Joseph Mark Glazner's upbeat memoir, California 1963-1967 Spaceship Earth, recreates the wild and crazy early years of the counterculture through the eyes of a college student, promising young writer, and conflicted war resister living on the edge of Hollywood and the music industry while trying to make sense of the sexually charged, anything goes California of the 1960s.
In his words:
"Everything was changing, and nothing could stop it.
Optimism and rage lived side-by-side with sexual revolution, mind-expanding drugs, and music that changed the world.
Friendships promising to last forever competed for our attention with soaring racial unrest and a war tearing America apart.
Living in California between the last weeks of President Kennedy's White House (1963) and the Summer of Love (1967) was like looking out the window of a spaceship and catching a glimpse of the future. That spaceship was planet earth. We were traveling together, destination unknown.
The rules were changing. We felt it. We tried to define it and redefine ourselves to make more sense of the best and worst parts of the journey.
We were desperate and curious enough to try anything. No matter what we did, nothing would ever be the same again."
Glazner draws on hundreds of letters from the 1960s, dozens of interviews, headline news, and personal memories to bring to life the terror of the Watts Riots, the promise of the world's first Love-In, his own family's struggles back East, and famous and not-so-famous people who influenced his writing and the one irrevocable, life-changing decision he had to make about the Vietnam War and his own future.
For those who missed the 1960s or were there but don't remember them, meet some of the foot soldiers of the counterculture as well as some of the innovators and young black sheep of the music industry and Hollywood through Glazner's eyes, including Allen Ginsberg, Edie Sedgwick, Beatles' insider Derek Taylor, underground publisher Paul Krassner, artist Paul Thek, and many others.
California 1963-1967 Spaceship Earth is an antiwar story with a happy ending and the prequel to Glazner's first memoir Life After America.
