Of Young-bloods and Old Soul-diers
Doug Bradley
All of us who came of age in the late 1960s are familiar with the sweet tenor voice and harmonious lyrics of Jesse Colin Young on “Get Together,” one of the cherished anthems of that era. “Come on, people now,” encouraged Young, the lead singer of the Youngbloods, “smile on your brother/everybody get together/try to love one another right now.”
If only we’d abided by that song’s message, took to heart what Jesse Colin Young and the Youngbloods were exhorting us to do…maybe the 1960s world would have been a little kinder…and perhaps the world we live in today would be a lot less ugly?
But now Jesse Colin Young whose boyishly high pitch breathed life into that iconic song is gone, dead at the age of 83. But if you are going to have one song, one shining moment, what’s better than “Get Together?” As Young himself remarked on numerous occasions — “The lyrics are just to die for. To this day, it gives me a thrill to play it.”
Oddly, “Get Together” wasn’t a hit song the first time the Youngbloods released it on their debut album in 1967. It took the song’s being featured in a major public service announcement by the National Conference of Christians and Jews for it to reach the charts in 1969. Even more strange, like so many social and musical moments of the 1960s, “Get Together” has both a military and Vietnam connection. Go figure…
The song was written by U.S. Air Force veteran Chet Powers, a ’60s folk singer who later adopted the pseudonym Dino Valenti when he was a member of the band Quicksilver Messenger Service. There he teamed up with, among others, John Cipollina, a Vietnam veteran considered one of the fathers of the San Francisco sound. Say what you will about “Get Together,” there’s no denying that many of the lyrics in Valenti’s “What About Me?” (which he published under another pseudonym Jesse Oris Farrow) reveals the plight of many a Vietnam veteran.
“I work in your factory
I study in your schools
I fill your penitentiaries.
And your military too!”
Later “What About Me?” opines “I smoke marijuana/But I can’t get behind your wars/And most of what I do believe/Is against most of your laws.” The searching song ends with these haunting lyrics that Vietnam vets well understood:
“And I feel like a stranger
In the land where I was born
And I live just like an outlaw.
An’ I’m always on the run.”
Maybe there’s not all that much distance between the troubadour of love Jesse Colin Young and the troubled veteran Chet Powers? Young composed many other key pieces of the Youngbloods’ repertoire during their prime, including “Darkness, Darkness,” in which he imagines the horror U. S. soldiers experienced in Vietnam.
Time and again, the myth and reality of the 1960s, the war, peace, and protest are blurred. Less black and white; less hawks versus doves; less “What About Me?” than “Get Together.” And while the legacy of “Get Together” transcends that of many other 1960s hits, listen some time to the Chet Powers/Dino Valenti version. There’s something different, prescient, in the lines “Love is but a song we sing/Fear’s the way we die.”
When we pay tribute to Jesse Colin Young, let’s not forget Chet Powers/Dino Valenti. When we listen to “Get Together” let’s hear both their voices. And let’s all “smile on our brother, everybody get together right now.”
About the Author: Vietnam veteran Doug Bradley is the author of Who’ll Stop the Rain: Respect, Remembrance, and Reconciliation in Post-Vietnam America, co-author with Craig Werner of We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War, which was named best music book of 2015 by Rolling Stone magazine, and DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle, now available as an audiobook. His music-based memoir, The Tracks of My Years, https://legacybookpress.com/tracks_years/ will be released by Legacy Book Press in August.
Image: Jesse Colin Young.jpg
Jesse Colin Young at the California Saga 2 Charity Concert at the Theatre at the Ace Hotel on July 03, 2019 in Los Angeles California (Photo by Glenn Francis/Pacific Pro Digital Photography) Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
