Another Little Piece of My Heart (17 page)

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.