In 1966, twenty-two year old Goldstein walked into the
Village Voice and invented the job he wanted: rock critic. During his time
doing this, he had some amazing adventures and met a lot of the great rock
innovators. He became friends with Janis Joplin, was a passenger in a car
driven by a completely stoned Dennis Wilson (who at one point in the trip said “Whoa!
The road is doing these weird things.”), and had the Velvet Underground play at
his wedding. But in this time of social upheaval, music came to seem less
important than politics and protests. His beat changed to protests, he became
friends with Abbie Hoffman, and hung with the Black Panthers. Later he became a
chronicler of pop culture, and then a worker for gay rights.
The book really only spans a few years, but so much happened
during that time- the core of the hippie subculture came and went. Music went
from being all about the music to selling out to commercial interests. The drug
scene went from happy, smiling potheads to bikers selling the hard, injectable
stuff. The innocence was lost.
The book is a personal memoir, but Goldstein’s life is
inextricably meshed with so much of the history of the time that you cannot
tease them apart. He changed as the times did.
I loved reading this book; I was born in 1954 so I was too
young to appreciate much of what was happening in the world even though I was
aware of it. This was a nice trip back through time, viewed through a critical
eye.
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