In Search of the Lost Chord

1967 and the Hippie Idea

"Antiwar radicals, recoiling from soullessness, challenged the church of technocratic rationality. Taking this challenge seriously, recovering the mood of an extended moment, requires beginning earlier and ending later than 1968. Cultural upheaval cannot be confined by the calendar. At least one contribution to the literature, the music industry executive Danny Goldberg's In Search of the Lost Chord, treats 1967 as the defining moment when 'the hippie idea' still held transformational promise, and countercultural protest had not yet succumbed to police violence, undercover provocateurs, or media caricature--while 1968, in contrast, was a dark time of assassinations, riots, and the resurgence of the right."
--New York Review of Books

"Out now in paperback, In Search of the Lost Chord contains a good bit of reflection and nostalgia, not from the perspective of a participant in the events of 1967 but from a teenager observer in New York, feeling the vibes and watching as the world tilted on a different angle."
--Shepherd Express

Selected praise for the hardcover edition of In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea:

"A legendary steward of the hip musical world...Goldberg plunges into a thorough, panoramic account of the culture, politics, media, music and mores of the year to demolish the idea that it was trivial...Goldberg's deep purchase on his subject and his storytelling ease make it fresh."
--Sheila Weller, New York Times Book Review

"[Goldberg's] newest book, In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea, explores and fuses together the musical, political and spiritual revolutions of the time into a narrative about a moment when 'there was an instant sense of tribal intimacy one could have even with a stranger.'"
--Rolling Stone

"Goldberg brings a personal passion that itself illustrates the lasting resonance of the hippie era."
--Publishers Weekly

"Written with the acuity of someone who lived through the times he writes about, this is a thoughtful and wide-ranging exploration not just of one year in history but also of a culture and a way of thinking that continues to reverberate today."
--Booklist

In Search of the Lost Chord is a subjective history of 1967, the year Danny Goldberg graduated from high school. It is also a refreshing and new analysis of the era; by looking at not only the political causes, but also the spiritual, musical, and psychedelic movements, Goldberg provides a unique perspective on how and why the legacy of 1967 lives on today.

1967 was the year of the release of the Beatles's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and of debut albums from the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin, among many others. 1967 was also the year of the Summer of Love; the year that millions of now-illegal LSD tabs flooded America; Muhammad Ali was convicted of avoiding the draft; Martin Luther King Jr. publicly opposed the war in Vietnam; Stokely Carmichael championed Black Power; Israel won the Six-Day War; and Che Guevara was murdered. It was the year that hundreds of thousands of protesters vainly attempted to levitate the Pentagon. It was the year the word "hippie" peaked and died, and the Yippies were born.

Exhaustively researched and informed by interviews with Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Tom Hayden, Cora Weiss, Grace Slick, and others, In Search of the Lost Chord is a mosaic of seminal moments in the psychedelic, spiritual, rock-and-roll, and political protest cultures of 1967.

This paperback edition includes a brand-new afterword by the author, along with twenty photographs by Peter Simon.