Sha Na Na - Revision history

Pacman: /* Testcases of Invented History: from the Highlander to the Greaser */

2009-07-22T01:13:51Z

‎Testcases of Invented History: from the Highlander to the Greaser

Pacman: /* Origins of the Group: Columbia and American Popular Culture */

2009-07-22T01:11:36Z

‎Origins of the Group: Columbia and American Popular Culture

Pacman: /* "A pre-political Teenage Eden" */

2009-07-22T01:10:37Z

‎"A pre-political Teenage Eden"

Pacman: /* Permissions Notice */

2009-07-22T01:06:33Z

‎Permissions Notice

Pacman: /* Permissions Notice */

2009-07-22T01:06:15Z

‎Permissions Notice

Pacman at 01:04, 22 July 2009

2009-07-22T01:04:39Z

Show changes

Sixth Floor Jay: /* Sha Na Na members today */ revised for this version

2009-07-19T15:14:31Z

‎Sha Na Na members today: revised for this version

Sixth Floor Jay: /* "A pre-political Teenage Eden" */ added section headings

2009-07-19T14:53:13Z

‎"A pre-political Teenage Eden": added section headings

Sixth Floor Jay: /* Sha Na Na and the "Invention of the Fifties" */

2009-07-19T14:46:38Z

‎Sha Na Na and the "Invention of the Fifties"

Sixth Floor Jay: /* Sha Na Na and the "Invention of the Fifties" */ cutting dupe info

2009-07-19T14:43:51Z

‎Sha Na Na and the "Invention of the Fifties": cutting dupe info

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 So one understands the American meta-historian’s interest in the parallel test case at the College. The invention of the American greaser, swaggering in his gang’s motorcycle jacket, as the Noble Savage of the American Century was a direct parallel to the Romantics’ tough Highlander swaggering in his clan’s tartan — as invented a tradition, alas, as the kilt. The “Highland Flings” were as ersatz as “Fifties dance,” George’s transparently College mix of camp Busby Berkeley movies seen at the New Yorker and Thalia revival houses, with Chuck Jackson’s routine from the Apollo, a relatively short walk from his dorm room, 629 [[John Jay Hall|John Jay]].
-Hobsbawm’s school had had to travel as far as Tokyo and Zanzibar to study the birth of such invented traditions as Japan’s “traditional” dish, sukiyaki (introduced by Meiji Japanese officials who speculated that America’s meat diet promoted their sailors’ growth). But Columbia was closer than Zanzibar; the concerts were well-documented in [[Jon Groner]] ’72, ’75L’s articles in the archives of ''[[Spectator]]'' and ''[[CCT]]''. “My book ''Retro'' was conceived and written at Columbia University,” Guffey said. “I was living at 116th and Morningside while working on it, and most of my research was based in [[Butler Library|Butler]] and [[Avery Library|Avery libraries … The rise of Sha Na Na and other tales of the late ’60s had special, highly personal resonance for me, and I often thought of [Sha Na Na] when I’d walk across campus.”
+Hobsbawm’s school had had to travel as far as Tokyo and Zanzibar to study the birth of such invented traditions as Japan’s “traditional” dish, sukiyaki (introduced by Meiji Japanese officials who speculated that America’s meat diet promoted their sailors’ growth). But Columbia was closer than Zanzibar; the concerts were well-documented in [[Jon Groner]] ’72, ’75L’s articles in the archives of ''[[Spectator]]'' and ''[[CCT]]''. “My book ''Retro'' was conceived and written at Columbia University,” Guffey said. “I was living at 116th and Morningside while working on it, and most of my research was based in [[Butler Library|Butler]] and [[Avery Library|Avery]] libraries … The rise of Sha Na Na and other tales of the late ’60s had special, highly personal resonance for me, and I often thought of [Sha Na Na] when I’d walk across campus.”
 ==="A pre-political Teenage Eden"===

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 ==Origins of the Group: Columbia and American Popular Culture==
-In [[1969]], the [[Kingsmen]], Columbia’s traditional a capella group, gambled on a new concept. At a Wollman concert, “The Glory That Was Grease,” the Kingsmen, outfitted in gold lame and sporting Elvis Presley hairdos, performed original dances while singing classic Fifties rock ’n’ roll. That led to a memorable “Grease Under the Stars” concert on [[Low Plaza]], soon after which they shot to stardom, opening for Jimi Hendrix at the original Woodstock Festival.
+In [[1969]], the then-members of the [[Kingsmen]], Columbia’s traditional a capella group, gambled on a new concept. At a Wollman concert, “The Glory That Was Grease,” the Kingsmen, outfitted in gold lame and sporting Elvis Presley hairdos, performed original dances while singing classic Fifties rock ’n’ roll. That led to a memorable “Grease Under the Stars” concert on [[Low Plaza]], soon after which they shot to stardom, opening for Jimi Hendrix at the original Woodstock Festival.
 Columbia had always been a major force in American popular culture: Rodgers, Hart and Hammerstein shaped the Broadway musical, Ginsburg and Kerouac led the beats, Art Garfunkle (with Simon) pioneered American folk rock; and there, on stage behind Hendrix at the most famous guitar solo in rock history, stand a bunch of [[Columbia College]] undergrads. In the newly released 2009 Blu Ray DVD version of Woodstock, for its 40th anniversary, while Rob Leonard, '70 is singing "Teen Angel," the camera cuts to Jimi, loving it.
 Renamed Sha Na Na, these members of the Kingsmen became regulars at Fillmore West and East, appeared in the Oscar-winning Woodstock movie as well as the movie version of Grease, which their act had inspired. Their syndicated TV show ran for years, worldwide.
 ==Sha Na Na and the "Invention of the Fifties"==

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 “As Voltaire noted,” Guffey observes in ''Retro'' (a word she has theorized and made her own the way Sontag captured and theorized Camp), “History does not change, but what we want from it does.” The Columbia test case supports Voltaire. Columbia College, in 1969, wanted something new from the 1950s, and its reasons were well-documented. “Band members linked their success to a disillusionment with radical politics a year after massive student unrest at Columbia,” Marcus writes (pp. 12–14).
-During the revolution the year before, the Vietnam-era culture wars had escalated into fist fights, even mob fights, between the “jocks” and the “freaks” (and even “pukes”), as protestors were called. Later, the Leonard brothers wrote of those times, "We remember professors [[John D. Rosenberg]] ’50, ’60 GSAS, [[Arthur Danto]] ’53 GSAS and Richard Kuhns ’55 GSAS linking arms in a human chain of faculty members to block the Tactical Patrol Force from clubbing student demonstrators. [[Kenneth Koch]] stopped his poetry class from rushing down from Hamilton to join in a brawl between jocks and freaks going on below by crying out, like a WWII movie heroine, in his campiest voice, “Stop! WE’RE … what they’re FIGHTING FOR!” His students broke up laughing, sat back down and Koch went on with the lecture, while the jocks and freaks punched it out outside."
+During the revolution the year before, the Vietnam-era culture wars had escalated into fist fights, even mob fights, between the “jocks” and the “freaks” (and even “pukes”), as protestors were called. Later, the Leonard brothers wrote of those times, "We remember professors [[John D. Rosenberg]] ’50, ’60 GSAS, [[Arthur Danto]] ’53 GSAS and Richard Kuhns ’55 GSAS linking arms in a human chain of faculty members to block the Tactical Patrol Force from clubbing student demonstrators. [[Kenneth Koch]] stopped his poetry class from rushing down from [[Hamilton Hall|Hamilton]] to join in a brawl between jocks and freaks going on below by crying out, like a WWII movie heroine, in his campiest voice, “Stop! WE’RE … what they’re FIGHTING FOR!” His students broke up laughing, sat back down and Koch went on with the lecture, while the jocks and freaks punched it out outside."
 Researching in Butler and Avery libraries, Guffey discovered George Leonard’s twice-weekly Spec ads: “Jocks! Freaks! [[ROTC]]! [[SDS]]! Let there be a truce! Bury the hatchet (not in each other)! Remember when we were all little greaseballs together” (p. 113). The ads consciously “evoked,” Guffey commented, a “vision of the Fifties as a pre-political teenage Eden.”

← Older revision		Revision as of 01:06, 22 July 2009
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	Permissions Notice: A version of this material appeared in ''[[Columbia College Today]]'' September/ October 2008 as "Sha Na Na and the Invention of the Fifties" by George J. Leonard ’67, ’68 GSAS, ’72 GSAS and Robert A. Leonard ’70, ’73 GSAS, ’82 GSAS. Reprinted by permission of the authors.		Permissions Notice: A version of this material appeared in ''[[Columbia College Today]]'' September/ October 2008 as "Sha Na Na and the Invention of the Fifties" by George J. Leonard ’67, ’68 GSAS, ’72 GSAS and Robert A. Leonard ’70, ’73 GSAS, ’82 GSAS. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

−	[[Category:~~Campus bands~~]]	+	[[Category:Bands]]

← Older revision		Revision as of 01:06, 22 July 2009
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	Permissions Notice: A version of this material appeared in ''[[Columbia College Today]]'' September/ October 2008 as "Sha Na Na and the Invention of the Fifties" by George J. Leonard ’67, ’68 GSAS, ’72 GSAS and Robert A. Leonard ’70, ’73 GSAS, ’82 GSAS. Reprinted by permission of the authors.		Permissions Notice: A version of this material appeared in ''[[Columbia College Today]]'' September/ October 2008 as "Sha Na Na and the Invention of the Fifties" by George J. Leonard ’67, ’68 GSAS, ’72 GSAS and Robert A. Leonard ’70, ’73 GSAS, ’82 GSAS. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

−	[[Category:~~Student~~ bands]]	+	[[Category:Campus bands]]

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 The Columbia test case, then, suggests that even “he who controls the present” can still, at best, only select from the past. Looking at the skies, we deliberately drew lines between new stars to create a new constellation. But we did not, could not, create the stars themselves. The past too exists, even though we select from it."
 ==Sha Na Na members today==
-In the past 13 years, article co-author George J. Leonard ’67, ’68 GSAS, ’72 GSAS has sold three of his early novels and their screenplays to Universal Pictures, Hollywood, most notably to director Ron Howard. Meanwhile, his books on Asian culture and avant-garde American art are widely cited. He has taught at Yale and is professor of interdisciplinary humanities at San Francisco State (www.georgeleonard.com). Robert A. Leonard ’70, ’73 GSAS, ’82 GSAS became one of the founding fathers of forensic linguistics; Kathy Reichs, best-selling author/producer of the novel-and-TV series Bones, based the character of her heroine’s mentor, Rob Potter, on him. Rob, like his character, flies around the country helping solve murder cases, while doing cameos in movies reminiscing about Jimi Hendrix and holding down a steady job as professor of linguistics at Hofstra (http://people.hofstra.edu/faculty/robert_a_leonard). Links to other Sha Na Na members can be found by going to the Sha Na Na website on Wikipedia, which includes dozens of links. You can also google the names of these members who appear on the cover of Sha Na Na's classic first album, from left to right, standing, back row: Alan Cooper ’71; Joe Witkin ’70; Richard Joffe ’72, ’93L; Donald York ’71; David Garrett ’70E; Henry Gross ’73 GSAS, ’78L, ’80 GSAS; Bruce Clarke ’74; John “Jocko” Marcellino ’72; and Elliot Cahn ’70. Kneeling, gold lame: Robert Leonard ’70, ’73 GSAS, ’82 GSAS; Scott Powell ’70 GS; and Frederick “Denny” Greene ’72.
+Over the past 13 years, George Leonard has sold three of his early novels and their screenplays to Universal Pictures, Hollywood-- oddly enough, purchased by director Ron Howard, whose Happy Days also used the Fifties myth. George's scholarly books on Asian culture and avant-garde American art are widely cited. He has been a professor of English at Yale and is Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at San Francisco State University. [http://www.georgeleonard.com georgeleonard.com]. Robert Leonard became one of the founding fathers of forensic linguistics; Kathy Reichs, best-selling author/producer of the novel-and-TV series Bones, based the character of her heroine’s mentor, Rob Potter, on him. Rob, like his character, currently flies around the country helping solve murder cases, while doing cameos in movies reminiscing about Jimi Hendrix and holding down a steady job as professor of linguistics at Hofstra, where he was 2009 Professor of the Year. (http://people.hofstra.edu/faculty/robert_a_leonard). Elliot Cahn, '70, Sha Na Na's music director, after getting his law degree at Berkeley, stumbled on a local Bay Area band that was going nowhere-- Green Day. As their new manager, Cahn used his experience to take them national, and after them Papa Roach and other iconic West Coast punk bands. Al Cooper '71, Sha Na Na's other music director, is now Provost of Jewish Theological Seminary, American Conservative Judaism's most important institution. Other members have written a raft of books and gone on to important careers. More info will be added as it becomes available. Meanwhile, links to other Sha Na Na members can be found by going to the Sha Na Na website on Wikipedia. You can also google the names of these members who appear on the cover of Sha Na Na's classic first album, from left to right, standing, back row: Alan Cooper ’71; Joe Witkin ’70; Richard Joffe ’72, ’93L; Donald York ’71; David Garrett ’70E; Henry Gross ’73 GSAS, ’78L, ’80 GSAS; Bruce Clarke ’74; John “Jocko” Marcellino ’72; and Elliot Cahn ’70. Kneeling, gold lame: Robert Leonard ’70, ’73 GSAS, ’82 GSAS; Scott Powell ’70 GS; and Frederick “Denny” Greene ’72.

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 =="A pre-political Teenage Eden"==
 “As Voltaire noted,” Guffey observes in Retro (a word she has theorized and made her own the way Sontag captured and theorized Camp), “History does not change, but what we want from it does.” The Columbia test case supports Voltaire. Columbia College, in 1969, wanted something new from the 1950s, and its reasons were well-documented. “Band members linked their success to a disillusionment with radical politics a year after massive student unrest at Columbia,” Marcus writes (pp. 12–14).
-During the revolution the year before, the Vietnam-era culture wars had escalated into fist fights, even mob fights, between the “jocks” and the “freaks” (and even “pukes”), as protestors were called. We remember professors John D. Rosenberg ’50, ’60 GSAS, Arthur Danto ’53 GSAS and Richard Kuhns ’55 GSAS linking arms in a human chain of faculty members to block the Tactical Patrol Force from clubbing student demonstrators. Kenneth Koch stopped his poetry class from rushing down from Hamilton to join in a brawl between jocks and freaks going on below by crying out, like a WWII movie heroine, in his campiest voice, “Stop! WE’RE … what they’re FIGHTING FOR!” His students broke up laughing, sat back down and Koch went on with the lecture, while the jocks and freaks punched it out outside.
+During the revolution the year before, the Vietnam-era culture wars had escalated into fist fights, even mob fights, between the “jocks” and the “freaks” (and even “pukes”), as protestors were called. Later, the Leonard brothers wrote of those times, "We remember professors John D. Rosenberg ’50, ’60 GSAS, Arthur Danto ’53 GSAS and Richard Kuhns ’55 GSAS linking arms in a human chain of faculty members to block the Tactical Patrol Force from clubbing student demonstrators. Kenneth Koch stopped his poetry class from rushing down from Hamilton to join in a brawl between jocks and freaks going on below by crying out, like a WWII movie heroine, in his campiest voice, “Stop! WE’RE … what they’re FIGHTING FOR!” His students broke up laughing, sat back down and Koch went on with the lecture, while the jocks and freaks punched it out outside."
-Researching in Butler and Avery libraries, Guffey discovered George’s twice-weekly Spec ads: “Jocks! Freaks! ROTC! SDS! Let there be a truce! Bury the hatchet (not in each other)! Remember when we were all little greaseballs together” (p. 113). The ads consciously “evoked,” Guffey commented, a “vision of the Fifties as a pre-political teenage Eden.” After Woodstock, Sha Na Na founders John “Jocko” Marcellino ’72, Don York ’71, Rich Joffe ’72, ’93L, Scott Powell ’70 and manager Ed Goodgold ’65 gained the talents of Jon “Bowzer” Bauman ’68 and “Screamin’” Scott Simon ’70. Their popular television show joined with Happy Days and Grease popularizing the new myth. By the 1980 Presidential election, America had embraced the dream of the Fifties as a pre-political Golden Age. So much so, Marcus painstakingly shows, that the American political landscape was altered to take advantage of this invented cultural memory.
+Researching in Butler and Avery libraries, Guffey discovered George Leonard’s twice-weekly Spec ads: “Jocks! Freaks! ROTC! SDS! Let there be a truce! Bury the hatchet (not in each other)! Remember when we were all little greaseballs together” (p. 113). The ads consciously “evoked,” Guffey commented, a “vision of the Fifties as a pre-political teenage Eden.”
 In Ronald Reagan’s time, Marcus documents, politicians began invoking a Columbia College fantasy as if it had been history, and trying to ally themselves with it. “Conservatives [in the Reagan Era] parlay(ed) the cultural nostalgia for the Fifties that had circulated in the 1970s into the basis for a political offensive … ”(p. 58). Marcus describes in detail how Bill Clinton fought for parity by casting himself as a worthy descendant of Elvis. Baby Boom politicians have battled during four presidencies over who was the genuine heir to a Fifties that was itself a kind of artwork.
 ==Can History be Invented?==
 The Columbia College Today article ended with this reflection by the authors: "We admire the way that Guffey and Marcus accurately deduced, from imaginative research, the 1969 Kingsmen’s conscious intent to invent a Fifties that would reunite Columbia’s shattered, polarized student body by having them relive together their roots. Writing this essay, however, recalled our attention to Hobsbawm, Trevor-Roper and hard-line cultural historians, such as Jean Baudrillard (popularized by The Matrix) who (unlike Guffey and Marcus) at the least, imply that people like us have “invented” history out of whole cloth.

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 More precisely, in inventing it. “On the fourth day of the Woodstock Festival of 1969,” Guffey’s account begins, “just before Jimi Hendrix’s celebrated finale, the stage was held by a group of unknown undergraduates from Columbia University ... The rock-’n’-roll revivalist group Sha Na Na bombarded the audience with tightly choreographed 1950s classics like ‘Teen Angel’ and ‘At the Hop.’ The festival’s unlikely scene stealers sported dated looks, including greased ducktails, white socks and cigarettes rolled into T-shirt sleeves. Sha Na Na’s impossibly upbeat and exuberant version of the 1950s seemed the opposite of the arty psychedelica and hard rock that characterized Woodstock.”
 Guffey quickly spots that Sha Na Na was “subtly infused with Camp. George J. Leonard, the group’s leader [in matters of theory], described himself as a ‘22-year-old Susan Sontag buff.’ Recalling the group’s transformation from Ivy League glee club to television stars, Leonard spoke of a ‘vision of a group that would sing only ’50s rock and perform dances like the Busby Berkeley films that he ‘learned to love in college readings on Camp’ ” in Richard Kuhns’ aesthetics courses.
-Marcus was coming to the same conclusion: The idea of the Fifties that America still holds — the happy, “greasy” Fifties — was an “invented History.” Up until 1969, quite an opposite cultural memory held sway. When Americans remembered “the Fifties,” they thought of Joe McCarthy witch hunts, of an “age of anxiety,” of the “shook-up generation” diving under their desks during A-Bomb drills, of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit selling out and Holden Caulfield cracking up, or Allen Ginsberg ’48 and Jack Kerouac ’44 too “beat” to fight back. Nothing to get nostalgic about there. In a section titled “Re-inventing the Day Before Yesterday,” Guffey describes older critics, who remembered the decade only too clearly, “shocked at the happy-go-lucky imagery” of what Horizon Magazine protested as the “newly-minted” Fifties. Cultural critics had already agreed the decade was “a national pre-frontal lobotomy.”
+Marcus was coming to the same conclusion: The idea of the Fifties that America still holds — the happy, “greasy” Fifties — was an “invented History.”
 Then, Marcus and Guffey saw, around 1969, “history” had been deliberately rewritten — almost invented.

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 ==Sha Na Na and the "Invention of the Fifties"==
-So Columbia’s place in rock ’n’ roll history has long been granted. Recently, however, there has been an interesting new level of appreciation. Contemporary scholars of American cultural history have begun writing that Sha Na Na’s greatest achievement was the invention of a new American era: the “Fifties.” The whole notion of how artists can change the way a historical era is viewed, and relatively quickly, is interesting on its own; the fact that Sha Na Na and the College played such a role in this change makes it interesting for all Columbians. Brothers and founding members George J. Leonard ’67, ’68 GSAS, ’72 GSAS, who conceived and choreographed the Kingsmen’s change to Sha Na Na, and Robert A. Leonard ’70, ’73 GSAS, ’82 GSAS, the group’s first president and gold lame singer, report on the new scholarly interest in Sha Na Na:]
+So Columbia’s place in rock ’n’ roll history has long been granted. Recently, however, there has been an interesting new level of appreciation. Contemporary scholars of American cultural history have begun writing that Sha Na Na’s greatest achievement was the invention of a new American era: the “Fifties.” The whole notion of how artists can change the way a historical era is viewed, and relatively quickly, is interesting on its own; the fact that Sha Na Na and the College played such a role in this change makes it interesting for all Columbians.
 In the last few years, an unlikely group of scholars has been studying Columbia’s Sha Na Na as a test case: meta-historians, theoreticians of cultural history itself. In 2004, Rutgers University Press published a bold new book by Goucher professor Daniel Marcus, Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics. In 2006, Elizabeth E. Guffey, a Stanford Ph.D. and associate professor at SUNY Purchase, published Retro: The Culture of Revival (London and Chicago: Reaktion Books distributed by the University of Chicago Press, retrothebook.com). Both books contain extensive studies of Sha Na Na’s “Fabricated Fifties” (Guffey’s term) because Marcus and Guffey — working quite independently — discovered Sha Na Na and Columbia College, in 1969, playing an unusual role in 20th century American history.
 More precisely, in inventing it. “On the fourth day of the Woodstock Festival of 1969,” Guffey’s account begins, “just before Jimi Hendrix’s celebrated finale, the stage was held by a group of unknown undergraduates from Columbia University ... The rock-’n’-roll revivalist group Sha Na Na bombarded the audience with tightly choreographed 1950s classics like ‘Teen Angel’ and ‘At the Hop.’ The festival’s unlikely scene stealers sported dated looks, including greased ducktails, white socks and cigarettes rolled into T-shirt sleeves. Sha Na Na’s impossibly upbeat and exuberant version of the 1950s seemed the opposite of the arty psychedelica and hard rock that characterized Woodstock.”
@@ Line 11: / Line 11: @@
 Marcus was coming to the same conclusion: The idea of the Fifties that America still holds — the happy, “greasy” Fifties — was an “invented History.” Up until 1969, quite an opposite cultural memory held sway. When Americans remembered “the Fifties,” they thought of Joe McCarthy witch hunts, of an “age of anxiety,” of the “shook-up generation” diving under their desks during A-Bomb drills, of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit selling out and Holden Caulfield cracking up, or Allen Ginsberg ’48 and Jack Kerouac ’44 too “beat” to fight back. Nothing to get nostalgic about there. In a section titled “Re-inventing the Day Before Yesterday,” Guffey describes older critics, who remembered the decade only too clearly, “shocked at the happy-go-lucky imagery” of what Horizon Magazine protested as the “newly-minted” Fifties. Cultural critics had already agreed the decade was “a national pre-frontal lobotomy.”
 Then, Marcus and Guffey saw, around 1969, “history” had been deliberately rewritten — almost invented.
 ==The original 1950's become the Fifties==
 “The replacement of the Beat with the greaser as the emblematic 1950s rebel” had, Marcus reports, consolidated its hold on American “memory” within a very few years, by the time of Happy Days and Fonzie. Nor had that replacement gone unnoticed, Guffey discovered. “People begin to remember the 1950s not as they recall them but as they have been re-created for them,” Horizon marveled by 1972. “This is what makes the newly-minted myth of the Fifties so remarkable … .” “Vision fades and imagination takes over,” Time critic Gerald Clarke wrote.