Pianist,composer and bandleader Chick Corea is one of the jazz genre’s most unique and diversified voices. One of his earliest recordings, Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, is a landmark piano trio recording and was followed by a stint with Miles Davis who encouraged him to explore the electric piano and his own groundbreaking experiments with Return To Forever, first in a mixed electric-acoustic Latin-Brazilian format and then in pure electric jazz rock. He challenged the avant garde with Anthony Braxton and Barry Altschul in Circle and performed duets with Gary Burton, Herbie Hancock, Bela Fleck and Hiromi. At one time, he worked with both Acoustic and Elektric bands. In recent years, he toured with his bandmate from the Miles Bitches Brew period, guitarist John McLaughlin. In short, there’s no direction or combination of musicians that Corea hasn’t explored.

For his feature article in the 2010 Playboy Jazz Festival program, “Pop and Sizzle: Plugging Into Jazz Fusion,” the Rabbit had an email exchange with the always busy Corea about his early Miles experiences, his interest in all kinds of music and how his diverse past affects his equally diverse present. Here’s the complete exchange.

–As Stanley Clarke says in the “Chick Corea” documentary, “Chick has no problems with changing.” You’ve explored and developed so many styles of music—no need for me to list them—what has driven you? Why have you been (and continue to be) open to so many styles and genres? Is your father’s influence a key? And how does it relate to your own composing?

I’m often asked about what others consider my diversity of tastes. Actually, the simple, but most truthful and direct answer is, I never think about it. I follow my interests and find that it leads me to trying to understand other cultures and the artists that create within them. Often, rather than seeing another way of music as only a “curiosity”, I want to understand it more intimately – and that leads me to studying the music of and participating with the musicians of that culture.
–When you look back on the period in 1969 when In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew were recorded, how do you view what was going on then? How would you characterize the musical times? Were you aware that what you were doing with Miles would be thought to be so innovative and different? That it reflected the shifting cultural and social  times?

From present time looking back on the 60’s, it seems that there was more agreement and acceptance in society of experiment and change. There certainly was in the arts. If I compare it to what’s happening now, it seems “The Media” and “big business” has the flow of art locked up and tightened down. The public has gotten used to it. The result is, less individuality and thus everything else that goes along with that negative direction.

Of course at the time we were recording In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew, none of us were talking about what “impact” it might have on the future. Miles was in a constant mode of search and change; it all seemed perfectly natural. And, for me, still does.

–It would be great to have an anecdote from those days, some unique memory that reflects the spirit of those times. In his biography, Jack Chambers quotes Miles saying that after you first joined the group, you and he would “talk about music until late every night.” Is there anything that stands out from those discussions that you recall? What was the setting?

The first gig the Miles Davis Quintet played after Tony Williams left the band was a week’s engagement at a club in Rochester (Duffy’s Tavern?). Jack DeJohnette joined the band and we just finished the first set. As we were walking off stage, I was following Miles off to the left, he muttered to me: “Change again.” in his familiar cryptic way. I took it to mean that he had scanned his whole musical life in an instant and seen the constant change. Maybe he was resisting it at that moment – - I’ll never know.

–When you did the Five Peace Band Project, did you feel it to be part of a fusion legacy? Or was it something that stood apart, reflecting the current times? Both? How does the spirit of what you did then affect what you do now (ie, The Freedom Band)?

Working with John and the gang in the Five Peace Band felt fresh as a daisy to me. Not much talk about the past during the tours. But there was an unspoken (sometimes spoken) reverence expressed for Miles and “the day” – delivered in a manner not wanting to dwell on the past but with real feeling.
–Fusion can also suggest a combining of personalities, something you’re very familiar with especially considering the wide array of duo performances –Hiromi, Gary Burton, Herbie Hancock, Bela Fleck, Bobby McFerrin, et al—you’ve done over the years. Can you address the dynamic of fusing musical personalities in performance, how it affects those involved and what they create?

Making music with other musicians is an ultimate joy. To be a part of a group creation when there is complete giving amongst the group is my pay for being a musician. And each musician is a unique world unto himself. This is the subtle and high level challenge of communication between free spirits. Unencumbered by any particular protocol, and with a desire to make the other sound the best he can sound, soulful and satisfying music can be made. I’m fortunate to have these kind of associations with my musician friends.

I remember a wonderful incident when Herbie Hancock and I were first beginning to play 2 pianos together. At first we were careful about “not getting in each other’s way”. The playing moved cautiously and slowly. Then we both discovered that we could play whatever we wanted and never get in the other’s way because there was no offering from the other that wasn’t fully accepted and enjoyed. We were both trying to make the other sound good. We had a good laugh over that.

What is it that’s “invisible” in Paul Auster’s latest novel? It’s not the truth. The truth is there… somewhere … though choosing it from all the various claims and denials batted around by three different narrators and one or two other characters might be an impossible task. Or maybe it’s not. Let’s settle on this: the truth is not apparently visible.

What’s invisible is Auster himself. In the past, Auster has inserted himself to various degrees in his writing (remember the detective Paul Auster in City of Glass?). And his work has often focused on identity; how it’s established and how it’s held. In Invisible, Auster explores how our identity is developed and perceived, by ourselves and others, through the stories we tell.  Here the stories are of  trust, love, murder and incest, made-up and otherwise. Just when we think we know one of the characters, and through his/her telling, the others, the point-of view changes and the new narrator destroys what we believed about them all. As we take more and more interest in the entwining tales, the author of them all goes transparent.

It’s 1967 and Adam Walker,  a student at Columbia and aspiring poet (as was Auster) is befriended by an excitable, mysterious older Frenchman, Rudolf Born, and his younger woman friend Margot. The two become entangled in Walker’s’ already tangled life. Born proposes generously funding a literary journal that Adam will edit. In Born’s absence, Margot and Adam begin sleeping together, apparently with Born’s blessing. All seems hope and promise until Adam and Born are accosted walking on Riverside Drive and Born reacts with surprising brutality. Or does he?

This first of four sections seems to fall into a literary model of the type represented by John Fowles’ The Magus. A young man, full of aspiration and desire, falls in with an unpredictable, Svengali-like mentor who, through sinister manipulation, seems intent on teaching his young protege  the cruel and trustless realities of life. But in part II we’re propelled forward some 30 years and given a new narrator, Adam’s Columbia-era friend Jim, who hasn’t heard from him all this time.  Adam is dying from leukemia and entrusts the story–so it was only a story?–of his relationship with Born and Margot to his old friend. Their correpsondence reveals much more of Adam’s story, including his deep, incestuous relationship with his sister. After the Riverside Drive incident, Adam breaks with Born and questions his own involvement. He travels to Paris where he again takes up with Margot. Then he runs into Born, who has become a cipher that marks the point Adam’s life lost all innocence (or was it that incestuous experience with his year-older sister when he was fourteen?).  The affair with Margot becomes less serious even as it’s announced that Born will marry an old acquaintance with a strangely desirable daughter. Adam, anxious to expose Born’s murderous behavior, hatches his own magus plot, one that can only end in emotional–and dangerous– disaster. The daughter, years later, tells her own story.  As Auster writes, “Compelling as those twists and turns might be, they amount to just one story among an infinity of stories, one film among a multitude of films…”

Auster has discussed the power of the stories we tell ourselves previously, notably in 2008’s Man In the Dark. Here, the theme isn’t as much about creating reality as defining it. Identity creates truth, circumstance defines identity and truth, real or perceived, influences circumstance.  Adam and his sister are drawn together by the death of their younger brother. That leads them to intimacy. Born, something of a double agent, defines himself as he sees fit, leaving others to their suspicions. In his pursuit of revenge, Adam seeks a new identity but becomes something entirely unexpected, by him and the reader.

Invisible cements Auster’s reputation as a mystery writer, one who pursues the various clues of meaning towards an ever-elusive answer. In this sense, his writing is as captivating as any detective fiction while vastly superior in psychic and existential puzzles. This writer-as-detective is a stand-in for all of us who have ever wondered who or what to believe. Believing ourselves could be a mistake. Fashioning our lives as stories may or may not help make sense of it all.–Cabbage Rabbit

The same old thing wasn’t going to cut it in the early 1970s. And just about anything recorded before Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, in other words before 1969, was the same old thing. That wasn’t going to grab the ears of the hip new audience Miles had attracted with his magnum opus. And record companies wanted that audience…bad.

The music collected on Bridge Into the New Age, all of it (with the exception of one cut) recorded between 1971 and 1974 documents attempts to bring jazz into the age of Aquarius. There are reflections of the political, social and cultural trends that influenced the music, mirrored by peace-and-love themes and cries of “Free Angela!” as well as attempts to meld Afro-centric rhythms and soul–the “bad” sounds of James Brown, Sly Stone and Issac Hayes among others–to an art form which was popularly seen as  becoming to intellectual and formless  (though this wasn’t necessarily so).

As Bridge illustrates, there was much about this movement that was successful. The period (and earlier) produced some great music, not all of it by Davis. Any comprehensive selection of the era’s hits would have to include Miroslav Vitous’ Infinite Search, Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi, Wayne Shorter’s Super Nova, Joe Zawinul’s Zawinul, Weather Report’s eponymous first album and a host of others. Bridge documents the Milestone/Prestige label’s attempts at staying current. That most of the music here is satisfying and timeless in its appeal speaks to the musicians on the label’s roster–Joe Henderson, McCoy Tyner, Idris Muhammad, Gary Bartz–and their ability to maintain their individuality even as their approach to music changed.

The music reflects trends of the era: spiritual and ethnic-consciousness themes, electric instrumentation, emphasis on vocals, percussive color, accessible beats that supported strong and sometimes free-form solos, attempts to include non-traditional instrumentation into the mix, movement towards larger ensembles. Here, those trends are represented by drummer Muhammad’s eight-piece ensemble playing “Peace,” with two additional percusionists (occasionally augmented by saxophonist Clarence Thomas on bells) joining the drummer in rhythmic layering.  Larry Willis attaches echoplex and ring modulator to his keyboard for Henderson’s “Tress-Cun-De-O-La” with the leader’s vocal and guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer providing dissonant elements.  Alice Coltrane brings harp to Henderson’s “Fire.” Todd Cochran, performing then as Bayete, balances clavinet against the horn section on one of “Free Angela”’s three sections. Gary Bartz sing lyrics from Langston Hughes before cutting loose on alto.  None of the tunes would be identified (except by militant purists) as anything other than jazz. Yet they all sound different than earlier schools of swing, be-bop, post-bop. New.

It’s impossible to tell if (or how much) this direction resulted from label influence (as it did from the Columbia label) or if it came from the artists themselves.  And not everything here is music to our ears. Compare vocals from artist themselves (Henderson, Bartz, Cochran’s chorus) to Jean Carn’s strong and convincing voice on Azar Lawrence’s tune that gives the collection its title, or her work on  “Mother of the Future” from Norman Connors’ Slewfoot. The one piece that stands apart from the rest–Jack DeJonette’s “Brown, Warm and Wintry”–was recorded in 1968. Maybe something from the 1975 Prestige date Cosmic Chicken would have better fit the program (his excellent1970 recording Have You Heard? on Milestone may have been too far out or its trio too underpopulated to be included).

Needless to say, much of this music’s positive direction lost out as jazz recording moved on to jazz-rock and fusion. Too bad. But the Rabbit, who owned all but one of these recordings as a bunny, remembers the hopeful feeling this music gave him…and the conviction it gave that there indeed was something new under the sun. Dumb bunny.–Cabbage Rabbit

There’s much to quibble over in Abram’s big, beautiful The Art of Harvey Kurtzman (the “man” in Kurtzman isn’t spelled out but drawn as  simplistic balloon-stick figure). Why include the complete “Superduperman” from Mad no. 4 (1953) instead of  samples from “Dragged Net!,” the parody of television’s cigarette-selling, L.A Cop promoting Dragnet or “Bat Boy and Rubin” that parodied the legal power of comic book publishers and the homoerotic relationship between the protagonists or show more of the incredible post-horrors-of-war Two-Fisted Tales or, or…

That’s the problem with writer, illustrator, editor and Mad magazine founder Kurtzman. His career was so long, varied and important; so influential to American humor at large, that it would be impossible to do it justice in any single volume. His early strip work for Timely Comics and Stan Lee, his sci-fi and war stories for Will Gaines’ EC, the founding of Mad and its turn from comic to magazine, the follow-up publications  Trump, Humbug and Help, the bread-and-butter work of “Little Annie Fanny” for Playboy, his late work for the French alternative market; any overview can only touch work that all deserves long and serious consideration.

This over-sized book, selected and annotated by Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle, does an impressive job to highlight the obvious as well as illuminate less well-known aspects of the Kurtzman legacy.  Including everything from high-school woodcuts to his 1988 cover-design for the graphic novel Kings In Design this big volume would embarrass any coffee table with its crazed and crazy riches.

Not only did Kurtzman direct the course and tenor of  social satire, he employed and/or influenced many of its greatest artists and writers. Terry Gilliam came up at Kurtzman’s side where he was first introduced to John Cleese. Both Art Spiegelman and R. Crumb credit their success to Kurtzman. Even Gloria Steinem came up through Kurtzman’s rank ranks. Successful humor enterprises from National Lampoon to The Onion all wear their Harvey Kurtzman influences proudly. Kitchen and Buhle effectively quote a host of big names to find Kurtzman’s esteemed place in culture. On their own, they seem to have some trouble defining his importance. His work, they write,  not only gave us “critical insights that shaped our view of vernacular art and its uses, but it also helped shape the world as it came our of the war in the 1940s by giving us a very different future.”  A discussion of how Kurtzman shaped the future outside of the world of graphic arts and satire is lacking.

Kurtzman’s biography isn’t full of success. He was constantly  looking for ways to make money and remain true to his individual and artistic beliefs. It’s not surprising that anyone who challenges the status quo to the extremes that he did would find tough sailing in America. Kurtzman’s death in 1993 was given short shrift by the mainstream press and might have been entirely lost on the public if not for efforts by Spiegelman and Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker. His reputation was always secure among those he influenced and those who enjoyed bits of his work, even if it was consumed under bed covers by flashlight. This book goes a long way to lift the entire body of his work.–Cabbage Rabbit

Hugh Hefner may have had dozens of girlfriends over his 83 years, but his life-long love is jazz. Hefner declared his undying devotion to swing and big band music when the Rabbit interviewed him in 2008 for an inside story, “Jazz Playboy Style.” With all the recent attention, good and bad, given to Hefner –  Brigitte Berman’s documentary ” Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel that premiered at this year’s Toronto Film Festival, a  forth coming Hollywood biopic to be directed by Brent Ratner, a feature in the New York Times, rumors of financial problems and bad mouthings from former girlfriends — the Rabbit feels its time to revisit Hefner’s jazz legacy. Everyone knows what he did for the middle-class male libido. Let’s not overlook what he’s done for music.

“My own taste in music, as is often the case, was defined by my early experiences,“ he said in an afternoon call from the mansion. “There were two major sources of music in those days, the big band broadcasts on radio and recordings. I had some occasion in high school to take a girlfriend to a ballroom or a theater and see a band. I saw the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, the Harry James Orchestra, a couple of my favorites at the time. I really love the early origins of the music, the Dixieland, blues, and New Orleans music of the ‘20s and ‘30s. One of my favorites is Bix Beiderbecke. We still play a lot of him around here.”

Playboy’s affair with jazz dates to its very first issue in 1953 that included, along with the famous pictorial of “sweetheart of the month” Marilyn Monroe, a profile of the Dorsey Brothers. The magazine introduced its jazz poll in 1957 and its very first interview subject was Miles Davis back in 1962. The panel discussion on the state of jazz in Playboy’s “Jazz and Hi-Fi” issue of February 1964 included the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, Cannonball Adderley, Charles Mingus and Stan Kenton among others. The discussion center on the future of jazz, how it might evolve, where it would be performed and how it would attract new fans. The schisms between old and new, tradition and innovation and even black and white are often visible. Still, the comments somehow seem apt all these years later.

Hefner often brought jazz standouts to his television series Playboy After Dark and Playboy’s Penthouse, appearances that demonstrated his love and knowledge of the music. In a classic scene from a 1959 installment of Playboy’s Penthouse, Hefner introduces the “divine” Sarah Vaugh with the respect and affection of a dedicated jazz fan. He notes that she’s appearing at The Empire Room in NewYork’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, a club not normally associated with jazz. “That’s quite a transition,” Hefner says. The singer agrees, saying she’s trying to attract those listeners as well. Hefner talks of Sarah’s early involvement with Earl Hines pre-bop band that included Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. He lets Vaughn introduce her accompanists. Then he steps back to let her enchant us with “Broken Hearted Melody.”

Or take another example from a 1960 broadcast . Count Basie is at the piano at what appears to be a swank penthouse party (it was actually a studio at Chicago television station WPKB ). Occasionally playing with one hand while cradling a cigarette in the other, Basie accompanies singers Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks and Annie Ross, joined by Basie’s ”favorite son,” singer Joe Williams. They scat along to “The King,” a tune from the Lambert, Hendricks and Ross LP Sing A Song Of Basie. The composition pays homage to jazz royalty:  “Earl “Fatha” Hines, Duke Ellington and, of course, the Count. As the singers improvise a spiraling series of scat lines, a tuxedo-clad Hefner and a host of impeccably dressed men and women bounce along to the irresistible beat. Television has seldom seen a hipper moment.

The magazine, like the culture at large,  has largely ignored jazz over the last several years. And Playboy’s signature jazz festival, held annually at the Hollywood Bowl, has become something other than a celebration of jazz (though it always pays homage). But to find Hefner’s true devotion to the music of his youth, travel back to the inaugural Playboy Jazz Festival, staged at the old Chicago Stadium in 1959, an event that included a long list of the top jazz names then on the planet.

“What made Chicago [Playboy Fest] unique for me was the time frame and the giants that were there. [Jazz critic] Leonard Feather called it the single greatest weekend in the history of jazz. I wasn’t that far from my college and high school years and there I was standing on stage with all the greats that influenced me and were celebrities to me. It’s a moment impossible to recapture.”–Cabbage Rabbit

Jazz-fusion, jazz-funk, jazz-rock…we’ve never been quite sure how to define the music that plugged in around 1969 with Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way and burned out some five years later when “jazz” pretty much left the hyphenate and all the other components—the things that hybridized it—began to short-circuit in our ears. Oh, sure, lots of good electric and cross-cultural improvisational music has been recorded in the intervening 35 years. But nothing quite matches the frantic burst of creativity unleashed by the melding of electric instrumentation, rhythmic innovation, cultural assimilation and avant jazz improvisation, all played with amazing speed and dexterity. We’ll never forget the first time we heard Miles Davis’ Live At the Fillmore East or Tony Williams’ Emergency! or John McLaughlin’s My Goals Beyond or Chick Corea’s first Return To Forever recording. Here was music that matched the era’s cultural shift, played at speeds that paced changing times, that embraced global influence, that turned on to the electricity and promise of those psychedelic days. In the parlance then current, we were blown away.

And then it was over. Miles, as documented on Pangaea and Agharta, melted down and disappeared. McLaughlin and Corea, having recruited massive audiences with Mahavishnu and Return To Forever, began to repeat themselves (to the delight of their fans). I can’t tell you what happened to Tony Williams after the release of the excellent Turn It Over (with Cream bassist Jack Bruce), even as he continued to play like no one else. Like the rest of the fusion movement, he seemed to be reaching for something that was never there.

So forgive the Rabbit for getting all nostalgic—and a bit bitter—about those days of once-and-future glory. The mood’s been brought on by the new McLaughlin-Corea project Five Peace Band, which was recorded live at various European concert locations in the fall of 2008. The double album, while not exactly a rehash of those bygone energies, certainly recalls the spirit of that time—dig the word “Peace” in its name–as well as something of what it became.  Much of  it is good, even great, in surprising ways. And some of it–the minority–disappoints in ways that fusion came to disappoint us. A good part of the music is new, and what isn’t—“It’s About That Time,” Joe Zawinul’s “In A Silent Way,” Jackie McLean’s “Dr. Jackle” and “Someday My Prince Will Come”—all traces back to Miles.

So does the core of the band. Corea and McLaughlin both appeared on In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew as did guest keyboardist Herbie Hancock. Saxophonist Kenny Garrett, who provides much of FPB’s (sounds like a florist, eh?) linear excitement, was a member of Davis’ last bands. Though we’ve never been able to confirm Davis’ alleged comment that Garrett played like he was wearing Sonny Stitt’s “dirty shorts,” we can confirm a certain rank tone to his often suggestive play. Rounded out with frequent Corea collaborator Vinnie Colaiuta on drums and bassist Christian McBride, the quintet has definite super band credentials. But that doesn’t mean it always flies.

The first problem here, as with a lot of post-glory-days fusion, is a tendency to riff. The principles aren’t so much guilty of this in their play as they are in their composing. The main offender is Garrett who too often sets up camp when he should be breaking it. Then there’s the drumming. The best fusion drumming brought funk and poly-rhythms to otherwise straight beats. The worst of it just played it straight and Colaiuta, as quick and agile as he is, often falls into this trap. When he’s challenged with less obvious rhythms, he rises to the occasion with color and shading.

The disc opens promisingly enough with McLaughlin’s “Raju,” its theme moving as quickly as a summer thunderstorm with plenty of lightning-like punctuation. As he does throughout the set, Corea tinkers with his electric sound as much as he does with the lines he improvises. Listen to McLaughlin comp behind the keyboardist and you can’t help but recall the fine, unpredictable backup he provided on Bitches Brew. Corea’s “The Disguise” is one of the recording’s better pieces, with the composer’s quirky acoustic piano making something hopeful of the minor-key theme. McLaughlin’s “New Blues, Old Bruise,” is more bruise than blues but his “Senor C.S.” with melancholy suggestions of “My Funny Valentine” in its introduction, takes to soaring like a wide-winged glider once Colaiuta and McBride get it air borne. The tune also features Garrett’s best play and is the disc’s standout piece.

The other standouts are those that look back, both to the fusion era and past. With Hancock on board, the group makes something new out of the Zawinul tune Miles made famous. McBride’s electric bass on “It’s About That Time” is a monument to what the instrument’s become since  Jaco, Stan Clarke and  others  first broke from the ranks. “Dr. Jackle” is played at a much slower tempo than what’s heard on Milestones and with a bit of stride. Corea thoughtfully introduces “Someday My Prince Will Come,” even as McLaughlin anxiously races around the piano as if that day will never come. By the time they break into the familiar theme, the two, unaccompanied by bass and drums, show how well attuned they are to each other. In a sense, the piece represents what the recording is all about: making something new out of something old. Saying this is one of the best fusion recordings of all time is a lie. Saying it’s one of the best in the last 35 years, well, that’s not saying much. But it is. Who should buy it? You know who you are.—Cabbage Rabbit

The 1960s were all about consciousness raising: middle class white kids discovering the poverty and discrimination suffered by people of color, apolitical guys getting drafted and sent to the war in Asia, young women running up against the patriarchal system and nearly everybody expanding—or blowing—their minds on drugs. This lifting of cultural and political awareness is chronicled in Students For A Democratic Society: A Graphic History. A collection of cartoon vignettes that trace the brief and unruly history of the organization, the book follows the political enlightenment of the decade’s youth from rude awakening and reactionary idealism straight on to disillusionment and escape, all with enough sex, drugs and street demonstrations to keep it entertaining.

Founded in 1960 on the bones of the civil rights movement and the old left, the SDS grew to become the largest and most visible of campus radical groups before splintering into a million disaffected pieces some 10 years later. The group was so democratic, so broadly focused, so decentralized, locally controlled and even anarchic that it really wasn’t much of an organization at all but an umbrella sponsor for strikes, teach-ins, community support projects and acts of resistance. In this, it was truly American.

Most of Students For a Democratic Society was written by Harvey Pekar with illustrations by Gary Dumm—both known for Pekar’s American Splendor series—and is broken into two parts. The first is a history of the national SDS and the ideological tugs that eventually tore it apart. The second is a collection of geographically-based accounts of chapters in Chicago, Madison, Wisconsin, Austin, Texas, Los Angeles and other locales, providing a look at the varieties of the experience. These accounts are largely personal memoirs of political and cultural awakening in which the narrators discover the joys of jazz and marijuana as frequently as they do the evils of the military industrial complex.

Take David Rosheim’s history of the SDS in Iowa City, Iowa in the last years of the decade. Not only does Rosheim tell of ideological struggles within the movement but how knowing a few chords on guitar leads him to a sexually-liberated woman who turns him on to some “quality weed from California” thus radicalizing him in ways he never dreamed possible. Or “My Life At Stake,” Paul Buhle’s story of his own military induction physical in which he holds up a sign urging his fellow draftees to join him in resistance, an act so crazy it wins him a deferment.

There are lessons here for our own times and our resistance to the illicit and costly war that wages on in Iraq. As protests grew in the ‘60s, so did America’s involvement in Vietnam and the radical community began to question its tactics—namely street demonstrations—and lack of success. The frustrations led to violence and disillusionment, best characterized by the SDS splinter group The Weathermen and their call to “bring the war home” with window smashing, police attacks and bombings. That the war in Vietnam outlived the SDS by some five years is a sobering comment on establishment power.

The role of drugs as part of the disillusionment is portrayed here in uncertain terms, beginning with the use of marijuana at meetings (as one of “the left’s great young intellectuals” declares at a meeting “enough talk…let’s smoke some dope!”) and proceeding to disorienting hallucinogens and debilitating needle drugs. In one panel, a former Weatherman declares that he has gone underground as he passes a joint to a friend. The bong, the couch, cats and bimbo in the background imply that the “underground” declaration is, in the parlance of the day, a cop-out.

That’s one of the best attributes of Students For a Democratic Society. It doesn’t glamorize the movement, overstate its accomplishments or ignore the patronization shown on issues of race. The book underscores the pettiness of some of the ideological struggles as well as the second-class status of women within the movement. Still, it can’t help but make exciting times look attractive. The story of a wedding held during the occupation of Columbia University and an innocently-drawn section on the Children’s Strike For Peace highlights the naive atmosphere.

Principal illustrator Gary Dumm’s drawings are straight-ahead, minimally stylized depictions that occasionally exaggerate the zeal of pot-bellied police wielding their batons. His best work is set in the margins of the “Iowa SDS Story,” providing a collage of representative images that march smoothly alongside Buhle’s engaging text. Other illustrators provide contrasting styles, most notably Wes Mode’s cross-hatched, unfocused panels of the police riot against 10,000 demonstrators at the Justice Department in Washington, DC in November of 1969. The jagged depictions genuinely convey the chaos of the event. We know. We were there. –Cabbage Rabbit

Students For A Democratic Society: A Graphic History by Harvey Pekar, Gary Dumm and others; Hill and Wang, hardback, 214 pages, $22

A version of this review first appeared in the OC Weekly

The 1960s were all about peace and love, right? Forty years later, we know better; hindsight and all, though it was well then apparent. The assassinations, the race riots, the Asian War and the authoritarian crack-down on sometimes violent political and cultural protest all took the shine off the age of Aquarius. The decade’s last years were ripe with apocalyptic events: the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, the gone-wrong Altamont concert, the Manson murders. Let’s face it, Woodstock was an aberration.

For years, the hysterical right has been blaming a host of social ills on the decade’s if-it-feels-good-do-it morality. Demagogues claim that the 1960s gave birth to a kind of cultural debasement, crudity and self-absorbed indulgence that continues to this day. Silly them. They still want to blame the hippies. Those traits, categorized collectively as “human,” have been with us for thousands of years. They’re only pinned on someone when the status quo needs a scapegoat for its repression and institutional violence. Using famous and not-so figures from the ‘60s, Zachary Lazar’s fascinating novel Sway examines the decade’s ugly side, claiming that evil is biological and cultural. It springs from both nature and nurture. It mostly thrives on indifference. And we’re all capable of it.

Tracing the rise of the Rolling Stones, the life of underground film maker Kenneth Anger and the relationship between small-time rock musician Bobby Beausoleil and Charles Manson, the book reasserts an old lesson: violence begets violence, even when it’s separated by continents. Sway exploits actual events to offer a fictional account of the decade’s truly spoiled promise. Lazar takes the colorful, intersecting threads of his characters’ lives and weaves them tightly into dark cloth. As entertaining as it is thoughtful, Sway takes us back to the day even as it touches something timeless.

It’s not as if we don’t see disaster coming. Indeed, knowing ahead that the Manson family will paint walls with blood and that Altamont will end in gang murder has the effect of pushing the preceding events forward. Lazar introduces small acts of cruelty—Beausoleil’s treatment of his girlfriend, the brawls at the Stones’ early gigs, the spankings Anger endures from his father—to foreshadow larger acts of cruelty and violence. Anger reacts to his sadistic upbringing with depictions of devil worship and acts of masochism. Beausoleil acts on ugly subconscious whims while convincing himself he’s resistant to the manipulations of the man haunting his thoughts. Mick, Keith and the others are aloof, even as Brian Jones drowns. Delusion takes on a palpable presence.

There are times that Lazar seems sympathetic to his characters, especially to Anger and Anita Pallenberg, the love interest of first Brian, then Keith. But he largely remains detached from the evil that shadows his tale, exposing it from a distance, not judging his characters but letting their actions speak loudly. The Vietnam war serves as constant background and Lazar uses it to effect. Beausoleil thinks “the war had somehow permeated everything, even things that had no relation to the war itself.” The Stones, as if going to battle, arrive at Altamont in a Huey helicopter just like the ones used in Vietnam. The class struggle in England serves the same purpose. Early on, we see the Stones living in a filthy squat, cuddling with each other at night to fend off the cold. Beausoleil bums his way through life, falling in with Anger whose life is little better. The choice between conformity and rebellion is constant. Jagger chooses between singing or pursuing economics. The decisions seems arbitrary, or worse, ordained. Manson family member Susan Atkins is quoted saying, “You didn’t think about what you were doing, you did it.”

The most innocent and indifferent character is Anger, who accepts his sexuality and finds a way past the moral and cultural confusion by pursuing his art. The Stones seem clueless, surprised by their own success, trading girlfriends like comic books and playing, just barely, at fatherhood. The relationship between Brian, Keith and Pallenberg seems especially dysfunctional.

Would Lazar’s book be as hypnotic if it were based on fictional characters? Hard to say, but my youthful attraction to the Stones certainly made me want to find out what Lazar thought was in their heads. The historical legitimacy makes for uncomfortable reading at times, heightened by actual events: the Stones 1967 bust, the Manson murder of music instructor Gary Hinman, the chaotic, Lucifer-laden content of Anger’s films and the Stones’ participation in them. These bits of reality make Lazar’s words stronger and his premise more authentic. But you can’t help wonder what Lazar might have gained—or lost—if he had just made the whole thing up. And you can’t help but wonder if this really was the ways it was. –Cabbage Rabbit

A version of this review first appeared in the OC Weekly