First off I was born in 61 and am have two older brother 4 and 10 years my senior. I was playing with my Tonka trucks on the living room floor when my brothers were playing the Beatles, Beach Boys, Rolling Stones and later Cream, Hendrix, Led Zepplin along with many more. So, I feel I lived the music of the sixties, seventies and eighties and am qualified to speak. With that in mind, this book over all, is a good solid text book on rock history, from the early years of the 50's where country and rhythm and blues were fusing in to a new style that was marketed specifically to teens with artist like Buddy Holly, Elvis and Chuck Berry on through the nineties. Even though I have studied American music history and rock in particular, I learned much from this text. However, there are some glaring gaps. To be fair there are only 320 pages but, they just don't do some artist and groups justice based on their respective record sales and concert draws. 70's/80's groups such as the Allman Brothers, ACDC, Bad Company, Boston, Journey, Foreigner, Lynyrd Skynyrd or the genre of southern rock period. Wow, what a huge oversight. I realize when these guys say rock, they really mean popular music including soul, r&b, funk, contemporary country and so on. In light of that they need to broad brush and mention artist of note from a variety of genre's. But, please not to mention Foreigner and Journey in either the 70's or 80's chapter with all the hits between them strikes me as ridiculous. It would be like forgetting to mention the Stones and the Who in the 60's. It doesn't matter whether you like these groups or not, their record sales say much of America did. So, my gripes not withstanding, this is a good generalist starter text before moving on to texts that will cover specific genre's or decades in more detail.

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