Sonic Cool

The Life and Death of Rock and Roll

by Joe Harrington

Hal Leonard

In the traditon of Nick Tosches, Tom Wolfe, and Lester Bangs comes an epic and riveting history of rock and roll that reads like a novel. Sonic Cool presents the saga of rock and roll as the closest thing we have to genuine “myth” in the modern world, and it is the first book about rock to be written in the spirit of rock. Immense, fierce, opinionated, and hilarious, Joe Harrington presents rock as a movement of near-religious proportions and masterfully presents it against a backdrop of social factors and important events such as the invention of the guitar, the jukebox, LSD, the 12-inch phonograph record, the seventies recession, the Reagan Revolution, the Internet and the World Trade Center attacks. This is the history of rock as it’s never been told, as the legend of a massive cultural movement, one that had meaning, but ultimately fell prey to its own worst inclinations. In many ways, Harrington’s book reads like the same kind of raging polemic as LeRoi Jones (AKA Amiri Baraka). Radically egalitarian in its assessments—towering figures such as Lennon, Dylan, and Cobain stand along side lesser-known but equally influential artists like the MC5, the Misfits, and Joy Division—Sonic Cool is gripping reading for anyone who ever believed in the music.

US $16.95

CAN $XXX

6” x 9”

572 pages

16-page black-and-white photo insert

Softcover

May

ISBN 0-6340-2148-6

HL 00330763