The song that outsold The Beatles in 1966
History might be written by the victors, but art and culture is always where the losers get to have their say. A surface glance at the 1960s from a pop culture perspective paints the decade in liberal, pacifist, progressive tie-dye tones. The hippies seemed to have control. In truth, counterculture was a minority movement. The Beatles might have revolutionised art with Revolver in 1966, but most people were appalled.
The monochrome album cover for the band’s masterpiece is clearly indicative of the direction of the zeitgeist. The Vietnam War was intensifying, and tempers along with it. The times seemed fraught and frayed, but the mainstay of the American population remained conservative and onside with the government. Nothing proves that quite like the song that outsold The Beatles in 1966 in the States.
In his youth, Barry Sadler had not been all that different from the Fab Four. The New Mexico native dropped out of high school and drifted along the backroads of the south, trying to earn a crust playing in honky tonk bands. He was a far cry from the Green Beret image that would soon transform his fortunes.
He might have been wayfaring around on the open roads, but he later admitted that he was “going nowhere”. So, directionless and adrift, he did what many young men before him had done, Jimi Hendrix included, and joined the army. Unlike Hendix and a legion of others, Sadler was able to make the position stick. He soon became an elite Green Beret and was deployed in Vietnam.
He would be recalled before long after he injured his leg on a punji stick—the practice of concealing an array of spikes in the undergrowth and covering them in a form of poison, often excrement, to demobilise a unit. But Sadler’s duties weren’t over when he returned from the war. No, his contributions to the armed forces were just getting started.
With a posture so upright you could use his back as an ironing board, and a jaw you could trust, Sadler cut the perfect image of an upstanding young soldier. So, he was chosen to be the face on the cover for Robin Moore’s 1965 best-selling novel, The Green Berets. Things moved swiftly for Sadler thereafter.
Moore was a writer with art connections and when he heard that Sadler was a workable songwriter, he had a bright idea. From his perspective, plenty of hippies were making money from songs that disagreed with the war effort, but given that most Americans were in favour of the folly, surely there was money to be made from the flipside, too?
The army veteran’s number one hit
So, he polished up one of Sadler’s songs, decorated it with more pomp and pride than the “half-bombed” soldier himself, who just so happened to be highly glazed over on the novel’s sleeve, polished up the image of the wayward veteran, and presented the track to RCA. They instantly saw the appeal of playing both sides of the market and ‘The Ballad of the Green Beret’ was recorded swiftly over the Christmas of 1965.
It was released just as quickly after RCA got the backing of the Pentagon over the right to use an image of an active serviceman on the cover, though you suspect there also might have been more reasons than merely confirming they were contractually ironclad for seeking the authority’s approval on the song. And once it was released, it became an instant hit. In a pop culture counterpoint to the peace and love arts of the age, it seemed to galvanise the pro-war stance of many. Even John Wayne snapped up the movie rights to Moore’s book.
But whether Sadler was cut out for the life he had been polished up and thrust towards was another matter. The single may have become the biggest hit in the US in 1966, outselling The Beatles at their best and any other competitors from the left, it had made its point in one, and the album and subsequent singles failed to be flogged in any great measure.
So, Sadler became a drifter once more. Ultimately, he shot the country singer Lee Emerson Bellamy in the head, killing him in a dispute over a mutual girlfriend. He would only serve a brief few years in prison. Eventually, he faced further brushes with the law before being shot in the head himself while training rebels in Guatemala. He’d survive the attack but later die of complications in 1989, aged 49.
However, there is no doubt that he made his strange mark on American history. All that said, while he might have won the battle of ‘66, it was the art kids who won the cultural war.
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