"There's a Riot Going On" by Peter Doggett

Last week I promised to post a review of this book, and I've finally gotten around to doing so because... well, this is a really long book at 500+ pages. It has the sub-title Revolutionaries, Rock Stars and the Rise and Fall of '60s Counter-Culture and is about almost exactly that, spending as much on the folk, jazz and funk scenes as on the rock scene. It charts the history of the counterculture and its relationship with music from 1965 to 1972, and Peter Doggett has certainly done his homework. He's interviewed a lot of the really important subcultural personalities from that era, at least the ones he could get to. It's less about the music than how it fit into the broader cultural context of the day. I must say it's quite the eye-opener here with a lot of insights but it's also very "rambling" and at times rather confusing because there's all this information the author has processed but doesn't quite seem to know what conclusions to make. (more on this later)

That said, I did quite like its perspective. Doggett got into rock music in the early seventies as he relates nostalgically in the prologue, and while he does miss an era where an entire generation were striving to overturn the entire social structure and create something better, he also often has a very critical eye on the various "movements". It becomes clear how fractured the counter-culture of the day was, to the point that it seems like it was more like a bunch of different sub-cultures with vaguely similar goals than anything else, and it often points out a lot of hypocrisy on the part of the people participating in it.

One of the things that becomes clear when reading the book is how the connection between the counter-culture and the musicians was far more tenuous than it often seems like to the aftertime. For example, it goes into detail about how Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa had very mixed feelings about the people who adopted them as revolutionary icons. A lot of text is spent on accounting for how Bob Dylan got tired of his status as a rebellious hero because it led his fans to become as ridiculously obsessive as the worst Star Trek fans. Doggett also goes to great lengths to question whether the political adventures of the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, The Who and others were more than clueless bandwagon-jumping. He contrasts them with the Beatles, who did initially go political out of a desire to stay with the times but got genuinely invested into it after not as long, even though they also initially were as confused and naïve as everyone else Doggett shows a lot of respect for them. On the other hand, it also castigates the MC5 for losing their political commitment through their career. In general, a lot of icons of the day get a very critical treatment. Most notably, the legendary Woodstock festival is eviscerated and exposed as what Doggett sees as one of many cynical corporate attempts to turn a grassroots movement into a cash cow, a development he admits was hard to avoid because the independent label circuit back then was nowhere as big as it got in the eighties and nineties. Same thing about the Isle of Wight Festival, though it regrettably doesn't mention Hawkwind once during its description of the "alternate festival" outside the gates. Likewise, no time is spent on how Black Sabbath and for that matter the Mothers of Invention criticized both mainstream society and the counterculture of the day in their lyrics, something I thought would have been quite relevant especially now that history has vindicad the Sabs and the Moms.

That brings us to one of the most confusing things about There's a Riot Going On: It gives off some seriously mixed messages. One of the conclusions Peter Doggett makes in the epilogue is that "rock stars shouldn't be revolutionaries and revolutionaries shouldn't be rock stars", which is a bit odd when he's just spent about five hundred pages pontificating about how rock musicians weren't as politically active and ideologically savvy as they should have been and going out of his way to comparing them to jazz musicians who were generally much more willing to "walk the walk". Then again, he also criticizes how a lot of artists were basically press-ganged against their will by radicals who wanted to project their own views on them. Doggett seems more than just a bit confused about what to think about the whole thing, though to be honest I can't blame him.

I also doubt how big a part of the picture Doggett really focused on. I admire him for doing as much research as he did, but There's a Riot Going On's coverage of the counterculture is very intensely focused on the United States and Britain.  However, Lord knows how much more rambling and cluttered There's a Riot Going On would be if he had spent as much time on the Krautrock scene (for example) as on the US/UK rock scene.

I am also a bit skeptical about how accurate its narrative really is. The way he writes it, it's like the hippie subculture stumbled naïvely out of the gates in the late sixties with lots of idealism but took some time to really get its act together and know what they actually were doing which didn't happen until the seventies and then, just as they seemed unstoppable what with a Democratic presidential candidate standing for the same thing as they did in George McGovern, it died out mostly because the re-election of Nixon made everyone but a tiny hard core give up. It looks a bit reductionistic to me, really, I get the impression that it survived much longer than that (RIO, anyone?) and that the hippies who gave up upon Nixon's re-election really were that into it. Then again Hunter S. Thompson wrote about similar developments in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and that was back then so I think that it could have been a geographical thing. Let's not forget either that Peter Doggett and Hunter Thompson both were there back in the day so I guess they have a better understanding of it than I do.

All in all, my opinion on There's a Riot Going on is very much the same as that on the last book I reviewed for ProgArchives, Faking It. It's very informative and has a lot of useful insight upon music history but also structured in a rather amateurish way, despite how the writer really did his research. The weird thing is that I finished this book with an even more critical eye of the beatnik/hippie subculture than I used to have before, and I've for a while seen it as well-intentioned but misguided movement that historically showed itself to be a dead end despite producing some great artists...even though that is a much more negative opinion than Doggett holds. In his view, and for that matter Thompson's, it is more like that the subculture that never really realized its full potential because it surrendered just as it was beginning to go somewhere - and Doggett is the kind of author who wears his opinions on his sleeves. His perspective is unusual and refreshing, but it's not really objective either. After reading his book I'm still as confused as before about exactly where the hippies went wrong, so I can't really call it good. However, it's not completely useless.


Edited by Toaster Mantis - February 17 2009 at 14:34