Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll: The Rise of America’s 1960s Counterculture

by Robert C. Cottrell

Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll: The American Counterculture of the 1960s offers a unique examination of the cultural flowering that enveloped the United States during that early postwar decade. Robert C. Cottrell provides an enthralling view of the counterculture, beginning with an examination of American bohemia, the Lyrical Left of the pre-WWII era, and the hipsters. He delves into the Beats, before analyzing the counterculture that emerged on both the East and West coasts, but soon cropped up in the American heartland as well. Cottrell delivers something of a collective biography, through an exploration of the antics of seminal countercultural figures Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, and Ken Kesey. Cottrell also presents fascinating chapters covering "the magic elixir of sex," rock 'n roll, the underground press, Haight-Ashbury, the literature that garnered the attention of many in the counterculture, Monterey Pop, the Summer of Love, the Death of Hippie, the March on the Pentagon, communes, Yippies, Weatherman, Woodstock, the Manson family, the women's movement, and the decade's legacies.

Genres: History

452 pages, Hardcover

First published March 19, 2015

About the author

Robert C. Cottrell is professor of history and American studies at Cal State Chico and has written over twenty books, including Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll.

Reviews

[Robert S · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cottrell's Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll is a look back at the rise of the "counterculture" of the 1960's in the United States and the major figures that influenced it. While Cottrell's work does a good job of extensively covering major players like Kesey, its nothing particularly new and doesn't add any focus on the parts of the counterculture other than what you typically see on Wikipedia or a MTV documentary. Cottrell has a lot of great information here, but organizing it by type of information (musicians, books, etc) ends up with the reader jumping around a number of years and the same figures appearing throughout the same chapters.

If you haven't read anything about the subject before, this is a decent place to start.