Another Little Piece of My Heart (22 page)

Ecstasy and violence converged in pop culture during the sixties, as they would in radical politics. Art’s attack on bourgeois taboos had been the model for our rebellion, but it also laid the groundwork for the blind ferocity that undermined our vision. Sontag was right to warn about this, but she didn’t see the connection between x-treme culture and the economic forces that were transforming those fantasies into profit centers. Her political comments were sometimes bold, but often naïve. She was largely ignorant of left-wing theory, partly because she felt constrained by it and partly because it was regarded by the cultural elite as something even worse than reductive—
déclassé.
And Sontag was dependent on that elite. Even as she courted subversion she also craved prestige. She could never entirely break with the values of her class, and to me that was her greatest weakness as a critic.

That said, her work has aged well, unlike most of the apologetics that passed for solidarity in the sixties. I watched uneasily as intellectuals descended on radical culture and politics like tourists from the developed world. They were enchanted by what should have made them skeptical, and since they generally lived safe lives they were quite susceptible to the thrill of chaos. How else to account for the decision by the
New York Review of Books
to print a diagram of a Molotov cocktail on its front page during a riot in the Newark ghetto. The shocking thing about that cover was not that it ran, but that it felt right. Everyone who was anyone in the hip milieu, it seemed, wanted in on the incendiary
action. The result was a profound retreat from the liberal tradition, and not just in the streets. Freudians unmoored from Freud saw the oceanic future, and several of them promoted what Norman O. Brown called “holy madness” as an alternative to repression. I found such work ominous. It was part of a larger rebellion against systems and standards that had spread from the arts to the academy. Anything beyond the pale of Western rationalism was worth a hearing, if not a book. On the more benign end of this spectrum were celebrations, by dazzled professors, of all things young and shaggy. This embrace of the new was necessary, of course; it broke the back of the hierarchical thinking that underlay normalcy. But it lacked precisely what was needed most: a critique of our headlong plunge into ecstasy as liberation.

The best thing about the sixties was the willingness to try nearly anything that hadn’t been tried before. It was a truly stimulating strategy, because it allowed young people to imagine the future in practically limitless terms. But it placed all our impulses on an equal footing, suppressing our ability to think and behave strategically. What Gertrude Stein said of Oakland was also true of the counterculture—there was no
there
there, no will to form institutions that could transmit values, only a feeling that everything worth learning could be known in an instant. What we needed more than anything was perspective, but we isolated ourselves from anyone who could provide it. Driven by polemics—and publicity—we were rudderless in the current of our convictions.

Perhaps this is always what it’s like to live in revolutionary times, the sense that everything is coursing toward a destiny that seems irrational and immanent. And certainly the r-word was sounded more and more often, in antiwar rallies as well as in commercials for refrigerators. But in 1967 this uprising seemed more like a Jim Morrison meditation on killing your father and having at your mother. One thing about Oedipal fantasies, as opposed to genuinely revolutionary ones, is that you don’t really want them to succeed. You count on your parents to resist your most destructive desires. This is what I felt about America. It never occurred to me that one center of authority after another would give way, and that the nation would entangle itself in a ravel of rage and fear.

The breakdown of civil society had many causes, some more justifiable than others, but more than anything I blamed intellectuals. They were the guardian angels of my childhood, the authors of books that shielded me from the brutishness of my neighborhood. I expected them
to stand against the approaching chaos. I should have realized that they were as likely as any other group to fold under the pressure of conformity. And now there was the added inducement of fame, the great intoxicant, harder than even McCarthyism to resist. But it wasn’t just that intellectuals refused to occupy the pedestal I had placed them on. The pedestal itself was gone. It had been smashed, along with other signifiers of the order, and what took its place was a slope on which many people scrambled to a top that didn’t exist. I was one of those climbers, as deeply invested in the futile scrum as any Sisyphus. The uncertainty I saw in my heroes was a mirror of mine. Something was coming down the pike that none of us could stop, or even understand. It frightened me. But even as I recoiled from the approaching storm I was drawn to it. There would be many good stories to report.

I remember the moment when I decided that rock as a revolutionary force was dead. It happened in the spring of 1968, when I heard a seven-minute opus called “MacArthur Park.” I’ll mention just one of its all too many verses, something about being pressed “in love’s hot, fevered iron, like a striped pair of pants.” Actually the word
striped
was sung in two syllables—as in
stri
-ped—because, you know, this song was art. It had deep meanings, hidden references, and a refrain that was its own parody. A cake left out in the rain … the icing melting … the recipe lost forever … There was only one permissible response to imagery like that: a heartfelt “Heavy!”

Of course, icky words are not an impediment to a great pop composition. The lyrics of my youth were often insipid, but at least they were inspired by real emotions. What passed for rock poetry in 1968 lacked any relationship to recognizable experience. It was a set of floating metaphors for a culture that was growing detached from everything but its own tropes. Dylan had withdrawn from the scene, and when he returned he was writing more traditional, less flamboyant songs. A serious motorcycle crash was the ostensible reason for his retreat, but I suspect- ed that he’d caught a terminal case of disgust at the fake pieties that flooded rock in his wake. The synthesis of musical modes pioneered by the Beatles had become a rote exoticism with vaguely Eastern vibes. Every musician in Topanga Canyon was strumming a sitar. Meanwhile the Fab Four were heading for a breakup, and I could see the signs in their latest compositions, which were far easier to attribute to either
Lennon or McCartney than their classics had been. There was a rumor that Paul had died in a car crash, a precursor of the famous “Paul is dead” canard of 1969, which no amount of official denial could dislodge, because the truth was not the point—it was all about the feeling of doom projected onto a beloved star. These were symptoms of a deeper disintegration. I observed them, horrified but fascinated. It was like coming across a really nasty porn film from which you can’t avert your gaze. This was more than just the triumph of plastic—it was a symptom of exhaustion.

The decadence that overran the counterculture had happened so quickly. I scrambled to describe it, fighting off the fear that doing so would threaten not just my commitment but my career. I’d been called a fascist by Mark Rudd, a leader of the radical students at Columbia University, because of my dismissal of
Sgt. Pepper.
I was haunted by the thought of being booed off the stage, the way I’d seen students harangue the old socialist Irving Howe, who had warned them about the consequences of doing politics by passion alone. (The election of Richard Nixon in 1968 proved him right.) But I couldn’t continue to celebrate something that no longer thrilled me. On the contrary, I felt a seething contempt for hip enlightenment. All sorts of vacant slogans were in the air. The peace sign was mandatory; any criticism brought the admonition “You’re bringing me down.” It reminded me of Communism, with its obligatory optimism, except that in the Eastern bloc countries I had visited, nearly everyone thought the professed morality was bullshit. Here, where freedom allegedly reigned, millions of kids spouted empty platitudes. This was worse than even hype, because it was self-created.

I suppose I should have focused on the fun of it—the gushy sentiments of flower power, the sheer joy of a song like “Yummy Yummy Yummy” (“I got love in my tummy”), the outsize theatricality of concerts. But I’d seen one too many L.A. bands with fire bursting from their headdresses as they rhapsodized about love. Psychedelic music was giving way to fake opulence, and a new genre called art rock appeared. These were lushly orchestrated ballads with fabulous stereo effects. They had their own delight as kitsch, I suppose, but by then I had lost my capacity for enjoying it. Too much was at stake, given the mission I’d assigned to rock. I could only rail against the simulacra of the music I adored. I knew it would earn me the ultimate accusation—
bummer!
—but it was as close as I dared come to issuing a warning. My column was rarely a
pleasure to write, and it couldn’t have been fun to read, because there’s nothing felicitous about doubt.

I bonded best with other skeptics, and they weren’t easy to find, since most of my peers were convinced that I needed to mellow out and trip more frequently. My favorite holdout against this kind of thinking was Bill Graham, the rock impresario who managed the Fillmore Ballroom, booking the great bands I’d seen in San Francisco. I met him in 1968 as he was about to open the Fillmore East in a former Yiddish theater on Second Avenue. Graham was not a child of security like most of his customers. Born in Berlin, he’d escaped from the Nazis in a children’s refugee program and grown up in the Bronx with American foster parents. The intent expression on his face, the grimness around the eyes even when he was amused, was the only way in which his past life intruded. He was one of the few people I could trust with my apprehensions about the zaniness pretending to be a higher sanity, since he shared those qualms. Pondering the latest bizarro excess of the counterculture, we would shrug to each other like old Jews expressing fatalism toward the future. I could read the meaning of this gesture because at heart all Jews of my generation are survivors. My parents never mentioned the death camps, but I was aware of them as a boy in my nightmares. Graham had been shaped by the real thing. He didn’t do drugs, as far as I knew. I figured that he didn’t dare.

I spent many nights at the Fillmore East in the line of duty, sitting so close to the stage that my body vibrated from the sound and the fillings in my teeth hurt. After several hours of this barrage I would fall into a daze under the influence of blobby projections on the screen. I have trouble remembering the details of those shows, since I saw so many. But I do recall the night I noticed a musician in the B-band warming up the crowd. He was a Groovy look-alike, another long-haired, lanky kid with a sinus-driven thrum in his voice. I’d thought of Groovy often since our acid trip on Lake Tahoe, and I wondered whether he’d become a drug dealer, a patient in a psych ward, or a rocker. Any of those alternatives seemed possible. By then I associated him with an experience that was both outside my life and deep within it. On LSD I’d felt as if my defenses were a celluloid scrim. He could see through it to the murky core. I didn’t trust anyone with the power to do that, not in the midst of a confusion that made me feel as fragile and hollow as the Japanese paper lamp shade in my living room. I was pretty good at hiding my anguish,
even from those who knew me well. Only my mustache, uneven because of the hairs I bit out of it as a nervous tic, gave me away. But I couldn’t hide myself on acid.

The Groovy look-alike stepped to the mike, his face pale in the blue lights. His band was pure California mellow. The soft thump of the bass and the low patter of drums matched his supple voice. The beat was barely there, and the melodies seemed as indefinite as a breeze. But most of all I remember his wispy tenor. It blurred the lines between guy and girly. I closed my notebook and let the music take me.

I wasn’t sure whether it was the singer or the association with Groovy, but I felt a vibration in my pelvic region, as if fingers were running down my spine. It wasn’t a unique experience—my body was often suffused with arousal when I listened to rock. But this was so much like an overtly sexual feeling that I clenched my legs together and touched my crotch to reassure myself that I wasn’t getting hard. I looked around. Everyone was sitting alert with their eyes closed, transfixed.

The set went on for maybe twenty minutes. Then it ended abruptly. There was no applause, just a kind of sigh moving through the audience. The B-band left the stage, a new set of equipment appeared, and the clang of guitars in the semidarkness reminded me of the real reason I was here tonight. It wasn’t the kid from California. I had come to see some hard-driving British group, the Moody Yardbirds or whatever. I figured that they had brought this laid-back kid along, plucking him from a honeysuckle bush in L.A. as a gentle prelude to the bum’s rush of their act. I settled down for what I anticipated would be a very long set, but then I heard a commotion in the aisle. It was that kid, surrounded by a knot of fans. Now I
really
wasn’t sure if he was Groovy; acid had created an indefinite image in my mind, and the kid almost fit it. He smiled at me—was that a sign of recognition or a California courtesy nod? I thought of approaching him, if only to find out whether he really was my old acid buddy. But what did it matter? Seeing him had brought me back to that afternoon at Tahoe, when Groovy’s long face looked like a Disney doggy and his uncombed hair bristled like a mane.

The kid called the next day. He was following up on the eye contact we’d made, and he invited me to visit him at the Albert, the hip hotel for musicians in New York. This was proof that he was just another
peace-signer with a hard-on for success. I was sure that his first words when I arrived would be a West Coast version of,
Rich, baby, for you there’s some hash in the butterfly.

I realized right away that he wasn’t Groovy. The thrum in his singing, which had reminded me of my friend, was missing on the phone, and so was the laid-back attitude. This kid sounded as hungry as me. But he was definitely my type: string-bean body and an edge of delicacy that he couldn’t quite suppress. “Let’s do a doobie,” he said in an L.A. accent that spoke of surf and serenity. As we chatted I pictured myself stoned on his grass, gazing at his superstar grin while he sprawled across the bed, leaning on a skinny elbow, his wares showing through his jeans.