Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Book Review: In Search of the Lost Chord

In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea 
by Danny Goldberg 
Akashic Books 


Some years ago I did a review for Jewish Currents of a three-volume study of Jews in the creative arts. The chapter on the Jewish contribution to rock music was written by Danny Goldberg, and I found it the most annoying chapter in the book. He basically said, “I’m not just going to give you a list of who in rock music is Jewish” and then proceeded to do just that. It read like a laundry list.

I have a longstanding interest in the Sixties, including hippie culture, so when I heard Goldberg interviewed on Raghu Markus’ podcast about his new book, In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea I went and got it. After about 30 pages of his comprehensive chronology style, I was remembering what annoyed me about his writing the first time.

However, the book grew on me. What felt in 15 pages lazy and superficial, in 300 pages felt well-researched and wide-ranging. Goldberg basically takes the chronology of events in 1967 and give brief accounts of them: the people involved, the process that led to them, how they were covered in the press, how they affected the people involved, etc. Often this is covered in one paragraph; for more significant events more space is given, but no account lasts more than a couple of pages.  


The first event covered in detail is the Human Be-In in San Francisco in January. It was zenith of the Haight-Ashbury era, and the beginning of its end. By the end of the summer, media attention, a tsunami of teenage runaways and a concomitant influx of hard drug dealers and other users, had pretty much ruined the scene, as symbolized by a “Death of Hippie” event declared by the Diggers in October. Those two events bookend the account. There’s a chronology of 1967 events in the back, and it’s amazing how much happened that year, including riots, Abbie Hoffman’s famous throwing-money-at-Wall-Street demonstration, the death of Che Guevara, the release of Sgt. Pepper, etc. etc etc.  

Goldberg was a 17-year-old proto-hippie during the period, in California (putatively) to attend Berkeley, and a minor player in real time; most of the accounts are developed through copious of research, from sources such as the entire corpus of the alternative paper the East Village Other, and the memoirs of prominent (and less prominent) figures from the period, such as one-time Digger, later actor, and even later Zen Priest, Peter Coyote.

In a few cases Goldberg personally knew people involved in various events, such as Joshua Greene, a high school classmate of Goldberg who later became part of George Harrison’s involvement with Bhaktivedanta, the progenitor of Hare Krishna. In these cases Goldberg uses original interview material, which gives the account a personal flavor that is sometimes missing from the more research-y accounts.

The book is very thorough. Chapters are organized around music (particularly the San Francisco sound), various aspects of politics, spirituality, “black power” (what was happening in the civil rights movement and its offshoots), etc. Each chapter makes its way through the various events of the year in its category, stopping along the way for descriptions of the figures involved, including Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, and the Maharishi. In a couple of the really famous cases, such as Bob Dylan, Goldberg says, “There’s not much I can add to what others have already said.”

One thing that really stood out for me was the account of an event I’d never heard before: the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation (for the Demystification of Violence), which took place in London in July. It featured a panel discussion among Emmett Grogan of the Diggers, Allen Ginsberg, and Stokely Carmichael, who had recently stepped down from his position with SNCC.Carmichael is one of many sixties figures whose thoughtfulness and depth is not sufficiently appreciated by subsequent generations. Their discussions largely revolved around Ginsburg’s love and respect for, and Carmichael’s contempt for, the love-and-flowers ethic:  


[Ginsburg] turned to Carmichael and continued, “The reason the hippies have taken on these beads, appurtenances, music, of shamanistic groups, of ecstatic trance-state-types, is because they are beginning to explore, for the first time, the universe of consciousness of other cultures besides their own.” Some clusters of hippies were even “beginning to move in on authority with those weapons which have been called ‘flower power,’ being euphemistically for a simple, calm, tranquil equilibrium, nonviolent, as far as possible, as far as the self can be controlled, so that it can relate to other selves in disguise, including the police.”
Including the police! Carmichael had sarcastically said he would have more respect for flowers if they’d had any effect on the Newark police who had, in recent days, brutally quashed the riots in tier city. This was exactly the kind of language that drove him crazy about the hippies.
“Mr. Ginsburg, I don’t know much about the hippie movement, but I would like to beg to differ with you,” said Carmichael. “I think the reason most of them are hippies today is because they are confused little kids who have run away from their home and who will return to their culture within a year or two.”
Ginsburg responded, “There’s no culture to return to.”  
I think Carmichael gets the better of that exchange.

The question of hippies returning to the culture is an interesting one. In the 1970s there was a movie, the name of which escapes me for the moment, which was the story of a journalist looking for a fictionalized version of Abbie Hoffman, who was underground at the time. He finds him a suburban yuppie. Ironically, at the time Hoffman was organizing environmental protection for the St. Lawrence River under an assumed name. Most of the people Goldberg tracks down today are in some way connected to their hippie selves, including the former radical activist and early feminist whom Goldberg finds canvassing for Hillary Clinton.

Although 60s politics led to great political breakthroughs, especially in feminism and the environmental movement, it also led to a massive reactionary backlash, first embodied by Nixon and George Wallace and later victorious as Reaganism. In his conclusion, Goldberg writes,

Peter Coyote believes that the greater impact of the sixties are cultural: gay rights, legal pot, the proliferation of mindfulness, yoga, nontraditional medicine, health foods, and most currents of the environmental movement… But it’s important to recognize that the political forces protecting the status quo of the military-industrial complex and other massive economic interests were and are far more powerful that those which resist change on social issues.

We certainly didn’t learn to study war no more.

Goldberg’s chronology style doesn't leave much room for thought-piece consideration of the lasting impact, if any, of the hippie ideal. One piece of ongoing 60s culture he doesn't cover is the 30 year career of the Grateful Dead, which was a major locus of hippie energy and the hippie ideal for the hippies themselves and for subsequent generations who missed the original fun.

Goldberg really tries to restrict himself to 1967, so the lasting after-effect piece is understated. Most of the “hippie ideal” was translated almost immediately into yet another consumer lifestyle, a bohemianism that could be bought and which, once the wave had crested, could be divorced from the revolutionary spirit of the times. American capitalism is very talented at incorporating into itself the forces that challenge it. And of course “hippie” became a cliche almost as soon as it appeared. But if you look at the world we face - permanent war, corporate domination, wage-and-salary slavery, racism, Donald Fucking Trump - you’ll see that the “sixties ideal” -- of political revolution, radical personal freedom, and mystical spirituality -- is something we could use a lot more of right about now.




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