Born in the Bronx in 1944 and bestowed with what he describes as "the mental baggage of a New Yorker, sheathed in cynicism and highly suspicious of anything that claimed to be mystical", Richard Goldstein walked into the offices of New York's weekly alternative newspaper the Village Voice and informed the editor that he wanted to be its resident rock critic.
“What’s that?” the editor asked the 22-year-old, eventually agreeing to Goldstein’s mixture of ebullience, ego and enthusiasm, which in turn was used to take full advantage of the countercultural cluelessness of people (writers, editors, cultural commentators) older than him.
So began Goldstein’s path to a form of enlightenment – cultural, sexual and political – via writing about rock music as a serious art form.
Surging ahead with a credo of sorts – “To me, a critic didn’t have to get it right, he just had to notice things. My job was to write what I saw, heard and felt about something I loved” – Goldstein wrote reflectively about rock music at a time when music writing amounted to little other than overenthusiastic outlines for trade mags, record-company PR departments and teen publications.
In short Goldstein invented his own gig, spurred on by New Journalism’s blend of highbrow and lowbrow art forms and a genuine love of telling it like it was.
“It was the perfect career for an addict of spectacle who was also an introvert,” writes Goldstein, not for the first time hitting the nail right on the head. Being a journalist in the mid 1960s, he writes, provided an embarrassment of opportunities: doors to the trendiest venues opened wide, VIP areas and police lines made way, and when a press card was presented no one he wanted to talk with was out of bounds.
“When I got into journo mode, I would become the man I wanted to be – aggressive, competent, smart-assed.”
Another Little Piece of My Heart is full of such pithy sentences, and Goldstein doesn't hold back on the milieu or his part in presenting it to his readers.
There are occasional blushes of ridiculous self-importance – he describes his mission in the 1960s as “a crusader in the eternal struggle between light and darkness, the real thing and the hype” – but overall he strikes a balance between the absurdity and the relevance of the times.
The problem with the counterculture, he reasons, was that there was “no will to form institutions that could transmit values, only a feeling that everything worth learning could be comprehended in an instant”. Such absence of boundaries, he writes, was freedom to some, “but for others it would produce a yearning for the most authoritarian forms of devotion”.
Cue justified barbs directed towards Charles Manson and The Beatles’ one-time spiritual-enlightenment guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. (“He was represented by the same firm that handled publicity for the Ringling Brothers circus.”)
By turns dismissive (Grateful Dead: "their songs were a habitat for wandering"), admiring (Frank Zappa: "tightly erudite"), withering (Velvet Underground: "a cross between a dental drill and a construction site"), sceptical (The Beatles' Sgt Pepper album: "dazzling but ultimately fraudulent") and scathing (William Burroughs: "turned out to be a pig"), Goldstein pins his colours to the mast while admitting that one of the more admirable traits of a genuine critic is the ability to re-examine, if not revise, their most rigidly gripped opinions.
“They may be momentarily correct,” he says, echoing the ethics of his former acquaintance Susan Sontag, “but they are never permanently right, certainly not in a time of rapid change.”
As the 1960s melted into the next decade, Goldstein relinquished his role as an arbiter of hip. He reached a personal endgame with Woodstock and passed the baton to people who weren’t as jaded. Music was becoming ornate and decorative; Goldstein wanted no more of it, so he turned to writing about gender and LGBT politics, which has been his gig for several decades, and takes up the last section of this book.
Equal parts confessional, acerbic, honest, lyrical and intimate, Another Little Piece of My Heart is a memoir that upends the idea that if you remember the 1960s, then you weren't there". Goldstein was there, all right – in the vibrant, vivid and dissenting thick of it. Tony Clayton-Lea writes on pop culture/ arts topics for The Irish Times
