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Victor Lundberg: “An Open Letter to My Teenage Son”
From the album An Open Letter (1967)
When I stumbled upon this record in a dusty thrift store in Vero Beach, Florida, I knew I had found something special. I’ve long since disposed of all my LPs (and Mr. Lundberg was not spared), but fortunately I had the good sense to digitize this priceless piece of work before parting ways with it.
Victor Lundberg was a radio personality in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who experienced a meteoric spurt of fame with his 1967 record “An Open Letter to My Teenage Son.” The track made a brief appearance on the Billboard charts and even won a Grammy for best spoken word record. Spurred by this success, Lundberg released an entire LP devoted to his political opinions, all accompanied by background music of varying degrees of kitschy hilarity. It is a poignant document of Nixonian fury at the height of the 1960s culture war.
There are many great moments on this record, from ”To the Flower Power,” a smilingly spiteful fit of hippie-punching accompanied by Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, to ”Frogs and Freedom,” with its warnings of Medicare-as-socialism anticipating by some 40 years the political rhetoric of the contemporary American right. I’m especially fond of “A Man’s Hands,” where we hear Lundberg’s poetic side: “A man’s hands: holding his son, aiming a gun, teasing a woman…”
But the album’s indisputable highlight remains “An Open Letter to My Teenage Son.” Addressing such weighty topics as long hair on men, intergenerational politics, and the death of God, Lundberg confronts his son’s opposition to the Vietnam War. His closing lines will echo in your soul long after the last swells of the Battle Hymn of the Republic have died away:
“Your mother will love you no matter what you do, because she is a woman. And I love you too, son. But I also love our country, and the principles for which we stand. If you decide to burn your draft card, then burn your birth certificate at the same time. From that moment on, I have no son.”
For a remarkable catalog of similar records, check out WFMU’s post on the “hyper-patriotic hit single.”
Played 73 time(s).
May 11, 2010, 10:22am
