There’s a Riot Going On Peter Doggett Canongate, 598pp, £25
“All power to the Dylanologists – Free Bob Dylan from himself!” It is some time in the early 1970s, and a crowd of protesters outside the singer’s home is chanting: “Hey, hey, Bobby D, the revolution is in need of thee!”
Peter Doggett’s weighty tome is a treasure trove of countercultural anecdotes and reportage. Charting “the ambiguous relationship between music and revolution”, he throws us into the deep end of the radical west. Dylan and John Lennon rub shoulders with the Black Panthers, while Max Roach outlines the political significance of jazz: “I see jazz as very democratic music, whereas European classical music expresses imperialism.”
Later, we follow the actor and film-maker Melvin Van Peebles into the Mojave Desert where, we are told, the inspiration for the seminal Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song came to him: “He pulled off the road, reached into his pants, and let his imagination run riot as he masturbated himself to a joyous climax.”
Rock stars were “the era’s most potent youth icons”. Their music, suffused with the energy of sex and drugs, became a natural conduit for revolution. Doggett characterises his story as one of “faith in utopia, betrayed by commercialism and naivety”, but its enduring attitude is one of thrilling possibility.
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