Sex, Drugs & Rock Criticism: Richard Goldstein on the Sixties
The story goes something like this: In 1966, a 21-year-old journalism school graduate named Richard Goldstein walks into the office of Village Voice editor Dan Wolf and makes an impassioned pitch to become “a rock and roll critic.” When the young man finishes his plea, the 50-year-old Wolf asks, quite understandably, what exactly that is. I don’t know, says Goldstein. Well, try something, says Wolf. And so, rock criticism as we know it is born. At least that’s one version of the story.
In his quietly extraordinary new memoir, Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the ’60s, Goldstein doesn’t belabor the claim to being the first person to write about rock music: Crawdaddy! founder Paul Williams probably had him by a few months, and Rolling Stone founding editor Ralph Gleason, known primarily as a jazz critic, had been writing rock-concert reviews for years. In any case, the Voice writer’s beat was different. He called his column Pop Eye, and with its equal interest in the audience itself, the media, and emerging social trends, it in many ways prefigured the pop-culture landscape we know today. Goldstein understood the pimpled fanboy–rock star dynamic, the mooning eyes of the front-row screechers ready to stampede. He too wished to be transformed by rock and roll.
In those potent years, Goldstein witnessed up close most of the major players and scenes, from the Monterey Pop Festival to the Chicago DNC. The names are big (Morrison, Joplin), but the mood is intimate and largely forgiving — until it comes to sham prophets like Timothy Leary and the Maharishi, or the dulcet fripperies of the song “MacArthur Park” (“The moment when I decided that rock as a revolutionary force was dead”). In 1970, he gave up rock writing for good; a scrapped interview with a zombified Jimi Hendrix was among the last, and he spent the next 34 years writing about politics, gay rights, and culture for the Voice. (Full disclosure: I worked with him there briefly in the early 2000s.)
Goldstein took time out from teaching at Hunter College to speak to Rolling Stone about discovering rock as a liberating force, bonding with Janis Joplin and the legacy of the Sixties.
What was your favorite music growing up?
Well, I sang doo-wop as a teenager. I grew up in a housing project in the Bronx. The gods of the neighborhood were these Italian guys; you couldn’t join their gangs if you were Jewish. But you could sing with them, and so I did. We would sing anywhere. Those were peak experiences for me, and literally an introduction to the possibilities of rock.