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THE MANSION ON THE HILL Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen and the Head-On Collision of Rock and Commerce Fred Goodman, Times Books, 448 pages, Nonfiction if you've ever passed judgment on someone based solely on their musical preferences, you'll appreciate the candor with which Fred Goodman, in the preface to his book "Mansion on the Hill," recalls the elaborate stereotyping system that a nascent rock 'n' roll industry afforded him in his youth: "A passion for a perfectly acceptable group like Steppenwolf showed a certain genial rebelliousness, but suggested a lack of depth; a girl who listened to a lot of Joni Mitchell could probably be talked into bed, but you'd regret it later"; and "anyone with a record collection that traced the blues further back than John Mayall and the Yardbirds was an intellectual." "It was," Goodman concludes 30 years later, "a remarkably accurate system." But now that the music industry represents everything that rock 'n' roll once rebelled against, Goodman argues, that "secret language" of music no longer exists. The question left to rock's once-faithful followers is: How can rock 'n' roll remain truly authentic, when its perceived (and often contrived) authenticity has become its most marketable attribute? In attempting to answer that question, Goodman steers the spotlight away from the artists and instead details the careers of several music industry moguls -- including Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan's first manager, Jon Landau, Bruce Springsteen's longtime mentor and manager, and David Geffen -- who, with cancerous loyalty, devoted themselves to their clients and built entire empires around them. Nowhere is the relationship between art and commerce more suspect -- and the tension created by keeping them separate more evident -- than in the relationship between Landau and Springsteen. While Goodman is not the first to question just how much Landau controls Springsteen's work, he tracks Landau with particularly merciless scrutiny and follows his career from Rolling Stone writer who once declared Springsteen to be the "rock and roll future" to MC5 producer who convinced the band members to drop their radical politics and title their album "Back in the USA" to current manufacturer of Springsteen's populist image. Seeing how easily Landau shifted gears in order to capitalize on the zeitgeist, it's easy to understand Goodman's disillusionment. As Ray Riepen, Boston's former alternative media guru, puts it in "Mansion": "We believed in 1966 that maybe smart people were going to get control of things -- not just guys who were 'b'ness' men ...We were naive, but that's what we thought: Guys who were smart and had taste would get control." "Mansion on the Hill" amply demonstrates how, and why, that never happened. Feb. 11, 1997 -- Cynthia Joyce Bookmark: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html