Jimi, Ken, Leary & Stone
Hendrix, Kesey, Dr Tim, non-Dr. Robert: I review their bios
Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix, by Philip Norman. 3 stars on Goodreads (April 9th 2025 finished)
I have reviewed Norman's autobiography, his bios of Lennon, Harrison, and McCartney, Clapton, and Jagger. I liked his takes on the 60s and rock culture, and he's a reliable storyteller who mingles appreciation, critique, and investigation smoothly. But as he opens this on Jimi, he admits he had tired of chronicling the scene he helped publicize as a young contemporary, and document as a veteran scribe.
And so this tale becomes more straightforward reporting. I wanted to find out about an aspect probably far less prominent. Yet one that Norman shares, as his family background improbably overlaps, as does mine, with Hendrix' birthplace. I'd always assumed that, it being 1942, his father had moved there to work in the aircraft industry during WWII, as so many blacks from the South had been drawn to then. Yet, turns out his father's parents had stayed in Vancouver in 1919, after their tour in a minstrel show, to settle down. Jimi was born across the border, as was my father-in-law, within a year of Al Hendricks (earlier spelling). And both teens went, too, to the same high school of Garfield in the ethnically mixed Central District of the city, as would Jimi, who dropped out in 1960. But I didn't find out much beyond his unhappy teens, raised by a tough paternal figure who reminded me uneasily of the tyrants who spawned Beach Boys and the Jackson clans, eerily.
However, I did glimpse a sense of a Seattle more integrated at least in the first half of the past century than its stereotypes may lead readers today to think. Jimi was equally proud of his native Cherokee roots, which caused some uneasiness in his later career when his dalliances to gain street credibility among Black Panthers, Harlem militants, and Miles Davis caused the FBI to take notice. Norman attends to this as he examines the rumors that Jimi was done in by foul play rather than far too much red wine.
As for the music, it gets less fanfare. Norman prefers to tell of the dalliances, discrimination, drugs, and debauchery as expected in any look at this icon. Still, it moves along efficiently, similar to the parallel arcs of Eric and Mick. It's fine, but the drawn out doings of the various managerial, sexual, chemical, and logistical complications accompanying fame and its discontents rouse less than they chasten.
Acid Christ: Ken Kesey, LSD, and the Politics of Ecstasy, by Mark Christensen 3 stars on Goodreads. (March 29th 2025 finished)
This “participatory biography” smacks of the manic self-indulgence of its inspiration, and betrays a tiresome hedonism which well before the halfway point (still fifty pages from when Kesey and Paul Krassner et al begin to wax about Venusian conspiracy theories) wearied my patience despite my deep interest in the set and setting. As with much in print or on screen, it could've been cut by over half.
It’s far too rambling. Admittedly engaging anecdotes from the sly subject himself and his erstwhile surf-stoned acolyte are enriched by Oregon context, which rarely comes into proper perspective in the counterculture before, during, and after the Sixties. Sympathetic vignettes of David Crosby and Jerry Garcia--and wise takes on Hunter Thompson and the insulting dismissal of Kesey by most of the makers of the film adaptation of Cuckoo's Nest--contend against cameos by writer’s cousin Marty and local gadfly Walt Curtis. I guess the author felt obliged to include both pals frequently but did he have to keep inserting their attempts at light verse? Let alone puerile obscenity of the latter. You had to be chemically altered, I suppose. But these strained attempts at Prankster-ish hijinks grated on me.
Want to know what his later works were like? Sailor Song is mentioned once in passing. Demon Box gets a nod as to one of its inclusions, but that's it for coverage. The Last Roundup at Pendleton rodeo saga grabs the spotlight for protracted legal battles, rather than the content proper as it was published in good time.
While the treatment of the obvious Christian allegory of Cuckoo's Nest, and the backwoods brawls of Great Notion earn attention, the span of Kesey's top-heavy production sags. You understand his failures at film, his lack of drive, and as Tom Wolfe's profiling of the Furthur {sic} manic mastermind foreshadowed, his tendency to glom onto suspect figures and dubious claims for his subsequent amblings. It's telling that the author reminds us of how diligently Kesey and his cabal crafted their own public personae. He may not have come from the tony ranks of East Coast scions such as Timothy Leary, but they shared a knack for flimflam. Kesey's squandered talent does resonate in the rambling lack of progress in Christensen's wayward Me Decades partying, wave-riding, and dimebag-fueled quests, but both observer and participant in this paired picaresque come off as too cozy with those able to grease their wheels squeaking along as they try to evade the consequences of their mornings after. And the relatively modest standing of Denver U makes me wonder how Christensen kept so close and personal with multiple heirs to family fortunes, those folks with fourth homes in Aspen.
Apropos, what's with the jock-hick-misfit schtick Kesey peddled? Since his father ran rich Darigold, a successful dairy industry. As Christensen reminds us, this corporate conglomerate wasn't a pastoral bevy of shy comely milkmaids! I'd have welcomed deeper examination of how the son's rural raw enactment of his determinedly "Western" characterization rubbed Wallace Stegner the wrong way at Stanford, too. Given the b.s. detector which the teacher must have wielded, how fared his cocky pupil?
I did highlight {see my post at Goodreads} quite a bit as intermittent insights into the evolution and stagnation of the mission these addled if insufficiently propelled “neuronauts” aimed at in their youthful ambitions to create a detour from postwar and mainstream American patterns of the Combine left their tracks, as bucolic trails, plowed furrows, or crash sites, all deserved sharp excavation. But the dozens of typos or sloppy misspellings, the haphazard pace, the tedious lechery, and the flaw commonly found in many hippies of looking down on the squares weakened the potential value here. A missed opportunity at scrutiny.
Far as I can “grok” (a period coinage of Robert Heinlein appropriated lately for a spin-off spurred by dark lord Elon Musk amidst the counterculture spawning the Dead around Palo Alto), the definitive study of Kesey awaits; we have scattered lit-crit from the generation, i.e., mine, who were assigned that Cuckoo cinematic caper ties in paperback with manic Jack Nicholson a-gurning, as they call it in Yorkshire, from the cover. Which as Christensen agrees, must have rankled Kesey no end, given his brush-off by the moguls down Left Coast.
Timothy Leary: A Biography, by Robert Greenfield. 3 stars on Goodreads. (September 13th 2006 finished)
Don't blame the messenger. Kindly read my review, and not just the stars (I'd mark about 3.4 if I could; I rounded off) before you rate its helpfulness. It'd be a thoughtful gesture for all those who have entered the fray and who (I trust) have actually read the book carefully. This does not mean you agree or disagree with my own ranking, simply that a review assisted you in better judging the work under scrutiny. Such care, as Leary would have I expect emphasized, needs to be given to ideas and people that we may at first react to cautiously or with fear. This care also goes for those of us reviewing who have taken the considerable time and effort to read Greenfield's weighty biography. Greenfield himself, in taking up such a figure lionized or lambasted, shows also considerable courage, and chutzpah.
I admit having been completely neutral coming to this biography. To me, Leary's another once-famous/infamous guru better known to the generation previous to mine. I was still a child during the hey-day of Leary in the late 60s, so I have neither freak flag to fly nor ax to grind.
Often, as with the trials and the endless rigamarole that Leary and the Feds and the informers and ex-paramours and radicals and media all conspired to drag Leary's saga into the 70s and beyond, the book drags considerably. Greenfield's considerable primary and secondary research has been picked apart predictably, and perhaps this is inevitable; however, I admit that his credentials as a chronicler of this era (such as an oral bio of Jerry Garcia and "Bear" aka Owsley Stanley: both by me recently reviewed on GR; I drafted this critique back in 2006 when the book appeared) do place him arguably as well as any "mainstream" writer could be expected to approach this complicated man. As divisive as was Leary's effect on his times and his audience, the bitter debate over Greenfield's estimation of his shape-shifting subject seems inescapable.
I found this book more poignant than it may seem from the harsh reactions recorded here by some fellow readers. Particularly well handled, for example, are the fate of poor Susan, his troubled wife Marianne, his other manipulated and/or opportunistic lovers, Jack's difficult childhood, and Art Linkletter's unwanted role as bete noire to Leary, if in a less lucrative set-up than that enjoyed by Leary with Liddy.
The confusion of the Algerian years, the manipulation in Switzerland, the comedy of errors in getting busted on the Mexican border/ no man's land: all show well the predicament of Leary's rebellion. Not by accident was he jailed next to Manson by a calculating administration. Such antagonistic positions --literally and symbolically--stranded him within his time and space. The italicized vignettes that delve into what he may have been thinking are deployed sparingly, only three times--as a boy in confession, as a plebe at West Point, and most movingly, as it imagines Leary awaiting death--for once without his devoted acolytes and eagerly attentive coterie around him--in his Hollywood Hills home.
These (terse yet eloquent) departures from fact had been critiqued by the NY Times along with the negative emphasis on Leary's failings in raising his children, keeping his marriages/ partnerships intact, and his tendency to cut and run rather than stay and face the consequences of his actions. Jack Leary responded with hurt in a letter on behalf of "the Millbrook Foundation" to the NY Times Book Review. But, the vignettes do seem to have been re-created from what Leary wrote and/or those who could corroborate his frame of mind at such formative stages. Jack complained that Greenfield in his determination to assassinate Leary's character accentuated the negative and left out the positive. In fact, his son's letter made me want to read the book so I could judge for myself.
The grand hopes that Leary sought to usher into reality by the psychedelic revolution and the grim fate of those unable to keep up with the bewildering pace set by this relentlessly elusive Pied Piper both receive their share of Greenfield's attention. Leary does emerge as one unable or unwilling to take the blame for those who became acid casualties. He is cited as saying this guilt would be like charging Einstein with the damage done by the atom bomb, a provocative response worth debating.
Greenfield does strive to credit Leary with his leadership, but through so many quotes from Leary's admittedly "creative" musings published by a generous press in the 60s and 70s, he does manage subtly to undermine the pedestal upon which millions placed their celebrated Dr. Leary. One telling example is the flyer with which Leary publicized Jack's gone missing after the Laguna drug bust. It captures the simple love of an often absent father, the guilt of a very intelligent man who should have been a better parent, and the desperate desire to break free for himself and his son from the conventional mores and legal restrictions that hounded Leary and his family remorselessly.
On the other hand, Leary's ravenous intake of massive doses of chemicals even as his health wore down does make you wonder how he could keep up his mental and physical stamina so long given what he put his mind and his body through for four decades. Leary's ingestive powers astonished me. Maybe part of the difficulty in following his idealistic (and it seems quite expensive) path was that few could sustain such a consumption of substances for long without their mind and/or body giving in. Leary seemed both to succumb and to resist, the drug explorer combined with the psychological researcher perhaps inextricably, from the mid-1950s to the mid-90s. In the process, he carried exhilarated millions along with him while thousands less enchanted vowed to hunt him down. Yes, social and political contexts are left less fully explicated about the radical vs. the cultural left, but this book is long enough as it is without having to develop into a miniature history of the complex upheavals of the Sixties.
One minor but persistently damaging flaw: the shortage of photos. Often, Greenfield describes with great detail snapshots that he has seen to make clearer his understanding of Leary's personae and his relationships and how he characterized himself before the public eye as well as in more intimate moments. All such remarks are conveyed well, but why so few photos? Perhaps the estate of Leary had fought with Greenfield? This book could have greatly benefited from such pictorial examples, as perhaps 50 such photos should have received their proper place in the chapter headings. Only a handful of photographs are in fact found there, and no photo spreads are placed within the pages, unlike most biographies from popular presses of modern figures caught in the eye of the camera. In an era so dependent on the poster, the gesture, the album cover, the AP photo on the newspaper's front page, the film clip on the evening news: why then such a paucity of illustration?
Within our contemporary limits of biography in a litigious decade and a jealously guarded legacy, Greenfield has sought to portray as accurately as he could, with years of interviews and research, his take on a complicated, fragile, delusive, and imaginative pioneer "psychonaut." Whether Leary proves a success or failure may depend ultimately on a generation who decides his legacy after those with whom Leary prickled, posed, postured, and preached have also departed this world. It will take decades before the cosmic dust that he kicked up has settled. In the meantime, Greenfield, whether or not you agree with his perspective, has taken a brave first step by taking a figure seen to have been on the fringe and taking him onto center stage. You need not to have been converted to benefit from this revival of one man's messianic mission.
Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, by Robert Stone. 3 stars on Goodreads. (September 11th 2007 finished)
For once, refreshingly, reviews all over the place from one to five stars for this memoir. (I added my thoughts when I originally posted this to Amazon when the book appeared back in 2007.) Yes, another reviewer already cited the cliche "if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there." I was, but pretty young, being born nearer their start. So, my memories lag behind Stone's...
The title comes from the "green flash" which Stone, stoned, glimpsed from a Mexican beach. Much of the insight here resembles the recollectons one might expect from a friend of Ken Kesey, an acquaintance of Tim Leary, and one who hung out with the scions of the counterculture in New York City, New Orleans, California north and south, London, Mexico, and Vietnam. That is, pages at a time become illuminated with wisdom-- before sinking again into a miasma of mundane names, places, and events filtered muddily or waveringly through uninspired, if competent, prose. I have only read two novels by Stone, A Flag for Sunrise, and the disappointing "Damascus Gate. Like the latter book, Prime Green stumbles when it could have soared on a promising premise.
The opening chapter rambles on about his stint in the Navy; polar-driven wind and the feel of being at the bridge gain evocative detail, but then the narrative wanders off into recollections of an Australian swimmer he fancied, a bit of action he glimpsed during the Suez crisis, and exchanging Playboys with a Soviet crew. All three anecdotes fizzle. They almost follow randomly, such is the nature of this compilation of memories. Perhaps this casual style conceals careful craft. But, from a writer of Stone's level, that is, of critical acclaim more than another hack bestselling scribe, the offhanded attitude towards such potentially valuable incidents became disappointing. They are treated so offhandedly you wonder why he troubled to bring them up. Much of this book follows suit. It reminds me of a few all-nighters, if you could tape them, with a great storyteller; the difference is, you tend to edit mentally what you were bored or confused by, and highlight the stories which enraptured you, to replay again in your memory. I'd return to this book in the same manner.
For instance, the Bowery and its sudden replacement of white old bums with tough young blacks released from prison circa 1960 sets up a treatise on this sociological phenomenon. But, suddenly, Stone in the next paragraph sidles off into how he wrote copy for a furniture firm. Admittedly, he excels at his harrowing yet hilarious description of writing for the right-wing populist NY Daily News, which like certain media today manages to arouse the contempt of the working class for the system that supposedly favors those less qualified, yet deflects any blame from capitalism or the rich themselves for this inequality and this cynical game of having the victims turn on one another.
His send-up of another bottom-feeding journalistic stint at what he calls the National Thunder, a sort of Weekly World News, is priceless. Anyone who could survive a paper that created headlines like "Armless Veteran Beaten for Not Saluting Flag" or a close runner-up, "Skydiver Devoured By Starving Birds," merits some acclaim for such anecdotes. His accounts of being under the knife for a burst vessel in his brain, of interviewing bitter draftees in Vietnam, of watching the moon on the night of the first landing in 1969 from the California hills, all ring true; his narrative leaps to fitful if brief elegance in these sections. On drugs, Stone glimpses time's wheel and struggles to convey his psychedelic revelation. I wonder if any bard from this time can do so?
The remainder of the book, once Stone leaves in search of the elusive authenticity that takes him, seemingly with little money and the kindness of many strangers become friends, to Stanford on a fellowship, to London, to Vietnam, and to Mexico in a tumultuous but-- for a while-- rather childlike time despite his wife and two children (who are barely mentioned) to support does create in this reader a sense of how much could be seen and heard and experienced by carefree Americans with not much cash, plenty of drugs, and a sense of adventure that in our day has narrowed and priced out all but the affluent or the heavily guarded! Comparing his coming of age with the later century, the combination of a strong dollar, cheap costs of living, and goodwill manage, nearly, to create a glimpse of utopia. On the other hand, his escape from menacing sailors on a Greyhound bus ride from hell that winds up with him barely getting away from the ironically if improbably named hamlet of Highspire, Pennsylvania, marks a gothic tale where Poe meets Genet.
If you want a sense of the Sixties, disjointed and disconnected, with wisdom scattered along with a lot of languor, this does re-create a tone appropriate to these times. No history, or even tightly written account, nonetheless for all its faults, I learned from it. The conclusions are the expected sadness at the decade's waste of its promise, and the government infiltration and corporate co-opting of its ideals and its innocence. Not as many knockout punches as I expected, for the book needed editing and substantial tightening. It keeps reeling about, when it should have cut the flab and trimmed up under a drill sergeant of an editor, such as he used to work for in Manhattan in the early 60s.
The book bumps into the famous, nods, chats, and shuffles off again, In its slackness, casual air of street cred meets the dinner party, and Hollywood mingling with the Bowery, perhaps Stone, who managed to be in all of the proper places, dreadful or erotic, exotic or hilarious, remains the jester-cynic who sneers at the powers that be but knows if he had his chance on the throne (he gets a quick perch during his Hollywood visit), he'd settle down there comfortably enough. Stone, in a sloppy but occasionally memorable account, emerges rather blowsily, yet endearingly avuncular. He's slightly askew, a fitting if exasperatingly rambling witness and slyly calculating chronicler for a messy decade.