Rock Tao

Author: David Meltzer

Publisher: Lithic Press (2022)

Rock Tao is a rambling cohesive rock-n-roll poetics diary originally written in 1965 as Meltzer listened to KEWB in San Francisco transcribing lyrics of top hit songs. Along the way, he samples scientists, philosophers, psychologists, musicians, starlets… figures who defined what the sixties would come to be and how they would be remembered. Rock Tao is penetrating in its critical view of the consumer culture taking shape in America. Meltzer said, "…I began examining what is famous in America as a way to sight those archetypal inventions peculiar to the land." He presciently anticipated the homogenizing walmartification of how the country would develop over the next 50 years.