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

Nadya Zimmerman's Counterculture Kaleidoscope asks us take another look at—and give a more critical listen to—the "San Francisco Sound" of the 1960s. Contrary to popular memory and even much of the scholarship of the time period, she argues that we cannot simply lump this musical scene in with the broader oppositional efforts of the New Left, the antiwar effort, or the civil rights struggle. Instead, we must recognize how the bohemians who emerged from the ashes of the Beat Generation and the folk revival to forge San Francisco's psychedelic rock style between approximately 1965 and the ill-fated Summer of Love in 1967 adopted a kind of libertarian, anything-goes sensibility that, because it refused to take oppositional positions, ultimately undercut their very aspirations to break free of mainstream Cold War American consumer culture.

To Zimmerman, the effort to resist fixed foundations of any kind was, paradoxically, the foundational countercultural attitude pioneered in mid-1960s San Francisco. This led, she contends, to many problems. Expressing an escapist mode of neutrality and a commitment to uncommitted openness, the music and ideas of San Francisco counterculturalists were easily appropriated for misuse: corporations repackaged the counterculture's surface-level transgression against mainstream American consumer culture into a new cutting-edge "lifestyle" that fit well within that very system; political activists sought to harness rock to their own agendas in ways that were anathema to the original San Francisco scene; worst of all, Zimmerman notes, the counterculture's libertarian sensibility left it vulnerable to terrifying appropriations by psychopathic figures such as Charles Manson.

For Zimmerman, these were later distortions of the original vision of the counterculture in San Francisco, but they were caused by flaws present from the start. Favoring what Zimmerman calls "disassociation," "disengagement," "negation," the "nondialectical," and "pluralism," the San Francisco counterculture became complicit in mainstream ideologies and structures of power because its participants lacked a stable position from which to counteract them. Rock music—that most representative form of the San Francisco counterculture—especially manifested aspects of American imperialism, racism, sexism, technological destructiveness, and economic complicity. "The counterculture dissolved," Zimmerman writes, "because it falsely believed, from the beginning, that it could drop out of the system when in reality, it negated association with any one category while simultaneously mirroring various aspects of the capitalist system to sustain itself" (20). The kaleidoscopic qualities of countercultural music and ideology, in other words, do not dazzle Zimmerman; for her, they masked the major shortcoming of countercultural politics in the 1960s, which was to overvalue the power of unfixed, endless flexibility.

Examining both musical texts and social contexts, Zimmerman seeks to pull the tie-dyed wool from our eyes and unplug the greatest hits soundtrack from our ears. Her book hones in on four countercultural archetypes she perceives in San Francisco rock: the outlaw, the exotic persona, the natural persona, and the New Age persona. In each case, she shows how the refusal of participants to take a stand undermined countercultural claims of liberation. She focuses on "Summertime" by Big Brother and the Holding Company (with Janis Joplin) as an example of the problematic racial dimensions of the outlaw figure, "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane and "Eastern Jam" by Country Joe and the Fish as moments of Orientalist exoticism, "Sugar Magnolia" by the Grateful Dead as a composition that feigns an appreciation of Edenic nature but reveals the lurking countercultural dependence on technology, and "ReJoyce" by Jefferson Airplane as a portrayal of how the counterculture reasserted misogyny in the guise of New Age sexual liberation and free love. At times her connections between musical text and social context seem a bit strained. She contends, for instance, that the ascending, reverse bolero bass figure, flamenco guitar flourishes, ethnic music-inspired vocal stylings, and Alice-in-Wonderland lyrics of "White Rabbit" served as mirrors of the involvement...