The Last Musical Hurrah: Jazz and Pop Singing and the Onslaught of Rock. The title alone should give you some idea of the subject matter. To elaborate just a bit, it is about the impact of the tsunami of rock and roll as it swept across the land circa 1955-'65 and all but obliterated the half-century of songwriting achievements of such as the Gershwins, Porter, Berlin, et al that had come before. A body of work that has since come to be called, collectively, The Great American Songbook. "There's scarcely a lemon in this 250-singer lot (circa 1955-'65. And, to think, they did it all without...

Bill Reed has been active in various fields of journalism from the time he was barely out of short pants and Buster Brown Shoes. He has seldom experienced writer's block and is unaware of time passing when he is engaged in scribbling, to employ a Boswell-ian description of the act of putting pen to paper. THUS the title of this volume.

David Ehrenstein's writing career began in 1965 with an Andy Warhol interview, published in -Film Comment- in 1966. He soon began contributing to other publications such as -Film Culture, - -December- magazine and the -Village Voice.- In 1976 he moved to Los Angeles and began work as a film critic and entertainment journalist for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. During this period he also contributed to -Film Comment- and -Film Quarterly.- The Herald was one of the few newspapers in the U.S. with THREE movie critics. (Thus this book's -Third String- title.) His decade-long association with...