Counterculture Kaleidoscope: Musical and Cultural Perspectives on Late Sixties San Francisco (review)

Nadya Zimmerman's Counterculture Kaleidoscope takes a specific place and time as its subject: the Haight-Ashbury counterculture that flourished from 1965 to 1967, before its dilution/dissolution in 1968-69. This picturesque slice of the turbulent sixties, with its cast of idiosyncratic musicians and thinkers—Timothy Leary, Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Richard Alpert, Grace Slick, Jimi Hendrix, Allen Ginsburg, Alan Watts—holds a prominent place in popular memory of the 1960s. Zimmerman postulates, in order to demonstrate through musical analysis, that this specific San Francisco culture merits critique for its contradictory impulses and ambivalent historical results, setting out to "untangle" Haight-Ashbury from the rest of the 1960s, since it was "not, as the name implies, counter to anything" (emphasis hers). Ultimately, Zimmerman seeks to demythologize Haight-Ashbury by showing the culture as a tool of capitalism, more intent on separatist hedonism than on any articulated political program (3).

Zimmerman's argument against the Haight-Ashbury counterculture does not lack substance; the San Francisco counterculture produced a "pluralistic, not oppositional" movement that "attracted people who sought . . . to disengage from mainstream society, rather than transform it" (5). The thesis of the book is twofold. First, the counterculture, far from being the standardbearer of the sixties' challenge to the status quo, was actually quite content to capitulate to American imperialism and capitalism, albeit passively, because the counterculture had no rigorous form of political opposition or philosophic grounding. Second, Zimmerman seeks to pinpoint the intrinsic flaws of the counterculture through analysis of its music and artifacts.

Zimmerman perceives the counterculture holistically; interest in this book need not be confined to scholars of music. Her first chapter teases out the implications of the 1967 "Be-In" poster designed by Rick Griffin (7-10, 221), which she reads as presenting four paradigmatic dimensions of the Haight-Ashbury counterculture. The second chapter, "The Outlaw Persona," interrogates Janis Joplin's adoption/ transformation of the outlaw allure of black blues women. The third chapter, "The Exotic Persona," suggests that Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" supports imperialism; she also critiques Country Joe and the Fish for their "raga rock." The Grateful Dead's naïve intertwining of capitalism and freedom is studied in the fourth chapter on "The Natural Persona." The "New Age Persona" of the fifth chapter concerns the appropriation of spiritualities from Asia. The book ends with "Helter Skelter: Lessons from the End of the Counterculture," that asserts a dialectic trajectory from Haight-Ashbury to Charles Manson and the Hell's Angels at Altamont.

Zimmerman is graced with a dialectician's certainty that all things are interrelated. Her broad knowledge of 1960s California, and her sensitivity to multiple dimensions of music, create some insightful moments. Thus she sees that the outlaw image cultivated by the counterculture could draw simultaneous inspiration from the Black Panthers and the Hell's Angels. When coupled with the lack of an articulated politics, she contends that this contradictory embrace of a black liberationist group and a violent and frequently racist white motorcycle gang meant that the counterculture succumbed to the protection racket that the Hell's Angels provided rather than participating in the freedom struggle of the Panthers (34-35).

The outlaw persona that can remove racial politics from its view of the Panthers will also, she says, lead to the all-too-familiar appropriation of black musical styles and genres by white musicians, as well as the subsequent economic disparities between the white musicians who reap commercial success and the black musicians who earn the respect but not the cash (36-37). In this case, Zimmerman's analysis rests on an ambivalent figure: Janis Joplin. While some have accused Joplin of being a "racial impersonator" (43), Zimmerman also documents considerable outreach on Joplin's part to black blues singers: "she praised Etta James and Big Mama Thornton on stage and paid for half of a headstone for Bessie Smith...