I didn’t just bliss out in the Summer of Love. I got married. All sorts of living arrangements were possible in the sixties, from group sex to shacking up, as it was still called then. But Judith and I both wanted—and no doubt needed—something more permanent.
We’d met when I was in j-school at Columbia and she was a student at Barnard College. We bonded despite her yowling Siamese cat, but our families didn’t. If you raise an upwardly mobile child, as my folks did, your in-laws will probably be classier than you, and her parents were certainly that. Her mother was a talented painter, and her father was the rascal descendant of a British rabbinic family. Judith was raised to be an intellectual, but she had a secret passion for rock ’n’ roll. It corresponded to a hidden sense of herself as a voluptuous woman, and that zaftig hottie emerged during the five years when we were together, to my delight.
Our wedding celebration was held at the Cheetah, a large midtown discotheque with thousands of flickering lightbulbs. Murray the K hosted, the Velvet Underground played, and the bride wore a nightgown. (I was hoping she would wear her paper sari to go with my silver boots.) A few weeks later, we had a proper Jewish ceremony for the parents—this time Judith wore a minidress. When the rabbi was late, she stormed out of the bride’s room, shouting, “When the fuck is this going to happen?” I stomped on the glass that the groom is supposed to break, out of anxiety that I wouldn’t succeed. Our honeymoon was a trip to the event that inaugurated the tradition of rock festivals, Monterey Pop.
First marriages are often auditions, especially when they happen at a young age. My best understanding is that Judith and I grew each other up. Thanks to my career, we had remarkable adventures together. She was the best editor I ever had, and she managed to drag me out of despair about writing more than once by insisting that blocks were creative opportunities, urges toward change. She was right about many things except my ability to stay committed. My love for her felt real, and the sex was so good that it allowed me to quell the drawn-and-quartered feeling of my conflicting drives. The problem was my inability to let her—or anyone—all the way in. I saw myself as a fragile balloon, pendulous with liquid, that would burst if penetrated, splattering its murky water on the freshly waxed floor. It took many years and a long struggle, with some false starts and painful turns, to break through this terror of intimacy, but at the age of twenty-three it was buried so deeply that I wasn’t even aware of it. I was a jumble of desires and equally urgent fears. Still, there were times when everything seemed like it was right where it should be. I remember the morning we spent in Monterey before the opening concert. Monarch butterflies filled the air, and Judith was radiant with self-possession, her insecurities banished in the California dreaming.
When we got to the festival I realized right away that this was no love-in for nomads like the kids I’d met in Golden Gate Park. Though the tickets were cheap—a mere $3.50 for an evening show, as I recall—the crowd was anything but common. These were members of a new aristocracy, courtly and enlightened, wearing costumes of fine fabric in shimmering hues. Watching them promenade through the craft market, a woodsy version of the pushcarts I’d grown up with, I felt a bit like Otis Redding must have when he performed at Monterey. (He was the major representative of soul music; Motown was nowhere on the lineup.) Glimpsing the audience, Otis allowed himself a gently cynical quip: “This is the love crowd, right?” No R&B singer could achieve the perfect lack of edge, the casual insularity, that these people displayed. I was witnessing the birth of a new class pretending to be classless, and it was imperial at the core. The descendants of this bangled illuminati now dine on free-range meat and artisanal cheese. They colonize neighborhoods, driving out the poor and turning slums into Potemkin villages of art. You know these hipsters by the tilt of their fedoras, but their ancestors flashed peace signs.
Somewhere in the crowd I caught a glimpse of Brian Jones in a fur-trimmed-robe sort of thing. I introduced myself, sure that he would remember our encounter on that yacht during the Rolling Stones’ first American tour—after all, I’d been part of the rescue party that saved him from a pack of wild fans. But he looked past me and ambled away. We’d met as journalist and subject, which meant we were strangers. I should have known that, but I always felt hurt when it became apparent. I licked my wounds and proceeded to the press gate, where I identified myself. The credentialer was skeptical. “You’re the third Richard Goldstein we’ve had today,” she groaned.
I was flattered, but I needed access, so I yanked out my press card to prove who I was. As a journalist I could enter the restricted area behind the stage, and I joined the scrum of performers and their roadies hanging out there. I’d arrived in the aftermath of an argument between Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend of the Who over which of their bands would go on first. This was an important issue, since both were hard-rock acts. According to Townshend, they solved the problem with a coin toss, but the buzz backstage was that Hendrix lost the dispute because he was less famous. (That would change after his performance at Monterey.) I caught a glimpse of Hendrix huddling with his sidemen, thin British gents who could have played footmen to a libertine lord in a costume drama. It looked like they had a plan. I had a feeling that it had something to do with smashing guitars.
That was the Who’s signature shtick. Townshend would throw his ax into the amps during the climax of their most belligerent song, “My Generation” (“Things they do look awful c-c-cold/I hope I die before I get old”). Then Keith Moon would knock over his drum kit as smoke enveloped the band. Busting up equipment seemed risky to me, but it epitomized the Who’s crypto-punk image, though it also obscured their musical gifts. I think of them as the fathers of anthemic rock and, in a broad sense, all the genres that emanate from metal. As for Hendrix, he redrew the borders of pop by melting blue notes and reshaping them into elastic sonic sculptures. His revision of “The Star Spangled Banner,” complete with bombing sounds and snippets of “Taps,” is the most astonishing statement in sixties music about the violent and ecstatic dream life of America. Hendrix was the John Coltrane of the wah-wah pedal, but it took me some time to grasp that. At first his playing seemed too disconnected from melody, too chaotic. As I’ve already confessed, I came to rock as an English major.
I understood why Hendrix was focused on the Who. He had a history of topping his betters. As a rookie rocker he’d outflashed Little Richard in that singer’s own band. (He got fired for that.) Now he decided to outdestructo the Who. Hendrix would smash his guitar and then ignite it, tossing the flaming thing into the audience. The moment has been captured in countless video clips, but I saw it happen. I was sitting just below the stage, and I ducked the incoming. Robert Christgau, who was sitting near me, made a World Series catch, grabbing the remains of the charred instrument. He kept it in his East Village apartment until a subtenant lost it.
I “interviewed” Hendrix not long before he died in 1970. The occasion, I recall, had something to do with the opening of his recording studio in Greenwich Village, but it may have happened earlier than that. What sticks in my memory is the way he looked. Hendrix was stupefied, his shirt stained with what looked like caked puke. I listened to him mumbling for several minutes before leaving as graciously as I could. There was no publicist to make excuses or even wipe him up. I was tempted to put that meeting into print, but by then I had lost my distance from the musicians I wrote about. I’d learned to honor the feeling of empathy that they often aroused in me. There were two kinds of rock stars, it seemed: the survivors, such as Dylan and Jagger, who hid behind their personas, and those whose precarious egos marked them for ritual self-destruction. No way would I perform the journalistic equivalent of that nasty spectacle by blowing Jimi’s cover. I was horrified but not surprised when he choked to death on his vomit.
By the time of my encounter with Hendrix I had lost my cynicism about why performers were willing to behave in such self-abasing ways before a reporter taking notes. But at first I thought of it as a kind of show. They wanted to give me something that would make good copy. It was part of the symbiotic relationship between celebrities and the press, and it meant that I could write about whatever went down without worrying about hurt feelings. An interview might be superficial, but my readers expected insights into the personalities of those they adored. In order to meet this need I had to be basically hypocritical, sympathetic during the meeting but merciless at the typewriter. I would scour my notes for intimate details that could be shaped into a character analysis. I still cringe when I remember these invasions of privacy. The most unforgivable one followed a chat with Leonard Cohen in a shabby hotel room near Times Square. He kvetched for nearly an hour. Finally he excused himself to take a pee, and I could hear him through the thin walls, relieving himself in short bursts. Who knows—maybe he had a finicky prostate. But I used that detail to portray him as a man so neurotic that he couldn’t even piss decisively. Several years later I was traveling to a panel discussion with some countercultural writers when the van had a flat. We got out while the tire was changed. One of the men paced in the road, dying to take a leak, but he wouldn’t do it. Finally he gave me a hesitant look. “No one will piss in front of you,” he said. I got a laugh out of that, but it stuck in my throat.
I realized pretty quickly that it was impossible to turn a real person into story form, but if you’re going to be a New Journalist, using the techniques of fiction in the service of reality, you have to be prepared to mold a life, with all of its complexity, into a well-shaped narrative. A good reporter can make readers think they’ve met a person even though they’re merely encountering a protagonist. Only when I got involved with rockers as they actually were could I create true impressions of them, and that was far more difficult than rendering a journalistic sketch. Forging an ethic I could live with was a slow process, and my time in California with Brian Wilson and Jim Morrison was the start of it. I decided never again to treat my subjects like haunches of beef ready for carving. Though it was hard to convey the true texture of their conflicts, it seemed essential to my role as a chronicler of the new, fragile art form that was rock. Of course, I limited my scruples to performers I saw as artists; otherwise I wasted them for fun and profit.
Yet, try as I might to be faithful to the spirit of the music, there was always something to remind me of the gap between authenticity and artifice that was such a central issue for me during the sixties. Rock, for all its power to stir and transgress, to shake and rattle the establishment, was also show business. At Monterey I was constantly reminded of that fact. Since I was sitting in one of the front rows I could see what was going on in the wings. As techies prepared the stage for the Who, I watched them carrying sacks with something inside. I deduced that the bundles contained chunks of dry ice, which could create—or at least enhance—the smoke when the group kicked over the amps at the end of their set. Looking closely at Townshend’s guitar, I thought I saw seams. Did that mean the instrument could split apart neatly when he smashed it? I wasn’t sure, but I decided on the spot that the Who’s famous rite of destruction was a fake. At one point perhaps it had been real, but now it was something the audience expected. It looked fabulous, but dangerous it was not. Whenever I hear the famous poignant refrain from Tommy—“See me … feel me … touch me … heal me”—I picture that seamed guitar. Maybe the Who were so good at critiquing the pop-star spectacle because they themselves were a show.
I think it was while watching their set that I realized what this festival was really about. It was the dawn of the New Age, for sure, but not of its stated intentions. I’d seen the potential of rock to subvert the order; also its capacity to subvert the subversion. This was a music whose reach depended on mass consumption, and that produced a contradiction. How can you have a revolution that hinges on turning a profit? The question nagged at me as I realized why this crowd was different from the hoi polloi in the Haight. I was sitting in some sort of VIP section. It looked like the entire hip contingent of the music industry was there. Unlike the performers lingering backstage, who had no idea who I was, these machers were eager to connect with me. I flashed back to my stroll through the grounds of Hugh Hefner’s house, when I was stalked by the exotic animals in his menagerie. Any sign that I belonged on the business side of the music business horrified me, probably because I feared that I did belong there.
In New York it was easy to believe I had nothing in common with the hit mongers, because their attempt to be cool was so transparent. But out here I couldn’t detect the difference between an “under-assistant West Coast promo man,” as the Stones had dubbed such disposable types, and … well, a hard-working hippie like me. (At twenty-three I was already on antacids.) It’s hard to convey in retrospect why I was so anxious about where I fit. Cultural commerce is so extensive and entrenched today that it seems naïve to fret about the consequences, and no critic of any popular form will get very far by taking a stand against marketing. But that wasn’t the case in the sixties, especially when it came to music. In the Summer of Love it seemed possible to create a culture based on tangibility, a hands-on, person-to-person sensibility that would displace the system that organized human beings into consumer groups. I’m not talking about a guerrilla form like street art, but a well-organized and mass-distributed movement with creativity at its core. That’s what the counterculture meant to me, and the bursts of love and hope I’d felt hanging out in the Haight, dropping acid with Groovy, meeting rock stars who were making music from the issues in their lives—the intensity of these encounters had a profound effect. I was no longer just the chronicler of a hot new scene; I was a crusader in the eternal struggle between light and darkness, the real thing and hype.
It’s not unusual for a young man to love music so much that he thinks it stands for truth and beauty. But I was in a position to instill that passion in a large audience of my peers, so I thought. I would only gradually understand that rock critics have little power to shape popular taste. Everything depends on the audience—and the agents of stylization are always waiting in the wings. I should have known that, since I was in a position to see it firsthand. The broader the appeal of a new sensibility, the more conventional it eventually becomes, and commerce rapidly accelerates this process. But rock proposed a different model. It was blunter about the relationship between freedom and desire, between sexual and political repression, than any mass form that had come before it. I believed that the channeling of erotic energy was the means by which the system controlled us. Rock was all about breaking through that block, and therefore it had the capacity to smash the order. If money still circulated around it, at least it could express an alternative to the world as it was, and in doing so provide a paradigm for a new way of life. Such was the importance I placed on pop culture that I saw it as the key to social change. So, yes, I thought of rock as a revolutionary force.
I would soon find a potent ally in the émigré philosopher Herbert Marcuse. White-haired and vigorous, he gave lectures to halls packed with students, offering a critique of the system that focused on its capacity to unleash carefully manipulated forms of pleasure, creating a stunted eroticism and an impoverished being he called “one-dimensional man.” Marcuse was the most countercultural of the Old School Marxists, and Marx was a thinker whose ideas had to be liberated from Communism as it actually existed—that was what people like me believed. It was a thorny project, but a crucial one for radical democrats, and Marcuse was an important part of it. I was especially drawn to his concept of “erotic labor,” which I took to mean insisting on work that enlists your deepest passions. It’s painful to think that this idea may seem like pure fantasy to many young people caught in the struggle to plug into a career or staggering under student debt. I owe my good fortune to the fact that in the prime of my youth there was room enough in the economy to find jobs that enlisted my deepest instincts, or to invent those jobs. This wasn’t a matter of working in some office with yoga mats on the premises, and it wasn’t just about making art. Lots of people found the pleasures of erotic labor in political organizing. This was about work as an act of love. Marcuse made me see that when work is love it can be liberating.
I also shared with him a faith in the revolutionary potential of art. At its purest, it had the capacity to alter our perceptions of reality, and so it was a more reliable source of consciousness expansion than LSD. The question that both inspired and haunted me was whether the strategies of art could be applied to popular culture. The answer, if there was one, lay in the combination of freedom and commerce, of music and community, that was rock. It was up to critics to protect its potential. My job was to be a champion of the sound that would remake society.
Looking back on the intensity with which I embraced this mission I realize that it wasn’t just a commitment. It was a way to resolve the conflict between the hustler and the artist within me. Many people in my generation felt, I think, that rock was an agent of refusing to accept our assigned fate, which was to fit the mold of success. A political movement would soon emerge from this rebellion, one I became deeply involved in. But in 1967 it had yet to gel. There was still a gulf between hippies and the hardcore left, and students were just beginning to feel their power. Music was the thing everyone had in common, and the way to build a social agenda was to form a community of fans who understood that the “four-chord music anyone can play” (my favorite definition of rock ’n’ roll) was now a model for an alternative identity.
This was why I couldn’t just go with the flow at Monterey, though it was the most extraordinary rock lineup I’d ever seen, ranging over three days. I felt the auspiciousness of the occasion, and, flush with angst and aspiration, I found every reflex of the audience meaningful. Naturally I was disappointed. The crowd acclaimed everything in a state of indiscriminate delight. The most rancid schmaltz and the most militant antiwar sentiments received the same standing ovation. When the audience rose as one for Ravi Shankar, master of the sitar, I understood that few people had the faintest idea what raga music was about. In the film Monterey Pop the crowd is totally with him, leaping to its feet at the end of his piece. But the movie doesn’t show that he also got an ovation for tuning up. Poor guy, I thought; to represent an ancient musical tradition in an arena where all that matters is that it sounds trippy. I pondered the interview I’d done with the young white bluesman Paul Butterfield. I’d asked what he thought of the microtonalities produced by the sitar. “I get raga,” he replied. “All ghetto music is the same.”
What, finally, was the real thing? The question may be irrelevant now, given the triumph of the hyper-real, but in 1967 it demanded to be answered, and I remember quite clearly what the real thing meant to me. It was the feeling I had at Monterey when all my misgivings were swept aside by a band that was unknown outside San Francisco. The sidemen were thin and long-haired, à la mode, but the lead singer was a rather squat woman with a not-so-hot complexion and very messy hair. It took me a few minutes to realize that I’d seen her before. She was the woman Judith and I had met at that house in Daly City. I’d also met the members of her band, but I’d forgotten its name. Now I heard it announced. They were Big Brother and the Holding Company, and she was Janis Joplin.
I’d never seen them perform; not many people in that audience had. The sidemen seemed completely focused on Janis, cradling her with their riffs and coaxing her vocal flights. From the first notes her voice stunned me with its primal drive. And her songs were all about the contradictions of desire. Why is love like a ball and chain? She posed that question with aching frustration and sputtering rage, cut with an assertion that, yes, this is me, inside and out—take my heart if it turns you on. This was every reason I had for never trusting anyone, the great fear of helpless devotion that lurks beneath paranoia. But she was willing to acknowledge her vulnerability and able to face the terrifying prospect of emotional dependence. I was many years away from letting myself go the way Janis did in her songs. Hearing her for the first time was like meeting my most guarded self. Her voice was the liquid inside the balloon that I struggled to prevent from spilling out. I understood the connection between rock and the inexpressible demanding to be made overt. This was the power I had seen in Jim Morrison’s performances, the thing that made sixties music a singular art, daring the market to set a price on it.
Of course, the market did, with astonishing speed. But for a little while I could give myself to the belief that this woman wailing onstage had a direct line to my emotions and the possibilities for creating a new world that lay within me. I suppose this feeling of intimacy with a great artist is the grand show-business illusion, but I’d never experienced it before, and neither, I suspect, had anyone who saw that performance, not in quite the same way. I knew instantly that Janis would be a big star, someone I would have to write about in my column. But I didn’t imagine that she would also bring me as close as I ever came in the rock world to loving someone.
I got back to New York as the first heat wave of July was smothering the city. Within a few days the sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll, even the rush of seeing Janis perform for the first time, all seemed like a fantasy of being abducted by aliens from an advanced planet. The hot and crowded streets of Manhattan didn’t invite openness as California had. It was either Fuck you! or Fuck me!—business as usual.
Only the hair on young men had changed, longer by a foot since I’d left town, so it seemed to me. Tie-dyes and sandals were everywhere, along with peasant shirts with strips of embroidery, produced by old Ukrainian tailors baffled by their new clientele. But it was the arrival of mass-produced psychedelia that really pissed me off. An ad in the Voice, placed by a pair of local light-show producers, declared their availability for “discotheques, fashion shows, industrial shows, commercials and bar mitzvahs.” Was it the bluntness of this pitch that made it seem so New York, or was there something about the city that repelled utopian experiments like the ones I’d seen in the Haight? Generations of radicals had found a home here in the general indifference to extreme behavior, but the counterculture was too big to fade into the urban parade. Hip was a vanguard that had caught on, and it was porous to the point of incoherence. In California, the threat was violence and tour buses, but here it was the swarm that the scene had become. Long-haired kids descended on Greenwich Village. I would see them in the parks, scrounging for communion and spare change. I decided that isolation was the real consciousness here, the ideal mode for working and consuming.
My college friend Joel had risked his life as a civil rights worker in Louisiana, where he’d come under fire from the Klan. Now he was living communally, tilling the land in the Catskill Mountains, not far from the Borscht Belt resorts where his parents had scarfed gefilte fish. For Joel, leaving the city was the only way to maintain the hippie ideal against the urban corruptions of commerce and chic. The soil was its own romance, as it had been for centuries of radical utopians. It was where the transformation of consciousness could take root, Joel explained in a voice that seemed unnaturally serene. I was skeptical but intrigued, since he was a pretty rigorous guy. The commune he described was more structured than the crash pads I’d stayed in, with duties assigned and decisions made by consensus. I decided to check it out.
In college Joel had favored preppy chinos, but when we met he was wearing a work shirt and overalls. In the back seat of his truck, his college girlfriend, whom I remembered for her loose hair and pendulous earrings, greeted me with a sturdy hug. I didn’t recall her birth name, but now she was Stardust, her face scoured with grit, her smile still radiant. I stayed with their “family” for several days before I finally made my excuses. It was wearying to watch them vote on who would go to town for milk (since they didn’t have a cow). I wasn’t tempted by their diet of parsnip stews, and the women were too tired at night for anything but nodding off to the Grateful Dead. I soon realized that I was hooked on pavement and novelty, on streets that sizzled with activity, and on the ambivalence that the city inspired. There was no solace for me here.
Still, I gave my friends their best shot by writing about them. I left my doubts out of the piece, not just as a favor to Joel but also because I wanted such projects to succeed. The idea of collective living intrigued me, and by the end of the sixties, I was part of a commune. The results were very mixed. I can only say in retrospect that, narcissism and possessiveness being what they are, communes based on the hippie model—which involved affinity and little else—have a short life span. The ones that endure are grounded in strongly held beliefs, not just a general injunction to do your thing or a quest for family. But that was the whole problem with the counterculture. There was no will to form institutions that could transmit values, only a feeling that everything worth learning could be comprehended in an instant or immediately felt. “Nothing you can know that can’t be known,” the Beatles sang to us. “It’s easy.”
The absence of boundaries was liberating to some, but for others it would produce a yearning for the most authoritarian forms of devotion. I could see this coming long before Charles Manson or the Peoples Temple because I covered the most egregious spiritual leaders of the sixties, who always presented a vivid spectacle. I was invited to attend a press event for the man who had guided the Beatles to enlightenment though a practice called Transcendental Meditation. He was known as the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a set of honorific titles that obscured his ordinary Indian roots. After his anointing by the Fab Four he attracted the attention of the hippest of the hip. When I met him in a flower-decked room at the Plaza Hotel, he was represented by the same firm that handled publicity for the Ringling Bros. circus. Cradling a hyacinth bud in one hand and gesturing with the other, he explained that the poor were that way because they were lazy, and they were lazy because they lacked self-knowledge. Wealth was a sign of inner harmony, and there was no reason to share it. “Like a tree in the middle of a garden,” he intoned, “should we be liberal and allow the water to flow to other trees, or should we drink ourselves and be green?” But isn’t that selfish? someone asked. He replied with the lacquered smile of an airline steward. “Be absolutely selfish. That is the only way to bring peace, and if one doesn’t have peace, how is one to help others attain it?” Mitt Romney couldn’t have said it better.
The Maharishi’s message was the most odious thing I had ever heard, and it disgusted me to think that it appealed to the Beatles. (It still attracts affluent aesthetes who think they’re too spiritual for Scientology.) Were the Beatles so freaked out by fame that any exotic claptrap seemed wise to them, or were they searching for a way to enjoy their fortune without guilt? It didn’t matter. To me, they lacked the bullshit detector that is absolutely necessary to guide yourself through early and abrupt success, and this was nearly as bad as selling out. I should have been more sympathetic, since I was grappling fitfully with the same issues. All that saved me from the gurus was a thorough skepticism about authority. But I was convinced that the music scene in New York was threaded through with charlatans. The only way to escape them was to devote my column to what remained of the underground.
I took shelter in the Downtown poetry scene, where I met a group of young writers who were attempting to extend the ideas of Frank O’Hara into the hip scene. I admired their determination to write highly personal poems that couldn’t be set to music, their respect for the magic of mere words, and the sustenance they found in each other. They congregated at a venerable radical church, St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie. This was the scene that had produced Lou Reed and would soon spawn Patti Smith. I wanted to publicize these people, but there was only so much I could add to what was written about poetry. The same was true for experimental theater; it was too avant-garde for the mainstream, and so it wasn’t part of my beat. I was doomed to chase the elusive ideal of a radicalism that could also be popular. But New York was not San Francisco. Self-inflation was what the big city offered, in abundance, and that was what I often ended up writing about, in the most withering prose I could summon. Nothing was as ripe for plucking as a young French import named Antoine.
His is not a name that will ever grace a street in Paris. After the sixties he faded into the ether of Eurotrash, but for a year or so he was the hottest thing in post-yé-yé pop. Antoine had mastered an ersatz genre called le protest, and his greatest hit was a rant about saying what you think and doing as you please. I can’t convey the feeling of this lyric in English, but it managed to insult both rock poetics and the French chanson. I couldn’t resist covering his arrival in New York, courtesy of Warner Bros. Records. He was a classic nerd, with hair that curled too neatly around his ears and a bemused look on his face. The best quote I got was from an electrical worker who asked, with practiced disdain, “Who the hell is he?” Still, Antoine had his admirers, among them Andy Warhol, who had probably been paid by the Warner label to “host” him. This was surely why Warhol had decided to give him a screen test. I was shocked, since I still thought of Andy as making something sacred called art. But I was watching the low end of his enterprise, an early example of the marriage between chic and shlock, and I had a part to play in the mix. Nobody cared if I unleashed my venom in print. It didn’t matter what I thought of it; only that I thought of it. Say what you want and do what you can—just like Antoine.
Why was I drawn to pseudo-events like this? The answer had less to do with covering things that made good copy than with my fascination for fakes and failures. It was like watching a cripple and feeling good about your flabby legs. There was an Antoine within me—that’s what I believed—and I had to be careful or he would burst out in a song and dance. Very careful. A local news show wanted me to review rock concerts. When I pointed out that these concerts often lasted past midnight, while I would have to be on TV at eleven P.M., the producer shrugged and said, “So leave early.” I flashed on a musician getting electrocuted onstage (this would actually happen to several rockers) as I blithely praised his playing on-air. I turned the gig down, another chance to break into the big time rejected because of the agita I felt at moments like that.
My agent accused me of feeling guilty about making real money. I knew he was right—the Oedipal fear of besting my father welled within me. But I also needed to preserve my self, or what was left of it. The connection between writing and my emotions, which had been such a solace in my life, would be lost behind the flattening demands of television. I would end up as a velvet-caped exotic, canceled after a season, no doubt. I would never be the writer I wanted to be. My talent, such as it was, depended on connecting with my passions, and TV was the enemy of real emotions. In those stunted days before the Internet, every entry into the mass media demanded stylization, the thing I dreaded most. It was a betrayal of erotic labor and an argument for clinging to the Village Voice, though it paid bubkes. Like many of its writers, I needed the freedom to make my own mistakes in the name of sincerity. My agent was undeterred. He took me to lunch, and, over dessert, he chirped, “Don’t say anything—just think about this.” Then he revealed that he’d heard from a music publishing company. (Libel laws prevent me from naming it here.) I’d be paid $25,000—a very significant sum in 1967—to give a few lectures at their conferences. But that was just the pretext; it was understood that I would favor their artists in my column. In other words, payola! I excused myself, and in the toilet I barfed up the food.
There would be other, nearly as repugnant offers. In 1968, the Hollywood producer Otto Preminger took me to lunch and asked whether I was interested in writing the book for a musical he wanted to bring to Broadway. It would be called I Protest, and the opening scene, as he described it with glistening eyes, would feature students marching down the aisle, carrying signs, to the heroic strains of Beethoven. This time I managed to avoid a trip to the toilet, but, needless to say, I never got back to Preminger.
By then I’d stopped returning my agent’s calls. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was caught on a hook, lured by the glitter of a bauble bobbing in the sunlight. I reacted by railing against hype. No hustle escaped my wrath, and when I wasn’t venting I proclaimed a generational uprising, an intifada of the kids. But the more I fulminated, the greater the demand for me. I thought I was protecting myself by refusing big money, but the attention was much harder to resist. Why was I making all these pronouncements about youth culture, swinging wildly? I asked myself that question many times, until I recalled an incident from when I was maybe seven. A child had run away, and I said I’d seen him. Suddenly I was surrounded by police and by the anguished mother pleading for details. I can still see her face as it became clear that I’d lied. I longed for the spotlight. Everything threatening dissolved in its magic beams; I was special after all. I remember how thrilling it was to be famous in the housing project, even for a moment—and how ashamed I was to need that.
A ball of terrified fury, sustained by charcoal pills for chronic indigestion, I chose my friends from outside the pop milieu, and only when stoned with them could I briefly relax. Sex? I had more than I deserved, considering how jittery I was. But the idea that I might have an affair, or even a close friendship, with a rock star seemed more fanciful than even the offers my agent had dangled before me. Just as I was sinking into the routine of interviewing people who were afraid of being unmasked by me; just as I was resigned to feeling riven; just as I felt my style grow heavy with alliterations that passed for passion; just then I got a call from the bass player of Big Brother and the Holding Company. He hadn’t forgotten the time we’d spent together at that house in Daly City. The band was about to embark on its first tour of the Northeast. Would I like to join them in Philadelphia? In the words of my favorite literary character, Molly Bloom: Yes I said yes I will Yes.
Even when she was a certified superstar, Janis was far more accessible than her equivalent would be today. You might see her mingling with the audience before a set, and you could probably worm your way backstage if you tried. I didn’t have to carry a press card. I just caught up with the band. In those days, an emerging group like Big Brother and the Holding Company would play in venues that were often old theaters, sometimes with the seats ripped out so people could mill around. In Philadelphia they performed in a huge converted garage. Their sets were long and rarely rehearsed. It was an exhausting ordeal, with little to keep the musicians grounded except one another. The guys who made up Janis’s band were very good at creating an umbra of warmth, even in a strange dressing room. They kept a close eye on her, much as one might watch an insecure sister diving off the high board. They weren’t doing it because she was their rainmaker. They cared for her—it was obvious and it moved me. Unlike the members of the Doors, who had a simmering contempt for Jim Morrison and his bouts of drunken release, these musicians respected Janis’s need to be intoxicated. They didn’t drink, but they also didn’t judge.
Her fragility was hard to miss up close, but before a performance it was especially intense. Waiting to go on in Philadelphia, she stalked around the dressing room, her fingers drumming on a tabletop. “Oh, shit,” she said, looking out at the crowd. “We’ll never be able to get into those kids. Want to see death? Take a look out there.” The crowd was an undifferentiated herd of hippies—the usual. I had the sense that she was like this at every show. She looked like she was trying to jump out of her skin. For someone as self-conscious as Janis, stepping onstage must have been a very charged sensation.
She reached for her trademark, a bottle of Southern Comfort. In those days it had a lower proof than most alcoholic concoctions, but she could guzzle an uncanny amount of the stuff. “I don’t drink anything on the rocks,” she told me. “Cold is bad for my throat. So it’s always straight or in tea. I usually get about a pint and a half down when I’m performing. Any more, I start to nod out.”
As a nice Jewish boy I’d never seen anyone drink like that, and it was hardly the drug of choice for a hippie. But liquor is famous for its disinhibiting effect on shy people, and, as countless alcoholic writers will attest, it can loosen up the associative parts of the imagination, as can other drugs with hazardous side effects. Some musicians are lucky enough to get there from the act of performing itself, but many do their best work in an altered state. I cringe when media wags gloat over a performer’s overdose. They demand greatness, but they won’t accept what it takes to achieve it. In the sixties this puritanical reflex was suspended; unfortunately, it was replaced by a reluctance to intervene no matter how self-destructive the behavior. In that respect Janis was a typical victim of the decade’s worst sin: indifference to consequences. But as long as she remained attached to her band, she was safe.
No one makes great art out of contentment with the world, and Janis had the requisite rough youth in Texas. She was the town slut, a victim of the nasty collusion between sex and contempt for women who crave it. No need to go into detail about her biography; it’s pretty well-known—her time in Austin, where she was part of the boho music scene that seeded the San Francisco sound; her journey west with Chet Helms, who would run one of the city’s two major music venues, the Avalon Ballroom; her appearance at the legendary Trips Festival. “We were just interested in being beatniks then,” she told me. “Now we’ve got responsibilities, and I guess you could say … ambitions.”
Too much attention is paid to the flash of great sixties rockers and their larger-than-life lives; not enough to their craft. If you listen beyond her famous shrieking you’ll realize that every note Janis sang was shaped. She was a serious student of blues, especially the music of Bessie Smith, the great stylist of the 1930s. Janis’s greatest achievement—and it influenced the entire range of rock vocalizing back then—was to blend Bessie Smith’s expressiveness with the drive of Otis Redding. “See, Bessie, she sang big open notes in very simple phrasing,” Janis explained to me. “But you can’t fall back on that in front of a rock band. I mean, you can’t sing loose and easy with a big throbbing amplifier and drums behind you. The beat pushes you on. So I started singing rhythmically, and now I’m learning from Otis how to push a song instead of just sliding over it.”
Sexual politics didn’t come up in our conversations, but her articulation of desire and frustration was certainly something a proto-feminist could identify with. And she had more than booze in common with Jim Morrison. Both were “erotic politicians,” to use his phrase. They were dedicated to the idea of music as an intoxicant of liberation. I would call that the best instinct of the sixties—the Whitmanesque urge to sing the body electric. But Morrison’s allure depended on a certain distance. I never felt close to him, not when I heard him sing or when I met him. With Janis I had the feeling that I knew her issues intimately.
There was an edge of doubt to her performance of herself, and I understood it well. That was how I’d felt as a kid and how I felt years later as a media sensation. It was easy to see the writhing and swaying of her body as a woman in the throes of orgasm, but orgasm contains so many emotions that complicate the question of ecstasy. The sexual spectacle she made of herself was clearly the effect she intended, but it wasn’t the only thing she wanted. Validation, degradation, possibly cessation—all of that was in her voice. Thinking of her now, I can’t help wishing that she’d grown up in a place like Queens, where she would have had friends who didn’t regard her as a tramp just because of her sexual appetite. If she’d been part of a scene with kids who had creative compulsions like hers (kids like, well, me) she might have had the strength to resist her fate. What I’m trying to say is that I wish I could have saved her. She is one of the ghosts that haunt my memory of the sixties, the ones I cared for who died before their time.
Janis was the most self-conscious performer I’d ever met, about her shape, her breasts, and especially her hair. She made Morrison’s fragility seem puny and my own body issues trifling. I didn’t know about her bisexuality (an attribute of Bessie Smith as well), and I didn’t mention mine, though it was surely part of the reason why we clicked. As for heroin, I never saw any telltale signs in her. But I was acutely aware of how hard she found it to connect with men. Being an emblem of unleashed female emotion hardly helped with the dudes who made up her core audience. “I never end up with a guy on these tours,” she groused. “I mean, you saw me dancing out there between sets. All these guys were standing around, panting in the corner. Finally I had to say to one of them, ‘Well, do you wanna dance or not?’ and he comes on waving his arms around like a fucking bat. Now, why do things like that always happen?” She sighed. “They’re all afraid of me. Shit.”
Just as she was bemoaning her fate, a man in a fur suit sauntered into the dressing room. His name was Gary the Gorilla, and he’d been hired by the club to stoke the crowd. Janis offered him her bottle, and he pulled off his ape head to chug from it. Then he unzipped his belly and passed his paws around. Suddenly she leapt into his lap, and she sat there buzzed and contented until it was time to go on. I watched her empty her guts into song after song, howling need and frustration, stomping out the beat and the pain. “Ball and Chain” was her signature number, and she regarded it as the hardest of her songs. “I have to really get inside my head, every time I do it,” she said. “Because it’s about feeling things. There’s this big hole in the song that’s mine, and I have to fill it. So I do. And it really tires me out. But it’s so groovy when you know that the audience really wants you. They yell back at you, call your name, and like that.”
When the set was over and the band bounded into the dressing room, sweaty with the sizzle of playing, I watched Janis throw herself at Gary the Gorilla, who was waiting patiently. I have a vivid memory of her nuzzling his furry chest, burying herself in his faux-hairy folds, and opening another bottle.
I saw Janis several times after that tour. Once I accompanied her to a party celebrating her new contract with Columbia Records, which came with an enormous advance. Her annual income would soon top $1 million in today’s dollars, and in New York nothing draws the glitterati like new money. Amid the glad hands, Janis gazed at herself uneasily in a mirror. She shook out her hair only to confront an elegant woman out of Harper’s Bazaar, who covered up her drink and hissed, “Do you mind?” To which Janis replied, “Fuck off, baby.” It was a show of bravado, but later I caught her pouting into that mirror. “Face it,” she muttered. “You’ve got ratty hair.” At that point, of course, her hair had become a style millions of young women imitated, but to her it was still what it had been in Texas, a symbol of her otherness.
We never had a date or anything like that, but I did take her to the Jewish dairy restaurant Ratner’s. It was right near two major downtown rock venues, the Fillmore East and the Anderson, and after a concert the place was full of hippies stoned on music and whatever they could score. Ancient waiters delivered blintzes and tea with hands shaking so badly that most of the liquid was in the dish under the cup. I expected a mob scene when we walked in, but everyone was zombie-faced. She loved the ambience, and we stayed for hours. I remember strolling with her at dawn, the sky glowing dark blue over damp and empty streets. It was the kind of early morning that makes New York look like a movie set. We kissed lightly. It was more than a buddy peck and less than an invitation. I was way too shy to ask what was on her mind. But I left with a feeling more gripping than even sexual arousal. I realized how deeply I cared for her.
I hardly ever had sexual fantasies about the rock stars I wrote about. (Exceptions: Bob Weir and Dion, the Shangri-Las and the Shirelles, a few others I’m too embarrassed to mention.) The romance of meeting musicians was too ethereal to be truly erotic, and I could never cast them in obscene scenarios, any more than I could have lusted for Mickey Mantle, the baseball hero of my youth. But friendship seemed at least abstractly possible, and I don’t think I ever did an interview without hoping that it would result in a personal connection. For a number of reasons—my introverted nature or the arbitrary quality of these encounters—it rarely happened. That was one of the many ironies of my life in the sixties. Openness was almost a fetish back then, yet I felt more isolated than ever. With Janis I sensed a warmth based on a certain recognition. We shared a knowledge of self-doubt, a sense of ourselves that would make us outcasts even when we reached the hot center. Most people are grotesque, but not many know it, and those who walk around with that awareness as a steady undertone recognize each other. On that basis I think we connected.
Over the next few years I lost touch with Janis, and then she was dead. I can easily imagine the struggle she must have waged to do her thing again and again on ever more impersonal stages, to enact the spectacle of need that she was known for while maintaining the tangibility of her art, which involved a self-exposure so intense that it impelled everyone in the audience to do the same. That was the essential rock experience of my youth, and she will always represent it. For me, Janis was the promise of the sixties—and the tragedy.