It's Only Rock 'n Roll but He Likes It: Doug Bradley's The Tracks of My Years

BY MARC LEEPSON

He grew up in the fifties and sixties embracing rock ‘n roll, the music of his generation—the music of the Vietnam War generation. He suffered through more than his share of adolescent angst in high school in the Pittsburgh suburbs, though he also played basketball, was a top student, and couldn’t get enough of early and mid-sixties rock music.

During those years, he writes, teenagers’ “music broadcast our independence, anointed our individuality. Music on the radio, from records spinning on the tiny RCA 45-RPM record player I shared with [my older brother], music constantly in my head, in the hallways, everywhere. Connecting to my body, my feet, to every other kid walking down the halls of Thomas Jefferson High School.”

His love of music dominated his life even more after he went off to college in 1965. During his four years at Bethany College in West Virginia, he enjoyed BMOC status thanks to his side gig booking big-time musical acts for his small school.

As it turned out, rock music in all of its forms—from Doo Wop to Motown, from folk-rock to acid rock —has provided the soundtrack to Doug Bradley’s life. That includes his two-year stint in the U.S. Army after being drafted on March 2, 1970, particularly during his 1971-72 Vietnam War tour of duty as an Army journalist.

So, it’s not surprising that the title and subtitle of Bradley’s forthcoming new book, his fourth, are The Tracks of My Years: A Music-Based Memoir (Legacy Book Press, 400 pp. $22.95 paper). Bradley spends the first half of this fast-reading, engrossing book focusing mostly on his music-fueled high school and college years. Much of the second half deals with his time in the war in Vietnam. Through it all it, Bradley’s enmeshed in rock music and the rock music scene, including intoxicants and the opposite sex.

During his last year at Bethany and for months afterward, Bradley wrestled with what he calls “the elephant in the room”: what do to about the draft. He talked “to everyone who’d listen—friends, family (other than my parents), clergy, counselors, strangers” about what to do. He contemplated enlisting or fleeing to Canada. He opted for law school, but dropped out before finishing the first semester. He took a factory job. Then came a low number, 85, in the first draft lottery in December 1969 and two months later he took the oath and started Basic at Fort Dix.

Throughout training—or as Bradley puts it, riffing on song lyrics as he does throughout this terrific book—“stuck inside of Basic with the freedom blues again,” he’s convinced he’ll be going to Infantry AIT and soon thereafter become a “hopeless grunt” in Vietnam. But the Army had other ideas, making him an Information Specialist and stationing him at the Army Hometown News Center in Kansas City. Then came orders for the warzone.

Music – via AFVN, EM club juke boxes, and transistor radios – was still a big part of his life in the rear. And when his Freedom Bird took off from Tan Son Nhut, every GI on board, Bradley writes, “burst into a chorus of ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place.’ Everyone smiled as if the weight of the world had been lifted from their shoulders. Little did we know we’d be carrying the weight of that godforsaken war the rest of our lives.”

Doug Bradley had readjustment issues, but soon went to grad school and, after getting his MA in English, moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he helped set up Vets House, a community-based service center for Vietnam War veterans. Then he went to work for the next 30-plus years in communications at the University of Wisconsin.

That included co-teaching a popular course, “The U. S. in Vietnam: Music, Media, and Mayhem,” for eight years with UW Professor Craig Werner. Bradley also wrote three noteworthy books, including the acclaimed look at music and the war, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War (2015), which he co-wrote with Werner.

The Tracks of My Years is a unique and valuable book. Reading it, every Vietnam War veteran will experience flashbacks—the good kind. Flashbacks to our younger days and to the music we grew up with and many of us continue to love 60 years down that long and winding road.

The heavily shaded pencil graphics by the Canadian artist and filmmaker Alain Chevarier in the graphic novel, Clay Footed Giants (Mad Cave Studios, 264 pp. $19.99 paper; $14.99 Kindle) are deceptively simple. Not long after you page through the book, Chevarier’s images of characters’ faces and bodies begin to come through loudly and clearly, with the complexity of life. And paired with the words of co-author Mark McGuire, the drawings evocatively and powerfully convey the up-and down emotional lives of main characters Mathieu and Pat, Chevarier and McGuire’s fictionalized selves.

In this sometimes intense, sometimes darkly humorous tale, the men negotiate marriage, work, child rearing, friendship, and—in the case of American-born Pat—the extreme angst of trying to come to grips with growing up the son of an alcoholic, abusive, ultra-negligent Vietnam War veteran father. The plot also involves Mathieu’s grandfather’s service in the French Resistance during World II and its emotional baggage.

As the story picks up, Pat’s quest to determine the cause of his father’s PTSD and the impact it had on his difficult childhood takes center stage. Said quest mainly involves trying to discover his father’s big Vietnam War secret: how he came to be awarded the Silver Star, why he adamantly refuses to discuss it, and why he hits the bottle and lashes out whenever anyone brings it up.

Slight spoiler: Pat learns that his father’s stress disorder has more to do with his catastrophic upbringing than with what happened to him in the Vietnam War. In other words, he had PTSD before he went to Vietnam.

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