Friday Interview: Rock Music's Role In Toppling The Wall | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: This post was created by the CJ Staff of the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

Historian Schweikart shares themes from recent documentary

    RALEIGH — Rock 'n' roll is fun; it makes us move, smile, and sing. Dr. Larry Schweikart, professor of history at the University of Dayton, says rock 'n' roll also can change the world. He's the driving force behind the movie Rockin' The Wall. Schweikart discussed the movie's key themes with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Head to http://www.carolinajournal.com/cjradio/ to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)

    Kokai: So how'd you get this idea of putting together the movie, Rockin' The Wall, which tells the story [of] rock 'n' roll and its role in fighting the Cold War and bringing down the Berlin Wall?

    Schweikart: Well, several things coalesced the same time. First of all, I had a book called Seven Events That Made America America. And I had done a chapter in that called "A Steel Guitar Rocks the Iron Curtain." And I got some of the idea from a book called Rock Around the Bloc, but I didn't think that he went far enough, and I thought that I could add some insight to that.

    At about the same time, the Vanilla Fudge lead singer, Mark Stein, and I had been in contact on another project, and basically he had asked me to co-author his biography. And I said, "I won't do it unless we can do a broad history of rock 'n' roll." And so he agreed.

    So Mark began putting me in touch with all these rock 'n' rollers. And I began to realize that a lot of them had played near or behind the Iron Curtain, so I kind of folded the two projects together. And about that time, I talked to a producer friend of mine in Hollywood, and I said, "Hey, do you think this would make a good documentary?" And he says, "Yeah, I do." He said, "I happen to know a guy who'd be the perfect director for this."

    So I got put in touch with Marc Leif. We started working on it over a summer in 2009. ...

    Kokai: People will have to watch the movie to get the whole story, but tell us what was the role of rock 'n' roll in fighting the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall?

    Schweikart: The first thing, and what might be surprising to many people, was it wasn't the lyrics, because so many of them did not understand English. But what appealed to them was the freedom of rock 'n' roll as a musical structure. And this meant that in rock — country, jazz, blues, [too], but we focused on rock — these are all American music forms, and they start together as a group, they end together as a group, but in the middle you always have the solo.

    And I discovered that was an expression of America, and Western values, that you do things together as a society, but you never lose track of the individual. The individual always gets a chance to shine. And I think that, as much as anything else, really appealed to people — that they could sense that coming through.

    And, of course, there was a general freedom and rebelliousness of rock that is not there with classical music. Classical music is played the same from century to century to century, you know? And while you can have different players, and they can do it very well, they're essentially playing what Beethoven wrote, you know, 200 years ago. Well, rock 'n' roll changes every single time you play it because of the solos, but also because no two players play it alike, which is why we have so much cover music.

    Kokai: I think one of the things that also came across from your film was the sense that this wasn't done as a conscious effort from the West to say, "Let's pump rock 'n' roll music in here." In fact, the folks who were in charge didn't think rock 'n' roll was a good use of their time to try to use that to fight the Cold War.

    Schweikart: Exactly. And-free market people ought to think about this. Rock 'n' roll music came up without a dime of government support. In fact, it was opposed by government at the state/local level, even the federal level, as much as they possibly could. And yet, it became not only the dominant music form in America, but the dominant music form in the world.

    You can go in a karaoke bar in Japan, and Japanese girls who don't know English will be singing Madonna lyrics. And I talked to a guy who was bicycling through South Africa, and he was in some real remote, hilly trail, and he came to a place that was offering water at a little stand — one guy had a Van Halen T-shirt on. So rock 'n' roll is that famous word: ubiquitous. It is everywhere, and it came up solely through the free market, without any government support at all.

    Kokai: One of the other pieces of this story that's quite interesting is just how much some of this rock 'n' roll music really moved people behind the Iron Curtain, who didn't have a whole lot to look forward to in their lives. Rock 'n' roll really gave them some hope, didn't it?

    Schweikart: Right. You know, it's funny, I was present at all interviews. ... And I said to Marc, "There [are] two questions I want you to ask everybody. And one of them is, I want you to ask them about their impressions — what they saw behind the Iron Curtain." And we had a cut of one after another, these rock artists saying the word "gray." There's gray, gray, gray. "Everything I saw was gray." "It was dead. It was lifeless. It was gray."

    And rock music pumped life into them. They came alive when they heard the music and the expressions of, you know, "Live your life. Love people. Be free. Enjoy life." And I think that that greatly appealed to them. And so when these rockers finally went in to the East after the wall fell, they were mobbed by people telling them how much the music had meant to them while the Iron Curtain was still up.

    Kokai: There's no Iron Curtain today, and Eastern Europe has changed quite a bit since the fall of the Wall, but do you think there are some lessons that we should learn about the role of rock music and the role of allowing people this freedom that would apply to some of the issues we're dealing with today?

    Schweikart: Yeah, one thing I think that we've really missed in the so-called war on terror is a dedicated propaganda effort through music. You know, in the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration sponsored Louis Armstrong to go on goodwill tours around the world and even into the Soviet Union. And that sent an incredible message because, whatever they could say, here was a jazz band — and again, we go back to the form of jazz — led by who? A black man.

    At the very time they're telling everybody how racist and evil the Americans were — and we still had a lot of problems then — but nevertheless, here's a band of white men, mostly whites, being led by a black man. And that very image had to tell people, "Everything they're telling us isn't right."

    And so I think we need a dedicated propaganda effort in the Middle East, of music and pop culture, focused by the government. You know, we need ambassadors of music to go in there, because right now what's happening is that jihadists, they like the energy of rock 'n' roll, but they're applying their own death lyrics to rock music in a lot of cases. So far, it's not having the same impact in the Middle East, for example, that it had in Germany.