Nothing to freak out about: Albert Goldman's Freakshow

Why did I buy it? And why did I read it (some of it)? Er, I'm talking about Albert Goldman's Freakshow: Misadventures In The Counterculture, 1959-1971, his ragamuffin collection of articles on music, comedy and cultural trends, first published in 1971. 

Get ur freak on: Albert Goldman's book

Why, indeed. Actually, it was probably the combination of the decent title and the acid-coloured cover design (from the 2001 reprint), along with a dim memory of having read Goldman's book-cum-hatchet job on John Lennon and quite enjoying it, not least the lurid tales of druggy excess and paranoia during Lennon and Yoko Ono's Dakota building years. Anyway, we all make mistakes. In my humble estimation, Freakshow is pretty terrible. At least that's how I found the 80 or so pages on "rock music" - the sections on "Rock Theatre" and "The Death Of Rock" - which I must admit are the only parts of the book I've managed to read. After wading through mostly very turgid accounts of bands like The Who, the Doors, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, I simply couldn't face reading yet more Goldman wisdom on jazz, soul and the blues, or his musings on Lenny Bruce and "Sick Jew Black Humour". Life is short, man. There's other stuff to read. For what it's worth, then, here are a few bits and pieces culled from Goldman's definitely-not-great book:

*To my mind, an essential failing with Goldman is that he overdoes everything. When, for example, he writes about The Who's Tommy shows at the Fillmore East in 1969, he (over-familiarly) talks about rock's toughest, truest, most brilliantly innovative talents". Apparently The Who have "remarkable ideas, extraordinary energy and unique integrity". Hmm, was this passage dictated word-by-word to Goldman by Roger Daltrey? What follows is all sorts of overblown stuff comparing Tommy to Wagnerian opera. Likewise, in another exercise in wildly-over-the-top writing, Goldman describes the climax to a Rolling Stones show at the 18,000-seater Los Angeles Forum (November 1969) like this: "Up and up the fever chart zigzags, on and on the orgy rolls, until after two shows, eight hours, a couple of buckets of sweat and a million killing watts of electroencephalic energy, apocalypse is attained." A few lines later and Goldman's comparing this big stadium version of the Stones to a Hitlerian rally (it's "pure Nuremberg!"). "No question about it", says Goldman as he continues to dig a deeper and deeper hole, "Der Führer would have been gassed out of his kugel by the scene at the Forum". 

*As the above should indicate, Goldman frequently comes across like a proto-Lester Bangs. A gonzo music writer high on his own wildly excessive prose. Wildly excessive, un-funny and - even - faintly repellent. For sure, Bangs could be excruciating to read, but, in my opinion, he partly redeemed himself with his (mostly) decent taste in music and, as well, his writing seemed to get better as he got older (poor in the early-70s, decent by the late-70s). With Goldman I'm less inclined to be generous. It's gonzoid stuff (and also snobbish stuff) and musically he doesn't appear to have any great discernment over what's good, mediocre or just plain terrible (Tommy, ffs!?, plus his tiresome ravings about the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's album). 

*Goldman is often deeply condescending about the audiences at late-sixties rock concerts, or in fact just young fashionable people in general. Apparently they thrive on "essences" and they're "strong on certain ethnic types". Back at that Who show at Fillmore East, Goldman says things like "the drums roar, the audience moans". Or: the "onlookers have arisen from their seats and are being drawn down the aisles, as if summoned by a mighty hypnotist". Back in 1969 this might just about have passed muster with the (mildly titillated?) readers of the New York Times or Life magazine, places where this and numerous other pieces in Freakshow were originally published, but ... now? It's dated and corny beyond belief. In one piece Goldman refers to the "kids I see in the college classes I teach", and it's a reminder that he was already in his forties when he was checking out the "kids" at Fillmore East or at the Electric Circus. He was the Lionel Trilling-educated Columbia University academic slumming it with the "drably" dressed young masses, then reporting back to the great and the good. True, I think at the time this was largely how rock criticism - then a new form - was nearly always done. Either way, Goldman is the stuffy adult version of the younger Richard Goldstein (aged 25 in 1969) at Village Voice, an infinitely better music writer in my view.

Hmm, it seems I wasn't too impressed by those 80 pages of Freakshow. So, having stuck the knife in and twisted it, I'll now withdraw my little dagger and offer the dying man a plaster or two. In other words, there are a few things about Freakshow that seemed OK-ish to me. For one, Goldman clearly has a basic grasp on the (by then) 50-year historical trajectory of pop, blues and rock, including the well-known story of how black music filtered into white music forms (did he get some of this from Nik Cohn's Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, published in 1969?). And I agree with Goldman's appraisal of Little Richard as "the greatest" of the black performers who were attempting to outdo "their white imitators". Goldman calls little Richard's style one of "erotic defiance", which actually seems spot-on to me. Whether, as Goldman also says of Little Richard, he was "the greatest basic rock performer", I'm not so sure, but ... who's to say, really? Great though, for sure. And again, on a positive note, I thought Goldman might have been on to something with a 1968 piece for Vogue where he talked about rock music's ability to conjure up various kinds of theatricality, in fact - at times - a "theatre of cruelty". He sees this in the Doors, The Who (of course), Arthur Brown and Sgt Pepper's-era Beatles (again), among others. I kind of get it, and I suppose theatre of cruelty-wise the Rolling Stones at Altamont might have been a good example, or, later, the Stooges or the Sex Pistols (or, later still, pretty much the whole death metal genre). And one final bit of mitigation for Goldman's book is, perhaps, the simple fact that Beatles/Stones/Who/Doors-style rock music hadn't been around very long when Goldman was writing about it and it's not that surprising that critics like him were more or less making it up as they went along. It's true that this friend of John Updike's, an author of books about Thomas de Quincey and Wagner, couldn't ever shake off his elitism and high-culture snobbery with his stuff on this new gutter music, but, well, I guess he was showing an interest. Evidently, the original 1971 edition of Freakshow had the very Nik Cohn-like subtitle, The Rocksoulbluesjazzsickjewblackhumorsexpoppsych Gig And Other Scenes From The Counter-Culture, which I must admit I quite like. It's not as good Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, but again, at least the professor from uptown Columbia was making an effort ...