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Nostalgia for the 1960s is a complete waste of time
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The Bad Trip
By James Riley
Icon Books, £14.99
WRITING in 1997, music critic Ian MacDonald lamented the lack of a serious study of the culture and counterculture of the “disappearing decade” of the 1960s. The Bad Trip is an ambitious attempt to put that right by demythologising this period of upheaval and identifying its real legacy.
Joan Didion and others have characterised the sixties as an era in which utopian dreams were demolished in a spate of tragic violence: there was the civil rights movement, anti-war demonstrations and sexual liberation, but the last months of the decade bought the Manson Family murders and the violent pandemonium of the free rock festival at Altamont Speedway.
Riley rejects the simplistic view that the counterculture suddenly lurched into occult-inspired darkness in 1969, suggesting instead that it was imbued with paranoia, apocalyptic gloom and Dionysian sensuality from the outset.
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