In search of the lost chord : 1967 and the hippie idea /

IF ONE BECAME a young adult during the sybaritic, communitarian summer of 1967, when the last years of the slick "Mad Men" era and lingering staid '50s morals were turned on their heads, it's hard to describe the euphoria of the time without sounding silly. Over the decades, that year and the "hippie idea," as Danny Goldberg calls it - "when 'peace and love' was not meant or taken ironically" - were at first solipsistically ballyhooed and then retired to a permanent state of ridiculed cliché. Thus, writing about the time without cynicism carries risk. Goldberg - a legendary steward of the hip musical world (as a journalist, publicist, manager, producer, head of several record labels and author) - takes that risk with "In Search of the Lost Chord." He was entranced by the new ethos as a senior at New York's liberal Fieldston high school. "None of us felt, individually, that we were 'saints,' but we did believe that there was a growing subculture . . . with a better value system than the one we were born into." "We didn't see 'innocence' and 'wisdom' as mutually exclusive," and he recalls a "collection of energies" that created "the lost chord that . . . penetrated deeply into the minds and hearts of those who could hear it." After staking that romantic claim (which many of us shared), Goldberg plunges into a thorough, panoramic account of the culture, politics, media, music and mores of the year to demolish the idea that it was trivial. He has researched and interviewed widely - his section on underground newspapers is impressively detailed - and he's been there with many of the principals through all these years. Some of the stories, like the development and popularization of LSD and the saga of the Monterey Pop Festival, have been told before (though readers may be surprised to learn that psychedelic music's launchpad was a Nevada dive called the Red Dog Saloon). But Goldberg's deep purchase on his subject and his storytelling ease make it fresh. As do his counterintuitive reveals. During the planning of the kickoffevent of 1967, the Be-In, we see diverse idealists (The San Francisco Oracle's euphoric poeteditor Allen Cohen; the toughly anarchist group the Diggers; the non-hedonistic Berkeley poli ticos) jostling like "Team of Rivals" strategists. Doubt clouds the rapture: After Timothy Leary exhorts "Turn on, tune in, drop out" at the huge celebration, Allen Ginsberg asks Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "What if we're all wrong?" about the new world these Beat elders are helping the next generation usher in. And it's good to be reminded that even Robert Lowell dropped acid with Leary. (When Leary said, "Love conquers all," the manic-depressive New England poet riposted, "I'm not so sure.") Personal asides give the account intimacy: The soon-to-berevolutionary singer Gil Scott-Heron was a Fieldston neo-hippie kid; Goldberg cherished their friendship, and he threads into the narrative other questing school friends. He also uses his command of culture to make points hiding in plain sight - for example, that "A Love Supreme," the 1965 masterwork of John Coltrane (who died in 1967), was "as influential a musical/spiritual opus as any rock record." Goldberg moves from the province of privilege (Time magazine estimated that there were 300,000 self-identified hippies in America in 1967, mostly white and middle class) to the fight against segregation in the South and the rise of the Black Power movement and the Black Panthers. He deals consummately with the power players in the antiwar movement and S.D.S. At times the book feels overpacked. Still, that flaw hides a virtue: proving that so much activism and passion can be crowded into barely more than a single year. When Goldberg was writing his book, that might have been a useful message. Today, in Trump's America, with a fueled and gathering resistance, it is a potentially mirroring one. SHEILA WELLER'S books include "Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon - and the Journey of a Generation" and "The News Sorority," about Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric and Christiane Amanpour.

Goldberg, who graduated from high school in 1967 and seeks here to recall the culture that existed around him at that time, defines the hippie idea as the internal essence of the tribal feeling separate and apart from the external symbols. It's not just peace symbols and long hair and free love and drugs; it's the mind-set and the passions that created a culture based on those things. Just think about what happened in 1967: the Monterey International Pop Festival, the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album, the debut of Rolling Stone magazine, the death of Che Guevara, Muhammad Ali refusing to fight in the Vietnam War, and much more. A busy year, to be sure, one full of political and social upheaval, and one that, according to the author, shaped the remainder of the twentieth century. Written with the acuity of someone who lived through the times he writes about, this is a thoughtful and wide-ranging exploration not just of one year in history but also of a culture and a way of thinking that continues to reverberate today.--Pitt, David Copyright 2017 Booklist

In a "subjective and highly selective" chronicle of 1967, Goldberg (Dispatches from the Culture Wars), a music executive, defends the ideals of the hippies and their lasting impact. After high school, Goldberg headed west to San Francisco, where he experienced firsthand Haight-Ashbury's countercultural blossoming. He extols the sense of agape, the ancient Greek term for unconditional love, that the hippies professed. The "lost chord" includes LSD and the new music scene, most prominently Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. The ideal was pure, but Goldberg doesn't avoid various criticisms, including the growing commercialization of the movement and the charge by political radicals such as the Black Panthers and antiwar activists that the "freaks" were merely self-indulgent kids rebelling against their middle-class parents. The drugs were supposedly "mind-expanding," but they led to destructive behavior, especially after pot and acid were replaced by heroin and speed. Goldberg isn't blind to these weaknesses, but loyally defends the period as "a flash to indicate something different was possible." He credits the hippies with bringing environmentalism, yoga, meditation, and organic food, among other things, into the mainstream of American life. While often just skimming the surface of complex issues, Goldberg brings a personal passion that itself illustrates the lasting resonance of the hippie era. Agent: Laura Nolan, Kuhn Projects. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A reminiscence of the time that brought us Sgt. Pepper and the Summer of Love.The year 1967 was D-Day for the counterculture, when granny glasses and acid dreams flooded into the larger consciousness and the larger society outside San Francisco and London. It was also the year when the San Francisco anarchist collective called the Diggers would proclaim the "Death of Hippie," claiming that much of the whole business was really the creation of the media. Goldberg (Bumping into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business, 2008, etc.), no stranger to media creations himself as a music executive, was on the ground then and in full-tilt nostalgia mode now. "If I could time travel back to 1967," he enthuses, "there is no question that I would begin in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco." The year was more than lice, tea, and free love, of course; there was the creep scene of Vietnam, for instance, to spoil the party. Still, Goldberg's tone is almost always upbeat, a free-form festival where Nureyev and Quicksilver hang out here and Paul McCartney jams with Jefferson Airplane there. (A minor bummer: "the left-handed McCartney had a hard time playing [Jack] Casady's bass.") Goldberg's approach is sometimes dutiful, and he doesn't add much, apart from personal anecdotes, to his descriptions of well-known events and people. Readers won't emerge knowing anything more about the likes of Timothy Leary or Abbie Hoffman than before, apart from the fact that Hoffman, "an old man of thirty in 1967," had a nicely subversive "twinkle" in his eye. But Hoffman was not as old as Buckminster Fuller, of course, who was "brimming with futuristic visions, which he expressed with machine-gun verbal intensity." No substitute for more serious histories of the era but a genial you-were-there memoir of a golden age. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.