Rock Meets Politics in 1976

Consider the following words spoken by a major Democratic party power broker in May:

“I will make a statement and I will back a candidate. It will come in the next few weeks when all the primaries are over and after I look over all the candidates and I see who’s got a shot at the nomination.”

Nothing special there, except that this statement wasn’t made by Richard Daley or George Meany. It was made by Jerry Weintraub.

Jerry Weintraub is John Denver’s manager.

He also promotes the concert tours of Frank Sinatra, Led Zeppelin,. Elvis Presley and Eric Clapton, among other music-business notables. And, because of a loophole in the 1974 federal campaign finance law, Jerry Weintraub has become a very important person — perhaps not yet as important as George Meany, but catching up fast.

Under the post-Watergate rules of electoral politics, a normal human being can contribute no more than $1000 per election to the candidate of his or her choice — a law that was passed to prevent the wealthy from throwing huge wads of cash around. But human beings, normal or abnormal, are allowed to do as much volunteer work as they want for political candidates. They can ring unlimited doorbells and lick unlimited envelopes and they can volunteer to sing. When someone like John Denver volunteers to sing, people will pay to listen. He can fill a stadium and raise $100,000 or more for the candidate of his, or Jerry Weintraub’s, choice.

It is perhaps no great coincidence that the two most successful candidates in the Democratic primaries — Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown — were the ones who worked the rock-music beat most successfully. Carter’s campaign forces, depending largely on artists from Georgia’s burgeoning music business, raised about $350,000 through rock concerts and matching funds from the federal government. That’s enough to pay for several good-sized primaries.

Jerry Brown, who entered the campaign late but still managed to raise $150,000 through concerts (again increased by matching funds), relied on California artists. Although his personal taste runs more toward 10th-century Gregorian chants, Brown — like Carter — courted the rock stars. He had private dinners with Chicago, the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Ronee Blakley (who eventually became his warmup act on the stump) and others . . . and regaled them with his knowledge of Zen and the Whole Earth Catalog. “He told us that people should make their choice based on the style and spirit and approach of the candidate more than anything else,” says Peter Asher, Ronstadt’s manager. “Essentially he said a lot of the same things he says on TV.”

But he took the time to say them in person, and that was impressive. “There’s a certain attraction that athletes and politicians and show-business people have for each other,” says Jeff Wald, Helen Reddy’s husband and manager (and a Brown supporter who eventually went to the Democratic convention as a Brown-pledged delegate). “They are a kind of American royalty and each group holds the other in awe.”

From time to time this year, the press has toyed with the curious spectacle of rock stars as political power brokers. It’s been portrayed as a cute and rather ironic twist on the campaign spending law. An innocent phenomenon: politically naive stars like Gregg Allman blithely stepping into roles formerly reserved for Howard Hughes and W. Clement Stone. A significant yet essentially harmless phenomenon: what sort of favor could Gregg Allman possibly ask of Jimmy Carter? The now-standard joke is that he’s in line to become Carter’s Food and Drug Administration commissioner.

But it may not be as innocent as all that. Gregg Allman didn’t just wake up one morning and decide, in the spirit of patriotism and for the good of the country, that he would help Jimmy Carter become president. He did it because Phil Walden, the president of Capricorn Records and a man who holds great sway over the future of Gregg and the rest of the Allman Brothers Band, was a major Jimmy Carter supporter.

In fact, most of the performers who staged benefits for presidential candidates in 1976 — and especially those who worked for Carter and Brown — did so at the behest of powerful figures in the record industry. Many grew to like the candidates they were performing for, but it wasn’t the innocent love affair between performers and politicians it seemed to be. The real relationship was between the music-business executives and the politicians.

This is something new. For a long time in this country — and especially during the McCarthy era — politics and music did not mix. Those few performers who dared to speak out, especially left-wingers like Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger, often found their careers badly damaged as a result. The record company executives usually encouraged their stars to keep quiet: politics was controversial and controversy hurt business. (Interestingly, ex-senator Fred Harris pretty much cornered the old-time radical folkies in 1976 with the support of Seeger and Arlo Guthrie, who says he raised $65,000 for Fred during a five-week concert tour before the Oklahoma populist’s campaign aborted in April.)

In the early Sixties, politics became safer for celebrities as the Kennedy family actively wooed entertainment figures — especially middle-of-the-road types like Frank Sinatra and Andy Williams. Sargent Shriver, a Kennedy by marriage, might have been able to take advantage of the old Camelot repertory company this year if his campaign hadn’t been such an abysmal bomb. “I had friends — Neil Diamond, Tony Orlando and Dawn — who agreed to do benefits,” Shriver said in July, “and if I’d been able to stay in the race longer, I’m sure they would have.”

But more than anything else, it was the Vietnam War that led to the marriage of rock and politics. In 1968, performers like Simon and Garfunkel played fund-raising concerts for Eugene McCarthy. “Most of my political feelings were very strong anti-Nixon feelings,” says Paul Simon, who didn’t perform for a presidential candidate in 1976. “I wasn’t working for anyone as much as against Nixon in ’68 and ’72. I didn’t feel that positively or negatively about anyone this year.”