Customer Reviews

Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

I came across this book in the bookstore of the Student Union at my university, and I'm so glad I did. I have devoted a lot of time to the study of the music of the '60s, and I've learned a lot of facts of the times. However, I've always been lacking in the etiquette of that decade (i was born in 1980 about 7 months before Lennon was assassinated). Well, I have to say that this book has changed some of that. It gives such a rich feeling of what it was like to be a teenager in the 1960s in middle class white America. But the best factor about this book is that it lacks nostalgia--it isn't a happy-dappy weren't-the-old-days-grand portrait. What you get is a *feeling* of what it was like (as well as a lot of good and original analysis of the music of the Beatles, Dylan, Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, The Band, and more). Now when I hear Dylan wailing, "How does it feeeel?" I can give a much better answer than I ever could have before reading this book.

This book is extraordinary at capturing the issues of adolesence in America, and how this intrinsically marginalized group has braved the challenge of being both insiders (adults) and outsiders (kids) with the assistance of drugs and rock in roll. In many ways I think that we idealize the 60's for their rebelliousness, the freedom of the times. But freedom has a price as is revealed in Bromell's Chapter', Ëvil¨is ¨live Spelled Backwards.' To question society, to question oneself, and the system is disettling, it is dangerous, there are no answers and how does one deal with that reality? Bromell captures these contradictions and complexities in a postmodern interdisciplinary style that is frighteningly penetrating. I may not be a child of the sixties, but his writing is so profound I think that it exceeds the limits of time.

Nick Bromell is a poet -essayist who has turned, over the the years, in a fermentation like that which creates fine wine, into a writer of society and history. Our society, our history as a people.

He was there in the national days of our youth, while the revolution churned and our own young hormones called out to the wind, in the 1960s. He was East Coast, I was West Coast, but we met somewhere in the middle of the world and I watched as he took in the cataclysmic world around us with a trenchant and absorbing point of view. We became friends.

In the intervening decades, he became a University professor and teacher of English in New England, and I moved out into the bitter deserts of the West to be a lawyer and legal historian. Over the years the warm grace and humor of his thinking still sometimes has called me like a literate breeze blowing through the traces of my memory; a cold and clear creek moving through dark sands toward a koranic garden hidden in my dusty, hardscabble feelings.

Now he has written a book about the sixties and their true legacy to us. Three things I must say. First, his writing continues to be beautiful, elegant and incisive. Second, he has made an important and rare contribution to the field of modern American studies. Third, his book is a valuable insight into one of the most important North American issues of our day. That insight is the genesis of the drug ethos in the rock-and-roll wing of the American counterculture -- of which millions of current social, business, and political American leaders were then part.

It is a book unlike so many others of the genre, one that looks freshly and unflinchingly at the facts and is brutal in its honesty about a side of life that was often an intrinsic part of growing up then, but often is a part of tragedy and tears now. There is so much that was and remains misunderstood about the movement of the sixties and seventies. I know only one other book by an actual participant of the time that attempts to be honest about what happened -- Emmett Grogan's Ringolevio. But that work was marred by obvious exaggeration and obscurantism, and it was not literary. Bromell's book is objective, clear, and balanced, and it should be read by everyone with an interest in where we were, and how we got here.

Bromell was there.

So was I.

But Bromell goes wild analyzing the spaces between words in Beatles or Dylan songs. While the spirit of the 60s is amenable to me and I agree that rock was an integral part of the times (and quite meaningful - quite "lived" as Bromell would say), it can be overdone. Nevertheless, it's an interesting read and at times Bromell's analyses of songs are more interesting than how I experienced the songs back when they were released (I think his PhD helped him look back with a keener eye than I'll ever have).

Beatle-crazed and ridiculously weak in terms of coverage of zoned superstars like the Jefferson Airplane, the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead, this book barely scratches the surface of the topics presented in the title.

As complete waste of money, not worth using as substitute for toilet paper ! This is full of the all-too-common Liberal claptrap, white middle aged males are responsible for subjugating women, minorities, and those of the alternative lifestyle community.

It advocates using mind altering, gene destroying drugs to achieve "consciousness" which is an affront to many and endangers our nations impressionable youth.

Verbose in the worst sense, author takes forever to express a single idea that could be conveyed in less then a paragraph.

This book is the equivalent of an overly long and wannabe-contemplative VH1 "documentary." With the acknowledgment of how hard it is to capture the essence of the 60s' music and its society, this book then goes on to underwhelmingly live up to that observation. With self-important theorizing on the meaning of this-and-that, and hackneyed philosophizing on the significance of some banal lyrics or events, this book attempts to pass off various cliches as meaningful metaphors for other cliches. Nothing much is really said, nothing interesting is really brought out by his observations, and his attempts at capturing meaning leave one with the sense of "So What?".

This book is another in a tired line of works on the sixties based on repititious mythologies and platitudes. It's useful if you are looking for some form of validation; however, one would be better off sticking to VH1.

Just like to add that this book is also a joy to look at. Beautifully produced example of the book binders' art. Check out the multi-coloured threads holding the pages together, someone put a great deal of thought into the production values here. Congratulations!