Another Little Piece of My Heart (30 page)

To my mind, the same decision was made in the black community, where the ghetto riots never evolved into a true insurrection despite the efforts of a number of radicals to organize a fighting force. It wasn’t just the fear of retaliation. Malcolm X’s famous slogan “By any means necessary” poses an implicit question: What, exactly, is the reason for this necessity? For most black people, including the rioters (some of whom were middle-class), the answer was similar to ours. There was a widespread underlying faith in the possibility of change—even Abbie Hoffman had named his son America. This belief inspired rebellion, but also restraint. And change would come. Fitfully, and not entirely for the better, a new America would be born. From rage, renewal: that’s the lesson of the sixties, dude. But at the time, the only thing that seemed to be approaching was … exhaustion.

I’ve already mentioned the Weather Underground and its futile attempt to end the war by setting off bombs. But they were rationalists compared with the Symbionese Liberation Army. In 1973, this cultish
cadre would shoot a school superintendent with cyanide-laced bullets. Later they would achieve fame by kidnapping Patty Hearst. By then I didn’t want to even hear the R-word. This violence was not only useless and immoral, but dour. The pleasure principle was missing. And the man who could have brought creativity to the remnant of the Movement was hors de combat. I would later learn that Abbie Hoffman had been struggling with severe depression. He would kill himself in 1989. The Revolution was a crucial distraction for him, even more than for me. When it was over, he lost his best defense. And so did I.

I took the train from Chicago to New York, composing my piece while the heartland streaked by, rusting and resentful. I wrote about crossing the line from reporting to participating, but it took some time for the full feeling of what I’d been through to register. I’d never felt so exhilarated as when I watched kids being clubbed at the Hilton and escaped without a scratch. Now I knew what it was like to exist in a state of pure sensation, to lose myself in the ecstasy of a riot. But the aftermath of that high was sickening. What kind of person did it make me? What had become of the idea, so central to the civil rights movement, that violence was abhorrent because it reduced people to inhuman objects? And what, finally, did we accomplish? We’d destroyed the president who betrayed us, but we had no alternative to offer. And Richard Nixon was lapping up the blood in the streets.

Back in the city I noticed the used needles on the sidewalks, the blathering burnouts, the mood of grim forbearance. It seemed worse than the usual Manhattan response to a summer that lingered too long. There was a pall in the air, as if everyone were breathing the stench of having failed to do what seemed necessary but horrible to behold. We had a stake in the system, hate it as we might, and the prudence it dictated stopped us in our tracks. It felt suspiciously like maturity, and not many of us were ready to accept that gracefully. We had struggled against growing up, but in the crucible of history we did. I certainly did, and it left me feeling prematurely old.

Amid this dejection I interviewed Joe McDonald, of Country Joe and the Fish. They’d been brave and committed enough to play at the Chicago protests, and I wondered what Joe thought of the Revolution now. I wanted him to offer some alternative to my glumness, but instead he affirmed it. “There isn’t going to be any revolution,” he said tartly. “Let’s be realistic.”

Why not? I asked.

“Because you have to control things, and most people I know aren’t ready for that. They want a leaderless society.” Contempt flashed in his eyes. “Three years ago we were hobos singing our hearts out about the virtues of the open road. Last year, we were Indians. Now we’re revolutionaries. Man, if the Revolution ever comes for real, they’ll probably use Andy Warhol munitions. You throw it and this big sign comes on—Pow!”

We heard the sounds of a demo in the street below his hotel. We ran to the window. Kids were carrying Vietcong flags. Joe drew the blinds. “I’m not into that anymore,” he sighed. What was he into? I asked. His wife and kid, he replied—the standard of the mature man, delivered with the venom of a defeated partisan. Like me, he had played a role that proved to be, for all its promise, a stylization, and now it was his life. “I’ve been a poet, a guru, a politico,” he said. “I’ll be anything you want. Tell me what you want me to be.”

I had no answer.

“Well, I’m in the entertainment business. It just so happens that the people I entertain are freaky.”

Joe paid a price for his realism, and it showed in his music, which became almost laconic. “Only the symptoms of energy remain,” I wrote. I could have been talking about myself, but I was still invested in the belief that my mission was more than merely entertaining. I had to find a new subject, something that could inspire the prophetic rhetoric that my readers expected from me. For the better part of a year I thrashed around for a subject. Nothing made my blood beat. Then I heard about the planning for a rock festival on a farm in upstate New York. “Three days of peace, love, and music,” the poster said. I needed that kind of inspiration. If anything could rekindle my ardor it was the lineup at Woodstock, even more definitive than the one I’d seen two years earlier at Monterey Pop. But I wasn’t going to make the same mistake of mixing with the industry elite, so I declined an offer to travel to the festival in a
VIP helicopter. I wanted to experience the scene the way I once did—as a fan—and that included getting there. So I joined some friends and we drove up the New York State Thruway. But the road was so jammed that the police shut it down, and I never reached my destination. The news coverage was all of Woodstock that I got to see. I have to say, I was relieved. Now I wouldn’t have to face the fact that I had no spunk left for this sort of thing. Epiphanies in the mud were no longer my idea of grooving.

Clearly it was time to leave the field of rock criticism to a not-yet-jaded generation, and already the
Voice
had taken steps in that direction with a new column rotating among a group of writers. It skewered the negativity of “professionals” like me, insisting that the music should be about pleasure, period. I watched from a distance, too melancholy to feel resentful. I understood the need to focus on joy rather than judgment, and I pondered what Joe McDonald had told me during our interview: “Two years ago we believed in music like a god. Well, it’s nothing to believe in. The only emotion I associate with it is pleasure.” The problem was, I couldn’t make that link. My head was hurting, not from the crashing sound of guitars but from Joni Mitchell’s homage to Woodstock, in which she channeled a magic world where bombers turned to butterflies. “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden,” she warbled. What garden? The one where it was forbidden to eat the fruit of real-world knowledge? Better to be expelled—or perhaps to be the serpent. I fumbled for a way to articulate these feelings, but I couldn’t summon up the language to describe what I felt. The only honest response would have been silence, but I wasn’t ready for that. I am a writer. When all else fails, we write.

At this point I was so desperate for a theme that I reviewed the L.L. Bean catalog. I also covered a march against hunger held in an affluent community in the Connecticut woods, where well-fed people carried neat signs to the village green. This was a feel-good gesture with no impact, the perfect expression of an exhausted ideology. My piece was laced with irony, and far from newsworthy, but the
Voice
published it. (I don’t think they ever turned down an article by one of their writers.) Then I went too far—I asked for health insurance. I’d seen my father- in-law die in a hospital that admitted him only on the last day of his life. He’d been a freelance writer. I wanted to protect my family against that fate.

As Robert Frost wrote, “Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” That was how I thought of the
Voice
, and the owners encouraged writers to regard the place as a family. But the look on the editor’s face when I made my request shattered that illusion. Dan Wolfe told me something I should have known all along. “Richard,” he said in a tone that took the full measure of my naïveté, “this is a business.”

I guess it was a reasonable call. I had the look, and probably the stink, of a washed-up writer. But I reckoned that I had given the paper my best work without asking for much besides attention. All I needed now was some shelter from the storm. But I knew there would be none. That’s when I left the
Village Voice
. I slouched uptown to see Clay Felker, and he made me an offer. I would become a contributing editor at
New York
magazine, with a modest salary—and health insurance. I stayed for about three years, until Felker and his backers bought the
Voice
in 1974. He asked me to be the arts editor, and I eagerly agreed. On my first day in that job I strode into Dan Wolfe’s office. It was vacant now. I walked up to his empty desk and sat in his chair.

I was sorry to leave
New York
. During my stint there, I wrote pieces and edited packages on pop culture, including a special issue about Latino life in the city. It earned the magazine a sit-in from activists, ostensibly because of the title I’d chosen, “The Big Mango.” The invaders were from the Young Lords, a gang that had evolved into a Pantheresque political group. Its ranks included several Latino militants who would go on to illustrious media careers. I met with them, and I had the impression that they bore no animosity toward me or the publication. They simply wanted in, and they were using the most effective tactic of the time. I was relieved, because all I cared about was being reassured that I hadn’t done anything racist. I liked the fact that they were ambitious. It was an antidote to the sense of futility that was endemic around me.

I often found myself thinking about how other radicals had coped with the failure of their revolutions. How did the young visionaries of 1848 deal with the suppression of their noble dreams? What did partisans in the Paris Commune think when their defeated comrades were executed by the thousands? How did Communists who deeply believed in the triumph of the proletariat live with the tyranny of Stalin? Some of them recanted in best-selling books, others clung to the long view of human history while settling down to raise ungrateful children. None of
it consoled me, because our revolution hadn’t even happened, and yet we had to suffer the feeling of impotence in its aftermath.

Most of us made an uneasy peace with our expectations, but nothing was settled. It felt as if we were lying in wait, with no leaders worth heeding or new strategies to reanimate us. Peace marches grew more virulent, but the war went on under the tarantula designs of Henry Kissinger. Universities reopened in a chastened mood, and student militants were largely isolated. Black radicals were fighting a futile battle against the culture’s capacity to subsume their power in erotic fantasy—as in the vast success of superpimp films. Meanwhile, in the white mainstream, retro reared its fashion-savvy head, an invitation to consume the past even as we were consumed by the present. Those supreme rock rascals the Beatles released a song about getting “back to where you once belonged.” I understood the feeling, and I shared the need, but I couldn’t do that trick, because I’d never belonged anywhere.

Even if I’d wanted to turn to music for sustenance, there was little that seemed nourishing to me. The hits kept coming, but not the revelations. The pain of reckoning with the events of 1968 led to a retreat from incendiary rock, and the hottest new bands made music that sounded decorative rather than destructive. Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, and (God help me!) the Vanilla Fudge: they all signified a spirit of withdrawal from the edge. These groups inspired the lighting of matches but not the kicking out of jams. On the soft end of pop, there was a lot of mystical crap around. Tiny bells seemed to be ringing on every corner, while something called the Human Potential Movement was hot-tubbing toward Big Sur to be born. The peace sign cohabited with the smiley face, and the raised fist looked painfully passé. Meanwhile in Los Angeles, the Charles Manson “family” stuck their knives into Sharon Tate’s pregnant belly, inspired by another prophetic Beatle song, “Helter Skelter.” All of it, I thought, reflected a retreat from faith in radical democracy.

In the summer of ’69,
Life
magazine ran a feature on hippie communes. But the real hippie life, at least in New York, had become a sitting target for the rage and violence of the slums. I’d seen the signs two years earlier, when a hippie chick from the suburbs and her less affluent boyfriend were murdered in the East Village by rapine thugs. That crime caught the media’s eye because it epitomized the naïveté of the counterculture. The story gave every reporter an excuse to feel good about the
compromises of the straight life. I was horrified to learn that the dead boyfriend had called himself Groovy. At first I thought he was my old friend, but as I’ve said, it was a common name. At the time I wrote that the outpouring of grief and gloating was the inevitable result of an alliance “between the fourth estate and the fifth dimension,” the media and the kids who’d been inspired by all the coverage to attempt the impossible. Except it wasn’t impossible. It was crushed—by commerce, chaos, and the anxieties of instability, which became unbearable.

The counterculture as I knew it was dead, yet its corpse remained, as lacquered and preserved as Lenin’s body in Red Square. There was an enormous appetite for films, plays, books, and TV shows about the florid ways of hippies. I could have siphoned off my share of this market and found a niche as a syndicated columnist, but I imagined myself flogging that beat until middle age, fending off angina and struggling to describe a youth culture that I no longer understood. I’m not saying it’s impossible for geezers to write about rock; there are several who do, quite well. I lacked their enthusiasm and their focus. My only recourse was to find a place where my peculiar blend of insight and vulgar energy would be welcome. But I wasn’t what’s happening, baby—not anymore.