This was a fun ride through the rock music of the Seventies and into the early Eighties. I've read some complaints that the author needed to highlight who the various names were, but it's really designed for those who lived it, and obsessively read the liner notes. Casual fans will be left behind.

So, while it was fun and often insightful, it's not without its flaws, starting right in the first chapter with the sentence, It was early 1969, over six months before the grizzly Tate-LaBianca murders for which Manson and his "family" would forever be associated...

"Grizzly"? Really? They were murdered by bears? The word, of course, is "grisly" and any competent writer (and editor) would have caught that.

Sigh.

Anyway.

This book feels very much like he's got three friends in Keith Olsen, Waddy Wachtel, and, to a lesser degree, John Kosh. It feels like he wanted to pay back some debt on by writing a book starring the three of them.

Granted Olsen and Wachtel cover a lot of ground through the Seventies, and Kosh designed a lot of great album covers throughout the same period, but some of the stories are so jarringly anecdotal (Kosh's run ins with Rod Stewart, for example) that they almost feel like filler.

At the same time, while focusing solely on American rock artists and bands (except for Rod Stewart's non-musical hijinks), he also seems to miss a broad swath of music that occurred at the time, but didn't cross over the Olsen/Wachtel territory, so was never mentioned. Where's the chapters on Steely Dan? Billy Joel? Aerosmith? Blue Öyster Cult? Where's Meat Loaf, for chrissakes? Or Bowie, if only for his Philly soul period with Young Americans>?

So, while it's a fun little ride, it's nowhere near the full story, and while Olsen's and Wachtel's accomplishments were great and interesting, there's a hell of a lot more stories out there that Hartman missed. ( )