In his innovative new book, Michael J. Kramer views 1960s rock within a trans-Pacific frame, which he terms the “Woodstock Transnational” in a play on Abbie Hoffman's 1969 book Woodstock Nation.Footnote ¹ The main body of the text is neatly divided into two parts, “San Francisco” and “Vietnam,” with three chapters each. The chapters on San Francisco address Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ Acid Tests; a strike at freeform FM station KMPX; and the contentious negotiations surrounding 1969’s Wild West Festival, which was cancelled despite much planning and publicity. The section on Vietnam includes chapters on radio, both U.S. military-sponsored and “underground”; live performances by U.S. soldiers organized by the Army's Entertainment Branch; and the CBC Band, Vietnamese musicians who were inspired by the music and values of the U.S. counterculture and moved to the United States after the war's end. As this summary suggests, Kramer does not attempt to provide a comprehensive survey of rock music in either San Francisco or Vietnam; rather, he explores well-chosen case studies in detail, with particular attention to the ways in which the San Francisco rock scene both influenced and was informed by U.S. actions in Vietnam.

The overarching concept of “citizenship” binds Kramer's case studies together. Kramer defines citizenship as “the relationship between individuals and the larger political and social modes of organization in which they are enmeshed,” with the caveat that the term refers not simply to formal politics but also to “everyday experiences in the cultural arena” (10–11). This definition is so capacious that it could include almost any form of human social interaction, but, in practice, Kramer is primarily interested in moments when Americans were inspired by the culture of rock to reconsider received notions of what it meant to be a U.S. citizen. He convincingly describes Kesey's Acid Tests, for example, as “unconventional conventions” that encouraged “intensive investigations of selfhood, democratic interaction, patriotism, and national identity not outside but within mass-mediated and militarized Cold War American culture” (32). For soldiers in the more oppressive environment of Vietnam, rock “spoke to issues of civics and citizenship in Vietnam despite its incorporation into the Armed Forces” (143). Rock bands formed by soldiers and promoted by Command Military Touring Shows (CMTS) opened “the possibility of civic engagement by citizen-soldiers stuck in the fundamentally uncivil setting of Vietnam” (190). In these examples, “citizenship” seems synonymous with laudable resistance to the forces of authority that sustained the war. At times, it might have been useful for Kramer to contrast this notion of citizenship against others with which it competed. He could have engaged more directly, for example, with official state doctrine that the war constituted a struggle against the threat of communism and that U.S. citizens therefore had a moral obligation to support it. Because this far more conservative idea of citizenship was rarely expressed in countercultural rock music, it understandably remains largely implicit in Kramer's narrative; however, a broader study of popular music and citizenship during the Vietnam era would need to account for the vision of patriotic duty represented in, say, Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler's “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” a number one pop single in 1966.

The advantage of Kramer's flexible notion of citizenship is that it enables him to bring his considerable skills as a social critic to bear on a wide range of topics. The chapters on Vietnam are particularly fresh and observant. One of Kramer's key insights here is his notion of “hip militarism,” which describes the U.S. armed forces’ decision to officially permit, or even promote, aspects of the counterculture as a way to raise soldiers’ morale and encourage their compliance. Kramer demonstrates that the Armed Forces Vietnam radio network (AFVN), rather than suppress acid rock, regularly broadcast songs by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Steppenwolf, and other musicians normally associated with hedonism and rebellion. As Kramer argues, “That the US military would use a music often associated with disengagement from—and sometimes even opposition to—hierarchical modes of authority in order to try desperately to maintain control over a failing war effort would produce many ironic effects in Vietnam” (136). Intended as “an effective new strategy of incorporation and cooptation,” hip militarism nevertheless always ran the risk of unleashing a spirit of insubordination and defiance among its target audience (137). Kramer provides fascinating glimpses of CMTS bands with such edgy names as the Electric Grunts and OD Circus, who performed openly antiwar songs, such as Eric Burdon and the Animals’ “Sky Pilot,” and drove older officers away from their performances with their loud amplifiers and psychedelic style (181). Even more seditious messages could be heard on the “bullshit band,” the “unused frequencies on military radios” that G.I.s commandeered for unsanctioned and often anonymous broadcasts (140). Kramer profiles the pseudonymous DJ “Dave Rabbit,” whose bullshit-band show, Radio First Termer, broadcast secretly from the back room of a Saigon brothel, satirized AFVN's official programming as it played the latest hard rock for three weeks in January 1971. While Kramer acknowledges that such projects had little impact on the larger war effort, he argues persuasively that rock on the radio “generated a counterpublic space” in which the values of the U.S. counterculture could be explored and valorized (155).

Kramer's study of rock provides a model for future work on music's significance for U.S. soldiers in Vietnam that might explore other musical genres and their connections to questions of racial identity and pride. As Kramer demonstrates throughout the book, “rock” as canonically defined was only one of many genres that mattered to U.S. troops. An audience survey conducted in 1970 by AFVN revealed that top 40, “oldies,” and country and western were all more popular than “acid rock” (165). In October 1968, AFVN's Stateside Top Thirty Countdown included Hendrix and Vanilla Fudge, but also Latin music (José Feliciano), soul (Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions), and pop of the pre-rock generation (Frank Sinatra) (148). Kramer explains that “one reason why Hendrix may have appeared on AFVN after 1968 was in fact that African-American GIs had protested the lack of black music on the official station” (149). Such protests sometimes became volatile, as when black G.I.s threatened to burn down a military club because it played almost nothing but country music (183). The hip-militarist CMTS responded with “Jimmy and the Everyday People,” a racially integrated G.I. group modeled on Sly and the Family Stone and devoted to an ecumenical mix of “Rock n’ Soul” (183). Future transnational studies might consider such racial conflicts in the context of the Black Power movement and its significance in African American music.

Throughout, Kramer's book is a model of thorough research, with conclusions informed by an extensive body of archival sources and original interviews with musicians, as well as serious engagement with the major scholarship on rock and the counterculture.Footnote ² In short, The Republic of Rock is a groundbreaking study highly recommended to any reader interested in 1960s rock or the role of music in the Vietnam conflict.