The first rock star to play at the White House
Like knighthoods in the UK, an invite to The White House can often spark controversy throughout the music industry. For centuries, the creative arts seem to have stood at odds with the establishment since philosophical yearning and protestation hold a central position in many lyrical and literary themes. With this in mind, it’s not difficult to understand why ‘White House’ and ‘Rock Music’ rarely crop up side-by-side in games of word association.
Despite such dissonance, Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones received a knighthood in 2003, much to Keith Richards’ indignation. Likewise, the White House has hosted many rock stars throughout its meandering history. Undoubtedly, the most spectacular and memorable rock ‘n’ roll moment the 224-year-old building has ever hosted was in 2010, during Barack Obama’s presidency.
Airing on July 28th, 2010, Paul McCartney: In Performance at the White House was hosted at the White House to coincide with McCartney’s acceptance of the ‘Gershwin Prize for Popular Song’. McCartney performed at the event, inviting the likes of Elvis Costello, Dave Grohl, Herbie Hancock, Emmylou Harris, Faith Hill, Jonas Brothers, Lang Lang, Corinne Bailey Rae, and Jack White and Stevie Wonder to enrich the line-up.
With legendary rock figures like Jack White, Elvis Costello and Dave Grohl present, the evening will live on in White House history, but it was by no means the first time a rockstar had performed at the grand venue.
Bizarrely enough, the first president to drag the White House into the rock age was Richard Nixon. As he took the reins from Lyndon B. Johnson in 1969, the Vietnam War was sadly no closer to a peaceful conclusion. While grappling with the overseas inferno, he set his sights on a more modern entertainment outlook for the White House.
For decades, the house hosted opera, ballet, jazz and classical performances to match the refined status of the elite politician, but Nixon humoured the tastes of his daughters’ generation. Was this fatherly love or an olive branch extended to a disorderly, countercultural generation?
In the late 1960s, Nixon’s eldest daughter, Tricia, became a huge fan of The Turtles, the Californian band responsible for saccharine pop rock hits like ‘Happy Together’ and ‘Elenore’. Naturally, she was delighted to hear that her father had arranged for the group to perform at the White House on May 10th, 1969.
At first, they hesitated as outspoken detractors of Nixon’s political persuasion, but their manager ultimately pressured acquiescence. “We were given President Lincoln’s library to use as our dressing room,” frontman Howard Kaylan wrote in the book Shell Shocked. “It was amazing. We were loaded — high from smoking pot back at the hotel and a wee bit tipsy from all the French champagne that was being freely dispensed —and we were roaming around the most important home in America unsupervised.”
Bands of The Turtles’ ilk were no strangers to inebriated performance, but the champagne may have tipped the scale that evening. When the group finally took the stage, Mark Volman could barely stand straight, let alone play his guitar.
“He fell off the stage a few times, much to the amusement of all present,” Kaylan recalled. Fortunately for the band, President Nixon was not present for the performance. “I am absolutely positive, considering our states of mind that evening, that I — or some other equally messed-up Turtle — would have given him an earful of our contempt and probably would have ended up in Gitmo,” he added.
Ostensibly, Nixon didn’t get a detailed rundown of the evening’s events. Publicity stunt or not, he continued to invite rock bands to the White House through the early 1970s. In 1970, he invited The Guess Who for a performance that he attended excitedly on the condition they omitted the supposedly anti-nationalist hit ‘American Woman’.
Listen to ‘Happy Together’ by The Turtles below.
