Rating: 
Summary: A GREAT BOOK BY A NATIONAL TREASURE
Review: Joel Selvin is a great reporter and a great writer who was on the scene and knows this story better than anybody. I'd recommend this book to anybody -- even to people who don't like rock and roll.
Rating:
Summary: A GREAT BOOK BY A NATIONAL TREASURE
Review: Joel Selvin is a great reporter and a great writer who was on the scene and knows this story better than anybody. I'd recommend this book to anybody -- even to people who don't like rock and roll.
Rating: 
Summary: Selvin's Scrapbook of Snapshots lacks Synthesis
Review: Joel Selvin's chronicle of the span of years that saw the rise and fall of San Francisco's Ballroom heyday leaves one with a mixed bag of responses. While it is jam-packed with bits of "insider" history, it lacks synthesis, often making for a tedious read. Its title is misleading--"The Summer of Love: The Inside Story of LSD, Rock n'Roll, Free Love, and High Times in the Wild West" suggests a comprehensive exploration from the inside out. It would have been more accurately heralded under something like "San Francisco's Ballroom Era: Snapshots of the Players." There is no in-depth analysis of the culture here--none of the great and privileged perspective that is often the gift of time and distance. Their is no insightful working over of how and why the elements came together the way they did. The text plods along, most of the time, with the certain monotony of required recitation --"this happened, then that happened,then this, then that..." It is distinguished only by chaotic leaps from scenes at one camp of personalities to those of another. It is the textual equivalent of a hastily compiled scrapbook covering some particularly seminal years in the rock n' roll counterculture. Some of the pages are given decidedly more consideration than others. We seem to be in Grace Slick's sidecar much of the time, but if this were the only exposure one had to the early days of the San Francisco scene, there is the danger of walking away thinking the Grateful Dead were a minor consideration, and Bill Graham was a pitbull who never had a good day. The text is rife with other minor sins. The period's biggest events play out in an almost anti-climactic fashion, with Selvin often focusing on odd bits of detail when it seems there ought to be vibrant, big pictures. Among places where minutiae effects the frustrating sense of walking through a major event with a view through a straw are Altamont, Woodstock, and the death of Janis Joplin. Too many minor characters are unceremoniously punched in, and subsequently abandoned to fates we are left to imagine. The text strives for cliffhanger transitions, structured with the same misguided melodrama of a soap opera. Clever turns of phrase make it to the page now and then, but more recognizable are attempts at lyrical grace that fall short of the mark. The content often smacks of secondhand news and the feeling that a peripheral perspective has been superimposed on the epicenter of dozens of critical moments and private conversations. A journalistic approach would have given more credibility to the many personal accounts. Was Selvin the ubiquitous fly on the wall in the lives of the people he writes about, or has imagination manifested the intimate details of conversations and events long since consigned to the quiet annals of private histories? Selvin has offered up a few good nuggets--some precious gems in the rough--but one must be willing to mine for them. This is no motherlode, and upon closing the book, one is left with the feeling that this was a collection of narrative notes, still waiting to be refined to glistening. There are myriad fascinating leaping off points, but in the end, too many have us still hanging in the air.
Rating:
Summary: Selvin's Scrapbook of Snapshots lacks Synthesis
Review: Joel Selvin's chronicle of the span of years that saw the rise and fall of San Francisco's Ballroom heyday leaves one with a mixed bag of responses. While it is jam-packed with bits of "insider" history, it lacks synthesis, often making for a tedious read. Its title is misleading--"The Summer of Love: The Inside Story of LSD, Rock n'Roll, Free Love, and High Times in the Wild West" suggests a comprehensive exploration from the inside out. It would have been more accurately heralded under something like "San Francisco's Ballroom Era: Snapshots of the Players." There is no in-depth analysis of the culture here--none of the great and privileged perspective that is often the gift of time and distance. Their is no insightful working over of how and why the elements came together the way they did. The text plods along, most of the time, with the certain monotony of required recitation --"this happened, then that happened,then this, then that..." It is distinguished only by chaotic leaps from scenes at one camp of personalities to those of another. It is the textual equivalent of a hastily compiled scrapbook covering some particularly seminal years in the rock n' roll counterculture. Some of the pages are given decidedly more consideration than others. We seem to be in Grace Slick's sidecar much of the time, but if this were the only exposure one had to the early days of the San Francisco scene, there is the danger of walking away thinking the Grateful Dead were a minor consideration, and Bill Graham was a pitbull who never had a good day. The text is rife with other minor sins. The period's biggest events play out in an almost anti-climactic fashion, with Selvin often focusing on odd bits of detail when it seems there ought to be vibrant, big pictures. Among places where minutiae effects the frustrating sense of walking through a major event with a view through a straw are Altamont, Woodstock, and the death of Janis Joplin. Too many minor characters are unceremoniously punched in, and subsequently abandoned to fates we are left to imagine. The text strives for cliffhanger transitions, structured with the same misguided melodrama of a soap opera. Clever turns of phrase make it to the page now and then, but more recognizable are attempts at lyrical grace that fall short of the mark. The content often smacks of secondhand news and the feeling that a peripheral perspective has been superimposed on the epicenter of dozens of critical moments and private conversations. A journalistic approach would have given more credibility to the many personal accounts. Was Selvin the ubiquitous fly on the wall in the lives of the people he writes about, or has imagination manifested the intimate details of conversations and events long since consigned to the quiet annals of private histories? Selvin has offered up a few good nuggets--some precious gems in the rough--but one must be willing to mine for them. This is no motherlode, and upon closing the book, one is left with the feeling that this was a collection of narrative notes, still waiting to be refined to glistening. There are myriad fascinating leaping off points, but in the end, too many have us still hanging in the air.
Rating:
Summary: Selvin's Scrapbook of Snapshots lacks Synthesis
Review: Joel Selvin's chronicle of the span of years that saw the rise and fall of San Francisco's Ballroom heyday leaves one with a mixed bag of responses. While it is jam-packed with bits of "insider" history, it lacks synthesis, often making for a tedious read. Its title is misleading--"The Summer of Love: The Inside Story of LSD, Rock n'Roll, Free Love, and High Times in the Wild West" suggests a comprehensive exploration from the inside out. It would have been more accurately heralded under something like "San Francisco's Ballroom Era: Snapshots of the Players." There is no in-depth analysis of the culture here--none of the great and privileged perspective that is often the gift of time and distance. Their is no insightful working over of how and why the elements came together the way they did. The text plods along, most of the time, with the certain monotony of required recitation --"this happened, then that happened,then this, then that..." It is distinguished only by chaotic leaps from scenes at one camp of personalities to those of another. It is the textual equivalent of a hastily compiled scrapbook covering some particularly seminal years in the rock n' roll counterculture. Some of the pages are given decidedly more consideration than others. We seem to be in Grace Slick's sidecar much of the time, but if this were the only exposure one had to the early days of the San Francisco scene, there is the danger of walking away thinking the Grateful Dead were a minor consideration, and Bill Graham was a pitbull who never had a good day. The text is rife with other minor sins. The period's biggest events play out in an almost anti-climactic fashion, with Selvin often focusing on odd bits of detail when it seems there ought to be vibrant, big pictures. Among places where minutiae effects the frustrating sense of walking through a major event with a view through a straw are Altamont, Woodstock, and the death of Janis Joplin. Too many minor characters are unceremoniously punched in, and subsequently abandoned to fates we are left to imagine. The text strives for cliffhanger transitions, structured with the same misguided melodrama of a soap opera. Clever turns of phrase make it to the page now and then, but more recognizable are attempts at lyrical grace that fall short of the mark. The content often smacks of secondhand news and the feeling that a peripheral perspective has been superimposed on the epicenter of dozens of critical moments and private conversations. A journalistic approach would have given more credibility to the many personal accounts. Was Selvin the ubiquitous fly on the wall in the lives of the people he writes about, or has imagination manifested the intimate details of conversations and events long since consigned to the quiet annals of private histories? Selvin has offered up a few good nuggets--some precious gems in the rough--but one must be willing to mine for them. This is no motherlode, and upon closing the book, one is left with the feeling that this was a collection of narrative notes, still waiting to be refined to glistening. There are myriad fascinating leaping off points, but in the end, too many have us still hanging in the air.
Rating:
Summary: If you go to San Francisco..........................
Review: So many books about rock 'n roll are letdowns because they speak in generalities about the music without informing the reader of the circumstances that shaped it. SUMMER OF LOVE is an exception; it's a well-written, engaging chronicle of the music and the players in the Bay area from 1965 to 1971. Selvin lets history speak for itself, so you get the glorious and the ghastly with no punches pulled. The impression one is left with is that, whether you think the Haight-Ashbury thing was wonderful, tragic or a load of P.R. hype, it certainly was like no other scene and it left a lot of fine music in it's wake. A good one.
Rating: 
Summary: Some people hate it...
Review: Some people love it. Nobody is neutral. Most of the principles in the story attest to its accuracy. Read it. Tell me. Look for my Sly Stone oral biography on Avon Books next year
Rating:
Summary: In-depth detail about rock but not much about anything else
Review: This book is an engaging, densely detailed history of San Francisco rock-'n'-roll from 1965 to 1971. It opens with the Charlatans giving birth to San Francisco rock and ends with the death of poor ol' Pigpen. Selvin writes in great detail about how bands formed, learned (or didn't learn) how to deal with the music business, and broke up. It's a tell-all about who slept with who, the types of drugs each musician used and where and when they OD'ed, and the details of their recording contracts. To hear Selvin tell it, Janis Joplin bedded just about every male rocker in the business-- except for Jerry Lee Lewis: she got into a fistfight with him! Bill Graham's monstrous ego gets full play, until you get sick of reading about his temper tantrums and underhanded dealing. But the book's title is misleading, for a couple reasons. For one thing, the summer of 1967 is completely absent from the book! The chronology jumps from spring to fall and ignores the summer altogether. Perhaps this was Selvin trying to emphasize his stark assertion in the book's first sentence: "The Summer of Love never really happened." But why he would deliberately omit the central scene of the whole saga is incomprehensible. The other thing lacking in this book is a sense of the whole Zeitgeist of the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene. The book has a focus on nothing but rock-'n'-roll music. Any mention of any other cultural aspects of hippie life, like folk music, the Human Be-In, the flower children, the communal Diggers, the arts and crafts, the antiwar movement, the Eastern mysticism, the wider scope of everything that went into the Haight scene, gets no mention except insofar as it directly relates to the story of the rock-'n'-roll bands. This is a book specifically about music, not about all the many things that went into making San Francisco the hippie mecca. Rock-'n'-roll was of course a central feature of the scene, and deserves a book all its own like this one. It just isn't the last word on it, as the title seems to promise. It doesn't give the reader a feel for the complete Haight-Ashbury experience. An accurate title would be "Rock Music in San Francisco, 1965-1971", or more accurately, "Rock Music in the Bay Area, 1965-1971." But it does give plenty of information about the unique personalities that made all that amazing music, how they developed their sound, the personal and professional pitfalls they encountered. It shows their development from naive groups of young people beginning by playing in cafes and garages and eventually hitting the big time, bringing their local little music scene, where everyone knew everyone else, onto the world stage.
Rating:
Summary: Summer of Love teaches children of baby boomers about 60's
Review: This book was not only informative but interesting as well. Selvin goes into incredible details about those rock stars who shaped us and our taste in music.
For those of us growing up in the Generation X mold, learning about the greats of rock and roll gives us a kind of legacy that we can fall back onto when the rock
of today gets unbearable. Never again will we be graced by the likes of Janis Joplin or Jerry Garcia. But through Selvin's book, we are able to catch a glimps of life behind the stage at our rock icons.
Rating:
Summary: Summer of Love teaches children of baby boomers about 60's
Review: This book was not only informative but interesting as well. Selvin goes into incredible details about those rock stars who shaped us and our taste in music.For those of us growing up in the Generation X mold, learning about the greats of rock and roll gives us a kind of legacy that we can fall back onto when the rockof today gets unbearable. Never again will we be graced by the likes of Janis Joplin or Jerry Garcia. But through Selvin's book, we are able to catch a glimps of life behind the stage at our rock icons.
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