VL related: drugs 'n' rock 'n' roll

[Doug Millison]

[book excerpt  at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/075532.html ]


>
>
>Bromell, Nick Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s. 210
>p. 2000
>
>Cloth $22.50 0-226-07553-2
>
>"There was something rigorous and instructive in getting stoned and listening
>to music as if it really mattered," writes Nick Bromell. His book is the
>first to take seriously the "drugs and rock 'n' roll" side of the 1960s--a
>side too often eclipsed by oversimplifications of that decade's hedonism or
>political idealism. To truly understand those years, Bromell argues, we must
>go back to this primal scene in which listening to rock--the Beatles, Dylan,
>Doors, Hendrix--was fused with the experience of being high. What did young
>people hear? What did they feel and think and learn?
>
>Tomorrow Never Knows focuses not on the stars who produced the music or on
>the leaders of the counterculture, but on those who sat in their dorm rooms
>and group houses, smoked dope, and played albums. Weaving together memoir and
>musicology, history and politics, Bromell shows how millions of listeners
>mixed rock and psychedelics in a quest to make sense of themselves and their
>times. This combination was not mere escapism, he argues, but a vital public
>philosophy, one that we must do justice to in order to understand not just
>the past but the present. For the most enduring legacy of the '60s--and the
>reason we both celebrate and revile them today--may be that they inaugurated
>a profound instability, a sense that foundations are fictions and culture
>itself a lie. As Bromell shows, this vision was expressed in complex ways in
>a body of music that has forced us to rethink what "pop music" can be.
>
>Tomorrow Never Knows is both a meditation on the ways the present remembers
>the past and an indispensable contribution to our understanding of the
>cataclysmic 1960s.
>
-- 
d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>