James Wierzbicki lives in the Australian town of Coober Pedy. For twenty year, he was the classical music critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other American newspapers, and for another twenty years a professor at the University of California-Irvine, the University of Michigan, and the University of Sydney.

This book explores the complex ethos of the American Sixties, as manifest in various forms of the period's music. Its five main chapters deal in detail with developments in folk, rock, jazz, avant-garde, and classical music, but the chapters' primary subject matter is never the music itself but, rather, the conditions under which the music existed and the ways in which the music related to the Sixties' most urgent political, socioeconomic, and psychological concerns. During the Sixties-defined as that prosperous yet troubled period between the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the U.S. military's retreat from Vietnam in 1975-Americans of all ages and of all political persuasions took seriously a great many things. These include the genres of music discussed here, genres that at least to their participants arguably 'mattered' far more during the Sixties than music had/has ever 'mattered,' before or since.

Chapter 1: Prologue: The Sixties.- Chapter 2: Folk.- Chapter 3: Rock.- Chapter 4: Jazz.- Chapter 5: Avant-Garde.- Chapter 6: Classical.- Chapter 7: Epilogue: Aftermath.