I wish I could write a coming-of-age story like Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe’s frisky tale of his time on the road in 1973 with a rowdy but caring rock band. I’d love to wring that kind of juice out of my life, to tap into the myth of music as a tool for self-discovery and sexual awakening. Well, the myth was true for me, but it was far from heartwarming. There are many reasons why. Crowe’s movie is set in the years when the anguish of the sixties had more or less calmed down. My trajectory was much more traumatic; also more intense. It was all about love and disappointment, yearning and satisfaction that led to yearning again. I learned to take risks and make real connections, but the death and destruction that I witnessed left me with a rueful self-assessment. I would have to learn to live within my means and without my dreams.
Eventually I found a new subject in the thorny issue of gender, and a new persona through the sex wars of the seventies. It seemed to me that the things I’d always hated—racism, warmongering, police brutality—were all aspects of patriarchal culture, and that the things I loved—such as androgyny in rock—were vectors of rebellion against those structures. I spent a good part of the next twenty years attacking machismo and its symbols, which were easy to parody, as are all forms of arbitrary power. Like any hegemonic class, the whiteboys, as my feminist friends called them, had no critique of their dominance. I was there to provide it.
I waged this combat on the page rather than in the street, but it was no less aggressive. I wrote with a shiv in my prose, although I had to fight the inner suspicion that I was carrying out a revenge mission on behalf of my own feelings of failed masculinity. Would I have become the sexist enemy I was fighting against if I could have carried off the macho thing? In the corners of my fantasies the question nagged at me. But if we have to wait for activists who aren’t motivated by personal problems, nothing will ever change. Feminism gave me a potent analysis of power, and its love child, gay liberation, allowed me to resolve (at least provisionally) the question of my identity. Am I gay? More or less. Homosexual? Not only. My sexuality has always been a congeries, but I’m satisfied with the shake, full of stems and seeds as it may be. Identity politics supplied two things I badly needed: a struggle that inspired me and a place on the sexual map. It also allowed me to leave behind the feelings of pain and failure that had haunted me at the end of the sixties, culminating in my massive writing block. Janis Joplin’s death was the trigger, but it persisted long after my grief settled into melancholy.
Years would pass before I crawled out of that hole. I had to invent a new style that didn’t seem stylized, and a voice that wasn’t artificial, as my previous persona of the hip arbiter had been. It was a slow and uncertain process. I learned to tolerate days, sometimes weeks, when nothing I wrote held together. But I pounded away at the typewriter, sitting there all night, crafting a paragraph that felt genuine, and then another. By 1971 I was finally able to complete an essay that had nothing to do with rock or youth culture. The theme was my deep attraction, sexual and otherwise, to WASPs. The piece was bought by Harper’s, whose editor, Lewis Lapham, confessed that he had the same obsession with Jews. I credit him with giving me my profession back, but I still couldn’t turn out copy on a regular basis. And I couldn’t bear to live in New York—there were too many absent faces and aching memories.
So I retreated to a small town on the Connecticut coast, not far from the Rhode Island border. Judith and I lived in a commune until it broke apart, along with our marriage. I won’t go into the details, except to say that our experiment in free love disintegrated in the usual explosion. At some point I was left alone in the house. That’s when I had my last encounter with someone who reminded me of Groovy. By then he’d become a spirit that popped up in my memory. At odd moments I would think of the stud I met at Tom’s house, who seduced me with the sound of his guitar; or the dude who introduced me to acid in San Francisco; or the kid from California who told me that I was afraid to love. I have no idea what became of any of them, and I suppose it doesn’t matter—Groovy the man wasn’t really what attracted me. It was the type, maybe even the idea. He was the hippie I yearned to be.
After the sixties ended I didn’t think I would ever meet such a person again, but I did. He was hardly a classic of the Groovy breed: too down-and-out, but by then I was full of self-doubt too. I bonded with him at an event that reminded me of how quickly the recent past becomes the stuff of nostalgia. I’d been sitting around the house in Connecticut, brooding; a college radio station was playing in the background, and the DJ said something about “a blast from the past.” He was plugging an event called Sixties Night. Only two years after the decade ended, it was easy to imagine that it had all happened in a dream, but the need to revisit the era persisted, especially for those too young to have participated in the Summer of Love. They were snacking on milk and Oreos while I was chewing ’shrooms. Now they could experience a simulacrum of, at least, the vibe.
The venue for this sixties spectacle was a bar in Westerly, a Rhode Island border town so strapped for cash from its only industry, which was fishing, that it called itself the Cat Food Capital of America. But Westerly was only a short drive away from my house, so I decided to check out the gig. In those days, bars in smallish cities might have gay nights or polka nights, whatever brought out a special clientele. The performers often weren’t billed; all that mattered was the theme, and in this case the era was the point. The owner had hung a frayed mandala in the window, and I could smell marijuana rising from the small knot of kids in the doorway. In their processed tie-dyes, they looked like mannequins in a retro-clothing shop. A car cruised by; empty beer cans were tossed at the crowd. I screwed up what was left of my courage and walked inside. Except for the bartender, I was the oldest cat in the joint.
Long hair was no mark of pacifism by then; it had become the signature of young working-class guys, and you never knew, when they raised a fist, whether they were greeting you or getting ready to beat you up. So I wasn’t sure whether the dudes standing around were there to hit on hippie chicks. It would be quite a task for any musician to reach this audience. The amps buzzed loudly. The room was bathed in ultraviolet light to mask the corroded walls. This was the kind of place that paid off fire inspectors. I decided to stay close to the flickering exit sign.
Then I noticed the high-schoolers gathered around the cramped stage. These were the kids who wished they had been there when it was cool to be a freak. I could tell that they spent a lot of time in their rooms, letting the sound of a reedy voice suffuse their suffering spirits and awaken their deepest recesses of love. It wasn’t all that easy in 1972 to find songs that inspired those associations. Regularity reigned, rhythm passed for blues, and there was no real place for the meanderings of acid rock. This was pure nostalgia for a world that never was but really could have been, and the music was the only part of it that remained.
Off to the side, I saw the performer tuning his guitar. His glum expression put me in mind of that Creedence Clearwater song about a touring band stuck in Lodi again. This was a guy who didn’t rate a roadie; he had to carry his own equipment. He looked more haggard than hip, with his stringy hair and the makings of creases in his cheeks. Hard living isn’t pretty after the age of, say, thirty-five, and he’d already crossed that threshold. At a signal from the bartender, he slunk to the mike and launched his act. A prerecorded track provided the beat, and he wasn’t even singing a song from the sixties—not technically. This tune had come out in 1970, and it always made me want to shoot up a post office.
Everybody’s beautiful in their own way
Under God’s heaven, the world’s gonna find a way
The set went on for maybe twenty minutes. When it ended, there was wan applause. I didn’t think he deserved a warmer response, but I was well aware of what a poor reception feels like, and it brought out my sympathy. So I dragged myself over to the nook that passed for a dressing room, and introduced myself. I told him that I used to be a rock critic. He summoned a weary smile, as if he didn’t care about my former profession. (That was a good sign.) Then he offered me a deal—if I put him up for the night, he’d take me to Woodstock. I didn’t know what the fuck he meant. I thought it might have something to do with sex. He had the hustler look, though it may have been the desperation of a traveling musician who has to pay for his own room. I suppose that was part of his appeal.
“Very good stuff,” he said, pointing to his pants pocket. I must have let my emotions show, because he explained that he was talking about LSD. I tried my best to hide my disappointment. Not that I was looking to hook up with a guy, but I was hungry for company. He made me feel the loss of my wife and of the commune we’d joined with so much hope. I wasn’t used to being on my own in a coastal town. I’d never heard anything as isolating as the sound of gulls on a narrow, empty street. I’m sure that’s why I saw an erotic spark in his tired eyes.
I remember thinking, I’ll take him home, he’ll drop acid, and I’ll watch him trip out. That was all I felt up for. I hadn’t had sex with a man in several years, other than the intoxicated rubbing that took place in the commune as part of our group-love experiments. I tried to control my nervousness as we drove to my place. He gazed out the car window; I fiddled with the radio dial. It was cold for October. There was a coating of frost on the front porch. I grabbed an armful of logs from the woodpile and threw a few into the pot-bellied stove that heated the living room. He plopped down on the couch, stretched his legs, and asked if I lived here alone.
“Now I do.”
“Ah,” he sighed, “the changes.”
He leaned back on the sofa, so that his hair fell against the cushion behind him. “The whole thing sort of slides by,” he said. “I mean, it’s hard. So phony. But … so what. Right?”
He’d had a promising start, a nibble from a label, but he could never, “you know, grab it.” I told him he was lucky. Everyone I knew who did grab it is gone. Not everyone, of course—not physically. But one way or another.
It didn’t matter to me whether he’d fallen from the grace of a one-shot song that made the bottom of the Hot 100 charts, or whether he’d even gotten that far. Some people possess the mystery of music, its uncanny ability to put people in touch with yearnings that have no object except for wholeness. That was what it meant for me to be in the presence of a rocker, even one who reminded me of a dog in a rainstorm, soaked and puny. I had to stop myself from trying to fluff him up.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of foil. Inside were two small tabs. I decided to go for it, and we sat before the fire, sipping tea, waiting. An hour later we were lying on the rug. He slipped out of his shoes and put his feet on mine, hesitantly. He slid them gently up and down my legs. I wriggled toward him until our bodies touched. We lay like that for quite a while, communing with the fire log sparking. I heard him breathe deeply, felt the brush of his aspiration against my cheek, caught its odor in my nostrils. He took off his shirt and put my hand on his chest. The hairs were downy against my fingertips. He put my hand on his cock. “Ta-da!” he said.
And then he kissed me. Lightly, with the tip of his tongue parting my lips and flicking my teeth. I felt a wave of nausea. I was no stranger to blow jobs, but I’d never been kissed by a man. Disgusting, I thought. But a line from a girl-group song reverberated in my mind. “It’s in his kiss, that’s where it is.”
Somehow we got out of our clothes, and he wound himself around me, grinding slowly against my belly. Soon we were balls to balls. Every now and then I would open my eyes to see the embers in the stove glowing like tiny eyes. A dry radiant heat rose from our bodies and enclosed us. Rabbis in heaven were frowning down on me. I gazed at his black hair, the strands swirling around his eyes. In my altered state, he had Don McNeill’s face, the friend lost to me. I realized that I’d wanted all along to hold Don, to nestle him and shelter him, but I never did, because guys don’t do that—and we were guys.
I’m not sure how we untangled ourselves. It was daylight when I woke up, and my pal was gone, leaving only the foil wrapping from the acid behind. I raced from room to room, thinking he might be in the attic or even under my bed. Maybe he’d crawled off to sleep in the bath. But he was nowhere to be found. An awful scenario presented itself to me. He’d had a homosexual panic, walked to the end of the spit of land near our house, and plunged into the Long Island Sound, disappearing in the black brine. I flashed on him washing up among the beer cans. I would be responsible for that, forever.
Then I calmed myself down. There was no evidence that he’d panicked. I didn’t even know if we’d had sex. The whole thing could have been an LSD hallucination, a wish come to life, not just for him, but for contact with what I adored in rock. I couldn’t say that I’d finally fucked a rocker, since I wasn’t sure I actually had. I couldn’t even think of his name. The odor of his body, which lingered in my nostrils, was all I could remember. Hidden desire, repressed queerness, grace—whatever he meant to me, it was fleeting, evanescent, like the music and the emotions it produced. I thought of that Neil Young song about being helpless. Yes, I was helpless before the feeling of love and loss, always would be. Helpless.
In the Facebookable universe, I imagine, everyone has a page. But you won’t find my Groovy there. I don’t think anybody goes by that name anymore; it’s part of the faded enigma of the sixties. And yet, there are times when I think I see him. Usually it’s just some stringy kid with an advanced degree in tweeting. I have to remind myself that I’m living in a present that sees the past through a glass wryly.
The sixties are a blur that comes into focus only in the froggy faces of the rockers who’ve survived, in a retro style more lurid than it should be, in movies awash in historical details but stripped of their true complexity. Also in books that offer rueful retrospectives on the counterculture by those who have nothing but tenure to show for their dreams. In these artifacts, the sixties are seen as either a puff of Acadian smoke or a dangerous diversion. The best defense against such distortions is to insist on radical subjectivity when describing that time, so there’s no pretense of authority. That’s the strategy I’ve followed here, though with some misgivings. I hate memoirs. They mainly exist to cast their authors in an unduly flattering light. I don’t think I’ve avoided that entirely, but I’ve tried to present my motives as they were—ambivalent most of the time.
Still, few reporters deserve to be the center of the story; that’s why I resisted writing this book for many years. I didn’t want to end up with a spin on Nabokov called Kvetch, Memory. But not long ago something changed my mind. I read Just Kids, Patti Smith’s account of her long relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. I was enchanted by her portrayal of their youth in the sixties, set in the bohemian milieu I inhabited at roughly the same time. Her writing manages to convey a sense of tragedy without losing generosity of spirit, a combination I find hard to achieve, partly because I’m not as great an artist as she is, and also because it wouldn’t be true to my own experiences. I look back on my trove of recollections with a mixture of anger and regret, but if I delve beneath the pain I can locate memories of immense pleasure as well as more love than I deserved (though I didn’t think I got nearly enough sex at the time). The transferential power of that love shaped me the way wind and water carve a rock. My inner life is an amalgam of my affairs, including those that ended badly. I needn’t say more, because the pattern of my sexuality that these feelings formed fell into place after the scope of this book.
As did my second career at the Village Voice. I returned there in 1974, when Clay Felker bought the paper and hired me to be its arts editor. That position allowed me to bring in writers who fit the strategy I’d learned from the original owners, which was that reporters should work the beat they live. If you need someone to cover midnight movies, find an underground filmmaker to do it. If you want someone to write about the punk-rock milieu, get a kid who hangs out at CBGB. If you’re looking for a performance-art critic, hire someone who empathizes with people rolling around in broken glass. Eventually I became the executive editor, with a specialty in turning young writers into, well, writers. And once my own block receded I filed a piece nearly every week. I wrote about artists, sexual politics, the media, and the incessant advance of hype. It was a concordance with my life that could only have happened at the Voice. My time there ended in 2004; I won’t elaborate on my departure, except to say that nearly everyone I worked with is gone now, and the paper is not what it was. But the most remarkable thing you can say about a person or a publication that’s been through many triumphs and traumas over nearly sixty years is that it’s still around.
So is the profession that I helped to found. Rock criticism has changed a great deal—there are many more women, for one thing—but it’s gratifying to know, or at least to believe, that during my tenure in the sixties I set a precedent that makes this form what it is. Other types of criticism put less emphasis on the personal, but a rock writer has to come across as an individual, not just an arbiter. The best of them have strong voices, different from mine yet not unrelated. This is a real distinction in an age when the author is supposed to have disappeared.
As for my own writing, it changed after my mother died in 2003. I lost the driving ambition that made me grasp for the spotlight, along with the energy to engage the latest outrage or sensation. It’s not easy for me to be silent; I have a tendency to rant at anyone who will listen. But I know that wielding the sword takes time away from other possibilities. I still write, on an almost daily basis—I feel bereft when I don’t—but rarely on deadline. By now I’ve learned to handle the horror of words that won’t come and the flop sweat of literary failure. You have to persist, and it helps to have a day job. So I teach, at the public university where, half a century ago, I wrote my first article on rock for the school paper. I’m blessed to have avoided the kind of academic politics that makes journalism look like a Quaker meeting. I haven’t ended up in a Rock Studies program where tenure hinges on one’s opinion of the third farewell album of a band that’s sold its catalog to Apple.
One of the courses in my repertoire is a seminar on the sixties. My students are fascinated by the era, but they don’t know much about what made it work. It’s up to me to take them beyond the tropes of “classic rock,” to describe the logic of the decade and explain how its madness forged their reality. Multiculturalism, feminism, gender theory, even veggie burgers; all are products of a time when foolishness created a space for many wise ideas. When they ask, as they always do, what happened to the hippies, I tell them there’s no easy answer. Some made a killing in real estate, some still live the communal life, some keep their commitments alive in social activism, and some are burned out. But most former hippies honor their past in a small corner of their existence, such as the record collection that they share with their grandchildren, as I do with my students. Every so often they make me realize that the meaning of a good song is constantly changing.
I once played John Fogerty’s “Bad Moon Rising” for my class. A student mentioned that he’d heard it as a child. At the time he thought the refrain went, “There’s a bathroom on the right.” I corrected him—it’s “There’s a bad moon on the rise.” But I realized that he’d given a perfect description of the difference between my youth and his: Don’t go ’round tonight, it’s bound to take your life … but, fear not, the nightmare will soon be over … there’s a bathroom on the right.
At my ballsiest, I argue that the sixties can happen again. Not in their original form—we don’t have the economy to sustain that kind of extravagance—and not with the same reckless naïveté. But the vision of that decade is imbedded in American history. Its roots lie in the periodic Great Awakenings of spiritual and political fervor; in the Transcendentalist ethos of Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau; in the shake-ups of the Jazz Age and the ecstatic politics of the Beats. These eruptions of idealism, which nearly always involve new modes of life, are a major way we change. We are a nation of unreal possibilities made manifest, also a land where new ideas of liberty unleash new mechanisms of repression. This is the American dialectic. Leonard Cohen says the U.S. is “the cradle of the best and the worst.” I believe that; I’ve lived it.
I was teaching my sixties course when the Occupy Wall Street happened. Most of the students were disappointed that the protest fizzled, but I told them to be patient (something I wish I’d told myself when our revolution fell apart). This new movement is a har-binger of a generational politics still in formation. Its most important achievement, aside from crystallizing the perception of growing inequality, was to get kids off their butts, to let them experience what had been repressed: the politics of making noise. And it happened at a time when protest was supposed to be passé among the young. It’s hard to imagine those joys when power is hidden and action is simulated in a video game; when the entertainment-industrial complex is so effective at delivering the libidinal goods. But an Instagram is not a life. There’s nothing more energizing than feeling your power in a physical mass of your peers. That, I believe, is why thousands of young people poured into the streets in 2011 to proclaim not a program but a statement—we are being screwed.
I had my reasons to be wary of the Occupy movement. Dis-illusionment is painful, and I didn’t want to join anything that might revive that feeling. Nor did I want to be reminded of my age by standing on my feet for hours. But one day, on an afternoon stroll, I ran into a demonstration blocking traffic. My blood pressure rose, along with the familiar feeling of regret that I’m no longer part of such things. I started to turn away, but a squirt of pepper spray hit the crowd and changed my mind. As usual, a cop had ignited a spark with his gratuitous brutality. I was gripped by a strange stirring, something like a man in a coma having an erection.
Over the next week I spent quite a bit of time at the Occupy encampment near the New York Stock Exchange. Tour buses took a detour to swing by, and I was surprised to see the passengers cheering. I also saw grizzled union members forming a protective circle. More than once they appeared when the city was about to move on the camp, sometimes very late at night, and in a labor town like New York they were intimidating to the political class. Between them and the tourists I realized that many people, across lines of age and class, felt held in check. They were sick of it, as was I—tired of walking around muttering to myself about the tyranny of a triumphant capitalism, the closed structure of wealth and influence, the recklessness and contempt of the financial class, the predation of wildcat development that homogenizes neighborhoods. But pessimism had deadened my capacity to resist. I could no longer imagine a practical alternative to the present. Yet the urge to kick out the jams was still within me. I longed for the thrill of possibility, and above all I wanted to move.
Well, I did move, with some difficulty. After a few hours of marching I was exhausted. It was all I could do to raise an arthritic fist. And the police used every tactic in their arsenal to make the experience uncomfortable. They penned us up in areas much too small, so that we were crammed together like fish in a net. They declared a no-fly zone to keep news helicopters from overhead. They conducted mass arrests designed not just to clear the streets but to enter the protesters in a vast surveillance database. It was a nonviolent operation by the standards of my youth, though a number of heads were cracked—no amount of training can stop a cop from being sadistic in a panic. Still, despite the overwhelming show of force, the protest spoke truth to power. And I got to parade behind a kid with long hair flying, one arm around his girl and the other porting a didgeridoo. He wasn’t Groovy, but he was the type. So it still existed after all. Doddering behind him, I realized that my adrenal glands were still capable of pumping, and that I still had the lung power to bellow. It didn’t make me feel young again—nothing can do that. But it did make me feel alive. And that, finally, is worth a lot.
Alive I am. And kicking. Not ready for a nursing home. I can only hope that, by the time I’ve fallen and I can’t get up, they’ll have special places for sixties types, people who can’t tell the difference between a contact high and dementia. Places with drugs so good you won’t miss drugs, and an ambience that encourages you to lose your dread by living in the remnants of your youth. You’ll have Be-In breaks, classes in art as self-realization, psychedelic music in the evening, and lava lights on all night. Kids will visit to hear your stories about the magic days as a nurse wipes up the drool. Munchies will always be available, Sara Lee cheesecake and other staples of the stoned. And there won’t be any locks on the doors to prevent you from breaking on through to the other side, not until the wandering begins and you’re tempted to walk to the water and sink under the waves, spreading your arms over the ripples the way I imagine Don McNeill did when he drowned.
One thing I know. After my senses have been stripped and the tambourine man has left for a more lucrative gig, after the Revolution is televised and banksters inherit the earth, when everything I value has been shorn of its original meaning, when my feet can’t feel the beat and nothing but self-delusion remains, I will still have the need that drove me to devour as much as I could. I was born famished—for food, for sex, for fame, and finally for love. And I will die hungry.
Visit richardgoldsteinonline.com to read selections from the author’s journalism in the sixties and to see pictures of his evolution as a rock critic.