There are very few good Buffalo Springfield videos on You Tube, probably because the band is still relatively obscure except for a few songs that everyone knows. But when the little-noticed drummer from an underrated band dies, his obituary still makes the news because the 60's generation that now works in journalism knows a noteworthy death when it sees one.

Buffalo Springfield was a folk-rock band from Los Angeles which stayed together only a few years, long enough to release three albums and spawn the careers of Neil Young and Stephen Stills. They ended the 1960's playing with other people, but their great songs and ensemble cast made Buffalo Springfield the closest thing that America had to the Beatles. And I don't give damn what anyone ways about that comparison. I'm sticking to it. The drummer, Dewey Martin, who died this week at 68, was not well-known, but his death reminds us that his generation of rock stars is now dying off one by one. It's time to appreciate what Buffalo Springfield did.

The story of how Buffalo Springfield got together is like something out of a slapstick comedy. Neil Young and bass player Bruce Palmer went to Los Angeles to find Stephen Stills, who becam acquainted with Young a few years earlier. According to Wikipedia, "Roughly a week later, discouraged at having been unable to locate Stills and ready to depart for San Francisco, they were stuck in traffic on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles when Stills, Furay and Friedman, sitting in their white van, recognized Young’s black 1953 Pontiac hearse, which just happened to be passing by in the opposite direction. After an illegal u-turn by Furay, some shouting, hand-waving and much excitement, the four musicians realized that they were united in their determination to put together a band."

The Beatles' influence on 1960's rock is well-documented, but an under-appreciated result of their success is abandoning the bandleader model for an ensemble approach. Buffalo Springfield had several leaders, Stills and Young, and most of the band wrote and sang. That created a diverse sound which includes folk, country, psychedelia and rock. It also means the band did not have a distinct sound, so while some of their songs are well known, many fans do not realize they emanate from the same group. That's kind of a compliment, in my book.

A pleasant demo of "Flying on the Ground is Wrong." Dewey the drummer is nowhere to be found

Buffalo Springfield's most famous song is "For What It's Worth," featured in nearly every movie about the 1960's. Most of us know the song from its chorus ("stop, hey, what's that sound"). But don't overlook the others, like "Bluebird," "Mr. Soul" and "I Am a Child," which turned into a Neil Young staple. My fave, though, is the little-known, "Flying on the Ground is Wrong," which unfortunately has the worst edit in rock history, as some engineer or producter stitched together two parts of the song in the clumsiest way possible. That does not destroy the song, but a better, acoustic version appears on the Buffalo Springfield box set. Scroll back up to hear it, and ignore the boring visual.

Buffalo Springfield perform "Rock and Roll Woman" before an audience of squares

In the 1960's, rock musicians must have thought it would last forever. It didn't. Neil Young went on to 40 years of success, and Stephen Stills made it work with Crosby, Stills and Nash, but even CSN only had a few good albums. Dewey Martin, the recently deceased drummer, kept the Springfield going for a few years with other musicians, but Stills and Young got a court order to stop the exploitation. According to Wikipedia, Martin eventually quit music to become a car mechanic, returning to music from time to time. He probably thought he would find success as a drummer with someone else, but rock history is all about five-year careers, with the lucky few chugging along for decades.

Whether you can read this or not, this is a Buffalo Springfield concert poster from the late 1960's

Reseaching Dewey Martin was enlightening. I had never heard of him, and I have most of Buffalo Springfield's work. Not every drummer is as famous as Ringo. Dewey apparently was a good guy. Here's a first-person account from Rolling Stone's website about Martin's character:

Gene Herd | 2/6/2009, 4:49 pm EST

I saw plenty of bar brawls during my days as a club musician, but none was as satisfying as one night in 1968 that my friend Dewey Martin punched out two beer-soaked rednecks who were ragging on him for his long blond hair at the club where my band was playing in Portland Oregon. Dewey, who was wearing little rectangle tinted glasses at the time was a ringer for John Lennon. He had just dropped by to say hello to our band. It started in the men’s room when one of them said to Dewey, “You’re in the wrong bathroom aren’t you sweetie?” Dewey told him to “Fuck off,” and walked out. As he went through the door, the redneck hit him from behind. Dewey turned and floored him with one punch. When Bubba’s friend came all the way across the dance floor to help, Dewey punched him out too. In case you’ve forgotten, hippie-length hair was not a popular hairstyle among the moral majority in the 60s. Longhaired kids were a favorite target of straight-arrow necks because longhairs were usually too intimidated to fight back. Dewey was an exception to that rule. Wherever you are Dewey, I hope they let you sit in.

So, Dewey didn't put up with any shit. Other first-person accounts of Dewey Martin in Rolling Stone further speak to his kindness and decency, frankly a rare set of qualities in a rock star. I didn't know the guy, but I'll say this: drumming for one of the greatest American bands of the 1960's is good enough for me.

In 1967, Bob Dylan and The Band holed up in a house near Woodstock, New York, to record some demos for the record company. Those demos were heavily bootlegged and the record company finally gave in by formally releasing some of the songs in 1975. The album is called the Basement Tapes. I think the songs really were recorded in the basement. Although this was taped in 1967, the songs are not psychedelic. They are more rustic and, for that reason, timeless. Dylan would never sound this way again. And I doubt that lyrics like this were ever written again. Scroll down after the YouTube link for the words. Read them out loud to the next person you meet.

Well, the comic book and me, just us, we caught the bus.
The poor little chauffeur, though, she was back in bed
On the very next day, with a nose full of pus.
Yea! Heavy and a bottle of bread
Yea! Heavy and a bottle of bread
Yea! Heavy and a bottle of bread

It's a one-track town, just brown, and a breeze, too,
Pack up the meat, sweet, we're headin' out
For Wichita in a pile of fruit.
Get the loot, don't be slow, we're gonna catch a trout
Get the loot, don't be slow, we're gonna catch a trout
Get the loot, don't be slow, we're gonna catch a trout

Now, pull that drummer out from behind that bottle.
Bring me my pipe, we're gonna shake it.
Slap that drummer with a pie that smells.
Take me down to California, baby
Take me down to California, baby
Take me down to California, baby

Yes, the comic book and me, just us, we caught the bus.
The poor little chauffeur, though, she was back in bed
On the very next day, with a nose full of pus.
Yea! Heavy and a bottle of bread
Yea! Heavy and a bottle of bread
Yea! Heavy and a bottle of bread

Now that the Bush administration is history, it's worth noting that the consequences of the Bush administration are still with us. The Iraq war will last for years. Some people predicted this would happen when the war began in 2003, but most Americans supported the war and actually thought Saddam Hussein played a role in the 9/11 attacks.

You don't just invade a country and then leave. In the case of the Iraq war, we invaded and destroyed the place and handed the Iraqi people a civil war. A philosopher might argue that we have a moral obligation to stick around to clean up the mess. A contrarian might say that the arsonist should not be allowed to put out the fire.

Where am I going with this? One consequence of the Bush administration is that some very good investigative journalists made a living writing excellent books about the inner workings of the administration and how the war was planned and executed. One of these writers, Thomas Ricks, wrote a book called "Fiasco." I read the book, and I do not recall that Ricks was a flaming liberal who wanted to embarass the administration. But the title of the book says it all.

Ricks has now written another book, a sequal to "Fiasco." He calls it "The Gamble." The review in the New York Times is quite sobering, reporting that Ricks believes the war is only half over. If that's the case, the hundreds of billions of dollars have yet to be spent on this folly. Here's an excerpt from the review:

Thomas E. Ricks’s devastating 2006 book, “Fiasco,” provided a lucid, tough-minded assessment of the Iraq war, brilliantly summing up the political and military mistakes that had brought the United States, after more than three years of occupation, to a terrible tipping point there. Drawing upon the author’s reporting on the ground in Iraq and his many sources within the uniformed military, “Fiasco” chronicled how the United States “went to war in Iraq with scant solid international support and on the basis of incorrect information,” and how flawed assumptions, drastic planning failures and plain old-fashioned hubris led to a “derelict occupation” that fueled a burgeoning insurgency.

In his equally powerful and illuminating new book, “The Gamble,” Mr. Ricks, who covered the military for The Washington Post from 2000 to 2008, takes up the story where he left off in “Fiasco.” This volume recounts how Iraq came close to unraveling in 2006, how the Bush administration finally conceded it was off course, and how a new set of commanders — headed by Gen. David H. Petraeus and Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno — began putting a radically different strategy in place.

. . .

While Mr. Ricks praises General Petraeus’s success in helping the military regain the strategic initiative in Iraq as an “extraordinary achievement” — reducing violence and reviving “American prospects in the war” — he also reminds us that the surge was meant to “create a breathing space that would then enable Iraqi politicians to find a way forward,” and that that outcome is still unclear. “The best grade” the surge campaign can be given, he says, “is a solid incomplete.”

. . .

Although Mr. Ricks writes that he is saddened by the war’s “obvious costs to Iraqis and Americans” and by “the incompetence and profligacy with which the Bush administration conducted much of it,” he adds that he has come to the conclusion that “we can’t leave.”

As Mr. Ricks sees it, the regional and global repercussions of failure in Iraq would be far more dire than those incurred by the United States’ withdrawal from Vietnam — ranging, in this case, from a full-blown civil war to “a spreading war in the Middle East,” from a stronger Iran presiding over a Finlandized Iraq to the rise of a brutal new Iraq led by “younger, tougher versions” of Saddam Hussein, who “by the time of the invasion was an aging, almost toothless tiger.”

Other assessments offered by Mr. Ricks in this volume are equally provocative. He writes that as a presidential candidate Senator John McCain “seemed most detached from reality, essentially not listening to Petraeus and instead laying out a concept for an ending that seemed unreachable,” describing Iraq “in terms that were eerily similar to how the Bush administration had described it on the eve of the invasion, as a country that the Americans would transform and turn into an engine of change for the entire region.” And Mr. Ricks predicts that with a smaller American presence in Iraq and more Iraqi elections scheduled for 2009, this year will most likely prove to be “a particularly difficult” one for President Obama and the Pentagon.

. . .

He adds that the Bush White House was so reluctant to acknowledge the worsening course of the war, suppressing dissent and “substituting loyalty for analysis,” that without the midterm elections of November 2006, which transferred control of Congress to the Democrats, the administration “might never have contemplated the major revisions in strategy and leadership that it would make in the following two months.” Until the election, he writes, “Bush seemed satisfied with blather. After it, he began to speak about the war seriously.”

. . .

This volume leaves the reader with an understanding of the hard-won military dynamics of the surge and the professionalism and competence of the generals who designed and executed it. But the dominant impression left by “The Gamble” and “Fiasco” is one of the devastating consequences of an ill-conceived and ill-planned war — an unnecessary war of choice, waged with too few troops and no overarching strategic plan, a war that was going badly but was allowed to continue along the same unfruitful path for three years by a White House “in denial” about its downward trend. It is a war, Mr. Ricks writes, that may well become “America’s longest war, passing the American Revolution and even the Vietnam War.”

“No matter how the U.S. war in Iraq ends,” he writes at the conclusion of this important and chilling book, “it appears that today we may be only halfway through it. That is, the quiet consensus emerging among many people who have served in Iraq is that we likely will have American soldiers engaged in combat in Iraq until at least 2015 — which would put us now at about the midpoint of the conflict.”

In other words, he adds, “the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet happened.”

A seismic shift is slowly taking place in American constitutional law. The modern Supreme Court, stacked with Republican appointees, is little by little doing away with a time-honored principle that was intended to keep the police honest: the exclusionary rule.

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, and it also requires that the police obtain a warrant before they can search your home or other private spaces. The question is how do we enforce the Fourth Amendment? Of course, you can train the police to respect the Fourth Amendment, but what if they get their hands of evidence that can be used against you in court, and the evidence was obtained without a warrant? Then what?

It was this scenario which gave rise to the exclusionary rule, which holds that evidence which the police had no right to obtain cannot be used against you in court. Even if the evidence would give the police a slam-dunk case in court. The exclusionary rule ensures that the police will get it right before evidence goes before a jury. If the evidence was obtained illegally, i.e., without a warrant, the judge throws it out before trial. That means there may not be a trial, without the evidence. For decades, the courts decided that it was better that guilty people go free rather than allow the police to get used to scheming to find evidence without probable cause, which is necessary to secure a warrant. The benefits of the exclusionary rule include the understanding that the police will not rummage through your stuff or invade your privacy without good reason. Ask anyone who had an unpleasant encounter with the police without doing anything wrong how important it is to ensure that the police have probable cause and a warrant before poking through your stuff.

The Court's Chief Justice is John Roberts, who as a young lawyer in the 1980's suggested doing away with the exclusionary rule. According to the New York Times, a recent Supreme Court case, Herring v. United States, is another step in the slow process of erasing the exclusionary rule. In that case, the Court said that evidence obtained as a result of the police's erroneous belief that someone had an outstanding warrant against them did not have to be thrown out pursuant to the exclusionary rule. The outdated warrant was still in a police computer. Someone screwed up. The Times reported a few weeks ago:

Taking aim at one of the towering legacies of the Warren Court, its landmark 1961 decision applying the exclusionary rule to the states, the chief justice’s majority opinion established for the first time that unlawful police conduct should not require the suppression of evidence if all that was involved was isolated carelessness. That was a significant step in itself. More important yet, it suggested that the exclusionary rule itself might be at risk.

The Supreme Court is moving in the direction that would allow the police to get away with obtaining evidence in violation of the rules so long as the police misconduct is not too serious. Minor errors -- such as computer screw-ups -- are not enough to invoke the exclusionary rule.

This issue first surfaced a few years ago, when the court signaled that it might erase the exclusionary rule, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that "much had changed since the Mapp decision in 1961 [which held that state and local police officers must adhere to the exclusionary rule]. People whose rights were violated may now sue police officers, and police departments are more professional. In light of these factors, he wrote, “resort to the massive remedy of suppressing evidence of guilt is unjustified.”

The Herring decision a few weeks ago which further eroded the exclusionary rule was decided 5-4, with the Court's reliable conservatives siding with the police. For at least the next four years, while Obama is president, no conservatives will be appointed to the court. But the Supreme Court does have a rock solid conservative majority. Five justices can do away with the exclusionary rule once and for all before Obama can start balancing out the court. That cannot happen unless people retire, and there is no way of knowing when that will happen, as Supreme Court justices like to hang around on the court for decades.

Most people are not constitutional scholars and would therefore not know what the exclusionary rule is. But they would also assume that the police have to follow the rules like everyone else. There is no perfect way to enforce the Fourth Amendment. What is bothersome is that no politician or judge will be taken to the woodshed for coming down harder against criminal defendants and advocating the end of the exclusionary rule. Conservatives call the exclusionary rule a "technicality" that allows the guilty to walk free. I prefer to call it constitutional dur process. We can go round and round on this. Imagine if we lived in a society where issues like this were debated all the time.