Rock’s in My Head
Encounters with Phil Spector, John & Yoko, Brian Wilson…and a host of other people who should be just as famous.
By Art Fein
$18.50 (paperback)
ISBN (paperback) 979-8-9856589-4-1 / (eBook) 979-8-9856589-5-8
Since first becoming a true believer in the power of rock & roll as a boy in the 1950s, Art Fein has been immersed in music and the music business. He’s been a journalist, band manager, record company staffer, TV host (of Art Fein's Poker Party, the long-running talk/live-music public access show), author, blogger (Another Fein Mess), photographer, record collector and rock & roll historian.
In this wry, rollicking and insightful memoir, drawn from 10,000 (!) pages of journals he began keeping in the early ‘70s, Fein recounts some of his amazing experiences with superstars and offbeat characters alike.
In 1985, Fein did the one thing fans are always cautioned against: he befriended an idol, becoming part of legendary record producer Phil Spector’s inner circle. That relationship—often gratifying, sometimes terrifying—lasted through Spector’s murder conviction in 2009. Here, Fein shares intimate details about Spector that have appeared nowhere else.
This extraordinary book lays out his entire journey through the innards and outtards of the scene, which in Los Angeles meant he saw it all. He even elevated the art of bitching about almost anything to a fine art. Not many people can do that. Maybe because Art Fein really did have a 360-degree view of the music business and life in Los Angeles with all its con jobs and corny disappointments he had been able to fashion his own perch in a continually evolving hierarchy of has-beens, still-beens and to-beens without letting hit knock him out of the game. This book tells the complete story of someone who was there in the middle of the action and, in his own quiet way, is still watching the river flow. The mind boggles at what he has seen and now that’s finally shared it all, the eyes often boggle at what’s on the page.
—Bentley’s Bandstand: January 2023
Everybody oughta get to know Art Fein, and his wonderful book is the best way to do it. Art has served rock & roll as scribe, flack, label guy, manager, promoter, TV host, kibitzer, schmoozer, and all-around good Joe. He has known the famous, infamous, nefarious, and fabulous denizens of the music and has lived to tell the tale, and tell it very nicely, thank you. His license plate is the best possible review of his tome: SO FEIN.
—Chris Morris, author of Los Lobos: Dream in Blue and Together Through Life: A Personal Journey With the Music of Bob Dylan
