Reframing 1968 by Martin Halliwell Nick Witham

Author:Martin Halliwell,Nick Witham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Figure 7.2 Phil Ochs performing at the Chicago Coliseum, 27 August 1968. Courtesy of Michael Ochs at the Woody Guthrie Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

For The Doors, this embodiment functioned on visceral and psychological levels, especially as Manzarek worried that Morrison was drinking too much in early 1968, did not always know ‘whom he was fighting’, and was developing a split-persona that placed the poet and the rebel at odds with each other. On a first take the contrast between Ochs and Morrison seems stark. Between 1967 and 1969 Morrison pushed his audience to the brink of revolt (he failed to stir up a mass riot though, despite police provocation), whereas Ochs mourned the rioting he saw around him in Chicago. However, although the two held different views about social engagement, there is an uncanny resemblance in the way their lives unfolded. The pair died within five years of each other after theatrically faking their deaths in 1968: Morrison’s death by firing squad in ‘The Unknown Soldier’ was only slightly more dramatic than Ochs’s inscription on his Rehearsals for Retirement album, ‘Born: El Paso, Texas, 1940; Died: Chicago, Illinois, 1968’. Dispirited by events in Chicago and the flagging fortunes of the New Left, this mock epitaph prefigured Ochs’s faked death in his final months at the hands of a recently emerged second self, the violent doppelganger John Butler Train – an act that foreshadowed his actual suicide of April 1976.

This comparison of Morrison and Ochs raises an important question for reframing 1968: how potent was public performance as a vehicle of social transformation, both as a means of insurgency and as a new aesthetic? One could argue either way, but participation was undeniably central, even if there were differing views about how organized participatory politics needed to be, or to what extent the lines between performer/audience and leader/group should be blurred.16 The Diggers and the Living Theatre were two radical collectives that showed it was possible to erase these lines whilst remaining a cohesive group, but the assorted performers and activists that engaged in street theatre tactics in the second half of the decade were often in danger of fragmenting into factions with divergent philosophies. As Daniel Matlin’s chapter discusses, this was particularly true of the Yippies’ revolutionary action theatre of 1968–9 that yoked together differing performance styles: guerrilla, pantomime, absurdism and surrealism.17

The ‘revelatory and sensory explosion’ that Paris was to witness in May 1968 had a similar intellectual lineage, linking to what Mark Kurlansky describes as mode of ‘shocking modernism’ that thrived on aesthetic provocation even if its politics were not always clear.18 However, whereas class conflict underpinned many of the events in Paris, in the United States the spectacle threatened to swallow the political content, as it did in Chicago when the Yippies (aided by Phil Ochs) nominated Pigasus the Pig for president.19 The absurdist pig imagery was in contrast to the imperialistic caricatures that students from the newly formed Vincennes University brought to life in the subways and streets of Paris in 1969.

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