a sense of doom as they blaze with energy. Something always stopped me from hitting on them; I think I feared that they would suck me into their addictions. But that didn’t stop me from wanting to protect them, or from feeling, when it proved impossible, that I’d failed at a sacred duty. Thinking back on it, I realize that Tom was a model for my attachment to Janis Joplin.
I didn’t go to Tom’s funeral because I didn’t want to see her in the grasp of her family. I was sure that they were every bit as bourgie (a word I’d just learned) as she was not. But a week later I stopped by her place. The apartment was empty. All her roommates, including the guy with the guitar, were gone. I felt bereft of a community I never thought I’d find. From now on I would have to face the fact that hanging out in the Village was not the same as living there. I was from the Bronx, and that was a place where creativity meant leading a solitary life.
But just a year later, when I was verging on nineteen, I felt a shock of recognition that would change my sense of possibility. The radio was tuned to a Top 40 station. Suddenly, I heard a song I knew from the folk clubs, Bob Dylan’s civil rights anthem “Blowin’ in the Wind.” It didn’t belong on the charts, but there it was, in a rather anodyne version by the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary. The beat was about as driving as a tuna melt, and the lyrics were far from the simple (though often poetic) patter that hit songs required—but still, I was stunned. It meant that something I’d regarded as the sole passion of my coterie was popular. Even in a place like Santa Barbara, where I pictured teenagers whose brains ebbed and flowed with the ocean tide, kids would soon be singing songs like this on the beach. Rock ’n’ roll was about to make a fateful leap, though it wasn’t evident yet. Surf music dared not tread where Dylan did, and not even the Beatles ventured into his literary terrain—not yet. But I was sure that this unlikely hit was a sign of more than musical change. I sensed that something was stirring, shuddering on its foundation. The present was beginning to feel different from the past. Nothing was stable, and that thrilled me.
It crossed my mind to try writing about Dylan’s role in this transition, but I was far too busy to think about journalism in the summer of 1963. I joined the civil rights movement, along with all my college friends. There was no need to find our identity in a song. We were the answer blowing in the wind.
White Like Me
Race was at the core of nearly everything in the sixties. Even more than sitars and exotic beats, it shaped the structure of rock. Even more than the war in Vietnam, it dominated politics. Even more than LSD, it defined the consciousness of my generation. Look at any aging boomer and you’ll see someone who was formed in the crucible of civil rights. The man I am emerged when I joined a campaign against job discrimination at the age of nineteen. I came to see my neighborhood—and my father—in a new way, and I broke with them, decisively. In other words, I became me.
I was itching for something to believe in as passionately as I didn’t believe in myself. And there were all sorts of causes to choose from in 1963: nuclear disarmament, environmental destruction, the Cold War and its absurdities. (Having failed to topple Fidel Castro, the CIA was trying to kill him with exploding cigars.) But I was riveted by images of black students in the South braving fire hoses and police dogs. There was something personal about fighting racism; it had a payback that working for peace did not. Yes, I believed in social justice, but it was also about identity. Marching for civil rights meant connecting with a tradition that went much deeper than my roots in America. It was a way to be come what my grandparents were not and what my parents wanted to be—a Yankee.
There were other reasons why I was drawn to the civil rights movement.