Reporting the Counterculture.

• Author: Gitlin, Todd

Reporting the Counterculture. Richard Goldstein. Unwin Hyman, $34.95. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as anthology. Today's American culture borrows energies-and bogeymen-from bygone times more successfully than it generates its own. As girths widen and hairlines recede, reporters in their thirties and editors in their forties have revived the days when tie-dyed giants in long hair stalked the earth. The worst thing about the recycled sixties blips and collages, which have choked the media during recent anniversaries, is that they lie by sentimentalizing. Inadvertently, they shore up the mainstream belief that sentiment precludes clear thought. Subjectivity or objectivity, says this belief: choose one. One virtue of the best of Richard Goldstein's Village Voice pieces of 1966-1971, now brought to life between hard covers, is their reminder that partisanship and insight need not cancel each other out. In those years, Goldstein proudly unlearned the inverted pyramid journalistic form he had been taught at Columbia, and signed up for what he calls, a bit pompously, "the struggle for subjectivity." His beat was rock, hip culture, widening out to movement politics on the left. In reading his pieces about the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Jim Morrison, even about a hack songwriter named John Kramer, what's clear is that Goldstein succeeded in tracking rock music across American culture precisely because he loved and felt rock music. The distant, Associated Press approach could never in a million cold facts have gotten the story. Out of his unabashed love for rock culture, Goldstein distilled the recurrent insight of his collection: in the counterculture, hope and hype were entangled from the start. "The most fragile thing to maintain in our culture is an underground," he wrote from San Francisco in 1967. "No sooner does a new tribe of rebels skip out, flip out, trip out, and take its stand, than photographers from Life magazine are on the scene doing a cover... American culture is a store window that must be periodically spruced and redressed." The freak culture of the hypothetical new age, Goldstein reminds us, had barely arrived in the Garden of Eden before it went into free Fall. "Flower power," he noted as early as 1967, on the occasion of the murder of two Lower East Side freaks, "began and ended as a cruel joke. The last laugh belongs to the mediamen, who chose to report a charade as a movement." This "bizarre...