TRIPS:
Rock Life in the Sixties by Ellen Sander
Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1973
Rating= 7
There’s a saying that, if you can remember the Sixties, you
didn’t live through them. While the era chronicled in TRIPS may have been “a search for the ultimate high,” pioneering
rock journalist Ellen Sander offers a clear-eyed, mostly unsentimental view of
a lifestyle coming into existence. Sander is both observer and participant in
this period of time—essentially 1962-1969—that Terry Southern calls
“undoubtedly the weirdest and most awesome in our history.”
As a writer working for magazines like Hit Parader, Vogue,
and Saturday Review, Sander was in a position to witness the growth of rock
music and teen culture into a driving social-economic force. While TRIPS concentrates on music-makers and
the rock milieu, this social phenomenon is placed in the circumstances that led
to it. Sander establishes the era as the first in which young people came to
influence the direction of popular culture and came to be political bargaining
chips. She sets a scene where both drugs and a natural euphoria led to a
“generational splendor” that blinded the first “rock generation” to the
violence that still surrounded their world of peace, love, and music. With the
Altamont concert, which ends Sanders’ history of rock life, cruel reality
brings a violent end to the communal fantasy of Woodstock and innumerable “Be-Ins.”
Along the way, Sander offers unblinking glimpses of life on
the road with Led Zeppelin and the rampant egoism of Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
The heartbreaking story of a rock star’s mistreated, rejected “old lady” and
former Monkee Peter Tork going broke through naive, blind generousity show the
downside to what promised to be boundless hedonism and happiness.
The Grateful Dead’s oft-misused lyric refers to the Sixties
as a “long, strange trip.” Sander’s book, instead, gives an impression of
seismic cultural changes taking place in an astonishingly short time. While the
decade may get undue credit for sweeping social change, Sander does show how
teens and young adults first gained real clout in the marketplace and,
consequently, became a major cultural influence. This is one retro trip worth
taking. — James A. Gardner