A wild insider's ride with one of music's most notorious journalists, this volume presents 15 gothic music profiles--legendary musicians and songwriters captured in moments of crisis, despair, revelation, and glory.

South School, 1962: The last segregated school in New York. Their teacher moonlights on "Lawrence Welk," the lady principal wears boxing gloves, and the student body is all-Negro . . . except for first grader Josh Friedman. He's white, but he's working on it. The acclaimed author of TELL THE TRUTH UNTIL THEY BLEED and TALES OF TIMES SQUARE returns with a one-of-a-kind autobiographical novel - "a memoir you can't accuse of lies." Center stage in the unflinching and frequently hilarious funhouse tour of Friedman's Long Island boyhood is a rogues' gallery that includes Bobo, precocious...

"Josh Alan Friedman has chops like a wolf... This book deserves wide attention." --Jerry Wexler, Atlantic Records co-founder "A can't-put-it-down rock 'n' roll read ... a must for any fan of good music writing and great storytelling." --William Michael Smith, Houston Press "He dances off the page, improvises, hits all the grace notes. He knows the turfspeak of both showbiz and quality lit." --Michael Simmons, High Times "The architects and the artists, the legends and the liars, the famously acclaimed and the anonymously unsung... each one a delectable bit of voyeurism." --PopMatters Back in...

"Josh Alan Friedman has chops like a wolf. The French had a phrase for his tropism for the seedy, the gutter, the outcasts: nostalgie de la boue. This book deserves wide attention." --Jerry Wexler, co-founder of Atlantic Records "A can't-put-it-down rock 'n' roll read ... a must for any fan of good music writing and great storytelling." --William Michael Smith, Houston Press "He dances off the page, improvises, hits all the grace notes. He knows the turfspeak of both showbiz and quality lit." --Michael Simmons, High Times "The architects and the artists, the legends and the liars, the...

The epic life of Mantan Moreland unfolds in Michael H. Price's vivid account of a career that ranged from the Minstrel tradition, through the circus world and Broadway, to Hollywood, through political woes and a defiant comeback. Who'd have thought that Charlie Chan's chauffeur had such an immense back-story? An expanded edition of the original volume of 2006, with newly unearthed photographs, fresh insights, and a rare 1948 interview in the artist's own emphatic words.