Danny Goldberg > Quotes

“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
― Danny Goldberg, In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea

“I keep returning to the last chorus of All Apologies, where Kurt sang: 'In the sun, I feel as one / All in all is all we are.'

And to these lines from his journals: 'No true talent is fully organic. Yet the obviously superior talented have not only control of study, but that extra special little gift at birth fueled by passion. A built-in, totally spiritual, unexplainable, new age, fucking cosmic, energy-bursting love.”
― Danny Goldberg, Serving the Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain

“1967 was the year of the Monterey International Pop Festival, which introduced Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Ravi Shankar, and Janis Joplin to a big American rock audience. Hendrix, Joplin (as part of Big Brother and the Holding Company), Pink Floyd, the Velvet Underground, Country Joe and the Fish, the Doors, the Grateful Dead, and Sly & the Family Stone all released their debut albums that year.”
― Danny Goldberg, In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea

“In 1967, previously esoteric ideas burst briefly into the center of mass culture, influencing the thoughts of millions more people than any American counterculture before or since. Changes in the technology of stereo recordings (and a newly portable ability to hear them), FM radio, and the mimeograph machine fostered “underground” media at an unprecedented level. The”
― Danny Goldberg, In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea

“On the other hand, perhaps some chose not to talk about certain nuances that seemed too fragile to survive in the public air. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James suggests that one quality of a mystical experience is the impossibility of describing it. Yet hints can be found.”
― Danny Goldberg, In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea

“David Crosby, Paul Kantner, and Robin Williams are among those who have been credited with the saying, “If you remember the sixties, then you weren’t really there.”
― Danny Goldberg, In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea

“What I mean by “the hippie idea” is the internal essence of the tribal feeling separate and apart from the external symbols which soon became overused, distorted, co-opted, and thus, understandably, satirized. The conceit is that if you subtract long hair, hip language, tie-dyed clothing, beads, buttons, music, demonstrations, and even drugs, there was still a distinctive notion of what it meant to be a happy and good person, and a sense of connection to others was the invisible force behind those things.”
― Danny Goldberg, In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea

“It was also the year in which the Beatles released the singles “All You Need Is Love” (introduced via the world’s first global satellite TV transmission) and “Strawberry Fields Forever,” in addition to the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Rolling Stone began publishing in 1967 and “underground rock radio” started broadcasting.”
― Danny Goldberg, In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea

“I refer to a “lost chord” in the title of this book because whatever “it” was in 1967 was the result of dozens of separate, sometimes contradictory “notes” from an assortment of political, spiritual, chemical, demographic, historical, and media influences that collectively created a unique energy. It should go without saying that no two people perceived the late sixties in the same way, and that the space limitations of a single volume and my own myopia require me to leave out far more than I include.”
― Danny Goldberg, In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea

“By the end of the summer of 1966, several thousand hippies were living in the Haight, and in the fall a new publication called the San Francisco Oracle appeared. During its brief but glorious eighteen months of existence, the Oracle was as definitive a document as would ever exist of the messianic aspirations of the Haight-Ashbury scene.”
― Danny Goldberg, In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea

“Martin Luther King Jr.’s devotion to Christianity, Muhammad’s Ali commitment to Islam, Timothy Leary’s reverence for The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the connection to Buddhism and Hinduism that inspired Allen Ginsberg and many of the other beats, the fascination of the Beatles with meditation and the Hare Krishna movement, the metaphysical metaphors in many Bob Dylan songs, the guitar solos of Jimi Hendrix, the ripple effect of John Coltrane, and millions of individual psychedelic experiences framed the counterculture of the sixties with a level of mysticism far more intense and meaningful than had been prevalent in the previous postwar era.”
― Danny Goldberg, In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea

“Yet, for all that happened in this pivotal year, my focus is on the feeling, not on the calendar, and there are moments integral to the story that occurred both before and after 1967.”
― Danny Goldberg, In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea