From the Introduction CALIFORNIA ROCK & ROLL by Joel Selvin

            When I started, they used to squeeze my pieces between the adult theater ads and the edge of the page. It was more than a year before so much as a one-column mug shot ran with one of my stories. Now they call it music journalism and teach courses about it at the universities.

            The ‘60s party was almost over when I first began writing for the San Francisco Chronicle. There were still some people who had stayed too late and enough wreckage around to indicate what kind of a bash it had been. On Thanksgiving night in 1972, I left my parents’ dinner table in the Berkeley hills and drove down to a toilet called Keystone Berkeley, where a sweaty, steamy, beered-up mob waited for Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen and the Elvin Bishop Group to play a benefit for ailing harmonica ace Charlie Musselwhite, who’d been injured in an auto accident and needed to pay some bills. That was where I walked in.

            I’d been around before. As a Berkeley High School student, I frequented the Fillmore, Avalon, the Jabberwocky, the New Orleans House, the Berkeley Folk Festival at the Greek Theater, anywhere there was music and, in San Francisco and Berkeley in 1965-7, there was music everywhere. After failing to make it across the finish line at high school, I ended up joining the copy boy crew at the Chronicle, where I earned $55 a week and could get on the guest list at the Fillmore. No greater aspiration occurred to me until I found myself writing about rock music for my college newspaper and started getting free records in the mail from record companies. Then I was done. When Chronicle columnist John L. Wasserman hired me to substitute for jazz singer Jon Hendricks, while he took a six-week engagement at a nightclub in London, I couldn’t envision any greater rewards in life. But I was 22 years old – what did I know?

            Over the course of the years, from my post as the Chronicle’s pop music man, I have been able to pursue my rather single-minded fascination with American music up close and personal. I have met the people who could answer the questions I wanted to ask. When I first got the bug, there was no Rolling Stone magazine or books about rock. I stood for hours after school and weekends reading the backs of album jackets in record stores along Telegraph Avenue. I checked out old folk and blues records from the public library. In a sense, my journalistic enterprises have been a series of post-graduate papers on my studies in the field.

            Although I have spent my career writing for a San Francisco daily, California has always been my beat. I have always seen myself as a Californian. In Europe, when people ask me if I’m American, I always tell them, no, I’m from California. They understand. Growing up in California in the ‘60s, the Beach Boys told my story as much as the Grateful Dead did….

FROM THE INTRODUCTION

CHAPTERS

FORWARD BY GREIL MARCUS

AN INTERVIEW WITH BARBARA FLASKA

PRESS RELEASE

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