Another Little Piece of My Heart (16 page)

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.