun intending to kill
another human being.
When I was getting ready to go public regarding my spying activities, a
journalist attempting to verify some facts was told by the FBI that if the
story appeared I would be in danger.
This warning was repeated to me by the FBI with the additional suggestion
that I should leave town. Charles Bates told me that of course they couldn't
stop me from talking but that I was placing myself in danger if the story
appeared. He stated that at any rate he was not going to allow the FBI to be
embarrassed. If there was anything they didn't like in the story they would
simply see that it was edited out, that they had done that before, that he
had "friends" on that particular paper somewhat higher up than the reporter
level.
I had already had a phone call saying I was next that was just after the
murder of a friend. Now friends and foes alike vied with each other to warn
me, each claiming to have heard from sources they refused to name that I was
to be "offed" or at the very least beaten.
Beyond a certain point pressure and threats are counter- productive. When one
is threatened to a point where one is convinced; that is, when I finally
accepted the fact that I was not going to be able to get away-that I wasn't
willing to pay the price-the realization I would probable be killed ceased to
frighten-it brought instead a sense of freedom.[9]
Conservatives, blind to the slag-pile of political corruption within their
own ranks, suspected a Soviet conspiracy in the rising challenge to authority
and organized against the storm.
In 1970, three weeks after Nixon invaded Cambodia, Edwin Meese Ill—the
godfather of the far-right political school christened by the Wasbington Post
(on January 26, 1984) the "Alameda Mafia," then Governor Ronald Reagan's
legal affairs secretary-observed in a McCarthyesque lecture delivered at a
state law enforcement conference, "The challenge is clear. The enemies of
society who are here in California are willing to sacrifice a generation of
youth to obtain their objectives. They are not only willing but desirous of
losing an international conflict. They will not stop at endangering life and
indeed they have killed several and injured thousands." The solution:
"Maximum photography, maximum evidence gathering by officers who are not
involved in the actual [political demonstration] control activity"maximum
spying, maximum keeping of secret files on private citizens.[10]
At the federal level, the CIA was already pursuing similar objectives under
the aegis of an illegal domestic operation code-named CHAOS. Among the
political targets of CHAOS, count Black Panther Geronimo Pratt, framed for
the murder of two radicals on a tennis court in Santa Monica, California.
Pratt was subsequently released from prison in June 1997, 27 years after his
sentencing, because it was proven that a witness had lied on the stand.'[11]
The International Secretariat of Amnesty International issued a press release
the following year citing the court's "failure to disclose crucial
information about a key prosecution witness in the trial of Gercinimo ji Jaga
[Pratt]—a former leader of the Black Panther Party released last year." This
stonewall, insisted Al, "should result in the reversal of his conviction and
finally put an end to 27 years of injustice."[12] Pratt is generally
considered a target of COINTELPRO, the FBI's notorious counter-surveillance
program, but Pratt is aware since requesting his files under FOIA that CHAOS
agents hitched horses with the Bureau to drag the Panther into an erroneous
conviction.
Politically active hippies were also fair game. One victim of the onslaught
was the underground press, according to Donna Demac, an instructor in
interactive telecommunications at NYU, "that diverse assortment of
publications that ... empowered many of the social movements of the 1960s."
The CIA and FBI "collected information on each paper's publisher, its sources
of funds and its staff members. Many underground newspapers were put out of
business when they were abandoned by advertisers who had been pressured by
the FBI. The Bureau also created obstacles to distribution, fomented staff
feuds and spread false information to create suspicion and confusion."[13]
The Central Intelligence Agency and its military counterparts, covert
templars of the ruling caste, watched the dissent movement's rise with
growing anxiety; the Operation was the Agency's response to civil unrest and
cultural upheaval. If nothing else, the word CHAOS implied that officials of
The Firm were aware of the social upheaval they were about to unleash upon an
unsuspecting proletariat.
Freedom of Information Act requests for the most sensitive files are
consistently denied.
"During six years [1967-1972], the Operation compiled some 13,000 different
files, including files on 7,200 American citizens," concluded the Rockefeller
Commission, which failed to pursue leads to settle critical allegations. The
files inspected by the ClA's in-house committee concerned some 300,000
individuals and political organizations, and the ClA's Directorate of
Operations created an index of some seven million names.[14]
Leaks were handled at the top. In April 1972, an article by Victor Marchetti,
an ex-CIA officer, "CIA: The President's Loyal Tool," appeared in The Nation,
charging the Agency with deceiving and manipulating the media, and co-opting
the youth movement, cultural organizations and labor. William Colby, then the
ClA's executive director, recruited John Warner, a deputy general counsel, to
halt the publication of a book that Marchetti planned to publish on the
criminalization of the CIA. Warner turned to White House aides John
Ehrlichman, the head Plumber, and David Young, a right-wing extremist from
Young Americans for Freedom, a Nazi front for "conservative" agents
emigrating to the US from Munich. Together, they obtained approval from
President Nixon to drag Marchetti into court where US District Court Judge
Albert V. Bryan, Jr. ordered him to submit the book to the Agency for
redaction.[15]
Operation CHAOS was the inevitable mutation of covert domestic ops conceived
during the Eisenhower administration and its directive to monitor emigre
political groups on domestic soil. A reformed insider, Vern Lyon, former CIA
undercover operative and current director of the Des Moines Hispanic
Ministry, writes that the directive led the CIA to establish a network of
proprietary companies and covers for its domestic operations. So widespread
did the network become that in 1964 President Johnson allowed CIA Director
John McCone to conceive "a new super-secret branch called the Domestic
Operations Division (DOD), the very title of which mocked the explicit intent
of Congress to prohibit CIA operations inside the US."
The classified charter of the DOD mandated the exercise of "centralized
responsibility for the direction, support, and coordination of clandestine
operational activities within the United States." This would include
break-ins of foreign diplomatic sites at the request of the National Security
Agency (NSA). Lyons: "The CIA also expanded the role of its 'quasi -legal'
Domestic Contact Service (DCS), an operation designed to brief and debrief
selected, American citizens who had traveled abroad in sensitive areas." The
DCS also helped with travel control by monitoring the arrivals and departures
of US nationals and foreigners. In addition, the CIA reached out to former
agents, officers, contacts and friends to help it run its many fronts, covers
and phony corporations. This "old boy network" provided the CIA with trusted
personnel to conduct its illicit domestic activities.[16]
A massive destabilizing effort was waged against the peace and civil rights
movements. The Army's CounterIntelligence Analysis Branch collected
personality profiles, mug shots and compiled "blacklists" of anti-war
activists, stored them on computer-files and microfilm reels. The Pentagon's
intelligence operatives, disguised as reporters, gathered information at
peace demonstrations-the "Midwest Audiovisual News," an Army intelligence
front, interviewed Abbie Hoffman at the 1968 police riot in Chicago.[17]
The military program came complete with "operations centers," direct lines to
local police, teletype machines to field intelligence units, street maps,
closed-circuit video, and secure communications channels. A 180-man "command
center" appeared in 1968 following the riots in Detroit. By 1969, the center
was housed in a $2.7-million war room in the cellar of the Pentagon.[18]
This was the year Richard Helms prepared a CIA research paper on the antiwar
movement entitled "Restless Youth" for Henry Kissinger. The cover letter
explained, "in an effort to round out our discussion of this subject, we have
included a section on American students. This is an area not within the
charter of this agency, so I need not emphasize how extremely sensitive this
makes the paper. Should anyone learn of its existence it would prove most
embarrassing for all concerned." But a small group at the ClA's Office of
Security was already monitoring student organizations in the Washington, D.C.
area. Helms expanded the domestic spying operation with the creation of the
Special Operations Group (SOG), directed by Richard Ober, one of the "Deep
Throat" candidates, to conduct "counterintelligence." This was the direct
precursor of CHAOS. SOG operatives provided the CIA Office of Current
Intelligence with scuttlebutt on the peace movement. Within a couple of
years, domestic operations swelled to meet the perceived threat to
military-industrial rule, even paralleling the growth of antiwar protest.[19]
But invisibly, in the shadows of the resistance.
In 1974, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh exposed CHAOS in the New York
Times. Hersh reported that the CIA had conducted a massive spying and covert
operations program on domestic soil. The story inspired the Church and Pike
hearings of 1975. These investigations verified Hersh's allegations. But the
media, especially the leading newspapers and news weeklies, ridiculed and
reviled Hersh. The Wasbington Post, Newsweek and editorial pages across the
country actually questioned his sanity and dismissed the story as a whimsical
"conspiracy theory." Time rushed to the Agency's defense: "Many observers in
Washington who are far from naive about the CIA nevertheless consider its
past chiefs and most of its officials highly educated, sensitive and
dedicated public servants who would scarcely let themselves get involved in
the kind of massive scheme described."[20]
NOTES
1. Peter Wicke, a music historian at Hummboldt University in Berlin,
emphasizes that the Nazi suppression of jazz and swing was motivated largely
by economics: "January 30, 1933 marked a deep cut for some forms of popular
music under the fascist dictatorship in Germany. The new ruling powers left
no doubt about their role in the arts with the renewal of Germany. A once
flowering European center of music expired into the Agony." Propaganda
expenditures directed against the emergent musical movements "targeted the
economic competition of the American music industry," and, oddly enough, "the
Jewish population-who had less to do with jazz than the other subpopulations
of Germany. 11 American recordings were banned, but Telefunken Studios
artists Peter Kreuder's Orchestra, Heinz Wehner's Swing Band and Kurt Widmann
were promoted in Nazi Germany, and the business of jazz recording continued
after the prohibition was enacted against imports, "not undisputedly, but
evenly, without closer inspection, minus the annoying competition from
overseas." The corporate influence on Nazi policies concerning jazz and swing
music contributed to "a beautiful banknote of private feeling" in Germany.
See Peter Wicke, "Populare Musik im Faschistischen Deutschland,"
http://w-ww2.huberlin.de/inside/fpm/wicke2.htm.
2. Bruce Pollock, Wben the Music Mattered: The Musicians Wbo Made it Happen
Tell How it Happened, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983, p. 86.
3. Randal Morton, "Alan Muncle's Interview," Clarence Wbite Cbronicles, no.
14, September 13, 1998.
4. Ben Fong -Torres, Hickory Wind: Tbe Life and Times of Gram Parsons, New
York: St. Martin's, 1991, p. 228.
5. Fong-Torres, pp. 200-201.
6. Fong-Torres, pp. 116-17.
7. "Rock Heroes on the FBI Record," Correspondent (UK), October 1, 1989.
8. Tom Rhodes, "Files show FBI tried to settle score with the maestro of
radical chic," London Times, July 30, 1994, p. 11.
9. Sarah Jane Moore, correspondence with Linda-Marie, Internet posting,
http://www.playink.com/sjmore.htm.
10. Edwin Meese, executive secretary to Governor Reagan, untitled lecture
typescript, 1970, released under FOIA request.
11. Geronimo Pratt interviewed by former Black Panther Lee Lew-Lee, 1997.
Angus Meredith, in Secrets: The Clk War at Home (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999): "The FBI's COINTELPRO [was] run in collaboration
with CHAOS" (p. 69).
12. "USA: Crucial information 27 years too late for Black Panther leader,"
Amnesty International press release, Al INDEX: AMR 51/41/98, 1 July 1998.
13. Donna A, Demac, Liberty Denied: The Current Rise of Censorsbip in
America, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990, p. 77.
14. Rockefeller Report to the President by the Commission on CIA Activities
Witbin the United States, June 1975, New York: Manor Books, pp. 2 3, 4 1.
15. Angus Mackenzie, Secrets: The CIA's War at Home, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999, pp. 43-44.
16. Verne Lyon, "Domestic Surveillance: The History of Operation CHAOS," Cover
t Action Information Bulletin, Summer 1990.
17. Blanche Wiesen Cook, "Surveillance and Mind Control," Howard
Frazier, ed., Uncloaking the CIA, New York: The Free Press, 1978, p. 178.
18. Daniel Brandt, "The 1960s and COINTELPRO: In Defense of Paranoia,"
NameBase NewsLine, no. 10, July/September 1995.
19. Thomas Powers, The Man Wbo Kept the Secrets: Ricbard Helms and the CIA, Ne
w York: Pocket Books, 1979, pp. 314-15.
20. Kathryn Olmsted, "Watchdogs or Lap Dogs?" Albuquerque Weekly Alibi, July
21, 1997.
pps. 9-18
=====
CHAPTER TWO
Time Machine:
The Birth of Top 40 Radio and Alan Freed's near-Death Experience
(Early CIA and Mob Influences on the
Rock Music Industry)
The Mafia was to be enlisted for the covert war aqainst counterculture, an
incarnation of Operation Under-world (the WWII-era alliance between the
military and the Mob to sabotage the Italians under Mussolini) on the
domestic front, a natural since gangsters already dominated much of the
popular music industry. "The music business," Albert Goldman acknowledged in
1989, "has always been a dirty business with strong ties to organized crime
and a long tradition of corrupting the media. One of the dangers that
researchers in this field run is that they will stumble across something that
will alarm the crooks, who are paranoid from the jump." Goldman reported that
the lesson was driven home when Linda Kuehl, a friend writing a book on the
life of Billie Holiday, was killed in Washington, DC by a plummet from the
terrace of her hotel room. Goldman phoned police and learned that they had
ruled suicide out as the motive (she'd been cleaning her face with cold cream
when she fell). He also "learned that she had been running scared because she
was getting calls from strangers who kept admonishing her, 'Why don't you
just write about the music?"'[1]
In the mid-'60s, CHAOS officials and the Mob both eyed the rising tide of
political rock music askance. Each had an incentive for exercising control
over the industry. The CIA was in the business of decimating the New Left and
popular music had, in the wink of a half-note, been transformed into a viper
pit of long-haired "communards" screaming for revolution and an end to the
war in Vietnam. The Mafia, of course, wanted more constrictive financial
control over the recording industry, the artists it signed, everything from
production to distribution.
It's not as though these two powerful entities, the CIA and organized crime,
were unknown to the industry. Top 40, the reigning broadcast format in
America, owes its very existence to the NSC-CIA-Mafia combination.
In the beginning there was Morris Levy. Morris began his career as an
appendage of the Genovese Family and rapidly rose through the ranks. He was
enlisted by the Mob as a juke box promoter in the 1940s. His brother was
gunned down by business rivals who mistook him for Morris-who lived to become
one of the most feared men in the business. He was the owner of the famous
Birdland jazz club in New York City, and a partner, with George Goldner, a
seedy record promoter, for the Rama label (home of R&B doo-wop group The
Crows) and a subsidiary, Gee Records (Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers, The
Regents).[2] These labels and further subsidiaries (Roulette, End) pumped out
apolitical bubblegum (Tommy James, Little Anthony, The Shangri-Las) through
the 1960s.
Gee Records was founded by Levy and Goldner specifically to draw in Alan
Freed, then a rising R&B concert promoter in Cleveland (he oversold one
concert and thereby incited the first rock 'n' roll riot), to New York. Freed
was hired at Gee in the Fall of 1954 to work his promotional genius, and from
the gun he and Goldner were close allies, Levy did not entirely trust his new
partner, however, and schemed to bring him under control, eventually
arranging a meeting in which Alan Freed-drunk at the time-was convinced to
sell his share of the label to Levy. The Mafioso now had a controlling
interest in the company, one of the first to enter the rock 'n' roll market.
John Elroy McCaw, another early kingpin in the genre, was also instrumental
in bringing Alan Freed to New York. McCaw was a veteran of the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA.[3] After the war, McCaw
bought a New York radio station, WINS at Seven Central Park West, and geared
the station's programming to hockey and basketball games. But by the early
1950s, the station pioneered the very first disk jock format, twenty-five
minutes of Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Steve Lawrence and other popular
crooners of the day, followed by five minutes of news. It soon became clear
to the programming directors at WINS that the jock was the radio personality
of the future. When Freed arrived in New York, he found himself in the
historically unprecedented position of shaping not only the music youth would
dance to (under Mafia control), but the medium that delivered it, as well (at
a station run by a veteran intelligence agent).
Freed, at a starting salary of $75,000, was expected to boost the ratings,
and toward this end he had no use for Perry Como. Rick Sklar, then an
apprentice copywriter and producer, reports that when Freed arrived in New
York, along with him "came hundreds of 45-RPM singles that he piled
helter-skelter in an old five-shelf supply cabinet in our office. That
chaotic, uncatalogued collection would become the most influential record
library in commercial radio, imitated by stations everywhere. it would change
the sound of popular music in America and the world for generations."
The WINS jocks couldn't know that in ten years time the invention of rock
radio would inspire a subculture of anti-war activists and flag-burning
bohemians to "tune in." Dissent inevitably died with a drugged whimper. Drugs
would enter the equation of music plus youth with the politics of heroin and
LSD. Hallucinogens fragged organized resistance to the war, but they were
only one of many dubious contributions the Agency has made to American
culture. Strains of drugged hedonism found their way to Top 40 radio with
tambourine men peddling magic swirling trips, pink-eyed adolescents wringing
their hands at mother's little helpers. The surf wave of Top 40 radio was
transformed into a spawning ground of countercultural self -medication, and
with the escalation of the Vietnam War, quasi-Marxist politics infused with
strains of mystical idealism.
Ironically, "Top 40," the pied piper of rebellion, owes its very existence to
McCaw, Alan Freed's boss, the entrepreneurial brains behind "big beat" radio
and an old covert warrior at ease in the closed cham-bers of Washington's
national security "elite": "Elroy's govern-ment contacts were extensive,"
writes Sklar. "He had maintained many of his OSS connections after the war
and was quite prob-ably still engaged in government intelligence work during
the time that he owned WINS. McCaw associates tell of saying good-bye to him
in New York, with plans to meet him in Chicago the next day, only to have
McCaw call Cairo and cancel the meeting
He was a member of the Advisory Council of the National Security Council,
placed there, along with other key industry figures, by his old boss, Air
Force General Hap
Arnold."[4] Elroy McCaw was the "unauthorized civilian" whose inadvertent
admission to an NSC meeting at the White House, chaired by John F.
Kennedy—who had never met the man and thought him an intruder-caused a press
furor in 1961. (The NSC and General Henry H. "Hap" Arnold, commanding general
of US Army Air Forces during WWII, both played significant roles in seeding
the prevailing Cold War culture. The NSC was patterned after Hitler's
security council, and its jurisdiction was to oversee the CIA by dictate of
the National Security Act of 1947.[5] McCaw was therefore instrumental in
determining CIA policy.)
The yawping, warbling, mind-numbing repetitions of Top 40 radio were given
trial runs first in Omaha, Kansas City and New Orleans. The format was
fine-tuned at WINS under McCaw, and the radio industry would never be the
same: "WINS hit the air in September of 1957," Sklar recalls, "with sharp
jingles, screaming contests and promotions, and Top 40 music. The city had
never heard anything like it." The jocks had personalities, an unprecedented
development. "News was introduced with ear-splitting sensationalist
effects.... A different sound was played each hour. One newscast would be
introduced by a woman screaming, another by a fire engine siren, and still
another by the sound of machine guns."[6]
The station lured more listeners than any other radio station in New York
within a month of breaking out the hit parade format. But corruption thrived
behind the DJ's mindless bluster, whistles and the latest "Pick Hit of the
Week."
Alan Freed, the godfather of hit radio, was scapegoated by Orrin Hatch's
House Legislative Oversight subcommittee probe of payola in 1959. He was also
very nearly a target of assassination the year before. In 1958, McCaw called
Freed into the WINS owner's office and announced his intention to fire him.
The DJ was so shocked that he canceled a concert and spent the entire day
pleading for his job. Freed was still in McCaw's office when a rock promoter,
enraged by the sudden cancellation, exploded through the rear entrance to the
radio station, gun in hand, searching for Freed. Sklar's pregnant wife,
Syclelle, and Inga Freed were standing at the Coca-Cola machine. They
immediately bolted into the record library and locked the door behind them.
The gunman was unable to find Freed, who was still pleading with McCaw in the
latter's office, and stomped out of the station in a cloud of disgust.[7]
pps. 19-23
NOTES
1 . Albert Goldman, "Rock's Greatest Hitman," Penthouse, September 1989, p.
222.
2. Marc Eliot, Rockonomics: The Money Behind the Music, New York: Citadel,
1989 , pp.47-48.
3. Rick Sklar, Rocking America: How the All-Hit Radio Stations Took Over, New
York: St. Martin's, 1984, pp. 11, 17 and 19.
4. Sklar, p. 54. John E. McCaw died in 1969. He sired four sons, including
Craig McCaw, who has been as influential in the molding of media and culture
as his spook father. McCaw, Jr. entered the cable industry early. A Craig
McCaw timeline: 1973: Craig takes over the daily operation of a small cable
television operation in Centralia owned by him and his three brothers. 1974: T
he company enters the radio common carrier (paging) industry. 1982: The
company is granted spectrum licenses made available by the FCC. 1996: The
company buys out MCI's cellular and paging operations. 1987: Deciding to
invest heavily in the emerging wireless industry, the company sells its cable
holdings. 1990: McCaw Cellular purchases 52 percent of LIN Broadcasting
stock-LIN owned interests in five of the top ten cellular markets. 199 1: McCa
w initiates an upgrade of its systems from analog to digital. 1992: The
Wireless Data Division contracts with UPS to track packages throughout the
U.S. 1994: McCaw merges with AT&T (Source: 1995 AT&T press release).
The latest Forbes Four Hundred report notes that in 1994, the McCaw family
"agreed to invest up to $ 1.1 billion in Nextel Communications." All four
brothers are exceedingly wealthy. Bruce R. McCaw, Forbes reports, is worth $80
0 million; Keith W. McCaw, $775 million; John Elroy McCaw, Jr., $750 million.
5. Mae Brussell, "Why is the Senate Watergate Committee Functioning as Part
of the Cover-Up," Realist, August 1971, p. 22. After WWII, a Nazi base was
established in the Caribbean. The NSC, "patterned from German intelligence,
provided the espionage framework inside the White House for our political
assassinations as well as the Watergate 'Plumbers' and election
manipulations."
6. Sklar, p. 28.
7. Sklar, p. 46.
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