Take a trip through rock 'n' roll's haziest, craziest period, beginning with the Beatles and Bob Dylan "turning on" in a New York hotel, and continuing on through two-decades of wonderful, colorful, history-changing music. From psychedelic Woodstock warriors like Hendrix and the Jefferson Airplane to psycho-stereo adventurers Pink Floyd; from the post-hippie bliss of Neil Young and cosmic cowboy Willie Nelson to the druggy blues of Black Sabbath and the hemp-happy rhythms of Peter Tosh and Bob Marley, Out of Our Heads gleefully celebrates music's most creative minds - and their chemically induced expansion. This is the rare book that is unafraid to bask in the groovy good times of rock 'n' roll without the politically correct preaching that has helped stifle the party. To all those who have ever listened to Dark Side of the Moon on a pair of headphones and said "Wow": this book is for you.
Welcome to my Author Central! I'm a Canadian writer with six books to my credit, whose topics range from rock 'n' roll to personal memoir, and from speculative fiction to cultural criticism. Currently I reside in my birthplace of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario (US translation: Flint Michigan or Youngstown Ohio), after twenty years of living in larger centers like Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver (think New York, Washington, and San Francisco). My shorter pieces have been published in the Vancouver Sun daily newspaper, the Vancouver Review literary quarterly, the US social science journal Skeptic, and in a number of anthologies.
What will you find in my books? My literary models are George Orwell (for his clarity of thought and power of rhetoric), F. Scott Fitzgerald (for his almost musical sense of rhythm and diction), and critic Stanley Kauffmann (an impeccable judge of the unexamined ideas and contradictions underlying a given work or experience) - but I also try to make my writing accessible to readers encountering my subjects for the first time. If there's a recurring theme to my work, it may be something to do with the relevance of the past in the present, the importance of cultural literacy, and a detached or introverted take on the noisy to-and-fro of modern and postmodern discourse.
At any rate (to use a pet phrase of Orwell's), curl up in a quiet outer or inner space with one of these titles, and get to know me through them. My words and my thoughts are waiting to engage with you.
