Cover of There's a Riot Going On by Peter DoggettThe wisdom of cliché reminds us that if you can remember the ’60s, you weren’t really there. If this ancient joke freights any truth, then the case for the existence of Peter Doggett’s exhaustive history of that storied decade is self-evident. There’s A Riot Going On grandly subtitled “Revolutionaries, Rock Stars And The Rise And Fall Of 60s Counter-Culture”, could well serve as a one-volume aide-mémoire for any irretrievably burned-out acid casualty struggling to recall what the hell it was he did 40 years ago that continues to fuel such a vast canon of beard-stroking analysis. Readers with a less vested interest, however, are likely to find themselves musing at length on the inadvertent irony of the title. This dauntingly hefty tome is everything but riotous, and might have been better suited by the heading “There’s A Really, Really Long Lecture With No Readily Discernible Point Going On”.

Doggett previously acquitted himself well with Are You Ready For The Country?, a fine study of country rock and its place in the cultural firmament of the American South. He should, perhaps, have chosen similarly limited scope when taking on the ’60s (Mark Kurlansky restricted himself to one year of the decade with 2004’s 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, and still cleared 400 pages). Confronted with such a vast, diverse landscape – Berkeley to Biafra, Paris to Prague, Saigon to San Francisco, Etcetera to Etcetera – and such a fabulous cast of heroes, freaks, geniuses and grotesques, Doggett rather flounders. No single figure holds centre stage long enough to make a lasting impression, and while the leaping from location to location may intend to evoke the sprawling chaos of the epoch, it’s the historian’s job to put things into context.

The trouble is that Doggett isn’t a historian. He’s a rock journalist – not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with that, or with those of our ilk venturing beyond the confines of verse, chorus and middle eight. And even accepting the prejudices that a rock’n’roll fan would bring to such a book, and conceding that rock’n’roll was important to this era like it had never been before, never has been since and never will be again, some balance is required. The minor and risible New York rock group David Peel & The Lower East Side grace the index 15 times; the 1968 Parisian student revolutionary figurehead Daniel Cohn-Bendit isn’t mentioned once.

Doggett’s indefatigable fossicking has unearthed some gems – his illumination of volatile, underrated folk troubadour Phil Ochs, for example, abetted by interviews with the late singer’s brother, is excellent. However, he’s hamstrung occasionally by moments of sloppiness (the Vietnam War did not, as he blithely asserts, claim “hundreds of thousands” of American lives: American combat losses were 58,226) and throughout by prose proceeding in the passionless plod of a textbook. Characters as unmakeuppable as Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and Huey Newton, to name but three, demand if not necessarily deserve to be imbued with a little more life.

The overwhelming impression of the ’60s conveyed by the book is one of failure. It’s commonplace for elderly hippies now to bewail the appropriation of the soundtracks of their dreams as commercial jingles, but the game was up a long time ago. All the ideals, the passion, the music in the cafés at night and revolution in the air, that entire glorious gilded decade of peace, love, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. . . and in 1972, America re-elected Nixon. This tragedy provides the epilogue of Doggett’s account, and his brief valedictory essay exploring the reasons for it is terrific. By that point, though, There’s A Riot Going On has been, like the decade it narrates, a long, bewildering ride to a thoroughly depressing destination. ■

There's a Riot Going On is published by Canongate