Airplane, Haggard to Retrace ‘60s Battle Lines in O.C. Visits

The Vietnam war was on, and the war of words at home was as bitter as the war of bullets overseas.

Social norms and traditional mores were under fire as well. A new word, counterculture , was being coined. And in popular music, as in the polarized American culture from which it sprang, the battle lines were being drawn.

Tonight, in a tamer time, lines drawn firm and hard in the ‘60s will be retraced in Orange County. The Jefferson Airplane plays at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa, singing old and new songs that celebrate revolutionary change. And Merle Haggard comes to the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim, holding firm as a craggy defender of patriotic traditions.

The Airplane flew out of San Francisco in 1966, giving lift to that city’s psychedelic-rock movement with songs and lyrical catch-phrases that crystallized what the counterculture was about: “You’d better find somebody to love.” “Feed your head.” “We are all outlaws in the eyes of America.” “Hey, what’s happening on the street? Gotta revolution!”

By late 1969, a year that saw the Airplane play at Woodstock and release “Volunteers,” its most insistent call to revolutionary action, Haggard had heard about all he could stand of countercultural broadsides. The words to “Okie From Muskogee” came tumbling out of him in 10 minutes, an instant anthem for those whose hackles were raised by the thought of long-haired American youth trying to counter traditional cultural values.

We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee,

We don’t take our trips on LSD.

We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street,

We like living right and bein’ free.

While the singer from Bakersfield may have given heart to folks in the country-loving heartland, he provoked smirks, rather than outrage, from “the hippies out in San Francisco” whom he skewered in his song. At least that’s how Paul Kantner remembers it.

“(‘Okie From Muskogee’) was the typical redneck reaction, the ‘send ‘em back to Russia,’ the ‘America, love it or leave it’ mentality,” Kantner, the Jefferson Airplane’s co-founder, said in a recent interview from a tour stop in Akron, Ohio. “In San Francisco, we had the luxury of ignoring it. It was amusing in the sense that Barry Sadler’s ‘The Ballad of the Green Berets’ was amusing. We took note of it, but it was just amusing.”

There is far more to Haggard than his beleaguered traditionalist’s stance--as Kantner himself can attest.

“I like Merle Haggard,” Kantner said. “I’ve seen his band several times over the past 10 years. He’s a real good singer and emoter.”

Haggard is one of country music’s definitive singers and songwriters when it comes to the old honky-tonk standbys of love sought and scorned. And when it comes to finding a bard of the gin mill or the jailhouse, Haggard is pre-eminent. Haggard’s musical pledges of allegiance to America’s common, working folk can also carry a suspicion of political authority and entrenched powers--suspicion that makes him far from an apologist who finds perfection in the American status quo.

In a record company biography released with promotional copies of his recent album, “5:01 Blues,” Haggard reflected on how he came to write “Okie,” using terms not so stridently conservative as the song itself.

“It was a serious time in America, a period when there were lots of serious disagreements. Things that had been accepted for years suddenly weren’t. . . . And I actually agreed with a lot of that. What bothered me was that a lot of the people who were bringing on these changes were burning the flag, and I was raised to salute the flag and mean it! So that’s what prompted me to write that song.”

Haggard hasn’t given up his flag-waving since the days of “Okie From Muskogee” and “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” the 1970 hit that hammered once again at the counterculture and the anti-war movement. A new song, “Me and Crippled Soldiers,” voices Haggard’s continuing outrage over flag desecration (The Celebrity is handing out free American flags to each concert-goer tonight).

There is no change in ideals on the Airplane’s part, either. The band’s reunion album, “Jefferson Airplane,” looks back fondly in “Summer of Love,” declaring that “even though those times are gone, the spirit lives on in me and you.” And Kantner, in “The Wheel,” a song dedicated to Nicaragua, continues to extol change--although the watchword this time is “evolution,” rather than “revolution.”

In the 1960s, Kantner said, the Jefferson Airplane saw pushing for change and challenging tradition and authority as a mission--a completely American mission that had its roots not in the countercultural Summer of ‘67, but in the patriotic Summer of ‘76--that is, 1776. Contrary to what Merle Haggard and his listeners may have thought, Kantner says, the Jefferson Airplane and the rest of the San Francisco rock movement was not unpatriotic.

“Not at all,” he said. “That was our American duty: ‘Don’t tread on me.’ Polarization existed, and we reflected it quite accurately. It was our duty at that point to point out what we did. As a rock ‘n’ roll band, we had the luxury of shining the light on things that were silly. We were middle-class youth sticking our noses out a little farther than people had been taught to.”

Sometimes, ‘60s polarization led to sparring that got in the way of music making.

“We got arrested the last time we were” in Akron, Kantner recalled. “We were doing a concert in a small outdoor stadium, and the police were tear-gassing people” who were trying to get into the concert. “We started mouthing off from the stage. Then Grace got arrested for assaulting one of the police officers--all she was doing was walking in and saying, ‘Cut that out.’ The guy stuck Mace in her face and broke her glasses.” Kantner says he responded by trying to grab the Mace can, but he wound up being shoved to the ground and booked along with Slick.

“Police were hassling (us) at every show at one point,” he said. Pulling the plug on the band became a common tactic, so “we had to have megaphones available to continue the shows.”

One show that Kantner readily acknowledges could have benefited from a police presence was the Altamont Festival in December, 1969. Crowd control was left to the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, which wound up stabbing one concert-goer to death during the Rolling Stones’ festival-ending set.

Earlier in the day, Airplane singer Marty Balin had been knocked unconscious by a Hell’s Angel who didn’t like it when Balin tried to intervene and stop a fan from being beaten.

These days, Kantner said, “some of my best friends are policemen.” As an extra-musical project, Kantner said, he has been working on a newspaper article about a San Francisco homicide detective.

In 1969, Kantner’s anthem “We Can Be Together” envisioned that the Airplane and its countercultural allies could “tear down the walls” of misbegotten power in a grand--and almost playful--act of transforming anarchy. But a vision is all that it was.

“That was something we hoped as naive children to overcome,” Kantner said. “You learn you’re not going to change things overnight. But you can change some things. Of course, as you get older you realize the ultimate inevitability of compromise.”

Reuniting most of the principals in the ‘60s Airplane required some compromise among old cronies who feuded on and off through much of ‘70s and ‘80s. For the first time since 1971, Balin, Slick and Kantner are teamed together as a touring unit with Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen, the Airplane’s original bassist and lead guitarist. Rounding out the tour lineup are session musicians Tim Gorman and Randy Jackson on keyboards, Kaukonen’s younger brother, Peter, on guitar, and Kenny Aronoff, acclaimed for his work with John Cougar Mellencamp, on drums.

Kantner said that it is uncertain whether the Airplane will stay aloft after the reunion tour. “There has been good and bad to it,” he said. “We’ll probably take stock of that after we finish. We never thought more than three months in advance.”

The Jefferson Airplane plays tonight at 7:30 at the Pacific Amphitheatre, 100 Fair Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $16 to $24. Information: (714) 634-1300.

Merle Haggard and the Strangers play tonight at 7:30 and 10 at the Celebrity Theatre, 201 E. Broadway, Anaheim. Tickets: $20. Information: (714) 999-9536.