October, 2017 RollingStoneAus.com | Rolling Stone | 17BOOKS
In mid-1967, at the
tail end of the Sum-
mer of Love, Berke-
ley freshman Danny
Goldberg went
down to Haight-
Ashbury to check
out the scene. The
neighbourhood was
buckling under the
weight of 100,000 new hippie inhabit-
ants, but a sign in a store window
told Goldberg all he needed to know;
it read simply “Nebraska Needs You
More”. “It couldn’t possibly survive
the attention it got,” says Goldberg of
the San Francisco counterculture. “It
was dead.”
Goldberg may have arrived late, but
1967’s transformational spirit stayed
with him as he navigated through the
music industry in the coming years,
first as vice president of Led Zeppelin’s
Swan Song Records and eventually
as Nirvana’s manager. In recent years,
Goldberg has taken on a side career as
a historian. His newest book,In Search
of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie
Idea,explores and fuses together the
musical, political and spiritual revolu-
tions 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”.
Goldberg’s primary goal for the
book was to tell the actual story ofA Less-Travelled
PathBacktothe
SummerofLove
W
hen otis redding died
on December 10th, 1967,
the 26-year-old was an
R&Bmastercrestingintosuperstar-
dom. In June, he’d introduced his
stun-gun soul to the Summer of Love
crowdatMontereyPop,alongside
breakoutsbyJimiHendrix,Janis
JoplinandtheWho.Andjustthree
days before his twin-engine aircraft crashed
into a Wisconsin lake, Redding finished “(Sit-
tin’On)theDockoftheBay”,heraldinganew
chapter of his art. Released posthumously,
itwouldbecomehisonlyNumberOneand
standamongpop’sgreatestachievements.
ButasJonathanGouldnotesnearthestart
of his 500-page bio, Redding’s life story was
barelyknownatthetimeofhisdeath.Rock
journalismhadn’ttrulytakenoff;Redding’s
only substantial print interview ran in the
fan magazineHit Parader.(The first issue of
Rolling Stone debuted just a month before
his death.) The lack of fi rst-person source ma-
terial and the brevity of Redding’s life invite
Gould to go long on context, something he
does well: See his 2008 Can’t Buy Me Love:
The Beatles, Britain, and America. Otis Red-
ding: An Unfi nished Life takes a similar ap-
proach, with equally admirable results.
Opening on a detailed description of Red-
ding’s Monterey set (“I was pretty sure thatI’d seen God onstage,” noted Bob
Weir),Gouldunpackshowthehis-
tory of Redding’s home state of Geor-
giawasacrucibleofblackpop.The
bigger picture, inescapably, is Amer-
ica’s midcentury civil-rights struggle.
Gouldgoesfarafieldattimes,but
his research is deep; it’s
grimly illuminating, for
instance, to learn Redding turned
14thesameyearasEmmettTill.
If facts about Redding’s life are
sketchy,Gouldstillmanagesarich
picture of his world. Redding’s gold-
en years as a performer accelerate
thrillingly as he’s discovered by na-
tional promoters (Bill Graham de-
scribedhisthree-nightrunatSan
Francisco’sFillmoreas“thebestgig
I ever put on in my entire life”), like-
minded musicians (Joplin turned
up at the club hours early each night to secure
a vantage point near the stage) and critics (fu-
ture Bruce Springsteen manager Jon Landau
called Redding’s music “the highest level of
expression rock ’n’ roll has yet attained”). And
naturally, Gould charts the arc of the mighty
“Respect” from Redding’s version to Aretha
Franklin’s signature, noting there was talk of
the pair collaborating – which of course, sadly,
would never happen. WILL HERMESThe Mystery of Otis
Anewbiographychroniclesthelittle-knownstory
andworld-changinginfluenceofOtisReddingMusic-industry vet Danny
Goldberg’s memories of 19671967, not what he calls the “cartoon-
ish” version that has fl ourished for de-
cades. He goes deep on less- discussed
topics like the short-lived but
infl uential underground newspaper
San Francisco Oracle, and psychedelic
scenemakers like the Fugs and the San
Francisco Mime Troupe. “There was
a real fl ash of idealism...and inner
exploration,” Goldberg says, “and it
created something I think is worth
GETTY remembering.” ANDY GREENE
Redding
in 1967Golden Gate Park, 1967