Rock's in My Head

Since first becoming a true believer in the power and importance of rock & roll as a boy in the 1950s, Art Fein has been immersed in music and the music business, taking on many diverse roles:

•Journalist: onetime music editor of Variety, contributor to the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Rolling Stone, Billboard and many other publications.
•Band manager: Blasters, Cramps
•TV host: Art Fein's Poker Party, a talk-and-live-music public access cable show that ran for 24 years. Guests included Brian Wilson, Dwight Yoakam, Dion, Alison Krauss, Ruth Brown, Jackie DeShannon, Dr. Demento, and loads more.
•Record company staffer: Capitol, Elektra, Casablanca
•Music Consultant, TV and film: Roadhouse 66, Tour of Duty
•Album Producer: L.A. Rockabilly
•Author: The L.A. Musical History Tour
•Blogger: Another Fein Mess
•Add to that: event promoter, photographer, record collector, and rock & roll historian.

In his wry, rollicking and insightful memoir Rock's in My Head, drawing on 10,000 (!) pages of journals he began keeping in the early 1970s, Fein recounts such incredible rock & roll adventures as:

•A week working with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. ("I was in the unique position of coaching John Lennon on old rock & roll. Not many records got to Liverpool in the '50s, and a lot of mine were new to him…")
•Watching The Band record and befriending Levon Helm
•Hearing Ike Turner's legal woes directly from the legend himself
•Touring the UK with rockabilly legend Ray Campi
•Throwing wild, rocking New Year's Eve parties for hundreds of revelers with cars as door prizes
•Cooking up an ill-fated album with Ringo Starr ("Twenty-six years later…I was chatting with Ringo and mentioned the rockabilly album we'd planned. He said, 'Did I do the album? Did I stay at your house? I was so drunk in those days.'")

In 1985, Fein did the one thing fans are always cautioned against: he befriended an idol, becoming part of legendary record producer Phil Spector's inner circle. That relationship—often gratifying, sometimes terrifying—lasted through Spector's murder conviction in 2009. In Rock's in My Head, Fein shares startling and intimate details about Spector that have appeared nowhere else.

Rock's in My Head is the story of a diehard rock & roll fan who saw Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show, bought now-classic Jerry Lee Lewis 45s the week they reached stores, and then grew up to become an active – and occasionally reluctant -- participant in that world. Fein writes, "It turns out I didn't want to be in the music business; I wanted to be in the music."