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Title: Summer of Love: The Inside Story of LSD, Rock & Roll, Free Love and High Times in the Wild West by Joel Selvin ISBN: 0-8154-1019-0 Publisher: Cooper Square Publishers Pub. Date: 01 October, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.75 (12 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Summer of Love teaches children of baby boomers about 60's
Comment: This book was not only informative but interesting as well. Selvin goes into incredible details about those rock stars who shaped us and our taste in music.
For those of us growing up in the Generation X mold, learning about the greats of rock and roll gives us a kind of legacy that we can fall back onto when the rock
of today gets unbearable. Never again will we be graced by the likes of Janis Joplin or Jerry Garcia. But through Selvin's book, we are able to catch a glimps
of life behind the stage at our rock icons.
Rating: 4
Summary: The Summer of Love That Never Happened
Comment: "Summer of Love" may have been a bit over the top with it's tabloid style coverage of the rise and fall of the San Francisco music scene, but it was a fun read. Author Joel Selvin does have his facts straight and seldom misspeaks on this insider's account of bands like the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Selvin devotes a fair amount of coverage of the Bill Graham organization and the Family Dog, the primary promoters of live music in the old ballrooms of San Francisco. That coverage is justified because it is doubtful that this music would have found a national audience without the vibrant live music scene in the Fillmore and Avalon ballrooms. And it is all there: Quicksilver's obsession with firearms; the Lovin' Spoonful's narking out on the manager of the improv group, the Committee; Janice Joplin's turbulent love life; Marty Balin's courageous attempts to diffuse the violence at Altamont, the internal bickering of the Grateful Dead which lead them to serve "walking papers" to Pig Pen and Bob Weir for not having enough musical talent, and Bill Graham's fisticuffs with just about anyone who disagreed with him. If you loved the music of Haight-Ashbury, you will enjoy "Summer of Love." Oh by the way, the expression "summer of love" was just a media label for the San Francisco music phenomena and I think some of the other critics have taken the book title too literally.
Rating: 3
Summary: Selvin's Scrapbook of Snapshots lacks Synthesis
Comment: Joel Selvin's chronicle of the span of years that saw the rise and fall of San Francisco's Ballroom heyday leaves one with a mixed bag of responses. While it is jam-packed with bits of "insider" history, it lacks synthesis, often making for a tedious read. Its title is misleading--"The Summer of Love: The Inside Story of LSD, Rock n'Roll, Free Love, and High Times in the Wild West" suggests a comprehensive exploration from the inside out. It would have been more accurately heralded under something like "San Francisco's Ballroom Era: Snapshots of the Players."
There is no in-depth analysis of the culture here--none of the great and privileged perspective that is often the gift of time and distance. Their is no insightful working over of how and why the elements came together the way they did. The text plods along, most of the time, with the certain monotony of required recitation --"this happened, then that happened,then this, then that..." It is distinguished only by chaotic leaps from scenes at one camp of personalities to those of another. It is the textual equivalent of a hastily compiled scrapbook covering some particularly seminal years in the rock n' roll counterculture. Some of the pages are given decidedly more consideration than others. We seem to be in Grace Slick's sidecar much of the time, but if this were the only exposure one had to the early days of the San Francisco scene, there is the danger of walking away thinking the Grateful Dead were a minor consideration, and Bill Graham was a pitbull who never had a good day.
The text is rife with other minor sins. The period's biggest events play out in an almost anti-climactic fashion, with Selvin often focusing on odd bits of detail when it seems there ought to be vibrant, big pictures. Among places where minutiae effects the frustrating sense of walking through a major event with a view through a straw are Altamont, Woodstock, and the death of Janis Joplin. Too many minor characters are unceremoniously punched in, and subsequently abandoned to fates we are left to imagine.
The text strives for cliffhanger transitions, structured with the same misguided melodrama of a soap opera. Clever turns of phrase make it to the page now and then, but more recognizable are attempts at lyrical grace that fall short of the mark. The content often smacks of secondhand news and the feeling that a peripheral perspective has been superimposed on the epicenter of dozens of critical moments and private conversations. A journalistic approach would have given more credibility to the many personal accounts. Was Selvin the ubiquitous fly on the wall in the lives of the people he writes about, or has imagination manifested the intimate details of conversations and events long since consigned to the quiet annals of private histories?
Selvin has offered up a few good nuggets--some precious gems in the rough--but one must be willing to mine for them. This is no motherlode, and upon closing the book, one is left with the feeling that this was a collection of narrative notes, still waiting to be refined to glistening. There are myriad fascinating leaping off points, but in the end, too many have us still hanging in the air.
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Title: The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition by Theodore Roszak ISBN: 0520201221 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1995 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Memoirs of an Ex-Hippie: Seven Years in the Counterculture by Robert A. Roskind ISBN: 1565220730 Publisher: Do It Yourself Pub. Date: 27 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Hippies and American Values by Timothy Miller ISBN: 0870496948 Publisher: University of Tennessee Press Pub. Date: 01 August, 1991 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: The Hippie Dictionary by John Bassett McCleary ISBN: 1580083552 Publisher: Ten Speed Press Pub. Date: 01 July, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Flashing on the Sixties by Lisa Law ISBN: 0916290816 Publisher: Squarebooks Pub. Date: September, 2000 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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