BOOK REVIEW : Memoirs of an Icon of the Counterculture : SOMETHING GOOD FOR A CHANGE: Essays on Peace Through Living, <i> by Wavy Gravy</i> . St. Martin’s. $18.95; 288 pages

If you were born between 1945 and 1955, then “Something Good for a Change” by Wavy Gravy may strike you as trippy, richly nostalgic, even inspiring.

If, on the other hand, you are already fed up with the mythification of the ‘60s, Wavy Gravy’s oh-wow-man memoir may come across as a caricature of the worst excesses of what we still like to call the counterculture.

“I think 18-year-olds should have legal access to mushrooms and peyote in a controlled environment,” writes the self-styled high priest of the First Church of Fun. “It could be like having a bar mitzvah or first communion, with the drug as sacrament.”

Wavy Gravy, in case you’ve forgotten or if you never knew in the first place, was a peripheral but vivid figure of the Woodstock era. Born Hugh Romney in 1936, he was already over 30 when the Summer of Love came along, but he managed to reinvent himself as court jester of the counterculture, an early cohort of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, founder of the Hog Farm commune, master of ceremonies at Woodstock, and something of a living icon.

Nowadays, as we learn in Wavy Gravy’s rambling reminiscences, he is devoted to the restless search for “some kind of right livelihood”--he runs a performing arts camp in Northern California, he clowns for kids with cancer, he shows up at sit-ins in a Santa Claus suit, he raises money for the Seva Foundation, which sponsors blindness-prevention programs in the Third World.

“Something Good” flashes back and forth in time in an appropriately psychedelic fashion. At one moment, Wavy Gravy is invoking the emblematic scenes of the ‘60s, and a moment later he is explaining how he has made sense of his own life in the ‘90s.

“We are standing squarely in the center of the ‘60s and assessing the cosmos,” he recalls of the day when we all convinced ourselves that the Big One was going to sever California from the North American continent. “Each of us asking our higher selves that colorful, kooky California kind of question: Are we about to fall into the Pacific Ocean or is Edgar Cayce full of it?”

Then, abruptly, Wavy Gravy is back in the here and now, raising money for his good works by putting on a concert at Carnegie Hall and offering his ever-so-practical advice on the politics of philanthropy. “Never count your money till it’s spent,” he advises. “Never, ever book a show on Yom Kippur.”

Above all, “Something Good for a Change” is an unabashed exercise in name-dropping. David Crosby is “the Cos.” Baba Ram Dass is “the Dass man.” Bob Dylan wrote “Hard Rain” on Wavy Gravy’s “rusty old Remington” in a room above the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village. Lenny Bruce gave Wavy Gravy a yarmulke on the eve of his own death: “Howdy Goyim!” Ben and Jerry even named a flavor of ice cream after him.

Wavy Gravy comes across as an aging flower child, to be sure, and--by calculation--a clown with a big red nose and a heart of gold. He goes on and on about his various surgeries and a near-death experience. He tends to circle around on himself, and tells us more than once how his wife, Bonnie Jean, changed her name to Jahara at the direction of her Sufi master. And he spouts just the kind of sappy folk-wisdom that you’d expect from a hippie who refuses to grow up.

“Feed yourself and your family,” he intones, “feed the world.”

Wavy Gravy may be a comic figure--and quite intentionally so--but he is not a laughable or pitiable one. And his message, if sloppy and sentimental, reminds us of the compassion and good intentions that were the very best qualities of the counterculture.

“You understand, when you get to the very bottom of the human soul--to the place where the nit slams up against the grit and you’re sinking pretty bad--somehow you manage to reach down and help someone who is sinking worse than you are,” he writes. “Well, that’s when everybody gets high and you don’t need any LSD.”