I loved this book. It starts off quite slowly as there's quite a bit on the roots of all the amazing changes in the sixties but once it get's going it's kaleidoscopic and give a really great insight into the era. Every time I read a good tome about the sixties I realise just how unoriginal so much that followed was. I include punk rock in this. To me - at the time - as a 14 year old in 1976 it seemed the most exciting and novel thing ever. I now realise that so much was initiated by people who were steeped in 60s culture and much was a rehash of what had gone before.

Read it and learn! ( )

Jonathan Green compiled this multi-voiced history of the London underground hippie scene of the sixties in the style of Studs Terkel. Interviews with something like 100 movers and shakers who were part if it all were diced and sliced these into a multi-voiced conversational exploration of many topics and events.

We get to hear stories from and about Hoppy, the nuclear physicist who dropped out to become the godfather of budding youth movement, Barry Miles who ran the Indica bookstore and later became a biographer of Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and a few books on the London scene and IT paper that are probably also essential reading.

We get a history of the UFO club and the spawning of Pink Floyd and The Soft Machine, told in part by Robert Wyatt. There's the Underground Press stories of OZ, IT, Time Out, Friends/Frendz magazines.

There's way too much here to summarize. The result is a tapestry that at times is hilarious, and often contradictory in a way that reminds of me the classic Rashomon book and movie where we hear the same event described by three people who all saw and recall a very different history. Memory and history are like that so the book seems to do a fair job capturing many perspectives.

Jonathon Green, a cynic fond of H.L. Menken, is mostly known for his work with lexicons and collections of quotes and word definitions. His own analysis of the of the sixties is in a companion book, All Dressed Up, which I found a lot harder to get through.

One of my favorite parts was hilarious material on the evolution of Mick Farren and the Deviants into the Pink Fairies in tales of excess that made Spinal Tap seem tame.

I've had the pleasure of corresponding with a few of the key players is this story after reading this.

I'd compare this to something like Charles Perry's Haight Ashbury book, or Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool Aid Acid test that lifted much content from Clair Brush Sasano's letters about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. ( )