Up with People: Look away, look away!
Up with People! was a wholesome musical crusade that started with a dream. But, then, so did the Donner Party.
During a March 1966 interview, John Lennon told a reporter that the Beatles had become “more popular than Jesus.” He didn’t mean that as a brag. At that point, they really were more popular than Jesus, and Lennon thought that betrayed a really messed-up value system.
Fortunately, he made the remark in England, where no one minded. People understood what he meant. Unfortunately, Lennon’s words were reprinted in America, a nation largely devoid of irony. And quite predictably, ministers, parents, KKK chapters, and Christian radio stations across the country rose up in righteous dudgeon.
We must defend our Lord!
They lit bonfires where throngs of evangelical teens gathered to burn their Beatles albums. There were celebrations across the Bible Belt reminiscent of the good times enjoyed by the Deutsche Studentenschaft back the 1933 Nazi book burnings.
Church elders and vice-principals had been warning young people about the perils of demon rock-and-roll (“Negro music,” as it was assailed from the pulpit) since before Elvis Presley first swiveled his hips on CBS’s Stage Show program in 1956. But the young people recklessly ignored those warnings because . . . well, because they were young. Young people just love to tap their toes and snap their fingers to a catchy beat. Who can blame them? But the next thing you know, they’re dancing and swiveling their own hips and fornicating in the back seat of Dad’s ‘59 Studebaker Lark.
Prohibition never worked in America. Not when it came to liquor, and certainly not when it came to popular music. So the “hip” church elders and vice-principals of the 50s and 60s realized that the best way to shield their youngsters from damnation was to give them what they wanted . . . but to give it to them CLEAN. Squeaky clean pop.
And Lord knows, they tried. They started with Pat Boone, the first of many anti-hormonal anti-Elvises. When he didn’t pan out, they followed up with Ricky Nelson, Bobby Darin, Frankie Avalon, the Everly Brothers, and even (desperately) Eddie Fisher. There was a surfeit of bad music in the 50s, most of it dedicated to keeping American kids from having sex.
With the dawn of the 60s, a new level of wholesomeness was added to pop. Patriotism. Purity wasn’t enough for the new decade. AMERICAN purity was where the action was. One of the top hits of the era was Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets.” It celebrated Army Special Forces in Vietnam with lines so jingoistic they might have made General Westmoreland himself gag.
Fighting soldiers from the sky,
Fearless men who jump and die,
Men who mean just what they say,
The brave men of the Green Berets.
Meanwhile, Miss America runner-up Anita Bryant was packing them into her flag-draped concerts and showing up alongside Bob Hope on his USO tours wherever America happened to be dropping napalm that particular day. Sexagenarian (but not in a good way) “God Save America” singer Kate Smith was making a comeback. Oddest of all, the near-senile Senator from Illinois Everett Dirksen recorded his own spoken-word album “Gallant Men.” In stereo, no less.
But of all the wholesome, patriotic acts of the 60s and 70s, none was more wholesome or more patriotic than Up with People! This troupe of young performers was the brainchild of a Presbyterian minister and radio promoter named J. Blanton Belk, who had earlier commandeered something called the Moral Re-Armament Movement (MRA) .
Originating in the 1930s, the MRA held that social reform could only be accomplished through individual spiritual renewal and awakening. A pleasant enough idea. Their choice of the term “re-armament” was a giveaway, though. The MRA had roots in militant Christianity, the Prince of Peace outfitted in fatigues and bandoliers. Never mind the happy bromides of its manifesto. Moral re-armament was all about Christian domination through the eradication of Communism.
Up with People!, the MRA’s musical offspring under J. Blanton Belk, started touring in the mid-60s to widespread adulation and sold-out concert halls, football stadiums and racetracks. Their appeal stemmed from the group’s enthusiastic optimism, a welcome relief from the cynical unrest infecting most public affairs. What with the war, crime, poverty, nuclear weapons, assassinations, pollution and racial tensions, everybody seemed to be unhappy. Up with People! was a godsend to a weary nation.
They went national. Then they went global. They were so infectious that even Chairman Mao invited them to China. Their song titles alone were enough to lift anyone’s spirit:
The Happy Song
Freedom Isn’t Free
What Color is God’s Skin?
You Can’t Live Crooked and Think Straight
Thinking about the Days Ahead
I Get a Kick out of Life
You Are What You Do
Up with People! had been sired by Moral Re-armament, but the only overtly militant thing about them was the way they stormed the stage at the start of each performance, rushing it en masse from several directions at once in a flanking maneuver that would have pleased Scipio Africanus or Frederick the Great. Once there, they dazzled the audience with their colorful matching outfits and blinded it with their frozen smiles of ecstatic cheer. The desired effect was stupefying. But any spectators who somehow managed to maintain control of their prefrontal cortexes would walk out of the concert sensing that what they’d just witnessed was certainly . . . wholesome. It was certainly . . . patriotic, as well. But it wasn’t . . . real.
Something’s wrong, whispered the audience member’s left cerebral hemisphere. Those couldn’t have been real, sentient being on the stage. They had to have been some kind of animatronic facsimiles. And if the performers weren’t genuine, how genuine was their message? It didn’t take long for a cadre of disbelievers to arise, cynics warning that Up with People’s corporate sponsors were using these happy young kids to sell uplifting pabulum that distracted the audience from just how screwed up the world really was.
Don’t fret over poverty, hunger and racism.
Focus on your own spirit.
Make yourself right, and the world will follow.
That was the message. Meanwhile, as the fictional Phin Beauclerk remarks while listening to a fictional Up with People! Performance in chapter 4 of Timberline, “the very companies underwriting all those happy songs about peace, equality and justice [were] busy inciting foreign wars, bulldozing the planet, and enslaving the plebs.”
The voices of the skeptics were strong enough that in 1965 CBS refused to air the group’s first national television special, citing the network’s policy against broadcasting ideological content. The group’s fans were incensed. Ideological? The nerve of calling Up with People! ideological! It was an insult, especially coming from the network that first let Elvis Presley swivel his hips in front of the entire country. NBC agreed to show it instead, and in time CBS came around with their own Up with People! Specials in 1968. The kids were free to sing and dance uncensored in white automatized choreography.
They always danced as a group, though. Not with each other. No touching. No eye contact. No suggestive hip swiveling. They danced from the sheer joy of their righteousness, not from any kind of sexual urge. Just a big, happy, androgynous army stepping into the spotlight and onto the front lines of America’s perpetual culture war. Onward, you melodious Christian soldiers.
Everything’s swell! There’s nothing to see here. Look away, look away!
~ D. Gray
Author, Timberline (or, Politics is Hell)