1970-1979

With an uncanny facility to tantalize and moralize at the same time, Frey and Henley described the insatiable appetites that drew so many of us into one kind of trouble or another. “What kind of love have you got?” they asked of a favorite character of theirs, a young woman just starting to worry about […]

Rock and roll splintered. Mainstream metal took on the flavor of professional wrestling, a theater of excess. Years earlier punk reacted years earlier with the Sex Pistols wonderfully-titled “Never Mind the Bollocks.” But they,too, became a splinter. Rap and Hip Hop emerged. The Wall Street Journal wrote a cover story about how rock’s audience had […]

Woke up. fell out of bed. Dragged a comb across my head. . Found my way upstairs and had a smoke And somebody spoke and I went into a dream (“Had a smoke and went into a dream.” Right!) Then John’s voice again, after the word “dream,” singing in falsetto, high and drifty. Behind John […]

When that happened I returned to San Francisco. Sitting on the edge of the bed with my father, we watched as Nixon resgined. I felt terrible for my father since he, like so many others, had stood by Nixon, believing him through the endless series of lies. Dad had voted for him, supported him, railed […]

A drive down Haight Street was not what it used to be. From the explosion of wide-eyed kids, a new desperate edge had crept in. Now people would watch you very closely as you walked along, looking to see if you wanted to score, or if you were a narc. And there was unquestionably the […]

The 60s didn’t end. Streams don’t dematerialize as they merge with a larger river. But it did seem our engagement with the idealistic and the political had come to an end. We, almost literally, abandoned the field. We abandoned the field out of out of exhaustion, excess, despair, weakness. Who knows? But nature abhors a […]

“To the guard at the gate, I gave my name, and then drove into the Malibu Colony and found Linda Ronstadt’s white-shingled, green-shuttered new home. The windows facing the ocean were open and the breeze blew through. Linda kept giggling embarrassedly, excited by her purchase. “It cost S0 much,” she’d say. Then it was as […]

“On the brave and crazy wings of youth,” Jackson Browne later sang about what, by then, seemed brave and crazy, we set out to try and fulfill the vast promises we collectively imagined. Sometimes, as Brown also sang, this was political and sometimes it was a journey back to nature. If it seemed daunting, no […]