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Title-> Life in the Stone age: checks, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.
Authors-> Menand, Louis
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I.
If you advised a college student today to tune in, turn on, and drop
out, he would probably call campus security. Few things sound less
glamorous in 1991 than "the counterculture"-a term many people are
likely to associate with Charles Manson. Writing about that period now
feels a little like rummaging around in history's dustbin. Just twenty
years ago, though, everyone was writing about the counterculture, for
everyone thought that the American middle class would never be the same.
The American middle class never is the same for very long, of course;
it's much too insecure to resist a new self-conception when one is
offered. But the change that the counterculture made in American life
has become nearly impossible to calculate-thanks partly to the
exaggerations of people who hate the `60s, and partly to the
exaggerations of people who hate the people who hate the `60s. The
subject could use the attention of some people who really don't care.
The difficulties begin with the word counterculture" itself. Though it
has been from the beginning the name for the particular style of
sentimental radicalism that flourished briefly in the late 1960s, it's a
little misleading. For during those years the counterculture was
culture-or the prime object of the culture's attention, which in America
is pretty much the same thing-and that is really the basis of its
interest. It had all the attributes of a typical mass culture episode:
it was a lifestyle that could be practiced on weekends; it came into
fashion when the media discovered it and went out of fashion when the
media lost interest; and it was, from the moment it penetrated the
middle class, thoroughly commercialized. Its failure to grasp this last
fact about itself is the essence of its sentimentalism.
The essence of its radicalism is a little more complicated. The general
idea was the rejection of the norms of adult middle-class life; but the
rejection was made in a profoundly middle-class spirit. Middle-class
Americans are a driven, pampered, puritanical, and self-indulgent group
of people. Before the 60s these contradictions were rationalized by the
principle of deferred gratification: you exercised self-discipline in
order to gain entrance to a profession, you showed deference to those
above you on the career ladder, and material rewards followed and could
be enjoyed more or less promiscuously.
The counterculture alternative looked to many people like simple
hedonism: sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll (with instant social justice on
the side). But the counterculture wasn't hedonistic; it was puritanical.
It was, in fact, virtually Hebraic: the parents were worshiping false
gods, and the students who tore up (or dropped out of) the university in
an apparent frenzy of self-destructiveness-for wasn't the university
their gateway to the good life?-were, in effect, smashing the golden
calf.
There was a fair amount of flagrant sensual gratification, all of it
crucial to the pop culture appeal of the whole business; but it is a
mistake to characterize the pleasure-taking as amoral. It is only "fun"
to stand in the rain for three days with a hundred thousand chemically
demented people, listening to interminable and inescapable loud music
and wondering if you'll ever see your car again, if you also believe in
some inchoate way that you are participating in the creation of the New
World.
The name of the new god was authenticity, and it was unmistakably the
jealous type. It demanded an existence of programmatic hostility to the
ordinary modes of middle-class life, and even to the ordinary modes of
consciousness-to whatever was mediated, accommodationist, materialistic,
and, even trivially, false. Like most of the temporary gods of the
secular society, the principle of authenticity was merely paid lip
service to by most of the people who flocked to its altar, and when the
`60s were over, those people went happily off to other shrines. But
there were some people who took the principle to heart, who flagellated
their consciences in its service, and who, even after the `60s had
passed, continued to obsess about being "co-opted."
There are two places in American society where this strain of puritanism
persists. One is the academy, with its fetish of the unconditioned. The
other is the high end of pop music criticism-the kind of criticism that
complains, for instance, about the commercialism of MTV. Since pop music
is by definition commercial, it may be hard to see how pop music
commercialism can ever be a problem. But for many people who take pop
music seriously it is the problem, and its history essentially begins
with Rolling Stone.
II.
Rolling Stone was born in the semi-idyllic, semi-hysterical atmosphere
of northern California in the late `60s, an atmosphere that Robert
Draper's entertaining history of the magazine does an excellent job
re-creating. His book is filled with vivid sketches of many of the
classic period types who passed through Rolling Stone's offices and
pages during the years the magazine was published in San Francisco-from
1967 until 1977, when it was moved to New York.
The theme that Draper has selected to tie the story together, though, is
the standard history-of-the-'60s theme of selling out. He chooses to
illustrate it by making Jann Wenner, the magazine's founder and still
its editor and publisher, both the hero and the villain of the tale-the
man who seized the moment and then betrayed it. This threatens to make
Wenner a little more complicated than he actually is. An opportunistic,
sentimental, shrewd celebrity-hound, Wenner was the first person in
journalism to see what people in the music business already knew, and
what people in the advertising business would soon realize: that rock
music had become a fixture of American middle-class life. It had created
a market.
Wenner knew this because he was himself the prototypical fan. He was
born in 1946, in the first wave of the baby boom-his father would make a
fortune selling baby formula for the children to whom the son later sold
magazines-and he started Rolling Stone (he is supposed to have said) in
order to meet John Lennon. He met Lennon; and he met and made pals with
many more of his generation's entertainment idols-who, once they had
become friends, and with or without editorial justification, turned up
regularly on the covers of his magazine. Wenner was not looking for
celebrity himself-, he was only, like most Americans, a shameless
worshiper of the stars. "I always felt Jann had a real fan's mentality,"
one of his friends and associates, William Randolph Hearst III,
explained. "He wanted to hang out with Mick Jagger because Mick was
cool, not because he wanted to tell people that he was cool as a result
of knowing Mick."
The person who thinks Mick is cool is the perfect person to run a
magazine devoted to serious fandom. But he is an obvious liability at a
magazine devoted to serious criticism. Wenner was not a devotee of the
authentic, not even a hypocritical one. He was a hustler: he believed in
show biz, and saw, for instance, nothing unethical about altering a
review to please a record company he hoped to have as an advertiser.
"We're gonna be better than Billboard! " is the sort of thing he would
say to encourage his staff when morale was low.
Morale was not thereby improved. For the people who produced Wenner's
magazine took the `60s much more seriously than Wenner did. It wasn't
merely that, like many editors, Wenner demonstrated a rude indifference
to the rhythms of magazine production, commissioning new covers at the
last minute and that sort of thing. It was that he didn't seem to grasp
the world-historical significance of the movement that his magazine was
spearheading. "Here we were, " Jon Carroll, a former staffer, told
Draper, "believing we were involved in the greatest cultural revolution
since the sack of Rome. And he was running around with starlets. We
thought that Jann was the most trivial sort of fool."
Draper's view is ail only slightly less inflated version of Carroll's
view. Quite correctly," he writes of the early years, "the employees of
Rolling Stone magazine saw themselves as leaders and tastemakers-the
best minds of their generation. "Rolling Stone covered the whole of the
youth culture-though it generally steered clear, at Wenner's insistence,
of radical politics. ("Get back," Wenner pleaded with his editors in
1970, after the shootings at Kent State inspired them to try to
"detrivialize" the magazine, "get back to where you once belonged.") But
the backbone of the magazine has always been its music criticism, and
its special achievement is that it provided an arena for the development
of the lyrical, pedantic, and hyperbolical writing about popular music
that is part of the 60s' literary legacy. Rolling Stone wasn't the only
place where this style of criticism flourished, but it was the biggest.
Rolling Stone institutionalized the genre.
This is what Draper responds to in the magazine, and where his
sympathies as a historian lie. His principal sources are from the
editorial side of the magazine, because that is his principal interest.
He tells us at some length about the editorial staffs travails, but
gives a perfunctory account, as though he found it too distasteful to
investigate, of, for example, the business staff's "Marketing through
Music" campaign-a newsletter for "Marketing, Advertising, and Music
Executives," circulated in the mid-'80s, that encouraged corporate
sponsorship of rock concerts and the use of rock stars and rock songs in
advertising. The business deals are here, but they are generally treated
from the outside, and always as inimical to the true spirit of the
magazine.
From the point of view of social history, though, "Marketing through
Music" is the interesting part of the story. For rock music, like every
other mass-market commodity, is about making money. Everyone who writes
about popular music knows that before Sam Phillips, the proprietor of
Sun Records, recorded Elvis Presley in 1954, he used to go around
saying, "If I could find a white boy who could sing like a nigger, I
could make a million dollars." But Elvis himself is somehow imagined to
have had nothing to do with this sort of gross commercial calculation,
and when Albert Goldman's biography appeared in 1981 and described
Presley as a musically incurious and manipulative pop star, the rock
critical establishment descended on Goldman in wrath.
All rock stars want to make money, and for the same reasons everyone
else in a liberal society wants to make money: more toys and more
autonomy. Bill Wyman, when he went off to become The Rolling Stones'
bass player, told his mother that he'd only have to wear his hair long
for a few years, and he'd get a nice house and a car out of it at the
end. Even The Doors, quintessential late-'60s performers who thought
they were making an Important Musical Statement, began when Jim Morrison
ran into Ray Manzarek, who became the group's keyboards player, and
recited some poetry he'd written. "I said that's it," Manzarek later
explained. "It seemed as though, if we got a group together we c million
dollars." Ray, meet Sam.
Pop stars aren't simply selling a sound; they're selling an image, and
one reason the stars of the `60s made such an effective appeal to
middle-class taste is because their images went, so to speak, all the
way through. Their stage personalities were understood to be continuous
with their offstage personalities-an impression enhanced by the fact
that, in a departure from Tin Pan Alley tradition, most `60s performers
wrote their own material. But the images, too, were carefully managed.
The Beatles, for example, were the children of working-class families;
they were what the average suburban teenager would consider tough
characters. Their breakthrough into mainstream popular music came when
their manager, Brian Epstein, transformed them into four cheeky but
lovable lads, an imag e that delighted the middle class. The Rol ling
Stones, apart from Wym an, were much more middle class. Mick Jagger
attended (on scholarship) the London School of Economic s; his
girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, herself a pop performer, was the daughter
of a professor of Renaissance literature. Brian Jones's father was an
aeronautical engineer, and Jones, who founded the band, had what was
virtually an intellectual's interest in music. He wrote articles for
Jazz News, for instance, something one cannot imagine a Beatle doing.
But when it became The Stones' turn to enter the mainstream, the lovable
image was already being used in a way that looked unbeatable. So (as
Wyman quite matter-of-factly describes it in his appealing memoir) their
manager, Andrew Oldham, cast them as rude boys, which delighted
middle-class teenagers in a different and even more thrilling way.
These images enjoyed long-term success in part because they suited the
performers' natural talents and temperaments. But it is pointless to
think of scrutinizing them by the lights of authenticity. One reason
popular culture gives pleasure is that it relieves us of this whole
anxiety of trying to determine whether what we're enjoying is real or
fake. Mediation is the sine qua non of the experience. Authenticity is a
high culture problem.
Unless, of course, you're trying to run a cultural revolution. In which
case you will need to think that there is some essential relation
between the unadulterated spirit of rock'n' roll and personal and social
liberation. "The magic's in the music," The Lovin' Spoonful used to
sing. "Believe in the magic, it will set you free." The Lovin' Spoonful
was a self-promoting, teenybopper band if there ever was one; but those
lyrics turn up frequently in Draper's book. For they (or some
intellectually enriched version of them) constitute the credo of the
higher rock criticism.
The central difficulty faced by the serious pop exegete is to explain
how it is that a band with a manager and a promoter and sales of
millions of records that plays "Satisfaction" is less calculating than a
band with a manager and a promoter and sales of millions of records that
plays "Itchycoo Park" (assuming, perhaps unadvisedly, that a case cannot
be made for "Itchycoo Park"). Theorizing about the difference can
produce nonsense of an unusual transparency. "Rock is a mass-produced
music that carries a critique of its own means of production," explained
the British pop music sociologist Simon Frith in Sound Effects (1981);
"it is a mass-consumed music that constructs its own authentic'
audience." To which all one can say is that when you have to put the
word "authentic" in quotation marks, you're in trouble.
The problem is more simply solved by reference to a pop music genealogy
that was invented in the late `60s and that has been embraced by nearly
everyone in the business ever since-by the musicians, by the industry,
and by the press. This is the notion that genuine rock 'n' roll is the
direct descendant of the blues, a music whose authenticity it would be a
sacrilege to question.
The historical scheme according to which the blues begat rhythm and
blues, which begat rockabilly, which begat Elvis, who (big evolutionary
leap here) gave us The Beatles, was canonized by Rolling Stone. It is
the basis for The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll
(1976), edited by Jim Miller, which is one of the best collections of
classic rock criticism; and it's the basis for Rock of Ages: The Rolling
Stone History of Rock & Roll (1986) by Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes, and Ken
Tucker, which reads a little bit like the kind of thing you would get if
you put three men in a room with some typewriters and a stack of paper
and told them they couldn't come out until they had written The Rolling
Stone History of Rock & Roll.
All genealogies are suspect, since they have an inherent bias against
contingency, and genealogies to which critics and their subjects
subscribe with equal enthusiasm are doubly suspect. The idea that rock
n' roll is simply a style of popular music, and that there was popular
music before rock'n' roll (and not produced by black men) that might
have some relation to, say, "Yesterday" or "Wild Horses" or "Sad-Eyed
Lady of the Lowlands"-songs that do not exactly call Chuck Berry to
mind, let alone Muddy Waters-is largely unknown to rock criticism.
The reason that the link between Elvis Presley and The Beatles feels so
strained is because we are really talking about the difference between
party music for teenagers and pop anthems for the middle-class-between
music to jump up and down by and music with a bit of a brow. Even the
music to jump up and down by is a long way from the blues: adolescents
from Great Neck did not go into hysterics in the presence of Blind Lemon
Jefferson. An entertainment phenomenon like Mick Jagger, with his
mysteriously acquired cockney-boy-from-Memphis accent, surely has as
much relation to a white teen-idol like the young Frank Sinatra as he
does to a black bluesman like Robert Johnson. Except that Robert Johnson
is the real thing. Of course some of the music of Jagger and Richards
and Lennon and McCartney appropriated the sound of black rhythm and
blues: that's precisely the least indigenous and least authentic thing
about it.
This is not to say that rock `n' roll (or the music of Frank Sinatra,
for that matter) doesn't come from real feeling and doesn't touch real
feeling. And it's not to say that there aren't legitimate distinctions
to be made among degrees of sham in popular music. When one is
discussing Percy Faith's 1975 disco version of "Hava Nagilah," it is
appropriate to use the term "inauthentic." But the wider the appeal a
popular song has, the more zealously it resists the terms of art. The
most affecting song of the 1960s was (let's say) the version of "With a
Little Help from My Friends" that Joe Cocker sang at Woodstock on August
17, 1969-an imitation British music-hall number performed in upstate New
York by a white man from Sheffield pretending to be Ray Charles. On that
day, probably nothing would have sounded more genuine.
III.
Spiro Agnew thought that the helpful friends were drugs, which is a
reminder that the counterculture was indeed defining itself against
something. The customary reply to a charge like Agnew's was that he was
mistaking a gentle celebration of togetherness for a threat against the
established order-that he was, in `60s language, being uptight. Agnew's
attacks were ignorant and cynical enough; but the responses, though from
people understandably a little uptight themselves, were disingenuous.
Few teenagers in 1967 thought that the line "I get high with a little
help from my friends" was an allusion to the exhilaration of good
conversation. "I get high" is a pretty harmless drug reference. But it
is a drug reference.
The classic case of this sort of thing is "Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds," also on the Sgt. Pepper's album. When the press got the idea
that the title encrypted the initials LSD, John Lennon, who had written
the song, expressed outrage. "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," he
allowed, was the name his little boy had given a drawing he had made at
school and brought home to show his father; and this bit of lore has
been attached to the history of Sgt. Pepper's to indicate how
hysterically hostile the old culture was to the new. No doubt the story
about the drawing is true. On the other hand, if "Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds" is not a song about an acid trip, it is hard to know what sort
of song it is.
Drugs were integral to `60s rock'n' roll culture in three ways. The most
publicized way, and the least interesting, has to do with the
conspicuous consumption of drugs by rock `n' roll performers, a subject
that has been written about interminably, A. E. Hotchner's overheated
book on The Rolling Stones being one recent specimen among many. Lennon
eating LSD as though it were candy, Keith Richards undergoing complete
blood transfusions in an effort to cure himself of heroin addiction
("How do you like my new blood?" he would ask his friends after a
treatment)-these are stories of mainly tabloid interest, though they are
important to rock'n' roll mythology since addiction and early death are
part of jazz and blues mythology as well.
The drug consumption was real enough (though one doesn't see it
mentioned that since the body builds a resistance to hallucinogens, it
is not surprising that Lennon ate acid like candy: he couldn't have been
getting much of a kick from it after a while). Some people famously died
of drug abuse; many others destroyed their careers and their lives. But
overindulgence is a hazard of all celebrity; it's part of the modern
culture of fame. That rock 'n' roll musicians overindulged with drugs is
not, historically, an especially notable phenomenon.
Then there are the references to drugs in the songs themselves.
Sometimes the references were fairly obscure: "Light My Fire," for
instance, the title of The Doors' biggest hit, was a phrase taken from
an Aldous Huxley piece in praise of mescaline. Sometimes the references
were overt Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," or The Velvet
Underground's "Heroin"). Most often, though, it was simply understood
that the song was describing or imitating a drug experience: "Lucy in
the Sky with Diamonds ... .. Strawberry Fields," "Mr. Tambourine Man
... .. A Whiter Shade of Pale.
The message (such as it was) of these songs usually involved the
standard business about "consciousness expansion" already being purveyed
by gurus like Allen Ginsberg and Man Watts: once you have (with whatever
assistance) stepped beyond the veil, you will prefer making love to
making war, and so forth. Sometimes there was the suggestion that drugs
open your eyes to the horror of things as they are-an adventure for the
spiritually fortified only. "Reality is for people who can't face
drugs," as Tom Waits used to say.) The famous line in The Beatles' "A
Day in the Life" was meant to catch both senses: "I'd love to turn you
on." It was all facile enough; but the idea was not, simply, "Let's
party."
What was most distinctive about lates-`60s popular music, though, was
not that some of its performers used drugs, or that some of its songs
were about drugs. It was that late-'60s rock was music designed for
people to listen to while they were on drugs. The music was a
prepackaged sensory stimulant. This was a new development. Jazz
musicians might sometimes be junkies, but jazz was not music played for
junkies. A lot of late-`60s rock music, though, plainly advertised
itself as a kind of complementary good for recreational drugs. This
explains many things about the character of popular music in the
period-particularly the unusual length of the songs. There is really
only one excuse for buying a record with a twelve-minute drum solo.
How the history of popular music reflects the social history of drug
preference is a research topic that calls for some fairly daunting field
work. it was clear enough in the late `60s, though, that the most
popular music was music that projected a druggy aura of one fairly
specific kind or another. Folk rock, for example, became either
seriously mellow (Donovan, or The Young-bloods) or raucous and giggly
(Country joe and the Fish), sounds suggesting that marijuana might
provide a useful enhancement of the listening experience. Music
featuring pyrotechnical instrumentalists (Cream, or Ten Years After) had
an overdriven, methedrine sort of sound. In the `70s a lot of successful
popular music was designed to go well with cocaine, a taste shift many
of the `60s groups couldn't adjust to quickly enough. (The Rolling
Stones were a" exception.)
But the featured drugs of the late `60s were the psychedelics:
psilocybin, mescaline, and, especially, LSD. They were associated with
the British scene through Lennon, who even before Sgt. Pepper's had
apparently developed a kind of religious attachment to acid. And LSD was
the drug most closely identified with the San Francisco scene,
especially with The Grateful Dead, a group that had been on hand in 1965
when Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters took their "acid test" bus
trips, and whose equipment had been paid for by Timothy Leary himself.
It would seem that once a person was on a hallucinogen, the particular
kind of music he was listening to would be largely irrelevant; but there
were bands, like The Dead, whose drug aura was identifiably psychedelic.
You didn't have to be on drugs to enjoy late-'60s rock `n' roll, as many
people have survived to attest; and this is an important fact. For from
a mainstream point of view, the music's drug aura was simply one aspect
of the psychedelic fashion that between 1967 and 1969 swept through
popular art (black-light posters), photography (fish-eye lenses), cinema
(jump cuts and light shows), clothing (tie-dye), coloring (Day-Glo), and
speech ("you turn me on").
Psychedelia expressed the counterculture sensibility in its most pop
form. It said: spiritual risk-taker, uninhibited, enemy of the System.
It advertised liberation and hipness in the jargon and imagery of the
drug experience. And the jargon wasn't restricted to people under 30, or
to dropouts. For in the late `60s the drug experience became the
universal metaphor for the good life. Commercials for honey encouraged
you to "get high with honey." The Ford Motor Company invited you to test
drive a Ford and "blow your mind." For people who did not use drugs, the
music was a plausible imitation drug experience because every commodity
in the culture was pretending to be some kind of imitation drug
experience.
Psychedelia, and the senibility that attached to it, was a media-driven
phenomenon. In April 1966 Time ran a story in the Carnaby Street, mods
and rockers, Beatles and Rolling Stones scene in London. In fact, that
scene was on its last legs when the article appeared; but many Americans
were induced to vacation in London, which revived the local economy, and
the summer of 1966 became the summer of "Swinging London."
Swinging London was perfect mass media material: sexy, upbeat, and
fantastically photogenic. So when 20,000 people staged a "Human Be-In"
in Golden Gate Park in January 1967, the media were on hand. Here was a
domestic version of the British phenomenon: hippies, Diggers, Hell's
Angels, music, "free love," and LSD-the stuff of a hundred feature
stories and photo essays. The media discovery of the hippies led to the
media discovery of the Haight-Ashbury, and the summer of 1967 became the
San Francisco "Summer of Love," that year's edition of Swinging London.
Sgt. Pepper's was released in June, and the reign of psychedelia was
established. The whole episode lasted a little less than three
years-about the tenure of the average successful television series.
Once the media discovered it, the counterculture ceased being a youth
culture and became a commercial culture for which youth was a principal
market-at which point its puritanism (inhibitions are oppressive) became
for many people an excuse for libertinism (inhibitions are a drag). LSD,
for instance, was peddled by Leary through magazines like Playboy,
where, in a 1966 interview, he explained that "in a carefully prepared,
loving LSD session, a woman will inevitably have several hundred
orgasms." This was exactly the sort of news Playboy existed to print,
and the interviewer followed up by asking whether this meant that Leary
found himself suddenly irresistible to women. Leary allowed that it did,
but proved reluctant to give all the credit to a drug, merely noting
that: "Any charismatic person who is conscious of his own mythic potency
awakens this basic hunger in women and pays reverence to it at the level
that is harmonious and appropriate at the time."
Playboy is not a magazine for dropouts; anid the idea that
counterculture drugs were really aphrodisiacs was an idea that appealed
not to teenagers (who do not require hormonal assistance) but to
middle-aged men. ("Good sex would have to be awfully good before it was
better than on pot," Norman Mailer mused, presumably for the benefit of
his fellow 45-year-olds, in The Armies of the Night, in 1968.) It was
not teenagers who put Tom Wolfe's account of Kesey's LSD quackery, The
Electric Kool-Aid Ad Test (1968), on the hardcover best-seller list.
Hippies did not buy tickets to see Hair on Broadway, where it opened in
1968 and played over 1,700 performances, or read Charles Reich's homage
to bell-bottom pants in The New Yorker. People living on communes did
not make "Laugh-In," Hollywood's version of the swinging psychedelic
style, the highest-rated show on television in the 1968-69 season. And,
of course, students did not design, manufacture, distribute, and enjoy
the profits from rock 'n' roll records. Those who attack the
counterculture for disrupting what they take to have been the
traditional American way of life ought to look to the people who
exploited and disseminated it-good capitalists all-before they look to
the young people who were encouraged to consume it.
IV.
After the Altamont concert disaster in December 1969, when a fan was
killed a few feet from the stage where The Rolling Stones were
performing, psychedelia lost its middle-class appeal. More unpleasant
news followed in 1970-the Kent State and jackson State shootings, the
Manson Family trials, the deaths by overdose of famous rock stars. And
even more quickly than it had sprung up, the media fascination with the
counterculture evaporated.
But the counterculture, stripped of its idealism and its sexiness,
lingered on. If you drove down the main street of any small city in
America in the 1970s, you saw clusters of teenagers standing around,
wearing long hair and bell-bottom jeans, listening to Led Zeppelin,
furtively getting stoned. This was the massive middle of the baby-boom
generation, the remnant of the counterculture-a remnant that was much
bigger than the original, but in which the media had lost interest.
These people were not activists or dropouts. They had very few public
voices. One of them was Hunter Thompson's.
Thompson came to Rolling Stone in 1970, an important moment in the
magazine's history. Wenner had fired Greil Marcus, a music critic with
an American studies degree who was then his reviews editor, for running
a negative review of an inferior Dylan album called Self-Potrait is one
of Wenner's rules that the big stars must always be hyped); and most of
the politically minded members of the staff quit after the "Get Back"
episode following Kent State. There were financial problems as well. By
the end of 1970, Rolling Stone was a quarter million dollars in debt.
Hugh Hefner, who is to testosterone what Wenner is to rock'n' roll,
offered to buy the magazine, but Wenner found other angels. Among them
were record companies. Columbia Records and Elektra were delighted to
advance their friends at Rolling Stone a year's worth of advertising;
Rolling Stone and the record companies, after all, were in the same
business.
The next problem was to sell magazines. (Rolling Stone relies heavily on
newsstand sales, since its readers are not the sort of people who can be
counted on to fill out subscription renewal forms with any degree of
regularity.) Here Wenner had two strokes of good fortune. The first was
a long interview he obtained with John Lennon, the first time most
people had ever heard a Beatle not caring to sound lovable. It sold many
magazines. The second was the arrival of Thompson.
Thompson was a well-traveled, free-spirited hack whose resume included a
stint as sports editor of The Jersey Shore Herald, a job as general
reporter for The Middletown Daily News, freelance work out of Puerto
Rico for a bowling magazine, a period as South American correspondent
for The National Observer (during which he suffered some permanent hair
loss from stress and drugs), an assignment covering the 1968
presidential campaign for Pageant, two unpublished Great American
novels, a little male modeling, and a narrowly unsuccessful campaign for
sheriff of Aspen, Colorado.
Thompson had actually been discovered for the alternative press by
Warren Hinckle, the editor of Ramparts, which is when his writing
acquired the label "gonzo journalism." But Thompson was interested in
Rolling Stone because he thought it would help his nascent political
career by giving him access to people who had no interest in politics (a
good indication of the magazine's political reputation in 1970). A year
after signing on, he produced the articles that became Fear and Loathing
in Las Vegas (1972), a tour de force of pop faction about five days on
drugs in Las Vegas. It sold many copies of Rolling Stone, and it gave
Thompson fortune, celebrity, and a permanent running headline.
Many people who were not young read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and
thought it a witty piece of writing. Wolfe included two selections from
Thompson's work in his 1973 anthology The journalism (everyone else but
Wolfe got only one entry); and this has given Thompson the standing of a
man identified with an academically recognized Literary Movement. But
Thompson is essentially a writer for teenage boys. Fear and Loathing in
Las Vegas is The Catcher in the Rye on speed: the lost weekend of a
disaffected loser who tells his story in a mordant style that is
addictively appealing to adolescents with a deep and unspecified grudge
against life.
Once you understand the target, the thematics make sense. Sexual prowess
is part of the Thompson mystique, for example, but the world of his
writing is almost entirely male, and sex itself is rarely more than a
vague, adult horror; for sex beyond mere bravado is a subject that makes
most teenage boys nervous. A vast supply of drugs of every genre and
description accompany the Thompson persona and maintain him in a
permanent state of dementia; but the drugs have all the verisimilitude
of a 14-year-old's secret spy kit: these grown-ups don't realize that
the person they are talking to is completely out of his mind on
dangerous chemicals. The fear and loathing in Thompson's writing is
simply Holden Caulfield's fear of growing up-a fear that, in Thompson's
case as in Salinger's, is particularly convincing to younger readers
because it so clearly run from the books straight back to the writer
himself.
After the Las Vegas book, Rolling Stone assigned Thompson to cover the
1972 presidential campaign. His reports were collected in (inevitably)
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1973). The series begins with
some astute analysis of primary strategy and the like, salted with
irreverent descriptions of the candidates and many personal anecdotes.
Thompson's unusual relation to the facts-one piece, which caused a brief
stir, reported that Edmund Muskie was addicted to an obscure African
drug called Ibogaine-made him the object of some media attention of his
own. But eventually the reporting breaks down, and Thompson is reduced
at the end of his book to quoting at length from the dispatches of his
Rolling Stone colleague Timothy Crouse (whose own book about the
campaign, The Boys on the Bus, became an acclaimed expos& of political
journalism).
Since 1972 Thompson has devoted his career to the maintenance of his
legend, and his reporting has mostly been reporting about the Thompson
style of reporting, which consists largely of unsuccessful attempts to
cover his subjects, and of drug misadventures. He doesn't need to
report, of course, because reporting is not what his audience cares
about. They care about the escapades of their hero, which are recounted
obsessively in his writing, and some of which were the basis for an
unwatchable movie called Where the Buffalo Roam, released in 1980 and
starring Bill Murray.
Thompson left Rolling Stone around 1975 and eventually became a
columnist for the San Francisco Examiner. He has been repackaging his
pieces in chronicle form regularly since 1979. Songs of the Doomed is
the third collection, and most of the recent material concerns the
author's arrest earlier this year on drug possession and sexual assault
charges in Colorado. Having made a fortune portraying himself as a
champion consumer of controlled substances, Thompson naturally took the
position that the drugs found in his house must have been left there by
someone else. (The charges, unfortunately for a writer badly in need of
fresh adventures, were dismissed.)
Thompson, in short, is practically the only person in America still
living circa 1972. His persona enacts a counterculture sensibility with
the utopianism completely leached out. There are no romantic notions
about peace and love in his writing, only adolescent paranoia and
violence. There is no romanticization of the street, either. Everything
disappoints him-an occasionally engaging attitude that is also, of
course, romanticism of the very purest sort. Thompson is the eternally
bitter elegist of a moment that never really was, and that is why he is
the ideal writer for a generation that has always felt that it arrived
onstage about five minutes after the audience walked out.
V.
If all popular culture episodes were only commercial and manipulative,
they would not matter to us. Some things are what you make them, and
even the shabbiest cultures contribute to character. If you grew up in
Disneyland, you would care about Mickey Mouse in spite of his
artificiality, for Mickey would have been one of the presences in the
world where your spirit was formed. Something like this is true for
people who grew up in the `60s. For the late-'60s counterculture was
not, by any means, the shabbiest episode of the postwar era, even if it
now seems the most antique. It was imaginative and infectious, and it
touched a nerve.
The faith in popular music, in consciousness-expansion, and in the
nonconformist lifestyle that made up the countercultural ethos seems
clearly misplaced today. You wonder why it didn't dawn on all those
disaffected Rolling Stone writers and editors that Wenner was successful
precisely because he wasn't the anomaly they took him for. But faith in
anything can be a valuable sentiment; and what young people in the `60s
thought their faith made it possible for them to do was to tell the
truth. Of course, telling the truth is much harder than they thought it
was; and the culture they imagined was sustaining them turned out not to
be "authentically" theirs, and not really sustainable, after all. But
those people had not yet become cynics.
The silliest charge brought against the `60s is the charge of moral
relativism. Ordinary life must be built on the solid foundations of
moral values, those who make this charge argue, and the `60s persuaded
people that the foundations weren't solid, and that any morality would
do that got you through the night. The accusation isn't just wrong about
the `60s; it's an injustice to the dignity of ordinary life, which is an
irredeemably pragmatic and open-ended affair. You couldn't make it
through even the day if you held every transaction up to scrutiny by the
lights of some received moral code. Radicals and youthful counterculture
types in the `60s weren't moral relativists. They were moral
absolutists. They scrutinized everything, and they believed that they
could live by the distinctions they made.
There are always people who think this way-people who see that the world
is a little fuzzy and proceed to make a religion out of clarity. In the
`60s their way of thinking was briefly but memorably a part of the
popular culture. Hotchner's book on The Rolling Stones is a melange of
cliches and misinformation; but it is constructed around a series of
interviews with people who were around the band in the `60s, and
although most of the anecdotes have the polished and improved feel of
tales many times retold, a few have a kind of parabolic resonance.
One of the stories is told by a photographer named Gered Mankowitz, who
accompanied The Rolling Stones on their American tours in the 1960s. It
seems that there were two groupies in those days who dedicated
themselves to the conquest of Mick Jagger. After several years of futile
pursuit, they managed to get themselves invited to a house where The
Stones were staying, and Mick was persuaded to take both of them to bed.
Afterward, though, the girls were disappointed. "He was only so-so," one
of them complained. "He tried to come on like Mick Jagger, but he's no
Mick Jagger." The real can always be separated from the contrived:
wherever that illusion persists, the spirit of the `60s still survives.
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