OUT OF PRINT!

IN THE SIXTIES by Barry Miles, Pimlico/Random House, 2003

Out of print books are recyclable and inexpensive. If you don’t mind reading on a screen, they can often be downloaded for free. No virtual strings attached.

Barry Miles knows a heck of a lot of people in London, not to mention he’s probably the best-known English rock biographer in existence and a leading expert on the Beats.

His memoir, In the Sixties, written with a light touch and deeply substantive text, is not only an evocative recollection of a time in Miles’ life, but a rich tapestry of descriptions that depict London morphing from post WWII drabness into a rainbow colored scene soon emulated around the globe. And it’s such a delight to read a memoir by a superbly accomplished writer like Miles, a book so opposite to the numbingly generic ghostwritten or “as told to’ memoirs we’re flooded with today.

It was at the Indica Bookstore and art gallery (co-owned by Miles), where Yoko first met John. Paul McCartney was crashing with girlfriend Jane Asher at her parents’ house, and that’s where Paul told Miles that the melody for “Yesterday” came to him in a dream. Most interesting are the accounts of many now famous artists back when they were just kids hanging around London, couch surfing, getting by, getting high, scrambling for gigs, and acting like regular people, because they were. Miles writes, “The Sixties began in black and white and ended in colour.” What a palette it was.