Another Little Piece of My Heart

by Richard Goldstein

  Sontag was one of the few people over the age of thirty whom I trusted. She understood the power of pop culture, and she was far more knowing than other intellectuals about things like pornography and camp. Her privileging of the sensual surface over interpretation, and her occasional nods to rock, made a major impression on me. It was true, as Sontag wrote, that a song by the Supremes was as complex as a piece by Bach, at least when it came to the canon that Motown artists drew from. Just the fact that pop music had a canon was an idea I never thought I’d see articulated by a prestigious critic. I was more in awe of her than I’d been of even Norman Mailer. And there was no danger that she would want to box me.

  Imagine how I felt when she appeared, out of the West Side ether, at a café near Lincoln Center. She flashed the wry but engagé look she showed in photos, and soon we were chatting away. I wish I could recall that conversation, but my mind draws a blank, a sign that I was very nervous. The only thing I remember—quite clearly—was what she said about my work. She told me that her young son, now the writer David Rieff, had hipped her to my column. And then she said, twinkling a bit, that I was “a teenage Marcel Proust.”

  I didn’t know it then, but backhanded compliments were typical of Sontag’s personal style. She was constantly hustled for endorsements, which she reserved for work that met her rigorous standards. European authors obscure to me—I didn’t know there were poets in Romania—won her loyalty, but she was wary of supporting writing she didn’t truly believe in, even by her friends. So she found a way to compose a blurb that was an art form in itself. I remember one such comment about a novel by a friend of mine, and hers. “A revolutionary down,” Sontag wrote, “but do we deserve an up?” At the time when we met, I had no feeling for the drollery that passed for hedging your bets in Manhattan. I’d read enough Proust to know that I was no teenage version of him. All I could do was wince at that pat on the back. As a cartographer of the new culture, Sontag was supposed to know better than to call a novice a genius. Another hero had turned out to have feet of irony.

  But why did she want to meet me? I think it had to do with something I didn’t believe I had—a sensibility. Rock wasn’t really her thing. She didn’t seem desperate to unearth the mysteries of the Beatles. The word heavy was not in her vocabulary. But she couldn’t be the premier critic of now-culture without understanding rock, and that wasn’t as easy as, say, grasping the meaning of films, since there was a whole body of work about what the French had convinced us to call cinema. But once she confronted pop music in all its vulgar energy, she was lost in a world without her finely honed standards, and for a critic that’s a pretty scary place. I was someone who lived and breathed pop. I seethed to its beat. This was probably what made me interesting to her.

  Fortunately I never needed a favor from Sontag, except for the time I asked her for a letter of introduction so I could report from revolutionary Cuba. She wasn’t keen on it, and the way she said so was to point out that the money the Castro government would spend on me could be better dispensed to the poor. Even I got the drift of that brush-off. But we remained in touch over the years, and I did my best to provide experiences that I sensed she needed. In 1975, on her first night out after her initial surgery for breast cancer, I took her to a place called the Loft, the most exciting downtown disco, the kind of utopian space where all the races and sexualities shook their booties. When things got going at the Loft, the mass swaying in half darkness felt like a subway train when the lights go out. Sontag loved it, and I loved showing her a scene she’d never encountered. I suppose we were friends, but I was always aware of the gap between us, and so was she. The last time I saw her was in the early eighties, at a luncheon held by the humanities institute at New York University. It was in financial trouble, and I’d been asked by its founder, Richard Sennett, to publicize its plight. It wouldn’t be easy to turn that situation into a story, but I was willing to try. At some point Sontag rose from the table. Staring at me, she said, “To think that we need Richard Goldstein in order to raise money!” It felt like a pie in the face—proof that I was nothing more than a necessity. She may have been a champion of humanism, but she was incapable of realizing how cruel her bons mots could be.

  Still, Sontag was the finest cultural interpreter of her era, and I’ve always been a fan. I dip into her work the way I listen to certain albums over and over. She had the courage to revise her thinking, which is a more remarkable trait than it should be in a critic. They may be momentarily correct, but they are never permanently right, certainly not in a time of rapid change; yet they are rarely willing to reexamine their most closely held opinions. Sontag was one of the few critics who didn’t rest in peace. She once called America “the cancer of Western civilization,” but she went on to write a brilliant critique of metaphorical thinking about illness. She made her name by privileging sensuality over morality, but in her later work she wrestled with the impact of unmooring aesthetic experience from ethical thinking. “By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, art changes morals,” she wrote in her best book, On Photography. “In the long run it works out not as a liberation but as a subtraction from the self; a pseudo-familiarity with the horrible reinforces alienation, making one less able to react in real life.” As usual her radar was acute.

  Ecstasy and violence converged in pop culture during the sixties, as they would in radical politics. Art’s attack on bourgeois taboos had been the model for our rebellion, but it also laid the groundwork for the blind ferocity that undermined our vision. Sontag was right to warn about this, but she didn’t see the connection between x-treme culture and the economic forces that were transforming those fantasies into profit centers. Her political comments were sometimes bold, but often naïve. She was largely ignorant of left-wing theory, partly because she felt constrained by it and partly because it was regarded by the cultural elite as something even worse than reductive—déclassé. And Sontag was dependent on that elite. Even as she courted subversion she also craved prestige. She could never entirely break with the values of her class, and to me that was her greatest weakness as a critic.

  That said, her work has aged well, unlike most of the apologetics that passed for solidarity in the sixties. I watched uneasily as intellectuals descended on radical culture and politics like tourists from the developed world. They were enchanted by what should have made them skeptical, and since they generally lived safe lives they were quite susceptible to the thrill of chaos. How else to account for the decision by the New York Review of Books to print a diagram of a Molotov cocktail on its front page during a riot in the Newark ghetto. The shocking thing about that cover was not that it ran, but that it felt right. Everyone who was anyone in the hip milieu, it seemed, wanted in on the incendiary action. The result was a profound retreat from the liberal tradition, and not just in the streets. Freudians unmoored from Freud saw the oceanic future, and several of them promoted what Norman O. Brown called “holy madness” as an alternative to repression. I found such work ominous. It was part of a larger rebellion against systems and standards that had spread from the arts to the academy. Anything beyond the pale of Western rationalism was worth a hearing, if not a book. On the more benign end of this spectrum were celebrations, by dazzled professors, of all things young and shaggy. This embrace of the new was necessary, of course; it broke the back of the hierarchical thinking that underlay normalcy. But it lacked precisely what was needed most: a critique of our headlong plunge into ecstasy as liberation.

  The best thing about the sixties was the willingness to try nearly anything that hadn’t been tried before. It was a truly stimulating strategy, because it allowed young people to imagine the future in practically limitless terms. But it placed all our impulses on an equal footing, suppressing our ability to think and behave strategically. What Gertrude Stein said of Oakland was also true of the counterculture—there was no there there, no will to form institutions that could transmit values, only a feeling that everythin
g worth learning could be known in an instant. What we needed more than anything was perspective, but we isolated ourselves from anyone who could provide it. Driven by polemics—and publicity—we were rudderless in the current of our convictions.

  Perhaps this is always what it’s like to live in revolutionary times, the sense that everything is coursing toward a destiny that seems irrational and immanent. And certainly the r-word was sounded more and more often, in antiwar rallies as well as in commercials for refrigerators. But in 1967 this uprising seemed more like a Jim Morrison meditation on killing your father and having at your mother. One thing about Oedipal fantasies, as opposed to genuinely revolutionary ones, is that you don’t really want them to succeed. You count on your parents to resist your most destructive desires. This is what I felt about America. It never occurred to me that one center of authority after another would give way, and that the nation would entangle itself in a ravel of rage and fear.

  The breakdown of civil society had many causes, some more justifiable than others, but more than anything I blamed intellectuals. They were the guardian angels of my childhood, the authors of books that shielded me from the brutishness of my neighborhood. I expected them to stand against the approaching chaos. I should have realized that they were as likely as any other group to fold under the pressure of conformity. And now there was the added inducement of fame, the great intoxicant, harder than even McCarthyism to resist. But it wasn’t just that intellectuals refused to occupy the pedestal I had placed them on. The pedestal itself was gone. It had been smashed, along with other signifiers of the order, and what took its place was a slope on which many people scrambled to a top that didn’t exist. I was one of those climbers, as deeply invested in the futile scrum as any Sisyphus. The uncertainty I saw in my heroes was a mirror of mine. Something was coming down the pike that none of us could stop, or even understand. It frightened me. But even as I recoiled from the approaching storm I was drawn to it. There would be many good stories to report.

  The Unraveling

  I remember the moment when I decided that rock as a revolutionary force was dead. It happened in the spring of 1968, when I heard a seven-minute opus called “MacArthur Park.” I’ll mention just one of its all too many verses, something about being pressed “in love’s hot, fevered iron, like a striped pair of pants.” Actually the word striped was sung in two syllables—as in stri-ped—because, you know, this song was art. It had deep meanings, hidden references, and a refrain that was its own parody. A cake left out in the rain … the icing melting … the recipe lost forever … There was only one permissible response to imagery like that: a heartfelt “Heavy!”

  Of course, icky words are not an impediment to a great pop composition. The lyrics of my youth were often insipid, but at least they were inspired by real emotions. What passed for rock poetry in 1968 lacked any relationship to recognizable experience. It was a set of floating metaphors for a culture that was growing detached from everything but its own tropes. Dylan had withdrawn from the scene, and when he returned he was writing more traditional, less flamboyant songs. A serious motorcycle crash was the ostensible reason for his retreat, but I suspect- ed that he’d caught a terminal case of disgust at the fake pieties that flooded rock in his wake. The synthesis of musical modes pioneered by the Beatles had become a rote exoticism with vaguely Eastern vibes. Every musician in Topanga Canyon was strumming a sitar. Meanwhile the Fab Four were heading for a breakup, and I could see the signs in their latest compositions, which were far easier to attribute to either Lennon or McCartney than their classics had been. There was a rumor that Paul had died in a car crash, a precursor of the famous “Paul is dead” canard of 1969, which no amount of official denial could dislodge, because the truth was not the point—it was all about the feeling of doom projected onto a beloved star. These were symptoms of a deeper disintegration. I observed them, horrified but fascinated. It was like coming across a really nasty porn film from which you can’t avert your gaze. This was more than just the triumph of plastic—it was a symptom of exhaustion.

  The decadence that overran the counterculture had happened so quickly. I scrambled to describe it, fighting off the fear that doing so would threaten not just my commitment but my career. I’d been called a fascist by Mark Rudd, a leader of the radical students at Columbia University, because of my dismissal of Sgt. Pepper. I was haunted by the thought of being booed off the stage, the way I’d seen students harangue the old socialist Irving Howe, who had warned them about the consequences of doing politics by passion alone. (The election of Richard Nixon in 1968 proved him right.) But I couldn’t continue to celebrate something that no longer thrilled me. On the contrary, I felt a seething contempt for hip enlightenment. All sorts of vacant slogans were in the air. The peace sign was mandatory; any criticism brought the admonition “You’re bringing me down.” It reminded me of Communism, with its obligatory optimism, except that in the Eastern bloc countries I had visited, nearly everyone thought the professed morality was bullshit. Here, where freedom allegedly reigned, millions of kids spouted empty platitudes. This was worse than even hype, because it was self-created.

  I suppose I should have focused on the fun of it—the gushy sentiments of flower power, the sheer joy of a song like “Yummy Yummy Yummy” (“I got love in my tummy”), the outsize theatricality of concerts. But I’d seen one too many L.A. bands with fire bursting from their headdresses as they rhapsodized about love. Psychedelic music was giving way to fake opulence, and a new genre called art rock appeared. These were lushly orchestrated ballads with fabulous stereo effects. They had their own delight as kitsch, I suppose, but by then I had lost my capacity for enjoying it. Too much was at stake, given the mission I’d assigned to rock. I could only rail against the simulacra of the music I adored. I knew it would earn me the ultimate accusation—bummer!—but it was as close as I dared come to issuing a warning. My column was rarely a pleasure to write, and it couldn’t have been fun to read, because there’s nothing felicitous about doubt.

  I bonded best with other skeptics, and they weren’t easy to find, since most of my peers were convinced that I needed to mellow out and trip more frequently. My favorite holdout against this kind of thinking was Bill Graham, the rock impresario who managed the Fillmore Ballroom, booking the great bands I’d seen in San Francisco. I met him in 1968 as he was about to open the Fillmore East in a former Yiddish theater on Second Avenue. Graham was not a child of security like most of his customers. Born in Berlin, he’d escaped from the Nazis in a children’s refugee program and grown up in the Bronx with American foster parents. The intent expression on his face, the grimness around the eyes even when he was amused, was the only way in which his past life intruded. He was one of the few people I could trust with my apprehensions about the zaniness pretending to be a higher sanity, since he shared those qualms. Pondering the latest bizarro excess of the counterculture, we would shrug to each other like old Jews expressing fatalism toward the future. I could read the meaning of this gesture because at heart all Jews of my generation are survivors. My parents never mentioned the death camps, but I was aware of them as a boy in my nightmares. Graham had been shaped by the real thing. He didn’t do drugs, as far as I knew. I figured that he didn’t dare.

  I spent many nights at the Fillmore East in the line of duty, sitting so close to the stage that my body vibrated from the sound and the fillings in my teeth hurt. After several hours of this barrage I would fall into a daze under the influence of blobby projections on the screen. I have trouble remembering the details of those shows, since I saw so many. But I do recall the night I noticed a musician in the B-band warming up the crowd. He was a Groovy look-alike, another long-haired, lanky kid with a sinus-driven thrum in his voice. I’d thought of Groovy often since our acid trip on Lake Tahoe, and I wondered whether he’d become a drug dealer, a patient in a psych ward, or a rocker. Any of those alternatives seemed possible. By then I associated him with an experience that was both outside my li
fe and deep within it. On LSD I’d felt as if my defenses were a celluloid scrim. He could see through it to the murky core. I didn’t trust anyone with the power to do that, not in the midst of a confusion that made me feel as fragile and hollow as the Japanese paper lamp shade in my living room. I was pretty good at hiding my anguish, even from those who knew me well. Only my mustache, uneven because of the hairs I bit out of it as a nervous tic, gave me away. But I couldn’t hide myself on acid.

  The Groovy look-alike stepped to the mike, his face pale in the blue lights. His band was pure California mellow. The soft thump of the bass and the low patter of drums matched his supple voice. The beat was barely there, and the melodies seemed as indefinite as a breeze. But most of all I remember his wispy tenor. It blurred the lines between guy and girly. I closed my notebook and let the music take me.

  I wasn’t sure whether it was the singer or the association with Groovy, but I felt a vibration in my pelvic region, as if fingers were running down my spine. It wasn’t a unique experience—my body was often suffused with arousal when I listened to rock. But this was so much like an overtly sexual feeling that I clenched my legs together and touched my crotch to reassure myself that I wasn’t getting hard. I looked around. Everyone was sitting alert with their eyes closed, transfixed.