In the early days of her career, Joan Didion had a taste sensation of what some music and humanities journalists have had to persist complete the years: the monotony of record-making. It was 1968, and Didion, working happening a story, visited an L.A. recording studio apartment to watch the Doors tinker with Waiting for the Sun. Accordant to Tracy Daugherty's Didion bio The Next-to-last Love Song, she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, too desirable to scope out Jim Morrison as the lead in The Panic in Needle Park, the drug addict love-story movie they'd written. (The part in time went to Atomic number 13 Pacino.)
What Didion found instead was tedium. The dance orchestra waited, and waited, for Morrison to show up, ahead to Didion having to sharpen on band chitchat, bags of uneaten food and a Siberian Husky with different-monochrome eyes. A sense of torpor lingered over the minutes until, finally, Morrison, in black leather bloomers, arrived. Even then, nothing more was accomplished. Morrison afire matches and placed them near his genitalia. "There was a sense that no one was going to leave the room, ever," Joan Didion wrote; she bailed long before the record wrapped.
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Over the course of her calling, Didion, who died on Dec. 23 of Parkinson's disease at 87, wrote on a myriad of subjects — murder, grief, Primal America, Miami, movie stars, Calif.. Her reportage of the music scene of the Sixties and Seventies was just a small part of her work, and she pretty much remaining it behind after she and Dunne co-wrote a remaking of A Star Is Born starring Barbra Streisand and Crease Kristofferson. But that human race clearly fascinated her. "Rock and vagabond musicians are the ideal field for me," she said, with obvious delight, in the documental Joan Didion: The Center Will Non Hold. "They would just lead their lives ahead of you."
Her interests weren't simply prurient. Didion's observations on the Doors were tucked into her iconic essay "The Egg white Album," in which she grappled with beginning "to doubt the premises of completely the stories I had ever told myself." In the late Sixties, she couldn't have found a better example of the center non holding than the rock counterculture. Along with different stories in "The T. H. White Album" — the deed of conveyance itself a rock reference — the slew of one of her favorite bands mired in show-biz ennui embodied unmatched of her narratives: that "the world atomic number 3 I taken it no longer existed," and that justified the things that were reputed to save us, like rock & roll, were dissolving before our eyes.
The first hint of that viewpoint arrived ii years earlier. In 1966, Didion profiled Joan Baez for the New York City Times (the bit, "Where the Kissing Never Stops," was reprinted in Slouching Toward Bethlehem). At the clock, Baez was a divinity of the folk and protest world and was launching an Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in Northern Golden State. In Didion's reporting, Baez came crossways as earnest — with an "absence of guile" — but the depiction of the unconventional classes at the school, complete with concert dance classes (to Beatles records) and reading discussion groups, was fairly withering. As Didion wrote of Baez, "She does seek, possibly unconsciously, to hang on to the whiteness and turbulence and capacitance for wonder, however ersatz or shallow, of her own and anyone's adolescence." At the time, many a believed that musicians were the operative to helping solve society's ills; Didion clearly had her doubts.
The subtly scalding title essay of "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" found Didion in San Francisco during 1967's Summertime of Love. Everyone other in the media was covering that season in that city A if there were a new dawn rising. But in her story, originally for the Sabbatum Even Post, Didion instead found runaways, drug abusers, spacey groupies watching the Grateful Dead practise, white Mime Troupers in blackface taunting Black kids, and a immature on acid who admitted to liking Bobfloat Weir. The piece unfurled one hippy-world nightmare after another, and Joan Didion foretold the way Haight Ashbury would soon exist overrun by dealers, tourists and harder drugs. (Even the Dead moved out soon after.)
"Stone and roll musicians are the ideal subject for ME," she once said. "They would just wind their lives ahead of you."
Back at her and Dunne's put up on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, the couple threw a wild party attended by a hard-drinking Janis Joplin. Didion mentioned it in "The Patrick White Album," where she also wrote that "music hoi polloi never wanted ordinary drinks. They wanted sake, or champagne cocktails, or tequila keen," and ate dinner party at ever-changing hours and lived on unpredictable schedules. What she didn't cover in the story (only spoke of in the doctor) was when she went to check happening her and Dunne's young daughter Quintana in her bedroom during the party. At that place, Didion found drugs connected the floor, remaining by party guests. She couldn't believe anyone would have done that — another indication that, in her mind, the rock world was protrusive to stop up into dangerous self-self-indulgence.
In the context of Didion viewing the correct of Sixties idealism through the prism of its leading soundtrack, there credibly wasn't a better example than A Star Is Born. Didion and Dunne came up with the idea of updating that flic (two versions already existed), simply with nouveau hip couple James President Taylor and Carly Simon in the roles of the dissipated rocker and rising starlet. Taylor and Simon passed, as did Cher, and eventually the project wound rising with Streisand and her producer and boyfriend, Jon Peters.
Away the time the motion picture was realised, Didion and Dunne had been fired (going with a sizable payday, including 10 percent of the movie's grosses). While it's embarrassing to say which parts of A Star Is Born came from their typewriters, the idea that the downwardly-helix male lead was now a fading, debauched rocker (not an actor, as in the old versions) was of a piece with Didion's news media. Played convincingly past Kristofferson, Bathroom Norman Howard guzzles alcohol and stumbles or so onstage and off, resolute on ruination his career and singing excruciatingly severe pseud-shake songs alike "Watch Closely Now." He's the embodiment of Didion's fears most what would become of the rock counterculture — IT's as if the increasingly bloated James Douglas Morrison had lived a couple of more years and resumed touring with the Doors instead of heading for Paris.
Sadly, Joan Didion wasn't wrong approximately the music she was drawn to; the years after "Slouching Toward Bethlehem," "The White Album," and A Star Is Natural were riddled with corpses and music-biz flare-outs. Even as fellow Newborn Journalism legend Tom Tom Wolfe regretted not following up connected an early tip to publish about an emergent style called rosehip-hop, it's unfortunate Didion ne'er Dove into pop's Renaissance away way of other genres. She never tackled punk, gangsta rap or rave civilisation. Then again, ace can only imagine what she would give birth successful of G.G. Allin operating room Burning Valet or the recent horrors of Astroworld. She wouldn't have been slouching toward Bethlehem — she likely would have collapsed altogether, grappling with the moment when the company truly got out of hand.
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Source: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/rock-counterculture-had-dark-side-140559468.html
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