Another Little Piece of My Heart (33 page)

In the Facebookable universe, I imagine, everyone has a page. But you won't find my Groovy there. I don't think anybody goes by that name anymore; it's part of the faded enigma of the sixties. And yet, there are times when I think I see him. Usually it's just some stringy kid with an advanced degree in tweeting. I have to remind myself that I'm living in a present that sees the past through a glass wryly.

The sixties are a blur that comes into focus only in the froggy faces of the rockers who've survived, in a retro style more lurid than it should be, in movies awash in historical details but stripped of their true complexity. Also in books that offer rueful retrospectives on the counterculture by those who have nothing but tenure to show for their dreams. In these artifacts, the sixties are seen as either a puff of Acadian smoke or a dangerous diversion. The best defense against such distortions is to insist on radical subjectivity when describing that time, so there's no pretense of authority. That's the strategy I've followed here, though with some misgivings. I hate memoirs. They mainly exist to cast their authors in an unduly flattering light. I don't think I've avoided that entirely, but I've tried to present my motives as they were—ambivalent most of the time.

Still, few reporters deserve to be the center of the story; that's why I resisted writing this book for many years. I didn't want to end up with a spin on Nabokov called
Kvetch, Memory.
But not long ago something changed my mind. I read
Just Kids
, Patti Smith's account of her long relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. I was enchanted by her portrayal of their youth in the sixties, set in the bohemian milieu I inhabited at roughly the same time. Her writing manages to convey a sense of tragedy without losing generosity of spirit, a combination I find hard to achieve, partly because I'm not as great an artist as she is, and also because it wouldn't be true to my own experiences. I look back on my trove of recollections with a mixture of anger and regret, but if I delve beneath the pain I can locate memories of immense pleasure as well as more love than I deserved (though I didn't think I got nearly enough sex at the time). The transferential power of that love shaped me the way wind and water carve a rock. My inner life is an amalgam of my affairs, including those that ended
badly. I needn't say more, because the pattern of my sexuality that these feelings formed fell into place after the scope of this book.

As did my second career at the
Village Voice
. I returned there in 1974, when Clay Felker bought the paper and hired me to be its arts editor. That position allowed me to bring in writers who fit the strategy I'd learned from the original owners, which was that reporters should work the beat they live. If you need someone to cover midnight movies, find an underground filmmaker to do it. If you want someone to write about the punk-rock milieu, get a kid who hangs out at CBGB. If you're looking for a performance-art critic, hire someone who empathizes with people rolling around in broken glass. Eventually I became the executive editor, with a specialty in turning young writers into, well, writers. And once my own block receded I filed a piece nearly every week. I wrote about artists, sexual politics, the media, and the incessant advance of hype. It was a concordance with my life that could only have happened at the
Voice
. My time there ended in 2004; I won't elaborate on my departure, except to say that nearly everyone I worked with is gone now, and the paper is not what it was. But the most remarkable thing you can say about a person or a publication that's been through many triumphs and traumas over nearly sixty years is that it's still around.

So is the profession that I helped to found. Rock criticism has changed a great deal—there are many more women, for one thing—but it's gratifying to know, or at least to believe, that during my tenure in the sixties I set a precedent that makes this form what it is. Other types of criticism put less emphasis on the personal, but a rock writer has to come across as an individual, not just an arbiter. The best of them have strong voices, different from mine yet not unrelated. This is a real distinction in an age when the author is supposed to have disappeared.

As for my own writing, it changed after my mother died in 2003. I lost the driving ambition that made me grasp for the spotlight, along with the energy to engage the latest outrage or sensation. It's not easy for me to be silent; I have a tendency to rant at anyone who will listen. But I know that wielding the sword takes time away from other possibilities. I still write, on an almost daily basis—I feel bereft when I don't—but rarely on deadline. By now I've learned to handle the horror of words that won't come and the flop sweat of literary failure. You have to persist, and it helps to have a day job. So I teach, at the public university
where, half a century ago, I wrote my first article on rock for the school paper. I'm blessed to have avoided the kind of academic politics that makes journalism look like a Quaker meeting. I haven't ended up in a Rock Studies program where tenure hinges on one's opinion of the third farewell album of a band that's sold its catalog to Apple.

One of the courses in my repertoire is a seminar on the sixties. My students are fascinated by the era, but they don't know much about what made it work. It's up to me to take them beyond the tropes of “classic rock,” to describe the logic of the decade and explain how its madness forged their reality. Multiculturalism, feminism, gender theory, even veggie burgers; all are products of a time when foolishness created a space for many wise ideas. When they ask, as they always do, what happened to the hippies, I tell them there's no easy answer. Some made a killing in real estate, some still live the communal life, some keep their commitments alive in social activism, and some are burned out. But most former hippies honor their past in a small corner of their existence, such as the record collection that they share with their grandchildren, as I do with my students. Every so often they make me realize that the meaning of a good song is constantly changing.

I once played John Fogerty's “Bad Moon Rising” for my class. A student mentioned that he'd heard it as a child. At the time he thought the refrain went, “There's a bathroom on the right.” I corrected him—it's “There's a bad moon on the rise.” But I realized that he'd given a perfect description of the difference between my youth and his:
Don't go 'round tonight, it's bound to take your life …
but, fear not, the nightmare will soon be over …
there's a bathroom on the right.

At my ballsiest, I argue that the sixties can happen again. Not in their original form—we don't have the economy to sustain that kind of extravagance—and not with the same reckless naïveté. But the vision of that decade is imbedded in American history. Its roots lie in the periodic Great Awakenings of spiritual and political fervor; in the Transcendentalist ethos of Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau; in the shake-ups of the Jazz Age and the ecstatic politics of the Beats. These eruptions of idealism, which nearly always involve new modes of life, are a major way we change. We are a nation of unreal possibilities made manifest, also a land where new ideas of liberty unleash new mechanisms of repression. This is the American dialectic. Leonard Cohen says the U.S. is “the cradle of the best and the worst.” I believe that; I've lived it.

I was teaching my sixties course when the Occupy Wall Street happened. Most of the students were disappointed that the protest fizzled, but I told them to be patient (something I wish I'd told myself when our revolution fell apart). This new movement is a har-binger of a generational politics still in formation. Its most important achievement, aside from crystallizing the perception of growing inequality, was to get kids off their butts, to let them experience what had been repressed: the politics of making noise. And it happened at a time when protest was supposed to be passé among the young. It's hard to imagine those joys when power is hidden and action is simulated in a video game; when the entertainment-industrial complex is so effective at delivering the libidinal goods. But an Instagram is not a life. There's nothing more energizing than feeling your power in a physical mass of your peers. That, I believe, is why thousands of young people poured into the streets in 2011 to proclaim not a program but a statement—we are being screwed.

I had my reasons to be wary of the Occupy movement. Dis-illusionment is painful, and I didn't want to join anything that might revive that feeling. Nor did I want to be reminded of my age by standing on my feet for hours. But one day, on an afternoon stroll, I ran into a demonstration blocking traffic. My blood pressure rose, along with the familiar feeling of regret that I'm no longer part of such things. I started to turn away, but a squirt of pepper spray hit the crowd and changed my mind. As usual, a cop had ignited a spark with his gratuitous brutality. I was gripped by a strange stirring, something like a man in a coma having an erection.

Over the next week I spent quite a bit of time at the Occupy encampment near the New York Stock Exchange. Tour buses took a detour to swing by, and I was surprised to see the passengers cheering. I also saw grizzled union members forming a protective circle. More than once they appeared when the city was about to move on the camp, sometimes very late at night, and in a labor town like New York they were intimidating to the political class. Between them and the tourists I realized that many people, across lines of age and class, felt held in check. They were sick of it, as was I—tired of walking around muttering to myself about the tyranny of a triumphant capitalism, the closed structure of wealth and influence, the recklessness and contempt of the financial class, the predation of wildcat development that homogenizes neighborhoods.
But pessimism had deadened my capacity to resist. I could no longer imagine a practical alternative to the present. Yet the urge to kick out the jams was still within me. I longed for the thrill of possibility, and above all I wanted to move.

Well, I did move, with some difficulty. After a few hours of marching I was exhausted. It was all I could do to raise an arthritic fist. And the police used every tactic in their arsenal to make the experience uncomfortable. They penned us up in areas much too small, so that we were crammed together like fish in a net. They declared a no-fly zone to keep news helicopters from overhead. They conducted mass arrests designed not just to clear the streets but to enter the protesters in a vast surveillance database. It was a nonviolent operation by the standards of my youth, though a number of heads were cracked—no amount of training can stop a cop from being sadistic in a panic. Still, despite the overwhelming show of force, the protest spoke truth to power. And I got to parade behind a kid with long hair flying, one arm around his girl and the other porting a didgeridoo. He wasn't Groovy, but he
was
the type. So it still existed after all. Doddering behind him, I realized that my adrenal glands were still capable of pumping, and that I still had the lung power to bellow. It didn't make me feel young again—nothing can do that. But it did make me feel alive. And that, finally, is worth a lot.

Alive I am. And kicking. Not ready for a nursing home. I can only hope that, by the time I've fallen and I can't get up, they'll have special places for sixties types, people who can't tell the difference between a contact high and dementia. Places with drugs so good you won't miss drugs, and an ambience that encourages you to lose your dread by living in the remnants of your youth. You'll have Be-In breaks, classes in art as self-realization, psychedelic music in the evening, and lava lights on all night. Kids will visit to hear your stories about the magic days as a nurse wipes up the drool. Munchies will always be available, Sara Lee cheesecake and other staples of the stoned. And there won't be any locks on the doors to prevent you from breaking on through to the other side, not until the wandering begins and you're tempted to walk to the water and sink under the waves, spreading your arms over the ripples the way I imagine Don McNeill did when he drowned.

One thing I know. After my senses have been stripped and the tambourine man has left for a more lucrative gig, after the Revolution is televised and banksters inherit the earth, when everything I value has
been shorn of its original meaning, when my feet can't feel the beat and nothing but self-delusion remains, I will still have the need that drove me to devour as much as I could. I was born famished—for food, for sex, for fame, and finally for love. And I will die hungry.

Visit
richardgoldsteinonline.com
to read selections from the author's journalism in the sixties and to see pictures of his evolution as a rock critic.

This is not a history of the sixties. It is a collection of recollections. Fortunately, there’s a published record of my encounters with rock stars and other celebrities during those years. The quotes from these people, and the descriptions of events I witnessed, are taken from those articles. But I didn’t report everything I saw or knew—no journalist does—so I’ve pieced together conversations that were off the record or edited out of my pieces. I’m confident in the truthfulness of these passages because I remember nearly everything that famous people said to me. I can’t make the same claim about people who weren’t famous. I didn’t take notes on our personal encounters, and it’s impossible to recall precisely what occurred between us fifty years ago. I’ve done my best to reconstruct incidents involving those people in a way that feels authentic to me.

I’ve also taken steps to protect the privacy of those who had no idea that they would ever be written about, and in some cases I’ve altered their names or appearances so they aren’t identifiable. I don’t believe in ambush journalism, or in reporting that violates privacy, and the details of my intimate relationships are not for publication. So you won’t find nearly as much here about the woman I was married to in the sixties as she deserves. Far too many characters in this book are dead, but some of them have children who may not know everything I do about their, parents’ lives, and in those cases I’ve omitted information that might hurt the survivors. In addition I’ve compressed or combined some scenes and sequences for dramatic effect.