In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea
Description
A legendary steward of the hip musical world...Goldberg plunges into a thorough, panoramic account of the culture, politics, media, music and mores of the year to demolish the idea that it was trivial. He has researched and interviewed widely--his section on underground newspapers is impressively detailed--and he's been there with many of the principals through all these years...Goldberg's deep purchase on his subject and his storytelling ease make it fresh...Personal asides give the account intimacy... The book proves] that so much activism and passion can be crowded into barely more than a single year. When Goldberg was writing his book, that might have been a useful message. Today, in Trump's America, with a fueled and gathering resistance, it is a potentially mirroring one.
--Sheila Weller, New York Times Book Review
Goldberg's] newest book, In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea, explores and fuses together the musical, political and spiritual revolutions of the time into a narrative about a moment when 'there was an instant sense of tribal intimacy one could have even with a stranger.'
--Rolling Stone
Goldberg brings a personal passion that itself illustrates the lasting resonance of the hippie era.
--Publishers Weekly
A reminiscence of the time that brought us Sgt. Pepper and the Summer of Love...A genial you-were-there memoir of a golden age.
--Kirkus Reviews
Written with the acuity of someone who lived through the times he writes about, this is a thoughtful and wide-ranging exploration not just of one year in history but also of a culture and a way of thinking that continues to reverberate today.
--Booklist
Goldberg's] analysis of what it meant to be a hippie in 1967--sans cartoon clich s--recounts the pursuit of wisdom and joy, as well as a crazy quilt of counterculture cool. And despite the demarcation insisted on by some, he shows that spirituality, activism and business are not incompatible.
--High Times
Danny Goldberg's new book is a subjective history of 1967, the year he graduated from high school. It is, he writes in the introduction, an attempt at trying to remember the culture that mesmerized me, to visit the places and conversations I was not cool enough to have been a part of. It is also a refreshing and new analysis of the era; by looking at not only the political causes, but also the spiritual, musical, and psychedelic movements, Goldberg provides a unique perspective on how and why the legacy of 1967 lives on today.
1967 was the year of the release of the Beatles's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and of debut albums from the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, among many others.
In addition to the thriving music scene, 1967 was also the year of the Summer of Love; the year that millions of now-illegal LSD tabs flooded America; Muhammad Ali was convicted of avoiding the draft; Martin Luther King Jr. publicly opposed the war in Vietnam; Stokely Carmichael championed Black Power; Israel won the Six-Day War, and Che Guevara was murdered. It was the year that hundreds of thousands of protesters vainly attempted to levitate the Pentagon. It was the year the word hippie peaked and died, and the Yippies were born.
Exhaustively researched and informed by interviews with Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Tom Hayden, Cora Weiss, and Gil Scott-Heron (one of many of Goldberg's high school classmates who entered the culture), In Search of the Lost Chord is a mosaic of seminal moments in the psychedelic, spiritual, rock-and-roll, and political protest cultures of 1967.
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About the Author
Danny Goldberg is the author of How the Left Lost Teen Spirit and Bumping Into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business. Since 2007 he has been president of Gold Village Entertainment, whose clients include Steve Earle and Against Me. Previously, Goldberg was president of Gold Mountain Entertainment (Nirvana, Bonnie Raitt, the Allman Brothers), CEO of Air America Radio, chairman of Warner Bros. Records, president of Atlantic Records, and vice president of Led Zeppelin's Swan Song Records.
Reviews
"Goldberg's book is what one might call a survey of the period. His narrative skillfully weaves the music, the drugs, the politics and the spiritual searching of the hippie counterculture into a tale that moves quickly and smoothly...What Goldberg has achieved in In Search of the Lost Chord is laudable. Not only has he provided his contemporaries with a very readable and fairly wide-ranging look at an important time in their youth, he has also given today's younger readers a useful and well-told historical survey of a subculture and time they hear about quite often."
--CounterPunch
"Danny Goldberg's In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea resonates with today's activist readers...Goldberg uses the afterword to bounce these ideas off our current political landscape and it's quite revelatory. That same chord that was ringing in the ears of some of those hippies of 1967 is now ringing in the ears of those with their boots on the ground in their own respective resistance movements today."
--PopMatters
"Goldberg, a longtime music industry executive and journalist, takes the reader through the history of the year 1967 and the social transformations that led up to it. The book is full of names and references and tales that stir memories of the time...The book is a tribute to a time gone by that helps us better understand who we are today."
--Progressive, A Top Book of 2017
"This wide-ranging, deeply personal narrative by journalist and music executive Danny Goldberg subjectively and perspicaciously explores the ongoing relevance of the political and counter-cultural movements that emerged in the pivotal year 1967."
--Big City Rhythm & Blues Magazine
"[Goldberg] conducts a survey of the hippie universe of that particular moment, touching on the rival hippiedoms of San Francisco and New York, the philosophical avatars of LSD, the wisdom of Allen Ginsberg, the grandeur of the Grateful Dead and other examplars of the 'San Francisco Sound, ' the New Left radicals and black-power militants (as seen from a hippie standpoint), and the underground press."
--Tablet Magazine
"In his new book In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea, author Danny Goldberg interviewed dozens of people who were touched by that summer."
--AARP Magazine
"[Goldberg] explores how the political, mystical, psychedelic and musical fused to create that memorable year."
--Toronto Star, included in Sarah Murdoch's "Arrivals" column
"A neat compendium."
--New York Journal of Books
"Entertainment industry executive and raconteur Danny Goldberg's new book tackles 1967, the most promising but confusing year of that era, straight on. It's a veritable literary head rush, and he delivers some tasty and tantalizing details along the way. The Vietnam War, race relations, psychedelic rock, LSD, the first Be-In, various counterculture groups: All get plenty of attention, and Goldberg's personal connection to several key figures allows him to get quotes and new thoughts on the era, 50 years later."
--Capital & Main
"Though the dream appeared to end, what Goldberg describes as a 'mystical experience' for many participants continues to reverberate a half century later in everything from the environmental movement to the push for organic food."
--Shepherd Express (Milwaukee)
"In Search of the Lost Chord takes a refreshing new look at 1967, offering up a unique perspective and personal analysis of the counterculture era itself."
--Night Flight
"Long a gloried mover and shaker in the music industry, Danny Goldberg knows whereof he speaks in his iconoclastic history of American popular culture...Based on his own exhaustive research, including interviews with luminaries ranging from Allen Ginsberg to Baba Ram Dass (aka Richard Alpert), the book drills deeply into sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, and much else besides."
--Jewish Journal
"In his ambitious In Search of the Lost Chord, Goldberg delivers a well-written and wildly polychromatic snapshot of an epochal moment...Reading Goldberg's book is a reminder that there was a time that optimism put on legs and took to the streets as well as the airwaves. We may never find that lost chord, but we may yet again strike a new one that carries longer and with more vigor, in the years to come."
--Regarp Book Blog
"[In Search of the Lost Chord is] a standout for its approach, which documents the experiences of events, people, and the changing tides which swept the nation and changed its direction forever."
--Donovan's Literary Services, included in Prime Picks Selection
"Danny Goldberg takes us back to 1967 and gives us a complete and panoramic look at the culture, politics, media, music and mores of the year."
--Reviews by Amos Lassen
"Danny Goldberg is a relentless tracker of people. However elusive this Lost Chord may be, Danny G. searches it out and nails it to the tree flesh. Eternity now! 1967 forever!"
--Wavy Gravy
"Danny Goldberg's deeply personal and political history of 1967 and the hippie idea weaves together rollicking, rousing, wonderfully colorful and disparate narratives to remind us how the energies and aspirations of the counterculture were intertwined with protest and reform. There is a direct line from many of the events, movements, and people of 1967 to our times. Goldberg draws the line for us with mesmerizing storytelling, characters, and conversations."
--Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation
"Danny Goldberg has written a lively, well-researched, kaleidoscopic account--at once openhearted and levelheaded--of a spiritual, pharmacological, political, and musical supernova whose reverberations are still strongly felt a half-century later."
--Hendrik Hertzberg
"Danny Goldberg is probably one of the purest, most reasonable guides you could ask for to 1967."
--Andrew Loog Oldham, author of Rolling Stoned
"Hippie 101--a kaleidoscopic snapshot of the Big Bang fifty years ago, three parts social and musical history, one part personal memoir, a sweeping overview that also manages to be up close and personal. Bravo."
--Joel Selvin, author of Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock's Darkest Day
"Danny Goldberg has done something I would not have thought possible: with diligent research, sharp prose, a clear mind, and an open heart, he has rescued a period of history from the clichés that had previously defined it. I began this book thinking hippies ridiculous. I ended it with a far more complex view, and one that showed me how little I had known or understood--a truly impressive achievement."
--Eric Alterman, author of The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama
"This extraordinary book transports us back to a 'moment' when, as Goldberg writes, the phrase '"peace and love" was not meant or taken ironically.' Beginning at sixteen, Goldberg was a participant in the rise and cresting of the hippie movement, the hippie ideal, which has been trivialized and disparaged in later decades. He cuts through the obfuscation and recreates the sense of magic, wonder, intimacy, and community that was in the air and you could breathe it in. If you want to know, or remember, what it was like to be alive and part of that historic wave, I can think of no better guide than In Search of the Lost Chord."
--Sara Davidson, author of Loose Change: Three Women of the Sixties
"In a time of the harshest dissonance, Danny Goldberg's In Search of the Lost Chord arrives like soma from a heaven that is still up there if you look hard enough. One the great gambits of the rightist culture has been to paint the 1960s, and the hippie movement in particular, as some stammering, slothful stoner movie. As an eyewitness, I can testify it was much, much more. Danny Goldberg's highly informative missive from that long, strange trip not only reminds veterans of the glorious possibilities of the age but also serves as an excellent primer to onward generations."
--Mark Jacobson, author of The Lampshade
