Vale Michael Herr, Vietnam War correspondent, and author of the brilliant ‘Dispatches’, who passed away at the age of 76 on June 23. “Beyond politics, beyond rhetoric… its material are fear and death, hallucination, and the burning of souls. It is if Dante had gone to hell with a cassette recording of Jimi Hendrix and a pocketful of pills: our first rock-and-roll war, stoned murder.” – New York Times
Well I guess “9th Best Non-Fiction Book Ever” (The Guardian) isn't bad going. There are, after all, a lot of books out there.
Michael Herr's Dispatches is definitely a very good book, and although I'm no expert, it may be the best one about war because it has the journalistic knack of focusing on the characters, on the soldiers themselves, rather than on the history. It also has the benefit of being short on judgement and as I'm at best ambivalent about the voyeuristic morality of war books, that's a good thing. Having said all that Vietnam was a wel written war and I'm a fan of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried too. And Under Fire by Henri Barbusse is a great, and sometimes overlooked by English speakers, World War I book from a soldier's point of view.
What makes Dispatches so special is that it's one of the best rock music books too. It isn't an analysis of rock n' roll in a historical sense. This is about music in context - and in this case the context is music keeping people borderline sane in an insane situation. Music is everywhere in Herr's book. It pours off every page as you'd expect from a book where one of the central characters is called Day Tripper.
Thought you understood what Jimi Hendrix mutilating “The Star Spangled Banner” was about? Well not until you've read Dispatches. Suddenly all those screaming, hurtling sounds are the sounds of the battlefield.
"Page took the record that was playing off the turntable off without asking ..and put on Hendrix: long tense organic guitar line that made him shiver like frantic electric ecstacy was shooting up from the carpet through his spine to the old pleasure centre in his cream cheese brain, shaking his head so his hair waved all around him, Have You Ever Been Experienced?"
Thought James Brown was an old funky guy who danced smart? Think again after reading Dispatches. Soul Brother #1 kept men sane whilst they shot women and children and bombed villages. Barely, but it gave them some sort of pride. Damn Right, I Am (still) Somebody.
You can't listen to the Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion” the same way again. Suddenly that magnificent prowling bass line has a new, dark meaning and you can smell the napalm in the trees.
Never really seen the point of "Give Peace a Chance" and always dismissed it as hippy ramblings? Well you will now. Didn't understand “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag”, or “For What It's Worth”. Let Michael Herr help you.
Vietnam gave rock and roll meaning, and made noise relevant. As Herr had it: "There was such a dense concentration of energy there, American and essentially adolescent, that if energy could have been channeled into anything other than noise... it would have lighted up a 1000 years."
But it was channelled into noise. And that noise was rock’n’roll. And you won't find its energy captured better anywhere else. Why else would they have pointed the speakers at the Iraqi army and played them "Enter Sandman"?
Herr said "Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods". And in doing so, he started the legend of the fucked-up war; the legend that he completed in his contributions to the screen play of “Apocalypse Now”. I won’t ever take his book off my shelf, and I wish all politicians were made to read it. They might think twice more often then.
And Herr also wrote about rock n' roll better than almost anyone else ever has because his context gave it power that no one just talking about the music ever could give it - and for that let's remember him. And thank him. And ensure that the book stays in print always.
- TH
A playlist of songs inspired primarily, but not exclusively, by Michael Herr's 'Dispatches':
