REVISED AND EXPANDED HERE, THIS PIECE ORIGINATED AS AN "ORAL ESSAY" FOR THE COSMOETICA OMNIVERSICA INTERVIEW SERIES More or less officially unveiled with the first New York appearance of the Ornette Coleman Quartet at the Five Spot Café in the fall of 1959, free jazz or new black music, space music, new thing, anti-jazz or abstract jazz as it would variously be labeled, gave new dimension to the perennial "where"s the melody?" complaint against jazz. For most of the uninitiated, what the Coleman group presented on its opening night was in fact sheer cacophony. Four musicians a saxophonist, trumpeter, bassist...
rock—no Kubrickian monolith buried there to validate the project. It was disappointments like these, disappointments equal in their size to the size of our ambition, that took the heart out of the "60s.

It wasn"t long afterwards, remember, that mind-expanding drugs began to be replaced—and necessarily—by mood-elevating stimulants like cocaine.

Beyond the moon shot it was just the motor revolving down after it"s been shut off. I mean the "60s are commonly judged to have ended when we finally withdrew from Vietnam. But they"d already expired at the foot of the Pentagon and in the deserts of the moon.