Rock & Roll: An Unruly History

Harmony Books

This rock history book, a companion to a 10 part TV series, includes a chapter, Eight Miles High, on the impact of LSD, the Acid Tests and Ken Kesey which includes a section about the Dead.

"ROCK & ROLL traces the course of rock's rich history through Palmer's own perceptions and experiences. Incorporating countless interviews with rock personalities that he has conducted over the last three decades, ROCK & ROLL follows rock's road of creative flashpoints, but diverges, too, to explore the fundamental traditions that have helped define both the music and its culture. With a corresponding chapter to each part in the series, ROCK & ROLL shows how people, places, and events from rock "gods" to little known session musicians, from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to the far reaches of West Africa shaped and defined the music's most important epochs. ....In ROCK & ROLL, Robert Palmer traces rock's ongoing evolution, showing how its many styles and early influences from blues and gospel to reggae, punk, and rap overlap and distinguish themselves from one another. With more than one hundred and fifty illustrations, ROCK & ROLL is the best of the two primary approaches to rock and roll history the history of innovative flashpoints, and the history of an ongoing tradition. As told through the senses and lifelong experiences of one of rock's preeminent critics, ROCK & ROLL is the most insightful and intelligent history of rock ever written"