A Scholar Reinterprets ‘60s Social Evolution

It’s an irony that’s long puzzled Alice Echols: For all of the ‘60s’ noble “question authority” rhetoric, the decade of the long, strange trip often gets the rose-colored glasses treatment.

As memory fades, many of us, she contends, have been swept up by a touched-up ‘60s that’s part Oliver Stone-esque impressionistic history, part remastered “Greatest Groovy Hits.”

As this telling would have it, while hippies were turning on, radicals fought on the front lines of social and political change, sparking a groundswell. And by 1969--with the violence at a concert at Altamont--it was over. Revolutionary fervor morphed into shattered idealism. Revolution had somehow become “Saturday Night Fever.”

But that familiar telling is too simplistic to Echols’ ear.

A feminist lecturer and historian, she has taken it upon herself to reconsider the pieces. Those seemingly jarring turn of events, she suggests, aren’t as illogical as they might seem. From academia to the airwaves and beyond, Echols often sees evidence of just how well we do or don’t understand the ‘60s. Often, in the college classrooms where she lectures, she hears the criticism or question before it’s voiced: “‘I just want to know how we got from people protesting in the streets to disco!’” Echols relays in a wide-eyed pantomime. “I just smile because, of course, there was no discontinuity for me. This was completely continuous.”

In her new book, “Shaky Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks” (Columbia University Press, 2002), Echols looks at a continuum of social change that begins in the ‘50s and winds its way to present day--informing race, identity, sexuality and gender movements. Along this path, she deflates some iconic truths about the ‘60s and reinterprets phenomena such as disco and the knotty politics of identity as extensions of social movements with ‘60s roots.

For Echols, disco, a key ‘60s “aftershock,” is an engine of social revolution. “It spoke to those not included in ‘60s rock culture: minorities, gays, women,” she says, and provided a greater possibility for interracial connectedness than the hippie movement had been able to deliver. It wasn’t an aberration. It was pivotal.

The ‘60s, she contends, wasn’t the big bang, a “golden moment when the ideas and values of dominant culture were banished.” Actually, says Echols, a lecturer in the women’s studies program at UCLA, it was the spark. It may have started the conversations that led to change, she argues, but it didn’t obliterate strict gender roles, didn’t foster sincere openness to alternative lifestyles or fully realize racial integration and parity.

Providing a Link

for Disparate Theories

Boasting prodigious footnotes, “Shaky Ground” links the scattershot theories--early feminist treatises, Civil Rights oral histories, political memoirs and studies of the long-range influence of plugged-in rock ‘n’ roll--that poured forth over the last 40 years but have often only existed on parallel planes. Echols, 51, hopes to create a more layered rendering of the ‘60s and its legacy by braiding disparate strands into one volume.

Consequently, “Shaky Ground” is a bit bumpy. The book splinters from the weight of her desire to be far-reaching and inclusive. Ranging broadly in scope and tone, the book’s academic essays on cultural versus radical feminism don’t always seamlessly segue into, say, her alternative press Q&A; with Lenny Kravitz or conversation with Joni Mitchell.

Despite its jaggedness, the collection is compelling when Echols mines unusual spaces--the hidden compartments of sexual ambiguity, the sweaty floors of disco- theques--to trace the far-reaching reverberations of post-’60s social movements. “There were all these ‘60s books coming out in the ‘80s,” recalls Echols, casual, in jeans, t-shirt and well-traveled Merrell hiking shoes, brown hair wind-tousled. And as an academic who had adopted the decade as her field of study, she was knee-deep in them: histories, memoirs and essays written primarily by white, male veterans of the radical New Left who highlighted “‘60s exceptionalism” and made the case that the decade was as singular as it was exemplary.

“Not that that isn’t important,” says Echols. But the sameness of the perspective began to wear on her. “I wanted to look at different areas--Janis Joplin, the women’s movement, R&B--that; have been trivialized or caricatured in histories of the ‘60s and render a more complicated meaning.”

Simply put, she says, “I’ve always been involved in moving margins to the center.”

Echols begins by firmly integrating the counterculture into the political history of the ‘60s. “More people,” she writes, “passed through ‘love ghettos’ like Haight-Ashbury than took part in the Students for Democratic Society, the leading New Left group of the 1960s.” What transpired in the close spaces of neighborhoods, loosely configured households and electric ballrooms of San Francisco is as important to her as what was advancing on the front lines of America’s moral conflicts--opposition to the Vietnam war and racial inequality. She challenges standard wisdom “that the counterculture was all about ‘goofy optimism,’ an especially durable myth among baby boomers.”

In convening her collection of voices--discordant, conflicted, exhilarated--Echols drew on many disciplines and media, from Joan Didion’s vivid journalism portraits and Canadian feminist Shulamith Firestone’s groundbreaking “The Dialectic of Sex” to the seismic shifts in 40 years of popular music.

Testing the Limits

Through Music

Throughout, Echols, who has also worked as DJ in clubs and discos, finds a sturdy, extended metaphor in music--from Joplin’s commitment to high-risk living she summed up as “superhypermost” and Sly Stone’s “you can’t figure out the bag I’m in” to Kravitz’s “can’t put me in a box.” Even as social movements pushed forward, she suggests, musicians felt constrained by the mainstream’s outdated definitions and boundaries.

“The idea that popular culture can be transgressive and empowering,” Echols writes of the late ‘80s, “is appealing in a period when mass-based political protest has sometimes seemed a thing of the past.”

Music became a laboratory to test the limits--not just of artistic tastes, but of the culture’s openness to the uncharted. “Pop music trashes the borders and boundaries,” says Echols, sitting on the balcony of her East Hollywood apartment in a neighborhood ‘60s idealism would like to lay claim to: artists, day laborers, nuns, teachers. “It has the ability to shake it all up. We have to look outside of the frame.”

Glimpsing the life of Joplin, for example, with her keep-’em guessing sexuality coupled with her extrapolation on the blues, pressed at all sorts of borders of thought. Her revolution was in her countenance: messy, ragged and impossible to neatly define.

In moving the soundtrack to the forefront, Echols reads the political and cultural messages in the evolution of R&B; and its often dismissed metamorphosis to disco.

For gay men, black women and the working class, she says, disco was a site of resilience, “an affront to white middle-class sensibilities.” Echols suggests that the music symbolized a split in the culture: Disco coincided with deindustrialization, affirmative action and the rise of feminism and gay liberation. “It feels inseparable from African Americans’ growing apprehension that the black movement had lost its momentum (not to mention its leaders),” she writes, “and white America lost its will to change.”

In this milieu, “gay men became very visible,” says Echols. “Black women’s sexuality was voiced in the music and on the dance floor.”

But it was vilified. It didn’t square with mainstream notions of “blackness”--like so much else that was wiggling out of definition.

That’s the hitch that impairs or dead-ends each movement in Echols’ survey--gay and lesbian rights, black power, feminism. Even the margins are ruled by expectation, assumption and the subjective rules of what’s “authentic” and what’s allowable.

Yet even with those limitations, the margins change the mainstream. Her optimism is buoyed by the multiracial, multivoiced give-and-take in her classrooms, the spaces where culture and politics fuse, “the ways in which the margins get absorbed in popular culture faster and faster.”

It’s a ‘60s-based optimism that she considers guarded, not goofy. “There is a recuperative force at work,” says Echols. “I long for politics that doesn’t confuse who we are with what we can become.”