"I ain’t gonna work on Maggie's farm no I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no Well I wake up in the morning Hold my hands and pray for rain I got a head full of ideas They 're drivin me insane It’s a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor

No I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no — Bob Dylan

I don’t think it’s news to people now that the rock and roll scene is incredibly fucked up, and that things in our culture generally aren’t anything like the way we all know they should be. I mean we know that the music we get to hear, and, the conditions we get to hear it in, aren’t what they started out to be, and that the conditions especially have changed so that they have less and less to do with the music and more and more to do with the sickness and greed of the death culture the music originally rose up against, to liberate us from the death machine and turn us on to our free human possibilities and make us whole

This isn’t what We wanted, is what I mean to say, this isn’t what we'got all excited about and thought would change the world, but the Whole process seems to be far beyond our control and we just go along with it, as much as we hate it. We just: go ahead and deal with these awful conditions as’-'a given now, as something that’s just thereand that we have to accept if we wantdo hear and be with any music at all. We’d-rather not think about it, but when we do think about it, it pisses us off, we get mad about it in our heads and hate it and want it to;6e different, but we don’t see what we can do about it as individuals and so we just accept; this shit as a necessary condition and go along'with it and hope that someday people will wake up and things will be better for us in our world, so we don’t have to put up with so much shit just to get the little things we'want for ourselves - our music, our sacraments, ourv.culture, our lives themselves.

We know we can’t always get what we want, but what I want , to say is that if we try real hard, we might find, that we’ll get just what we need. And I , want to suggest that there are ways we can try real hard, there are ways we can start changing things, ways we can move to bring it. all back home where it belongs, and that the best place for us to start is right here with 'our music and the conditions which pertain in the music business and in our culture as a whole, because that’s where we’re strongest in a lot of ways even though it seems sometimes like that’s where we’re weakest. There are things we can do to break the stranglehold the greedheads have oh our culture and our people, to break the music and ourselves and all our people free from the death culture altogether'. 1 won’t go into a long raht about how bad things really are, because everybody who reads this paper knows what’s happening better than 1 do anyway — I’ve been off the streets for a year now and it’s easier for me in the penitentiary, if you can relate to that It’s easier for me than if is for you out there, because the repression here is constant and predictable for the most part, and out there you can never tell what’s going to go down next.

Getting rode down by the police when you go to concerts or festivals, paying ridiculous prices to get in to hear and see and be a part of your own culture, having to hear music in stupid places and be treated like dogs when you do go to those places to be hr the music, trembling every time you see a squad car turn down your street, the way you have to live with the fear of getting hassled and arrested and locked up for getting high, or for going out to be with your brothers and sisters somewhere in public, or just for going out on the street to cop something to eat, or some weed, or some records, or some groceries from the store. You never know when the shit might come down or when you might get caught up in it, even though you don’t have anything to do with it or don’t wanna have anything to do with it.

The repression part is bad enough, but What’s probably worse is the way the music and our culture as a whole has passed out'of our hands and into the grasp of the pig — it was in our hands When We started developing it, but now we Have been relegated to the role of simple consumers and Our music and its by-products' are: controlled by an amazing oligarchy of Outsiders, and they use our culture against us to keep us in our place. Freedom starts with self-determination, and is

manifested most precisely in Self-determination, and when a people’s culture is controlled by forces outside the culture itself the people are reduced to the status of colonials or neo-colonial subjects of the people who control them. What we wanted was to be free, and our music and our culture developed as an expression of our freedom; we controlled it and the way it developed at first, and now we no longer have control over where it goes or how it gets there. That’s the worst part of the present situation, and if we want to be free we have to recapture our culture from the people who have ripped it off from us and put it back in the service of our own people, so it can inspire us and lead us on to freedom on all levels.

Before I go any farther here I had better make one thing clear: I’m not some kind of “radical” or “political” manipulator who’s trying to “infiltrate” and “cocrpt” the rock and roll scene in order to “radicalize” or “politicize” it, or some shit like that. 1 grew up on rock and roll mu sic, I’ve been involved and caught up in the music all my life (well at least since I was 11 years. Old) and everything I’ve learned about America I’ve learned through being involved with and inspired by the music. Rock and roll has been the major motivating force in my life ever since it first leaped out of a radio into my consciousness. And one thing 1’ve learned from being moved by this music, from the ways and the directions in which it’s moved me, is that the rock and roll scene is already “politicized” and has been politicized ever since it first erupted into the cancerous consciousness of plastic Amerika.' Rock and roll is “political”, whether we want to dig it tnat way or not, jlist by virtue of its existehce.as a high-energy force for change in the middle of the most deathly, most anti-human low-energy scene in ■ history. It not only has “political” origins but it is thoroughly ’’political” in its effects, on every level.

Because the main thing I’ve learned over the years since I first heard Chuck Berry and the Flamingos is that any act which has a political consequence is a political act - and that includes smoking weed, which can get you 914-10 years in the penitentiary in the state of Michigan, for example, and growing your hair long, which you can get beat up by the police for, or even going to concerts and pop festivals and other cultural events, because you can get arrested and beat up at those things like a lot of brothers and sisters in Cincinnati, for example, did. And you also have to realize that the money that you pay for those things, and for records and other cultural artifacts you buy in the stores, is used by monopoly capitalists and domestic imperialists to keep the consumer economy rolling on, so the war can keep on, and the pigs can stay in power, and CBS and RCA and people like that can keep on making obscene profits for themselves at our expense.

1 know it isn’t pleasant to have to think about these things, but it’s a lot more pleasant than the things themselves are, and it’s much hipper for us to examine these things and figure them out and move to change them than it is to'just go on accepting this shit and letting these people perpetuate their hideous death-style while they wreck our culture and fuck with the lives of people all over the world. Because if we study the way the pig has infiltrated and taken over and manipulated our culture, we can not only discover how to put an end to this exploitation but we can also see how monopoly capitalism and imperialism works in the larger society as well. What we have to realize, finally, is that everything that happens in the macrocosm of the American consumer culture can be seen in detail at work in the microcosm of the rock and roll world, and if we can combat the consumer mentality in our culture then we can combat it in the mother country culture too, and save ourselves and eventually all the people of earth from destruction at the hands of the greed creeps and “owners” who are causing all of us all this

One other thing before I go on - I want to make it clear when I use the despised word “politics” here I mean it like Huey P. Newton has defined it, where he says “Politics are merely the., desire of individuals and groups to satisfy-first, their basic needs - food, shelter and clothing, and security for themselves and their loved ones” — and 1 have to add, the desire to create and nurture and support and defend their own culture too, because a people’s culture is at the base of their entire being. Politics mean analyzing a given situation, and checking it out in all its complexity, .and devising a strategy for dealing with the situation so that thepeople’s needs will be satisfied, and then moving from that analysis and that strategy-to change the situation so it will be in line with the people’s • needs and desires. That’s something all of us do every day, one way or another, and all of our actions are political because finally we live in the world, we interact with Other people every day, and everything we do or which is done to us changes the shape of' bur lives one way or another. Whether we want to accept it or not, everything we do is political finally. What I want to say is that we have to start acting consciously and resolutely in such a way that we can make the changes in our lives and in the life of our people as a whole which will make things the way they’re supposed to be. And, that we can make the necessary changes, if we act and move correctly.

Our culture started to develop about five years ago as a real alternative to the death culture of the straight world. We started out from where we were then, which was almost nowhere, and we built up our new culture from the ground, basing it on our new dope-opened consciousness which told us that we had to get together and love everybody right now. We dropped so much acid that we started to see that we had to move beyond our own selves, though - we saw that we had to turn on everybody in the world, if possible, to what we had found out about ourselves and our possibilities for living beautiful human lives. Prior to 1965 we had slowly evolved a hip subculture which was pretty much a closed thing, an elitist trip meant only for the enlightened few, and when acid exploded onto that hip scene it transformed us so we knew we couldn’t possibly keep hoarding all that enlightenment and beauty for ourselves, because that was just being like the creeps we were trying to get away from.

This is important to remember, because this is what got us into the mass culture scene in the first place, and this is what made the new rock and roll culture different from the hip-beatnik-folkie subculture of the late 50’s and early sixties. We had been thinking about ourselves primarily, about getting away from the established scene and into something that would make us feel good, and we had a predominantly elitist sense of things that said, fuck the world, it’s too fucked up to bother with, politics is a drag, most people are a drag, we’re where it’s at and all we want to do is get high, dig. some jams .and .stay out of the pig’s

Then we started gobbling all that good LSD and got turned on to the rest of the world, and at the same time we. started hearing and feeling an incredible new music in the air — Bob Dylan’s rock and roll masterpieces, the Beatles, the Stones singing “Can’t Get No Satisfaction”, -r. and this potent combination moved us out of our shells and pointed us toward the mainstream we had dropped out of. Our ranks began to swell, we started seeing more and more weird people like ourselves everywhere, and in Amerika a whole new rock and roll music erupted out of the advanced neo-beatnik culture of San Francisco and Los Angeles and started spreading back across the country, turning on more and more people by the day. Where our music and our life-style had been intensely private, now it was growing more and more into a strangely public expression which effectively involved more and more people. Folk guitarists started investigating the new electronic possibilities introduced by Dylan, the Beatles and the Stones, they started plugging into amplifiers and adding drummers and microphones, and the music began to move out of cellars and living rooms and coffee houses into more public places which allowed for a much wider participation than ever before.

Some people started getting bands together, jamming and working out arrangements; other freaks discovered overhead projectors and slide projectors and oils and weird combinations of images and colors, and started mixing their “light shows” with the music; still others started thinking about places where these beautiful elements could be put together with the people so everybody could get off like the musicians and light people and their friends were doing; and more and more non-performers began to relate to what their brothers and sisters were doing and gathered around them whenever and wherever they got the chance. Ken Kesey and .his Merry Pranksters (among whom were people like the Grateful Dead and light geniuses like Stewart Brand) organized and brought off the astounding Trips Festival in San Francisco in which all of these elements were brought together and catalyzed with some powerful acid and a whole new scene was exploded onto the world.

What was beautiful about this new scene was that it was a wholly organic expression of a people’s life-style - it grew out ot the consciousness of the people and was brought into being by the people themselves, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the established entertainment industry, which was known to one and all as an incredible drag on every level. The new expression was a communal experience, a direct extension of the people’s highest consciousness, and it was motivated by great feelings of love and brotherfand sisterjhood rather than by any commercial or cynical interest. Everyone who was involved, from the bands and inventors to the dancers and listeners and general participants, was aware of the huge significance of what was happening - we were sure that what we were doing was going to change the world, and we felt very strongly that it was just going to be a matter of time now until the ugliness and filth of plastic Amerika would be transformed through the force of our music and love into something beautiful and holy.

It’s hard to describe the feeling we had, especially since it doesn’t exist like that anymore, but it was really powerful and everybody believed in it to one degree or another, everybody that is who was taking all that acid and dancing and screaming in the music and uniting on every level with everybody else around them. All of our experiences were unbelievably visionary, we had a whole new vision of the world and what its possibilities might be, and we knew that everything would be all right once the masses of the people got the message we were sending out through our music, our frenzied dancing, our colors and illuminations, our posters, our outrageous clothes and manners and speech, our mind-blowing, consciousness-expanding, earth-shaking dope.Everything we did was part of the whole we were making of our lives, and everything fit in with everything else — it was an .organic explosion of beauty and life unlike anything that had ever appeared on the planet, and the deeper we got into it the purer it got.

Whew! Just thinking about those days, trying to describe them for those of you who weren’t around then, turns me around and almost takes me out of this penitentiary cell and puts me back there in 1966 when I got out of jail the last time. I remember it so well because I was locked up when the first explosion started, and I walked out of the Detroit House of'Correction into a whole new world, a world which 1 had just been dreaming about six months before when 1 was locked up for getting high and trying to keep our Artists’ Workshop going in the middle of the obscenity that was Detroit. Everything I had been dreaming about since I first ate the magic peyote sacrament in 1963 was beginning to come true, and to say it was exhilirating doesn’t give any sense of what it was really like. I know it’s hard to relate to now that things have become so different, but people who were around then and who haven’t gone crazy or been completely twisted around since can testify to the truth of what I’m trying to say.

It was a whole new world, and we were sure that everyone was going to join us in time. The music and thexulture which grew up around the music, with the music as the core, were the vanguard of the new world, they were the most'visible, most accessible manifestations of our new world-spirit, and they .gave .us the breath, (inspiration) and strength to go on; everything was built up on the inusif, and it was going to be the force that would carry us through to the glorious world of the'.future. The music was holy and pure, the context of the music and the conditions in which it occurred were wholly integrated with the music itself, it was all part of the same thing and that thing was beauty and love and freedom.

Where in the past we had been scornful of the mass media and the music industry and the whole commercial world we had escaped from, now we welcomed these things as possibilities, as the means through which we could reach more .and mote people. Our bands started recording - Jefferson Airplane.Takes Off, the first Love album, East/West by the Butterfield Blues Band - and we could measure the effect of what our culture had become in records by established bands like the Beatles (Revolver) and singers like Donovan " (Sunshine Superman), and there were maniacal new hybrids like the Mothers with their amazing Freak Out album, and while we had to hunt these records out then, we knew that soon everyone would be hip to them and their magical effects on volition and vision. There was no indication of the existence of this new thing in the popular media, the music wasn’t being played on the radio, but we were just waiting for it to happen, and it did.

It sure did, and it happened bigger and crazier than we could ever have anticipated, and as events proved, we just weren’t ready for it. We put out the call, and so many people responded in so many ways that it almost wiped us out before we could get it all together. As 1966 zoomed into 1967 our culture began to emerge out of its communal obscurity into the hot public eye of the mass media, and “the hippies” were the biggest thing going. Our first mass public venture, the San Francisco Human Be-in of January 1967, gathered 25,000 people together in Golden Gate Park, and Newsweek did the first mass-media story on what we were doing in its Valentine’s Day (February 14) issue, and the Airplane hit the top 40 airwaves with “White Rabbit” right after that, and the shit hit the fan all over the country. Everybody wanted to know what was happening out there with all those freaks, and the highest heads in San Franqisco invited a whole generation to come out and check the Summer of Love in the Haight-Ashbury, where there was free rock and roll in the parks, dynamite acid flowing in the streets and through the veins and cells of the people, and a whole new world to be explored.

So thousands of young rock and roll addicts streamed across the country to the Golden West, and the culture started flashing back to Chicago and Detroit and New York, both on the streets and in the newspapers and magazines of Amerika. The Doors followed the Airplane with “Light My Fire” burning up the AM stations, and the Beatles finished everybody off with Sgt. Pepper’s. Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the Monterey Pop Festival in September was the capper. Our culture was established, the holy onslaught of rock and roll,dope, and fucking in the streets had begun for real, and we were just grooving and grooving and waiting for the Big Change to go down as we knew it had to — after all, what we were doing was the greatest thing to hit the world in all its history, and it was so pure and so beautiful that we knew it wouldn’t be long until the old order would quietly pass into history as anyone with any sense could see it had to.

Only it didn’t happen that way. The old order wasn’t going to give up so easy, it had a real stake in its perversity and lacklove and it just didn’t want to change like that; we had been so wiped out by our visions of love and universal truth that we were blinded to the real nature of the death culture and we just couldn’t believe it when Babylon refused to melt away in the face of the colossal wave of good feeling we had let loose on Amerika. We couldn’t believe it - all we wanted was for people to turn on, tune in, and drop out of the death machine, and the death merchants simply didn’t want to do all that. And what was more, they didn’t want us to do it either.

This wasn’t quite what we expected, and it knocked most of us right off our feet, and we still haven’t recovered from the shock of finding but that the world wasn’t going to change just because that was the best thing for it. And while we were off our feet lying on the floor trying to get our heads together, the greedheads and vultures of the death culture moved in on us and ripped us off for our music and the pure force of our energy and love and started using them against us, and we didn’t realize it until the rip-off was almost complete. And then we said, well, what the fuck, we might as well go along with this, it isn’t what we wanted but it’s what’s happening now and we might as well flow with it until it runs itself out, because it’s too big and too powerful for us to fight it and besides this is all we’ve got, if we don’t take this shit we might not get anything we want.

I know this is a ridiculously simplified version of what went down, but I haven’t got that much space in this paper and I’ve got a lot of current history to get to yet, and besides I think we can all agree pretty much that this is how it happened generally, to our

people and our culture as a whole. What’s important is that we figure out and then carry out some ways to get things back to where they were supposed to be when we started. I just wanted to try and define what it was we were doing and how it developed, and-what happened to it, why and how, and what it was that motivated us and how we got blasted off the righteous track we were on.

The important things about our culture when it first started to develop were (1) that it was an organic expression of the life-style of a people, (2) that this life-style was based on love and freedom and thus these forces inspired and motivated the formal cultural manifestations of our people, starting with our music and continuing through the whole spectrum of our personal and public activity, (3) that we not only invented and created this new culture but we also controlled the means through which - it was disseminated among ourselves, into our community and out into the larger world, at least in the early stages of its development, (4) that our culture, by virtue of its nature and the ways in which that nature was expressed, was a powerful force for change, and (5) that the change embodied in and demanded by our culture — again, starting with the music, the core, and moving outward - was a revolutionary change with a decidedly political effect, since it addressed the dominant culture at its very roots and insisted that the basis of western civilization be shifted from competition, greed, cold lust and death to cooperation, communalism, love, life and freedom for everyone.

These things have to be understood before we go any further. Our new culture was more powerful in its possibilities than most of us could understand. We knew it could change the world, but what was more important even than that was that the people who control the ' world as it is knew it too, and moved to stop us from doing just that. They attacked us at our weakest point — our naivete and our great feeling of love and trust - and they mounted an essentially two-pronged counter-offensive, co-opting and assimilating the least dangerous elements into their own consumer-culture, and attacking and repressing the most liberating features of our culture. The musicians were bought off, the music was adulterated and repackaged and sold to us like hamburgers, the dope was monopolized and cut and almost wholly defused as a weapon of cultural revolution (and people who remember what acid was like before the Summer of Love know what 1 mean - there wasn’t any speed in it then, in fact there was very little speed around at all, and smack was just something you read about), and the new forms of mass celebration we had created — dances, be-ins, love-ins, multi-media energy explosions were taken over by hip capitalists, perverted, hyped up, dehumanized, monopolized, and shoved back at us as the latest revision of the standard plastic Hollywood version of mindless entertainment. And the people who wouldn’t go along with this shit were painted out of the picture, stomped off the set, hassled, driven crazy or locked up in penitentiaries to teach everybody else a lesson.

Where the bands used to play for the people because they loved the music and the people equally, now they are motivated by

the money they can get and the j fame (ego-charge) they can buy with it, and the bigger they get (in terms of the capitalist market-economy) the less they have to go out in front of the people to perform. Where the music was powerful and exciting, pushing at the limits of the form and charging the people with huge blasts of love-energy, now it is mostly weak and tame and easily digested by even the blandest consumers out there in television-land, and those bands that refuse to be sucked into the death-trap are put down by the self-righteous pop star-makers as “tasteless” and “unimaginative,” as if that isn’t what rock and roll is all about and has always been all about, destroying and spitting on the standards of the plastic death culture with every scream and every simple amplified blast of sound.

Where the LSD was righteous and pure, and every trip a ticket to the farthest reaches of the known and unknown human universe of love and compassion, now the dope is hopelessly adulterated, powerless, full of speed and death, sending people off into nightmares of paranoia and ego-ness and bumming them out completely, or else it’s the. Plague, the stupid smack-o scene which kills all love and creativity and will for change and puts the brothers and sisters right where the pigs want them, under the thumb, on their asses, sitting in the corner drooling and moaning and out of the running altogether. Speed and smack, the pig drugs of all time pushed into the veins of our people by Nixon and Mitchell while their asshole agents run around trying to stamp out weed and keep acid from ever emerging again, using the insane marijuana laws to terrify all of our people on a daily, (on a minute-to-minute) basis, hounding us, tapping our phones, making films of our lives, following us around in their beards and bandannas and bare feet, busting down our doors and pulling us off to their stinking lousy fucking jails and courts and penitentiaries, building up their dossiers so when the shit comes down for real they can round us up and pack us in boxcars like they did the American aborigines and pen us up in concentration camps.

And the worst thing of all, the worst thing of all, is what’s been done to our beautiful celebrations, the dances and festivals and free outdoor gatherings that were the crowning glory of our culture, where all of us came together in the music and the light and the people, where we charged ourselves up and moved out from that incredible ecstasy to build our communes and our whole communal, high-energy, sound-color-light-orgasm life-style with each other, moving together every day and in every way just as we moved together in the music. Whew! These fucking PIGS! They’ve made our music and our celebrations into cheap consumer products, they’ve destroyed the use-value of our culture and converted it all into dollars and cents, anti-feeling and anti-sense, all in the name of profit and greed, and most of our people don’t even know what they’re missing because the pigs did this so fast that it’s the only thing most of us have ever known - concerts where you sit down in a seat all night and watch the S*T*A*R*S parade across the screen, 1 mean the stage, sitting on your ass just like it’s the Ed Sullivan

show, and you’re out there in television-land, part of the studio audience, and three or four or ten or twenty all-star pop corporations are propped way up there in front of you doing 30 or 40 or maybe 50 minutes if they’re BIG enough, of their all-star golden box-office hits, going through their little acts and collecting 5000 or 10,000 or 20,000 or 50,000 dollars a night for it, the Stones ripped off over a million and a half dollars from their BIG AMERIKAN TOUR, and they leave us the way they found us only a little more frustrated and a little more fucked up, and all the money goes out of our community and into the pig’s banks one way or the other, to be used again to keep us deeper in our

We started out controlling our culture and the ways in which it reached the people, and now we don’t have control over it at all. We started out making a new life-form in which all of us could participate equally, and now we have the same thing we were trying to get away from, only it’s worse because our original creative impetus has been blunted and perverted and channeled into the same old dead-end Hollywood shuck which insists that the only relationship we can have to our vital art-expression is as consumers, as buyers and consumers who just keep paying and paying more and more for less and less of what we

This is what our new push for life and freedom has come to, and the dream we had five and four and three years ago has been wiped out, or if it still remains in our heads and cells it’s been strangely twisted, or it’s barely holding on for dear life, or it comes to us in the night in penitentiary cells and shacks stuck out in the middle of nowhere where our people have been taken or have run away to, to get away from the monster that’s been made of our culture. This is what it’s come to, and it sucks, and all of us know it, even the musicians who are making tons of money and flying around the world getting drunk like Jackie Kennedy and creeps like that. Even the musicians know it and the people really know it because they have to take all the bad shit and they don’t even get rich, they just get frustrated and disgusted; they just keep taking this shit because they have to have the music and they’ll put up with whatever they have to put up with in order to get near the music and

The dream has been wiped out or twisted around, and the people who have been twisted the worst are the musicians and performers themselves, because they’ve gone the farthest into the bizarro world of the music industry and they’ve been subjected to even greater pressures than the rest of us have. Their music and their selves have been made into cheap commodoties, bought and sold as the terms of the mother-country consumer market dictate, and the powerful use-value they once had for our people has been overtaken by their market-value which is determined not by the people but by the pigs. What started out as the antithesis of the consumer culture has been transformed into the very thing it meant to eliminate, and the people are suffering from it - not just economically for us, but also culturally and spiritually, which is what hurts us the most.

Local culture has been replaced by

national (rootless) culture | in the market economy, the music and the musicians are cut off from their roots in the people and stuck into the capitalist melting pot where they get mixed around by the “owners” and dished out to the people in various insipid combinations of the same old beef stew. Bands aren’t shit any more until they are accepted by the industry “owners” and their spokesmen, packaged according to the standard formula and pushed for all they’re worth until the people get tired of them, at which point they’re replaced by the latest super-star products and dumped back on the people they left to join the Hit Parade. At any one time maybe twenty RIG Amerikan bands are making it in the industry, and their fortunes are determined and controlled at all levels by people who have as much to do with us and our culture in its positive sense as Richard Nixon and Spiro T. Agnew. Maybe twenty or thirty more bands and single performers are allowed to play for the people and make a living at it, but their entrance into the market has nothing to do with the music at all — it has only to do with the laws of monopoly-capitalist economics.

If this sounds absurd do as I just did and check out the bills for the BIG money festivals this summer — the same acts are rotated from cow pasture to baseball stadium as the “owners” see fit, and nobody else gets in to play at all. Fewer and fewer people control the performing conditions under which the bands are able to work, and they pack more and more of us into their extravaganzas with no regard for our health, education or welfare, just the big buck and the power it brings them. The big money drives the independents and local promoters (who aren’t really much better, but who do offer different opportunities at least) out of business or into the arms of the greedheads in ridiculously profitable merger scenes. What was an expansive and exciting possibility gets more constricted and less vital every day. The non-ethic of the pig has usurped the life-force of our culture, and all of us are affected by it whether we realize it or not,

The point is to do something about ft, something which will put an end to this economic and cultural exploitation and return our culture to the people who gave birth to it and nurtured it to the point where the pigs could come in and rip it off from us. Our life culture can’t survive much longer in this form, and even if elements of it do survive their force is gone, their utility as agents of revolutionary change is gone; they will only thrive as they come increasingly to serve the perverse interests of monopoly capitalism and the death merchants who “own” all the capital. And they are having their problem too, as an ad in Billboard, a full-page plea by Bill Graham to his colleagues in the money music scene will testify ■ «# their monopolization and concentration of the energies and materials of the rock and roll cultureis even killing off their own profit-making power, and they’re starting to get worried as they look into their ill-gotten pot of gold and see the nasty old bottom of the barrel winking back at them through the glitter. They’re getting worried too, but their fears and failures are generated by the irreconciliable contradictions inherent in their

system. They can’t keep plundering the rock and roll culture as they have been and still get the booty they want without at least making an effort at real economic development, and that can’t happen without a change in the basic philosophy of imperialism as it is practiced by these pigs.

‘The reactionary forces and we both have difficulties. But the difficulties of the reactionary forces are insurmountable because they are forces on the verge of death and have no future. Our difficulties can be overcome because we are new and rising forces and have a bright future.”

-Mao Tse-Tung, “Self-Reliance and Arduous Struggle”

The point is that the present situation is bound to change, and the question then arises, what direction will this change take and who will bring it about? If the people of the rock and roll culture, the people of Woodstock Nation, continue to consume and support everything the pigs hand them, the capitalists and rock and roll imperialists will determine the future of our culture just as they have determined its recent past. If, on the other hand, the people of the rock and roll culture start to get themselves together and work out solutions to their problems and unite with their bands and workers and diggers and start implementing these new solutions, the people will be able to recapture the control of their own culture and move for righteous revolutionary change. It’s time to make the decision, people, the time is right and what we have to do is SEIZE THE TIME, come together and “retake their universe of fear, death and monopoly,” as Burroughs puts it. We have to act now, before it gets any worse, and we have to act in such a way that, those who act against our interests, against the people’s interests, will be powerless to rip us off any more, whether they be capitalist record companies, rock and roll imperialists (promoters and booking agents), or pig-oriented bands and performers who are on individualists ego-trips and greed-and powertrips instead of people-trips.

Revolution is the only solution to rock and roll imperialism, just as revolution is the only solution to imperialism and neo-colonialism out in the rest of the underdeveloped world. We are certainly an underdeveloped Nation, and we are at a point now where we have to determine whether our economic and cultural development will be free and healthy, in the best interests of all our people, or whether it will be as fucked up and unhealthy as it has been for the past three years.

And I should make it clear right now that when I say “revolution” I don’t mean running around throwing bricks through windows or crashing the gates of the big money festivals or making idealistic demands of the pig promoters and “owners” — although there’s certainly nothing wrong with those tactics — but they aren’t the Revolution, the Revolution is brothers and sisters working together collectively to build up the New World within the ruins of the old, working together to destroy the old order by' undermining it and by constructing a human alternative to it which is based on self-determination, love, communalism and

freedom. The Revolution is the whole range of the people’s efforts to liberate themselves and build self-determination on all levels - it isn’t anything less than that, and it isn’t achieved without great dedication and hard work on the part of all the people in the Nation.

Now we have the potential for this kind of action, and we have the necessary elements already developed in our collective community, and what we need is to bring all these things together and put them in a new framework,a new perspective which is focused on the needs of the people and which can see that the needs of the people can be met through collective action. We have the energy we need, we have the materials and resources we need. We have the spirit necessary to the achievement of this dream, and all we need now is the unity arid the consciousness which will bring all of these things together and place them directly in the service of the people.

The consciousness is the primary thing, because all the other elements are already present within Woodstock Nation and they’re just waiting to be brought within a new context so they can be used in the people’s interest. We have a lot of capital on hand, which is necessary to finance and initiate certain programs and get them off the ground, but this capital is presently held by a relative handful of people - bands, promoters, young record industry geniuses, — and is being used to further individual profit schemes and consumption sprees. We have the energies and skills we need to bring off a comprehensive self-determination program - again, starting with the bands and music industry workers and going on to artists, technicians, hip accountants and economic geniuses, promotion maniacs, radio and other mass media operators, craftsmen, builders arid planners of all breeds and disciplines who share in common an expanded and expansive view of the world and its people - but so far they’ve all-been working separately or in small combines on individual projects.

We have a communication network, starting with the people’s newspapers and radio broadcasters and extending down into our neighborhoods and communities, where word of mouth gets the news around before it can be written up most of the time - we have this extensive communications network which has to be consolidated to the extent that it will be able to keep the people informed and knowledgeable in terms of what plans are being developed and how they are manifesting themselves in specific actions and programs and happenings. We have this possibility, but so far it’s been used the same way our other resources have been used, in a splintered, scattered fashion, with various people and groups often working at cross-purposes, and now it has to be unified and organized, at least minimally, so We can use it to educate the people in terms of the need and the possibilities for self-determination and how they can support all self-determination programs.

We have access, in our community, to all the energies and resources we will need to build self-determination, all the elements are present, and what we need now is organization and planning on a large scale -

coordination - so that all these people and things can be mobilized in the interests of the community, the Nation, as a whole. And as this is being done, there are two things that we have primarily to address ourselves to: (1) building collective economic power, so we can bring all of the products of our imagination and labor as a people and as individual members of a Nation of people under our own control; and (2) transforming our culture, which is simply the whole range of the formal expression of our National life-style, into a truly liberating culture, into a true revolutionary culture, bringing it back to where it started from and clearing the pigshit off and out and building it back up from this purified base so it can be a wholly (holy) rejuvenated extension of what it was when it first started to emerge.

In other words, we have to build a consciousness among all our people, from the performers and professional workers through all the people who are reached and affected and inspired and moved by their creations, which is a revolutionary consciousness, a collective consciousness, a unified national consciousness, and which is finally the cosmic consciousness we used to talk about before it started to sound corny — and we have to realize that it only started to sound corny because there were so many cynical creeps around us who were laughing at our naivete and ripping us off for what we had created out of it at the same time. We have to build and extend this consciousness on every level throughout the Woodstock Nation, and the chief builders will have to be the bands and media workers, simply because they already have access to the people and are in a position to turn the people on to cosmic consciousness once and for all, and show them how it can be used in the service of liberation and self-determination here on this planet Earth.

The bands and the artists and the media workers of our culture have already demonstrated in great detail how much they can do to influence and inspire a people -now it’s time for all of us to start directing our influence and breath toward liberating all of our people, not just ourselves, and toward creating the New World we’ve been dreaming about. The pigs have tried to buy this dream off, and they’ve been disastrously successful to a frightening degree, but their death-grip on our music and our culture -our people — can still be broken if we start working together to break it. They won’t just go away because we want them to, or because that would be best for the people, or because they’re fucked up and are fucking us up too, but they can be driven off the stage and chased out the door if we do the things that are necessary to bring that consequence

It starts with, unity, it starts with consciousness, it starts with collective organization for self-determination and goes from there. We have to get ourselves together, and get together with ourselves, all of u5, and start thinking about our people and what we can do to help liberate them. This is essential. We have to start bringing our bands and cultural workers together, and our economic workers together, and our listeners and participants and diggers together, and we have to start figuring out ways that we can move

for self-determination and freedom on all levels. We have to develop a unified collective consciousness, qnd then we have to put that consciousness into action on every front. Otherwise things will just get worse, and I don’t think any of us can relate to that, even the people who are making millions of dollars playing in bands and doing those other things that the pigs pay money for.

I’m not going to lay out an extensive program for self-determination now because we have to develop our national consciousness first, and we have to do one thing at a time so we will have a solid base upon which to build our national life. But I will make some tentative, suggestions about ways we might move once we get ourselves together, things we might start thinking about and working toward right now while we’re still in the first stages of coming together as a people. Because there are a lot of things that can be started now, programs which will develop in scope and intensity as we start to organize ourselves and work for the realization of our national goals, and these things should be known to everyone concerned so the more advanced workers and diggers can move on them now.

For one thing, bands which are already established as top earners and top drawing powers can play more benefits and more free gigs for the people. They can join with local people’s action groups and help raise funds to start implementing local self-determination programs which already exist and are just waiting for enough money to be put into action. In Detroit, for example, the community’s tribal council, which is known as STP (Serve the People), is working toward the creation and establishment of a People’s Ballroom, a place for the people’s music and culture which will be operated by the community in its own behalf on a cooperative, non-profit basis to provide a steady place of work for the people’s bands and a place where the people can come together with their bands to dance and get down together. We also have a collective organization called Open City which serves the needs of the Detroit youth colony by maintaining a full-time community information center, a free university, a free health clinic, free store, and other services, and this organization is always in need of funds to continue serving the people for free like they do.

There are organizations like this in a lot of cities, and the bands have helped keep them alive in the past, and what I’m suggesting here is that more bands start thinking about contributing to the support of people’s organizations like this wherever they exist. They can do this by playing more benefits when they are in a certain area or by contributing lump .sums of cash in other instances. They can also serve the people better by working wherever and whenever possible with community production groups rather than with pig promoters, although I know that there aren’t too many of these groups operating yet. But as our national consciousness grows there will be more and more of such operations emerging, and the established bands and performers can help their people grow by working with these people’s organizations whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Another thing we can do is start working toward the creation and implementation of a People’s Recording Cooperative, which would record and produce and package and market records by our bands instead of letting the pig companies do all that. This is an ambitious plan but it will certainly emerge with time, and all I’m saying is that bands have to start thinking in terms of operations like this. A People’s Recording Cooperative could start by recording new, unattached bands and releasing their products through capitalist companies to build up some operating capital; while at the same time, as the Cooperative develops, established bands could relate to it and start working with it, producing their records through the Cooperative wherever possible and releasing them as before, through the established labels, until their present contracts run out. Then they could throw all their weight behind the People’s Recording Cooperative if they found it worked well for

This Cooperative would have to be operated x>n a thoroughly businesslike basis, even better than the capitalist companies, with the distinction being that the profits from record sales and royalties would go back into the Natiori 'insfead 'ofintb the pig’s banks and corporations. As the Cooperative starts to accumulate working capital it could purchase recording studios, film studios, printing plants, radio stations, even television stations, and make these facilities available to the people of Woodstock Nation. It could branch out and start.funding other self-determination projects, buy buildings for cultural centers and community service facilities of all kinds, and it could even buy pieces of land so we -could set up incredible Earth People’s Park projects in the wilderness. All of these things are possible with enough seed capital, and all of them will help us build up our Nation as the Pig Nation slowly (or quickly) crumbles into history.

Another important project we could start working on right away is a People’s Booking Agency, which would contract jobs and other performance opportunities for the bands involved in the Recording Cooperative. This agency could operate on both a national and a local scale, booking bands into established situations and also producing and promoting concerts under its own auspices, the profits from which events would go back into the Nation to' help fund the other programs that would be initiated within the people’s cooperative movement. Again, this agency would have to be operated on a thoroughly professional level by people who know the business inside and out, and it could be built up on bands which are not already committed to the big pig agencies. The established bands that relate to the cooperative movement could also take bookings through the cooperative agency whenever possible, and if it is successful they could switch over to the People’s Booking Agency when their contracts with the established agencies run out. The difference, once more, is that the profits realized from the operation of this program would go back into the Nation, and everyone would benefit from it in the end.

I won’t go any further right now because this should be enough to get people thinking about some of the possibilities open to them, as I said before it’s important to concentrate on one or two major programs at any one time so we won’t try to do everything at once and spread ourselves out too thin at the beginning. The beautiful thing about these proposed programs is that no one would have to give up anything out of their own pckets to get them off the ground — initial funding could be raised through a series of two or three major benefit/festivals for which a number of established bands could donate their services for one day in the interests of serving the people and promoting national self-determination. When this funding was acquired a number of experienced business ' heads could commit themselves to work full-time setting up and operating the People’s Recording Cooperative and the People’s Booking Agency. They could draw a living wage from the cooperatives and do something that would be more satisfying and more exciting than 1 could possibly describe here.

The initial operating capital would be used to secure space for the. cooperatives to work out of, install telephones and secure business equipment, produce th'e fltsf series of albums (including the music, packaging for the records, and the advertising/promotion campaigns necessary to get them off the ground), and to start producing community-oriented dances and concerts.

The people’s press, starting with this paper and drawing on liberated newspaper outlets all across the Nation, could report on the progress of the programs and keep the people informed as to what was happening and how they could support it in their communities. People on campuses all across the Nation could tie in with the cooperative movement and work with the People’s Booking Agency to bring bands and other performers into their enclaves instead of working with the big pig talent outlets. Radio people could carry on educational and informational campaigns on their programs and push the cooperative programs whenever possible. Once all of us get into a unity trip we will find out precisely how great our existing resources and energies are, and as we all get turned on to the possibilities of self-determination music, we will increase our power and effectiveness by leaps and bounds.

The important thing to understand is that we aren’t going to get what we want right off — it will take some time to get this movement underway, and it will take even longer after it gets started, to achieve the maximum results. But is has to get started in order to grow, and we can get it started right now. We have to realize that we’re -talking about a period of years, not just a few months of a few seasons, and we have to keep the overall plan ip mind during every stage of the development of our program.. At first it may look to the apocalyptic rebels among us like we’re just doing the same thing that the pigs are already doing, but the first difference will be that we are starting to control the means of production for ourselves and our people, and the second difference is that the profits being realized from our work will be going back into our own Nation for the benefit of the people as a whole and not just a few rock and roll imperialists with huge egos and grasping hands.

Like I tried to say before, the Revolution is not an apocalyptic upheaval characterized by a few days of street fighting and a period of chaos afterwards — the struggle for self-determination and liberation is a protracted struggle which is fought on all fronts, particularly on the cultural front, and it has to be waged by the people as a whole because it will affect every person in the Nation when it is accomplished. The Revolution grows as the people’s consciousness grows, and once the people as a whole understand what is happening they will support all the manifestations of the revolutionary spirit, especially as these things relate directly and immediately to their lives.

I don’t know how many people can relate to these ideas now, but I have to put them forth just so people can have some sense of what possibilities do exist for them, and how they can make use of these possibilities to move for self-determination and liberation on all levels. We have a lot of talking and a lot of studying and a lot of planning yet to do in order to bring things like this off, but there are already a lot of people who are committed to working in the cultural arena for the people as a whole, and I know there are a lot of other people out there who are just waiting for something beautiful to happen so they can get behind it. The musicians and artists of our culture have to lead the way, we have to unite with each other and present a unified consciousness and a coherent plan for action to all of our people so they can understand what’s at stake and support the programs which are designed only to serve their needs.

The thing now is to get together with each other and start working out our differences so we can come to a common understanding of our situation and how it can be transformed into the beautiful thing we know we must have. Those who can’t relate to any of this now may be able to dig it later, after these things start to develop on a visible, measurable plane, but we certainly don’t need everybody who’s already active to make this thing work - we just need one or two bands at the established level, and a few people’s bands from the intermediate level of the Biz, and a few unestablished bands in different local, areas to get our self-determination programs started, and we can go from there. We also need a few people in different parts of our Nation who know the Biz and have experience in it, and who are ready to commit themselves to the people’s cause and make our programs work. It’s the only way we are going to get the control of our culture back out of the grip of the greedheads of pig nation and into the arms of the people of Woodstock Nation. We got into this mess because we didn’t know any better, for the most part, but now we know that it doesn’t have to be like it is, and all we need now is for enough of our musicians and workers to get together under the banner of liberation and self-determination and start serving the people instead of just themselves. Power to Woodstock Nation!

Our music and our culture were born in freedom and now they have to return to liberation. We can move, we’ve got to move, we will be moving, and we need all of us to move together in the music and build on the music so all of us can be free. People who are interested in talking further about the ideas laid out in this piece and in working on some of these programs are invited to contact Franklin Bach and/or Dave Sinclair at White Panther Party National Headquarters, 1520 Hill Street, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104 — telephone, (313) 761-1709. They can help direct you to other people who are involved in these plans, and keep you informed of meetings, planning sessions, and other developments along these lines. Come Together! All Power to the People! Long Live the People’s Revolutionary Culture! Build National Consciousness! Move for Self-Determination! Liberation for our Music and our People! Life to the Life Culture/Death to the Death Culture! Power to Woodstock Nation!!

John Sinclair

Chairman, White Panther Party

Marquette Prison, June-July 1970