Arguably the most enduring aphorism about the 1960s is the often repeated “If you can remember the 1960s you weren’t there.” The line is a clever little pseudo-koan that incorporates a double punch—a putdown of all those straight types who stayed out of the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll of those allegedly halcyon days (and have the brain cells to prove it) and an implicit self-congratulation to the more adventurous, who gave themselves so industriously to that liberated trinity, and most particularly to item two, the great pharmacy of “mind-expanding” drugs that were both the currency and the signature of what passed for liberation in those now antique days.
It also poses an epistemological quandary. If those who remember the 1960s were not there, and if those who were there can’t remember them, who is to tell the story of those days? Fortunately, or unfortunately, the problem is only superficial. The 1960s are the iconic decade of the boomers, and the boomers are...
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