Are You A Fan Of What They Call "Protest Songs?"

Go ahead, click on Patti

I think I first became a radio dj in 1966 or ’67— WUSB, the Stony Brook college station. They didn’t really want me but I controlled their budget so... they put me on overnights and I played cutting-edge music for Connecticut druggies on the other side of the Long Island Sound. I played a lot of long songs, so I could go up on the roof and smoke a joint, like “Revelation” by Love, “The End” and When The Music’s Over” by The Doors, Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive” and “A Saucerful of Secrets,” “Section 43” by Country Joe and the Fish, “The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil” by the Jefferson Airplane and the Dead’s Dark Star.” Oh, and I hired each of those bands to come play at the school.

But besides using the radio to play long songs— often with ridiculous drum solos— for stoners (including this one), I started playing protest songs— lots and lots of them, something I continued doing for decades. So… wasn’t I excited on Monday when Rolling Stone put together a list of the top 100 protest songs of all times, starting with Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” (#, 1963) and ending with “Bonzo Goes To Washington, 5 Minutes” by Jerry Harrison and Bootsy Collins (#100— 1984). “Music and protest have always been inextricably linked,” posited the writers. “For some marginalized groups, the simple act of creating music at all can be a form of speaking out against an unjust world… Some of these songs decry oppression and demand justice, others are prayers for positive change; some grab you by the shoulders and shout in your face, others are personal, private attempts to subtly embody the contradictory nature of political struggle and change from the inside. Many of our selections are specific products of leftist political traditions (like Pete Seeger’s version of “We Shall Overcome”), but just as many are hits that slipped urgent messages into the pop marketplace (like Nena’s anti-nuclear war New Wave bop “99 Luftballons”). This is probably the only Rolling Stone list to ever feature Phil Ochs, the Dead Kennedys, and Beyoncé side by side, but each of those artists is a vital participant in the long story of musicians using their voices to demand a better world.”

Most of the songs were— at one time or another— Howie Radio hits, from Heaven 17’s “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang” (1981), The Special AKA’s “Free Nelson Mandela” (1984), Country Joe’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag” (1967), The Clash’s “Guns of Brixton” (1979), Peter Tosh’s “Legalize It,” (1976) Dead Kennedy’s “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” (1981), Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” (1984), Woody Guthries’s “All You Fascists Bound To Lose (1944), Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” (1967), Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” (1970), “Tom Robinson’s “Glad To Be Gay” (1978), Green Day’s “American Idiot” (2004), Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind” (1963) and “<> Masters of War<>” (1963), Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” (1982), Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (1971), CSNY’s “Ohio” (1970), Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” (1939) and Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power” (1989).

They didn’t include some songs that I love— at least another 100 of them, many by the same artists (like Dylan and The Clash)— but also by lesser-known bands like this one by the Red Rockers, a song they released on their own and the one that convinced me to sign the band to 415.

If you're looking for a Rolling Stones song, “Street Fighting Man” fits right in, but I like one that is less part of the genre until you think about it more deeply, “Sympathy For the Devil,” especially the version at the link by Laibach. And here’s one that I used to play on WUSB all the time, although the original was by Buffy Sainte-Marie and first recorded by The Highwaymen (1963). This version came out in 1965 and I used to play it a lot on WUSB: