A fast-paced, fun, and sometimes brutal look at America's most volatile and creative year in music - 1969: a time of euphoria and devastation, freedom and assassination, revolution and retribution, moonwalks and sit-ins, love-ins and race riots, sex, drugs, and guns. Idyllic college campuses became killing fields and inner cities went up in flames as the drumbeat of popular music tried to drown out the drums of war. 1969 was birthed through the visions and violence of 1968. By the Time We Got to Woodstock breathlessly documents a year that saw more music-as-manifesto and rock-as-revolution than ever before. At one mad outdoor party after another - from Miami to Denver, and from Woodstock to Altamont - cracks in the promised hippie utopia quickly turned to canyons. This was the year that saw the Beatles go supernova while Bob Dylan hightailed it to Nashville. From the Byrds, Joan Baez, Jimi Hendrix, the Airplane, and Janis Joplin to the Velvet Underground, the Mothers of Invention, Funkadelic, and the Fugs, 1969 stands up as a decade-smashing anomaly in the annals of rock'n'roll captured gloriously in this blistering book.
After winning the Dejur award for fiction at CCNY(later won by Walter Mosley) and the Deems Taylor award for journalism from ASCAP, my review of Bruce Springsteen's second album is published in the Sunday New York Times, launching a freelance career in which I publish an article a week in one publication or another for something like 13 years. During the same time, I produce eight books, including three young adult novels for Houghton Mifflin. "An animated funny book," hails The Horn Book about the first. "Ray is a winning narrator," says Kirkus about the second. "Wry, funny, knowledgeable and shrewd," says School Library Journal about the third.
Aside from The Disco Handbook, my best seller is The Face of Rock & Roll: Images of a Generation (Holt), which was even hailed in Creem Magazine. This was followed by When Rock Was Young ("A fine work of impressionistic nostalgia," The Baltimore Sun) and When the Music Mattered ("Notable and worthwhile, insightful and evocative," Publishers Weekly).
After creating the first music video column in USA Today, I help start GUITAR For the Practicing Musician, which will become the most successful music magazine launched in the 80s, and edit the first 100 issues. During this period Hipper Than Our Kids is published by Schirmer. "One of the best books about the boomers and their generation," said Greg Shaw.
After jumping to another dream job as a record producer at BMG, now Sony BMG, I continue writing for Musician and Entertainment Weekly and compiling annual reference books on songs for Gale Research, leading to The Rock Song Index: the 7500 Most Important Songs of the Rock and Roll Era (Schirmer) which is praised by Booklist for its "concise, often excellent commentary" and the Bomp Bookshelf "Pollock is perhaps the most important scholar of American pop music."
In 2002, I compile over 100 interviews into Working Musicians: Defining Moments from the Road, the Studio and the Stage (Harper Collins)."A marathon Phish concert of a book," (Variety). "Marvelous, compulsively readable,"(Paul Williams). In 2005, the second, greatly revised, edition of The Rock Song Index comes out (Routledge) "Music fans will find plenty of satisfaction." (Gale Reviews)
Now I have completed my latest novel, first for adults, The Next Year Effect, a fictionalized memoir (are there any other kind) based on the lives of one of the rock and roll era's most romantic and tragic songwriting couples, but more importantly, a culmination of my experiences in and out of the music business and the writing business for the last thirty years.
