The Ballad of Sly and Brian

It’s impossible, and in a way inappropriate, to try to say anything more about music icons Sly Stone and Brian Wilson, both of whom passed away recently. It’s almost as if we’ve run out of words to describe the indelible impact their songs had on us individually, and collectively.

But there was one night, in 1971 in Vietnam of all places, where these two pioneers of popular music joined forces in a most unusual way.

Sly played lead on this special occasion. Or I should say his performance at the film version of Woodstock did. Curiously, the U.S. Army screened films like it and MASH—hell they even showed Easy Rider to us rear echelon soldiers during my 365 days at Long Binh Post in South Vietnam! Usually this meant sitting in the dark on lawn chairs staring at images projected on makeshift screens for us REMFs. But a couple U.S. military establishments had honest-to-goodness movie theaters for film lovers, and one of those was at nearby Bien Hoa Air Base. And one of those Southeast Asian nights, they were showing Woodstock.

Woodstock in Vietnam? How crazy could this war get? Maybe the Army realized a bunch of us draftees and enlistees had been there or had wanted to be there or were part of the Woodstock generation? This was too perfect a juxtaposition to be missed, so a bunch of us found a way to get over to Bien Hoa to catch the flick.

Before the movie, we went out near the bunker line to get high. Later at the theater, they stopped Woodstock just as Sly and the Family Stone were cranking up the volume on “Higher.” The lights came on, and we were ordered to leave the theater because the Viet Cong were nearing the perimeter and we had to get our ass to a bunker. With the movie’s sound track off, you could hear mortars exploding and sirens sounding. But while most everybody was heading toward the exits, several of us were standing on our seats, arms raised, singing along with Sly at the top of our lungs:

Feelin’s gettin’ stronger
Music’s gettin’ longer too…
I want to, I want to
I want to,
I wanna take you higher…

A GI revolution in A major, albeit momentarily.

Luckily, we weren’t busted by the MPs but were rudely deposited at our Long Binh home. When we got back to our hooch to tell our buddies about Sly and Woodstock, they were listening to “Sloop John B” by the Beach Boys and arguing over who was singing lead. Half of them claimed Brian Wilson, the rest Mike Love. The crazy thing about “Sloop John B” is that it wasn’t a Vietnam song but had become an EM jukebox favorite thanks to lines like “I wanna go home” and “this is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.” Damn straight those were Vietnam messages all right.

As our hooch’s music arbiter, I was asked to resolve the Beach Boy/”Sloop John B” dispute. I took the occasion to serenade my buddies with a chorus of Boom laka-laka-laka, Boom laka-lak-goon-ka boom and claim that Sly Stone was singing lead. Got everybody to laugh, listen to the story about Woodstock at Bien Hoa, and stop arguing.

Oh, which Beach Boy sang lead on “Sloop John B?” Both Brian Wilson and Mike Love, in separate verses…even if Al Jardine was the stimulus for the song. Go figure…

All I know is their music—Sly and the Beach Boys, not to mention all the other greats from that era—got us through that damn war. Even if it was one of the worst trips we’d ever been on…

Appreciate you, Sly and Brian. Keep going higher. Maybe sing a duet upstairs while you’re at it.

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Vietnam veteran Doug Bradley is the author of Who’ll Stop the Rain: Respect, Remembrance, and Reconciliation in Post-Vietnam America, co-author with Craig Werner of We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War, which was named best music book of 2015 by Rolling Stone magazine, and DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle, now available as an audiobook. His music-based memoir, The Tracks of My Years, https://legacybookpress.com/tracks_years/ will be released by Legacy Book Press in August.