BOOKS
Ellen Sander is one of those toney oversimplifiers of rock one is continually frustrated to find in magazines like (best example because it’s most middlebrow) Saturday Review or (more chic, still anti-rock) Vogue. She’s not the worst of the lot, and she certainly is not the best, especially now that people like Henry Edwards and Lillian Roxon have begun to introduce some taste into the culture 'zines.
BOOKS
TRIPS:
Rock Life in the Sixties
by Ellen Sander
(Scribner)
Ellen Sander is one of those toney oversimplifiers of rock one is continually frustrated to find in magazines like (best example because it’s most middlebrow) Saturday Review or (more chic, still anti-rock) Vogue. She’s not the worst of the lot, and she certainly is not the best, especially now that people like Henry Edwards and Lillian Roxon have begun to introduce some taste into the culture 'zines. (Ellen Willis, of course, has been there, all along,, at the New Yorker, and she is great.)
Trips begins like just another dreary rock tome, with a repetition of the standard “ ’50s as the atomic progenitor of it all” cliches. Sander threatens to begin a discussion of what it meant to be a woman in the Teenage Decade, but (like every other analytical thread in the book) that is left dangling.
For the rest, we face a fairly linear history of the ’60s, told by a (selfproclaimed) Green-wich Village insider. The result is both entertaining and infuriating.