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

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.

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. Copyright 2017 Booklist Reviews.

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)