One of the jokes about the sixties I've heard over the years is that if you can remember it, you probably weren't there. That is of course not true, or not entirely true. Mark Berger was there, surely, and he did not permanently stumble off into a Purple Haze but learned from it all. And he writes about it with a well wrought charm and poignancy that rings true if you went through those years like I did.
If later on it was seen bluntly as a time when "sex, drugs and rock and roll" reigned, that simplifies what was going on if you lived through that immoderately complex time. There was a lot, a very lot going on. Mark captures much of that complexity, the surprise of it all in "Something's Happening Here."
Beginning in Brooklyn in 1961 his own personal journey through the times climaxes as he finds himself one of the "Hog Farm" workers at Woodstock. I remember reading the ads for Woodstock in the Sunday NY Times Arts & Leisure Section, thinking that it was the greatest lineup for rock I'd ever seen, then going down to the Jersey Shore and hanging out with some of the freaks who came down there after it was over. Even then it was pretty clear it was going to define the era in many ways.
And so Berger's trips through everything for us--through hanging out, getting an education, and finding a life path as symbolically intertwined with the fate of hippie Woodstock Nation, which as we read was nothing all-at-once but rather a gradual kind of dawning.
Now some 50 years later we who are left might look back and wonder. The memoir heightens the friction of youth versus the elders and the establishment that reached a kind of zenith and nadir at the same time, the idiocy of how pot and other substances became the taint by which the whole era came to be rejected by some, and now how quickly perhaps those who were then far to the right of all of it have no problem looking to profit from the gradually legalizing pot scene. Back then as Mark points out via experiences vividly recounted, long hair and ideas of freedom and equality were part of a frightening world (to the "Moral Majority") that was in some views negated completely by the idea that youth was going off the rails with the demon dope, etc. Not everybody got it, on one side or the other. History can play out like that.
Mark's innate and pronounced "easy writer" brilliance makes this read absorbing and moving. That he was at the right age and positioned in a NYC center of things means that he found it all possible from where he stood, as it all was passing though his life at the very time there were developments most fertile in meaning and event-uality. He was paying attention and face it, not everybody understood like Mark obviously did. For every good dude like him in my experience there were folks also on an ego trip, looking at every point to score, to take advantage. But so there always seems to be I guess. Not everybody is a true player! Or rather there is never just one game going on.
The ecstasy of '60s lifestyle liberation can be felt between the lines and sometimes directly WITHIN the lines of the story. Ideally young men and young women found a new honesty between one another, mutual respect and the idea that they were the ones to create another set of cultural mores simply by doing what seemed right. And so a general search for social justice was part of all that too. Berger captures some of the contradictions and roadblocks that sometimes halted and reversed social progress. Nonetheless the thrill of being on the brink of something that remains with us today as a legacy of positivity and reform is captured with insight and a bird's eye view of the time in the everyday as well as the extraordinary.
For anyone who lived through the '60s it will make you smile and remember and for those who did not you will get a feeling for some of how it felt. Read this and appreciate some focused prose, do! This gives you one view of how it went. Read Ed Sanders's account of Charles Manson's Helter Skelter for the horror of the evil opposite and what harm that did. Woodstock was the culmination, as we find so happily here. Manson was in a way the downfall. Shangra La, as Max Weber cogently argued, can degenerate, routinize, dissipate, bureaucratize. It does not mean the earlier time was without merit. Read this and know the good of it.
