The phrase "Tomorrow Never Knows" is rich with meaning. On the one hand it conveys the tragic sense that back in 1966, we didn't know that "tomorrow" would bring not liberation but two decades of Reaganomics. But "Tomorrow Never Knows" can also be understood in a very different sense: Now that it is "tomorrow," we must concede that we don't really know what happened in the sixties--we are stuck with distorted ideological images. In particular, we tend to view the sixties with ironic detachment, consider the utopian hopes of the decade with embarrassment or with "a sardonic smile." In thinking about the sixties, Bromell wants us to resist the "irony-plated armature of academic discourse"--a wonderful phrase in its own right.

Of course, many writers have resisted ironic detachment. Historians and others have described the sixties as an explosion of democracy, a youthful challenge to established authority in the state, the university and the family, a renewal that, in its sweep and intensity, ranks beside the eras of Andrew Jackson and the New Deal. SDS occupies the center of this history for many because it articulated the crucial concept of the decade, "participatory democracy." But the personal quest for a meaningful life is typically not emphasized in these studies--a quest that Bromell suggests was often experienced not simply as liberation from traditional restrictions but as a burden, a weight.

"The Weight," the song The Band sang, is also full of meaning in Bromell's reading. The song concludes "She put the load right on me." But what was this weight? Was it the consciousness of the historic responsibility young people had taken on to speak truth to power, to throw themselves against the gears, to stop the war machine and the machinery of racism? Bromell suggests that it was also something deeper: the weight of the discovery that psychedelic drugs weren't necessarily so benign and blissful--that they unearthed, in Bromell's words, "something fundamentally malign at the very heart of things."

Jimi Hendrix, we are told, spent weeks working on his version of Dylan's 1968 song "All Along the Watchtower," another key to the era--especially the opening line: "There must be some way out of here." The line referred of course to Vietnam, but more broadly to many evils in the world: "businessmen they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth." It's tempting to conclude that "life is but a joke," but Hendrix and Dylan didn't want us to--instead they said "let us not talk falsely now, the hour's getting late." That sense of urgency is not unique to the sixties--today, Bromell writes, teenagers still feel trapped in an evil world they didn't make; they still yearn for a meaningful life; they "still stand there on the watchtower and wait and wonder."

Luckily for his readers, Bromell is a historian, and he knows that young people in many generations have asked similar questions. Emerson, for example, described youthful slackers in the 1840s, who dropped out of "common labors and competitions of the market" because they had had a private experience that transformed their consciousness. Emerson quotes one saying he realized "I had played the fool with fools all this time" and had been "a selfish member of a selfish society." He realized that "my life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world." And he concluded, "I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith for continuous daylight."

What made the 1960s different from earlier generations, Bromell observes, is the tremendous broadening of the number of participants engaged in this quest. This broadening--facilitated by the commercial world of rock music--was fundamentally democratic. Just a decade earlier Allen Ginsberg spoke of "the best minds of my generation," but they were only a handful of people. Now Bob Dylan sang with warm good humor, "Everybody must get stoned"--and tens of millions asked how to transform a flash-of-lightning insight into continuous daylight.

Of course, cultural conservatives have devoted considerable energy to attacking this cultural politics. Allan Bloom thought Woodstock resembled Nuremberg; Francis Fukuyama argued that the counterculture did the most "harm" to "the weakest members of society...the black community"; and Daniel Bell wrote that rock music, like the Beatles' later work, made it "impossible to hear oneself think, and that may indeed have been its intention."

At the same time the forces of commercial culture continue to colonize the sixties. VH-1, the music video cable channel owned by Viacom, just named Revolver the greatest album in the history of rock. Sixties rock provides the soundtrack to countless TV ads--I still haven't recovered from Michael Jackson selling the sound of John Lennon singing "Revolution" to Nike for a sneakers commercial more than a decade ago, or from Bob Dylan himself selling the rights to "The Times They Are A-Changin'" to the accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand. (We do have a few holdouts: Springsteen, R.E.M., Tom Petty, Neil Young, U2, Pearl Jam, Phish and Tom Waits--here's hoping they never "stare into the vacuum of his eyes/And say, do you want to make a deal?")

Meanwhile, in academia, Emerson and Whitman have been admitted to the pantheon, but you better not write a serious book about Dylan until you're tenured. Nick Bromell's Tomorrow Never Knows brings us closer to the heart of what we call the sixties than any other book I know.

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