(Free Press)

www.simonandschuster.com

It may be hard to imagine in this era where fluff (Blender), snark (Idolator) and celebrity jerk-off (Rolling Stone ) pass for music criticism, but once upon a time rock journalism had that rarest of qualities: to inspire and provoke, to make you think about both the big picture and the veiled subtext. Mikal Gilmore was - is - one such avatar of that lofty ideal. He earned a significant degree of acclaim in 1995 with his moving memoir Shot in the Heart, about his late brother and convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, but long before that he'd been probing the underbelly of the music world, getting his start in the early ‘70s for Rolling Stone (!) and other counterculture journals.

Stories Done isn't, thematically speaking, a successor to Gilmore's previous collection of music writings, 1999's Night Beat; that, Gilmore has said, was an attempt to draw "an outline, a shadow, of rock & roll history," while this new anthology, comprising mostly work from 2002 onward, is a "look at what was at risk in [the 1960s], through the lives of a handful of notable people and events that were elemental to the period's arts and arguments." To that end, four relevant repeats from Night Beat appear (about Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers) along with two previously unpublished studies on Dylan and Leonard Cohen, with other key entries including a look at Haight-Ashbury and the forces that killed the hippie dream, the creation of Sgt. Pepper and how that spelled the beginning of the end for the Beatles, an unusually insightful retelling of the Pink Floyd saga, and a deeply moving elegy for Hunter S. Thompson.

These are all well-worn stories, of course. Yet what makes a story worth retelling is how universal its resonance remains, and the ability of the reteller to bring its characters to life once again. Given how the echoes and repercussions of the art, cultural and political milieus of the era still thunder down the years - Gilmore sagely points out, for example, that the rise of contemporary conservatism was rooted in a push from the American subconscious to never again cede our institutions to upstart, boundary-testing youth like we had in the ‘60s - there's no question we can still learn from the lessons of the past.

And in Gilmore's hands, those lessons are sketched out with an uncommon elegance and specificity. At the conclusion of a piece on the Doors that nimbly places the band at the crest of the youth-culture zeitgeist, Gilmore notes Jim Morrison's decline into alcoholism and how he finally succumbed to the abyss. "Just the same," writes the author, "Morrison had the determination to overcome his self-negation through a body of dark and beautiful work that, some thirty-five-years-plus past his death, endures - and still heartens - with good reason. Let's give him his due, even as we hope for our own kinder ends. After all, he had the grace to sing to young people in this land, in times when they were treated as insane children, desperately in need of some stranger's hand."

Lines like the above, and scores more dotting Stories Done, can take your breath away. And that, my friends, is what great literature is all about. FRED MILLS