Much of Bythe Time is drawn from Pollock's personal recollections of the East andWest coast music scenes in '69, the rise of freeform FM radio and the rockpress, the ongoing riots on campus and the inauguration of Richard Nixon. Ifnostalgia inevitably shines with a warm glow, then maybe Pollock isn't exactlynostalgic for 1969. His memories tend to expose the stench that began to gatheraround all that talk about peace, love and understanding.
Pollock and the musicians and hippies heinterviewed recall a counterculture rife with arrogance and paranoia, rampantwith sexism and naïve calls to violence fueled by bad drugs and all aroundstupidity. It seems as if there was an evanescent moment, sometime around 1967,when a vision of a new Jerusalem shimmered on the horizon. Quickly enough, itwas co-opted by hustlers, cowed by heavily armed fanatics, hijacked by thecriminally insaneand all the while troops and police firing buckshot and teargas with a mandate to force the weird genie back into the bottle.Understandably, Pollock prefers the naïve good feeling of the Monterey PopFestival (1967) to the mud and crud of Woodstock (1969) and the decade's codaat Altamont, where the headlining Rolling Stones hired the Hells Angels forsecurity and were surprised when someone died.
Despite the tension, or maybe because of it,1969 was a great year for rock music with albums by Santana, the Who, Sly andthe Family Stone, the Velvet Underground, the Stones and the Stooges, alongwith great singles by James Brown, Elvis and the Supremes.
Pollock rambles and occasionally stumbles overkooky asides. Was stopping “the rising tide of high-decibel rock'n'rollrebellion” really at the top of Barry Goldwater's agenda during the 1964presidential election? But these are just asides as Pollock reiterates his maintheme about he ambiguity that peaked in '69, a time of great creativity anddelusion, forever lost to the tide of opposition that brought Nixon to theWhite House and the transformation of a counterculture into big business.
