Desire in all its permutations: reading Richard Goldstein's 60s memoir; or, how to get in touch with your inner hippie

It’s probably sacrilege to say so, but I’d never heard of Richard Goldstein before seeing a lone copy of his book Another Little Piece Of My Heart: My Life Of Rock And Revolution In The '60s (2016) sitting forlornly on a discount trolley in the basement of a bleak record shop chain just before closing time one Saturday afternoon earlier this year. Who’s this geezer, I thought? Probably yet another MOJO type banging on about the Beatles or the Kinks or whatever. Forget it! But no, it's not like that at all. Goldstein, I now know, is a fairly major figure of the sixties counterculture. As the first rock critic for New York's Village Voice - possibly the very first dedicated rock critic anywhere (it's contested apparently) - Goldstein was there as rock itself emerged as a musical genre and cultural force. Yep, he was a wise-guy gunslinger journalist in full “freak drag”, sticking it to straights - to the student-bashing pigs wielding their billy clubs, giving the finger to The Man, to the major labels, the suits, the military-industrial complex, to everyone ... 

Sounds potentially rather grandiose and dull, right? It's not, though. Goldstein is actually very nuanced. He's capable of a few airy flights but he's generally grounded and self-reflexive. There he was seemingly having the time of his life - going from Bronx schmuck wannabe to a nationally-known figure in the space of about two years. He got to interview and hang out with (or at least write about) a roll call of 60s rock titans - the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Janis Joplin, Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground (who, rather amazingly, played at his own wedding reception), the MC5, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, the Who and ... well, you get the picture. But, interestingly, even as he became something of a semi-star himself, he was plagued by self-doubt. He was often ambivalent about a lot of the music and the peace-and-love scene he was ostensibly championing. And, to add a further layer of complication, he seems to have plunged into the weird and wonderful world of music journalism as an escape from reality and a degree of self-hatred stemming from his latent homosexuality. Yep, this book is a heady mix man. You're gonna need plenty of head space - it's a trip and it's pretty far out.

Break on through to the other side: Goldstein's memoir

Actually, despite my unfunny mockery, Another Little Piece is extremely good (a few quibbles aside). The key thing is that it isn't really about music per se, or not just. As a teen/20-something, Goldstein clearly adored music (possibly liking it too much) but this is first and foremost a memoir, and in particular a memoir of young person's feelings. Anyway, here are few quick things I found interesting and/or entertaining about the book:

*Goldstein evokes his Jewish Bronx background extremely well, making it something of a leitmotif. Too short, chubby and generally un-macho to compete with the local Italian kids (the "kings" of the projects with their confident virility and tough gang behaviour), he found solace in music and reading.

*The "outer burbs" mentality of being from the Bronx gave Goldstein a double outsiderness: not part of the local straight scene (jocks, cars, girls), but also not comfortably assimilated into the middle-class/elite culture scene represented by the better-off student-hippies of Washington Square, the city's "tony" gatherings and its highbrow literary reviews

*He's good on the sensual/sexual thrill of pop music, eg this on the Spector girl groups: "Black girls, white girls, didn't matter. I was tuned to their voices, especially those sirens of stairwell sex, the Ronettes". 

*As the above suggests, Goldstein can throw out a few zingers - "Most people are grotesque, but not many people know it"; "he was another cat eating from my bowl" (on academic turned music guru Albert Goldman); "I was neither a butch vulgarian nor a fey aesthete"; "I was from the Bronx but not of it"; "what's a memoir if not a guess?", "to live in the project was to join a community of coughers, moaners and TV re-run insomniacs"; "This tune had come out in 1970, and it always made me want to shoot up a post office" - and his book is served with a thoroughly enjoyable garnish of peppy Jewish-New York phrasing.

*Like any good journalist, Goldstein has an ear for a memorable phrase. He recalls a Neil Young interview where, sitting on the patio outside Young's LA house in 1968, he asks Young what he'll do when the Revolution comes. "I'll die defending the swimming pool" is Young's answer. Covering the Chicago Seven trial in 1970, he hears the Yippie revolutionary-provocateur Abbie Hoffman shouting out to his wife "Water the plants!" as he's jailed for contempt of court.

*His opinions on the movers and shakers of the time seem basically fair: Andy Warhol is friendly and easy-going with Goldstein circa '65, showing him around the Factory, whereas his "minions" were "the nastiest people I had ever met"; Timothy Leary is a huckster ("he had the sleek serenity of a yogi and the well-tanned face of a movie star"); Marshall McLuhan is not much better and nor is William Burroughs; Hunter S Thompson is seen as mediocre ("his work didn't interest me"); while Susan Sontag is described as flawed but insightful and weighty.

In many ways Another Little Piece is about the souring of the hippie dream. There are moments where Goldstein's tale of the fall from Hippie Paradise reads like Joan Didion's acidic Slouching Towards Bethlehem, but it's not as unengaged (or as superior?) as Didion's book. In Goldstein's telling, the summer of love turns into a vision of hell - but this isn't a foregone conclusion and its fate was a bitter blow, not a subject for satire or mockery. Goldstein has a harrowing chapter called The Unravelling, where things begin to fall apart. Having personally run with the crowds to escape tear gas and rampant cop violence, by the end of the decade he was burnt out and jaded. Like Didion, Goldstein was painfully aware that the flipside to the starry-eyed tenderness of the hippie ideal - with its mellow un-macho men and its generally "less locked-and-loaded" attitude - had always concealed (and even enabled?) terrible incidents of thuggery and rape. But as it collapsed under the enormous weight of media hype, crass commercialisation and gathering political reaction, the death of the sixties still seems to have shaken Goldstein to the core. To Goldstein this stuff really mattered. It wasn't a few newsreels or a colourful magazine spread. At one point he tries to sum up what he'd been through by the end of the decade:

"I'd seen the most incredible images on television: the heads of my political heroes blown apart, cities across the nation smouldering. Anything was possible - that was how it felt on a daily basis. I walked around in a state of disorientation, as if I were experiencing the aftershocks of an earthquake that hadn't happened yet."

To me what's important about Goldstein's version of the sixties is the glimpse of utopian possibility it seemed to give him. Communal practices (rock concerts, protest meetings, rallies, actual communes) were part of this, but perhaps more importantly so were self-discovery and self-realisation. And a sense that the world could reduce its reliance on machismo. Later, he apparently channelled some of this into his 70s and 80s gay rights work. But for several years the deep potential of music shines through for Goldstein, and there are even hints of the radical millenarian possibilities that Greil Marcus discusses in his Lipstick Traces book. At his most positive Goldstein thought of rock music as a generational communications tom-tom, "its beat-borne messages cryptic to the straight world but quite clear to us". In 1967 he visits Communist Czechoslovakia, meeting students and musicians, and delights in the bewildered behaviour of the secret police and state functionaries. One of the latter asks him, "What is Surfin Bird? What means 'Bird is the word'?" What, indeed? Another aspect of Goldstein's book I've barely touched on is its self-questioning nature when it comes to journalism itself. A self-conscious practitioner of New Journalism (engaged, writerly), Goldstein seems to have been riven by doubt. Was he guilty of hype? Was he able to make meaningful non-showbizy connections with those he interviewed? He talks about how he felt a "conflict between the hustler and the artist" in himself and others, not to mention a debilitating sense of guilt about not trying harder to intervene when he saw self-destructive rock star behaviour. "Rock stars in those days were expected to be priests in a rite of fucked-upness", he says, and for every crafty "survivor" like Jagger and Dylan there were the frailer walking casualties - Hendrix, Joplin and numerous lesser-known drugs-scarred figures. But to return to ... music. For all that it's a memoir and a cultural history, I think Another Little Piece is quite an important book about how music can unleash deep emotions. In Goldstein's case music triggered all sorts of unpredictable passions and insecurities. As ever, for him this was bound up with his psycho-sexual being:

"I might pretend that virtuosity was what counted in rock - that was the manly thing to admire - but actually it was about longing and craving, the need to possess and adore; desire in all its permutations, unbounded and uncanny."

In one passage Goldstein describes an assignment in 1966 where he goes to interview the Rolling Stones on a boat moored on the Hudson River in New York (vague echoes of the Sex Pistols's jubilee boat trip). The Stones are in their peacock finery and the nervous young reporter is too shy to properly interview anyone until Charlie Watts takes him under his wing and Goldstein more or less accidentally ends up with the band after the party:

"We slipped into an underground garage where a limo was waiting. A mob of fans rushed us from nowhere, shrieking, tearing at the guys. Everyone made it into the car except Brian. He was engulfed in lips and fingernails. Five girls clutched at his jacket and pants. Others flung themselves over the hood, pounding on the windows, kissing the glass."

Phew. Longing and craving. This is uncannily like another Rolling Stones hysteria scene I mentioned in a blog I did a few years ago on Nik Cohn's excellent Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom book. I guess it goes to show that these things really did happen. By contrast, Goldstein found some of the other "British rockers" hitting NYC in these years "too earnest" - lacking the Little Richard-esque sense of flamboyance and wildness he associated with a lot of the best music. "This struck me as an anti-pop attitude", he says. "It had something to do with masculinity. Pop is basically the domain of teenage girls." Pure Cohn sentiments, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, there's a lot going on in Goldstein's facinating book. Almost too much. Occasionally I slightly tired of its enormous range and cast list (anyone from Hugh Hefner to Lou Reed popping up page after page). And I also thought I detected hints of definite vanity - phrases like "I knew they were going to be stars" and "I could see the signs" crop up here and there. But no, this is mostly an excellent full-immersion book on the far-out life and times of the pot-fuelled, hope-filled sixties counterculture and its beads-and-loons-wearing musicians and leading lights. Despite the acid trips and the semi-comical fervour, Goldstein's book is grounded. It's anchored by his roots in the Bronx and his love-hate relationship with his aspirational/striving Jewish parents. And after all, the sixties were (like any decade) deeply serious. As Goldstein makes abundantly clear, the Vietnam war was an ominious ever-present backdrop to all the groovy shenanigans in Haight-Ashbury or Greenwich Village. He recalls how he would get letters from young soldiers on the frontline addressed to him at Village Voice, letters adorned with peace signs and full of heartfelt comments about how rock music "was all that kept them alive". Never mind Apocalypse Now, this was the real deal. The way Goldstein mentions this you know it affected him. One of his abiding concerns throughout the book is with class awareness. As he points out, it mostly wasn't middle-class hippies (like him as he then was) who ended up trudging through the napalm-scorched paddy fields of south Vietnam. Goldstein's sixties disillusionment was especially intense - apparently the product of sexual insecurity and profound self-doubt/questioning. He seems to have taken it so hard because he'd invested so much of himself in it - the music, the politics, the writing, the self-invention. For a few years he'd thought of rock as a "revolutionary force". And then it wasn't. But he's generous and open-minded enough to say that if he'd been a 19-year-old kid trekking down from the Bronx to the Bowery in 1974-5, he would probably have been excited by the new rock music developing into punk. Good for him. Peace and love, dude!