The Magic Years
Scenes from a Rock-and-Roll Life
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3.6 • 10 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Jonathan Taplin’s extraordinary journey has put him at the crest of every major cultural wave in the past half century: he was tour manager for Bob Dylan and The Band in the 60s, producer of major films in the 70s, an executive at Merrill Lynch in the 80s, creator of the Internet’s first Video-on-Demand service in the 90s, and a cultural critic and author writing about technology in the new millennium. His is a lifetime marked not only by good timing but by impeccable instincts—from the folk scene of Woodstock, to Hollywood’s rebellious film movement and beyond, Taplin is not just a witness but a lifelong producer, the right-hand man to some of the greatest talents of both pop culture and the underground.
With cameos by Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Martin Scorsese, and countless other icons, The Magic Years is both a rock memoir and a work of cultural criticism from a key player who watched a nation turn from idealism to nihilism. Taplin offers a clear-eyed roadmap of how we got here and makes a convincing case for art’s power to deliver us from “passionless detachment” and rekindle our humanism.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this vivid albeit occasionally shallow memoir, Taplin (Outlaw Blues) recounts his extraordinary life spent with major cultural figures of the last half-century. As an "apprentice road manager for Dylan's manager," in 1965, an 18-year-old Taplin watched Dylan get booed off the stage at the Newport Folk Festival, only to be coaxed back by Johnny Cash. This "divisive show" prompted "a series of random acts of good fortune—being in the right place at the right time," that eventually led Taplin to become Dylan's tour manager and a witness to some of the greatest rock-and-roll moments of the '60s. After Woodstock, he began producing films, and (thanks to a film critic friend) quickly got an in with Martin Scorsese. Taplin attempts to frame his experiences as part of a larger picture about "the messiness and chance that are essential to the development of culture," but despite having dinner with the Beatles and rubbing elbows with Jackie O and Eric Clapton, his reflections and stories ("I was lying by my pool in Laurel Canyon when Marty Scorsese and Barry Primus arrived in a 1957 Thunderbird") can land as simple name-dropping rather than a deeper consideration of his milieu. Some impressive anecdotes aside, the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
