Sex, Drugs & Rock Criticism: Richard Goldstein on the Sixties

You had a close friendship with Janis Joplin, and you describe her succumbing to the “the machine.”
Yeah, she became a nomad of the industry. She had lost her communitarian support system when she changed bands. That’s my impression. The guys in Big Brother and the Holding Company adored her: They hugged her musically when they played, and they took care of her on the road. I think that’s why she ended up losing her life, this uprooting. She was a very insecure person, and we bonded over our doubts about ourselves.

A lot of really great rockers in the Sixties were very fragile people, unlike today. You have Amy Winehouse, but for the most part they’re very strong people, with enormously strong egos. Lady Gaga is not going to have a nervous breakdown — I don’t think, anyway. I don’t see Beyonce being fragile — and that’s great. It creates an image for young people. But many of the great artists in the Sixties were very fragile people, borderline personality. And Janis was one of them. She was terribly insecure about her hair, believe it or not. So many women imitated her, but she felt that her hair was, really, a mess, and Janis never lost the sense of herself as an outcast that she had as a girl growing up in Texas. That’s how we related to each other. I’d never seen someone get so drunk before performing. I had no idea about the heroin.

When I found out she had overdosed…it was the last straw. I went into a terrible depression and writing block that took me a long time to crawl out of. I couldn’t write about rock music any longer, because too many people whom I cared for — and not all of them were famous — had died.

Janis never lost the sense of herself as an outcast. I’d never seen someone get so drunk before performing. I had no idea about the heroin.

There seemed to be some disappointment in the book, a feeling and desire for change that maybe didn’t quite come through.
I think the Sixties produced a lot of changes. Multiculturalism comes from the Sixties. So does feminism, gay liberation, environmentalism, sexual freedom in general — even veggie burgers. A lot of things people take for granted today come from that decade. Most people had better lives as a result of the Sixties. But what didn’t change is the social justice agenda: equality. We’re less equal than we were as a society, and certainly racial justice has never been achieved. This was a huge priority. Almost everything of importance in the Sixties had something to do with race, including the music. Black music became front and center in a major way — black music by black people. And that’s never changed.

All of the things that did change were economically profitable. Multiculturalism created a new market. Feminism has, unfortunately, meant a cheap labor force. Gay liberation, gay marriage, means a new wedding industry. The things that didn’t change are things that demand that you give people money. Like racial justice. It means there has to be a program that redresses poverty — so it costs money. Same with economic equality: You have to tax people and distribute the wealth. These things failed. So to the extent that we thought we were changing the world…we were only making new markets. And we ended up as an advance force for the free-market economy. Maybe this is the way things work in history; I’m not saying we failed. But I certainly think our major goals in terms of justice were defeated.