William Bill Kreutzmann was born on May 7, 1946 in Palo Alto, California. Despite early criticism, Bill loved playing the drums. Before he was legal, he, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan formed a band.
Of course that band evolved into the Grateful Dead. Later Mickey Hart joined the Dead and he and Bill (“the rhythm devils”) drove the Dead’s beat.
Dead Drummer Bill Kreutzmann
All for one, one for all
Though there were sometimes solos during a show, it was never about an individual. Jerry Garcia may have been the axle of the band’s wheel, the band was greater than the sum of its parts.
Robert Hunter knew of what he spoke when he said in “Truckin'” What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been. That, of course, is a shibboleth for the Grateful Dead and many of the bands that the 1960s produced.
Dead Drummer Bill Kreutzmann
Always there
Bill Kreutzmann was there for all the Dead’s shows. The good and the bad. The ethereal. The cosmic. The highs and the lows.
In 2015, he and Benjy Eisen wrote about it in Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead [NPR article].
The book begins with a story about Jerry Garcia and Bill going scuba diving in the late 80s. Touch of Grey, the Dead’s only big commercial hit. Like anything that brings public attention, Touch of Grey brought the good and the bad. Scuba diving in Hawaii seemed like a good place to get away from it all. No drugs. No attention. Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream.
Then a scuba instructor swam up to Garcia with a waterproof notepad and asked for his autograph.
Dead Drummer Bill Kreutzmann
Dead End
When Garcia died in 1995 [NYT obituary] the Grateful Dead did, too. Without Jerry, the axle gone, the band could light a spark, could start a fire, but never burn as brightly as those previous 30 years.
Of course Bill Kreutzman has continued to play music. It is, it was, and always will be what his life is about.
Dead Drummer Bill Kreutzmann
Lifer drummer
He had helped form bands (The Other Ones, The Dead, The Rhythm Devlis, 7 Walkers, and most recently, Billy & the Kids) and has sat in at concerts (with Journey, Warren Haynes, Phish, David Nelson Band among others).
In 2015, a Grateful Dead formed to perform a series of concerts commemorating its 50th anniversary. Bill Kreutzmann, of course, was there and wanted more.
Also in 2015, he with Benjy Eisen so published a book: Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Deals and Drugs With the Grateful Dead.
Glide magazine wrote: During the course of the first person narrative of Deal, founding member/drummer of the Grateful Dead Bill Kreutzmann shows he’s (almost) as skilled a storyteller as he is a drummer. Particularly in the early going of My Three Decades, his informal style lends itself well to the increasingly fast pace of his life as he discovers the pleasure of music, his passion for playing and his abiding devotion to the Dead as they coalesced in the mid-Sixties.
PBS NewsHour interview by Jeffrey Brown
But in 2023…
Though Dead & Company embarked on their final tour, it was withoutKreutzmann.
Dead & Company announced: “After many long discussions and some good old-fashioned soul searching, we are letting you know that our brother Bill Kreutzmann will not be joining us on our final summer tour. Bill wants you to know that he is in good spirits, good health and he is not retiring.”
The band added, “This is the culmination of a shift in creative direction as we keep these songs alive and breathing in ways that we each feel is best to continue to honor the legacy of the Grateful Dead. The final tour will go on as planned with Bill’s full endorsement and support.”
Dead & Company’s farewell tour began in May and included a benefit show at Cornell University’s Barton Hall, set for 46 years to the day since the Grateful Dead played a legendary set at the venue.
On May 6, 1917 about 200 people watched a private showing Margaret Sanger’s film, Birth Control. Sanger had scheduled it to open publicly the next night, but New York officials banned it as obscene and it was never shown publicly.
Discomfort regarding sexually-related topics has long been part of American culture. A result of that attitude is that access to reproductive information and obstetric treatment for American women been limited socially as well as legally.
Margaret Sanger Birth Control
Comstock Act
On March 3, 1873 the Comstock Act [named after Anthony Comstock, a U.S. postal inspector] [Case Western article] amended the Post Office Act . Within that act it was illegal to send any “obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious” materials through the mail, including contraceptive devices and information. In addition to banning contraceptives, this act also banned the distribution of information on abortion for educational purposes.
Vestiges of the act endured as the law of the land into the 1990s. In 1971 Congress removed the language concerning contraception, and federal courts until Roe v Wade in 1973 ruled that it applied only to “unlawful” abortions. After Roe, laws criminalizing transportation of information about abortion remained on the books, and, although they have not been enforced, they have been expanded to ban distribution of abortion-related information on the Internet. [Britannica article]
Margaret Sanger Birth Control
Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger, 1879 – 1966, despite her eugenics statements, is in many ways the most important American in terms of reproductive heath care for American women.
Sanger watched her mother Anne die at the age of 49 after she had gone through 18 pregnancies (with 11 live births) in 22 years.
In 1911 she and her husband moved to New York City where, as a visiting nurse, she saw the devastating effects of poverty on health, particularly women’s health.
As an aid to this heath issue, Sanger believed that women needed access to reproductive health information. Her activities in support of that belief were often illegal.
For example: in March 1914, Sanger produced The Woman Rebel [NYU atricle]which instructed women on times when it would be wise for them to avoid pregnancy, such as in the case of illness or poverty. She did not give any instructions regarding specific methods for contraception, but the New York City postmaster banned the journal under the Comstock Law category of “obscene, lewd, lascivious” matter.
Margaret Sanger Birth Control
Clinics
Despite intense social and legal opposition, on October 16, 1916 Sanger and her sister Ethel Byrne [electric beanstalk article] opened the first birth control clinic in the U.S. in Brooklyn. The clinic served 448 people that first day. Ten days later the vice squad raided and shut down the clinic. The squad arrested Sanger and Byrne and confiscated all the condoms and diaphragms at the clinic.
On November 1, 1921 the American Birth Control League was created through a merger of the National Birth Control League and the Voluntary Parenthood League. Led by Sanger, the new league became the leading birth control advocacy group in the country. The American Birth Control League eventually became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. [Sanger did not like the term planned parenthood and continued to use the phrase “birth control.”
Margaret Sanger Birth Control
Birth control pill
Margaret Sanger’s long term goal was a birth control pill, yet laws against any form of birth control continued to be enacted and upheld in court [February 1, 1943, in Tileston v. Ullman [Cornell article], the Supreme Court upheld a Connecticut law banning the use of drugs or instruments that prevented conception.]
In the early 1940s, researchers began to discover chemicals that could affect ovulation and on April 25, 1951,Margaret Sanger managed to secure a tiny grant for researcher Gregory Pincus from Planned Parenthood. Pincus begins initial work on the use of hormones as a contraceptive. Within a year his research supports the idea, but Planned Parenthood decided not to support further research because it was too risky. In 1953 Sanger was able to gain financial support for Pincus’s research. In 1955 human clinical trials proved that the “pill” was 100% effective.
It was still six years later before the Food and Drug Administration approved the pill. It first went on sale in December 1960. Despite continued social, legal, and religious opposition, by 1964 some four million women were using the drug.
Margaret Sanger Birth Control
Griswold v. Connecticut
On June 7, 1965 in Griswold v. Connecticut (Oyez article), the Supreme Court struck down the one remaining state law prohibiting the use of contraceptives by married couples.
After an adult lifetime of fighting for women’s heath rights, Margaret Sanger died on September 6, 1966. [NYT obit]
Margaret Sanger Birth Control
Racist?
A 2015 Polifact article addressed the accusation that Sanger was a racist in many views, that she supported the Ku Klux Klan.
In her 1938 autobiography, she wrote that she was willing to talk to virtually anyone as she advocated for birth control across the United States: “Always to me any aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan at Silver Lake, New Jersey, one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing.”
Sanger later compared the group to children because of their mental simplicity. Jean H. Baker, author of Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion, said Sanger actually opposed prejudice.
Sanger “was far ahead of her times in terms of opposing racial segregation,” wrote Baker, a history professor at Goucher College,in an email. She worked closely with black leaders to open birth control clinics in Harlem and elsewhere.”
Even authors who treat Sanger critically don’t believe she held negative views about African-Americans. Edwin Black wrote a comprehensive history of the eugenics movement, War Against the Weak, and is no fan of the activist’s beliefs. Ultimately, though, he writes, “Sanger was no racist. Nor was she anti-Semitic.”
Eugenics Aftermath
July 21, 2020: Planned Parenthood of Greater New York announced that it would remove the name of Margaret Sanger, a founder of the national organization, from its Manhattan health clinic because of her “harmful connections to the eugenics movement.”
Sanger had long been lauded as a feminist icon and reproductive-rights pioneer, but her legacy also included supporting eugenics, a discredited belief in improving the human race through selective breeding, often targeted at poor people, those with disabilities, immigrants and people of color.
“The removal of Margaret Sanger’s name from our building is both a necessary and overdue step to reckon with our legacy and acknowledge Planned Parenthood’s contributions to historical reproductive harm within communities of color,” Karen Seltzer, the chair of the New York affiliate’s board, said in a statement. [NYT story]
Racist?
Some say that Sanger supported the Ku Klux Klan (she merely addressed a women’s auxiliary and later compared them to children because of their mental simplicity), Jean H. Baker, author of Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion, said Sanger actually opposed prejudice.
Sanger “was far ahead of her times in terms of opposing racial segregation,” wrote Baker, a history professor at Goucher College,in an email. She worked closely with black leaders to open birth control clinics in Harlem and elsewhere.”
Even authors who treat Sanger critically don’t believe she held negative views about African-Americans. Edwin Black wrote a comprehensive history of the eugenics movement, War Against the Weak, and is no fan of the activist’s beliefs. Ultimately, though, he writes, “Sanger was no racist. Nor was she anti-Semitic.”
In early 1956, Elvis’s popularity was, like the Beatles seven years later, about to run wild. No one had coined a term like Elvis-mania, but it could have been that.
Elvis’s 1955 singles (“Baby Let’s Play House” and “I Forgot to Remember to Forget”) with Sam Phillips Sun Records had done well on the country charts.
Elvis Presley album Elvis
RCA
Colonel Tom Parker, Presley’s new manager, had grand plans and the chutzpah to carry them out. His first move was to have RCA records buy Elvis’s contract from Phillips. It cost RCA $35,000 and with the omniscience of retrospect, we might say that that was quite a good deal for RCA. At the time it was an expensive risk.
Rock and Roll, derived some many sources, was just beginning to make mainstream headway despite mainstream suspicions. Editorials suggested that the music was immoral, that the music turned teenagers into juvenile delinquents, and that the music was simply devil music. These phobic fears did more to entice than dissuade young people.
On September 9, 1956, Elvis appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. The appearance marked, as the Beatles in 1964, a huge step in Elvis’s success. It was on that show that the cameras kept the image above Elvis’s swaying waist.
Elvis Presley album Elvis
Elvis Presley
RCA had released his first album, Elvis, on March 23, 1956. The album had 12 songs, some that Elvis had done with Sun Records before moving to RCA as well as with RCA after the move. Elvis composed none of the songs. In fact, a different person or group wrote each song.
The album hit #1 on May 5, 1956, the first rock and roll album ever to make it to the top of the charts.
Side one:
Blue Suede Shoes
2. I’m Counting on You
3. I Got a Woman
4. One-Sided Love Affair
5. I Love You Because
6. Just Because
Side 2:
Tutti Frutti
Tryin’ to Get to You
I’m Gona Sit Right Down and Cry (Over You)
I’ll Never Let You Go (Little Darlin’)
Blue Moon
Money Honey
The entire album clocked in at 28:03 seconds (the Beatles “Meet the Beatles” album totaled 26:43). Unlike what the Beatles would begin to do with pop albums with their 1965 Rubber Soul, much more a unified album, Elvis Presley became a collection of singles. That’s where financial success was.
And the album was a success.
Elvis Presley album Elvis
Legacy
The album spent ten weeks at number 1 on the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart in 1956, the first rock and roll album ever to make it to the top of the charts and the first million-selling album of that genre.
In 2021 Rolling Stone magazine ranked it at 332 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
Elvis Presley album Elvis
What's so funny about peace, love, art, and activism?
Bill Kreutzmann was there for all the Dead’s shows. The good and the bad. The ethereal. The cosmic. The highs and the lows.
