I saw the news yesterday, in
a diary by Catte Nappe, that BJ Thomas just fell off the dash. Though my musical taste is fairly broad, I’ve never much cottoned to him, and I was a bit surprised that news of his death hit me so hard.
I do know why. It’s on account of he sang one of the two best anti-war songs of the Vietnam era, “Honorable Peace.” Before it, in the late ‘60s, he some big hits with the semi-schlocky numbers for which he is now being remembered. After it, in the mid-’70s, he found religion in response to a bad drug habit, and sank into the soulless abyss of the Contemporary Christian charts.
But in between came the murderous Christmas bombing of North Vietnam, a massive war crime perpetrated in 1972 by the inhuman Nixon/Kissinger combo. Late on Christmas Eve, a few days after the bombing started, blues guy Barry Goldberg and songwriter Gerry Goffin (who co-wrote all those Brill building hits with Carole King) scored some studio time and pulled together a crew to cut a song they had just written. BJ Thomas took the lead vocals, backed by musicians from a band called Bulldog, which featured ex-Young Rascals Gene Cornish and Dino Danelli.
“Honorable Peace” is brilliant. The hatred of Nixon so palpable, the songwriting so sharp, that it was yanked from FM radio almost as soon as demos of it were circulated. No 45s were ever pressed, far as I can tell. It just vanished. Even my music geek friends and veteran comrades these days say, “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
I never forgot the few times I heard it broadcast, but I couldn’t even remember that it was BJ Thomas. I only found the damn thing again on an album of his in a cut-out bin in the early ‘80s, but as soon the needle dropped, it turned out I remembered every word:
Oh but what kind of logic
In what kind of brain
What manner of man
Would think it was sane
What kind of soul
And what heart that beats
Would chose to kill millions
For an honorable peace
The first verse speaks to the generation gap of those years, then the second disposes of the chin stroking which it greeted it, and all the wars since:
There are those who will argue
It's all too complex
You must live past the present
To see its effects
As if the peasant in the field
Hearing planes in the sky
Waits for history to tell him
It's his turn to die
And for Kossacks of my generation, it puts words to a recurrent mantra:
I know the tide of protest has passed us somehow,
But when do you speak out if you don’t speak out now.
[Fellow olds, do me a solid and let me know if you recall ever hearing it back in the day.]