Got a Revolution! - by Jeff Tamarkin (Paperback)

About the Book

In an era when rock was the musical accompaniment for a vast cultural upheaval, Jefferson Airplane provided the soundtrack for a generation. Acclaimed music journalist Tamarkin's exhilarating and exhaustive "Got a Revolution!" chronicles the band's long, convoluted history in crisp, engaging prose and informed by scores of insider interviews.

Book Synopsis

"Jeff Tamarkin is an able guide through the tangled history of one of the Sixties' most musically visionary bands." --Rolling Stone

From a renowned music journalist, a close-up portrait of Jefferson Airplane, chronicling the band's origins in 1965 San Francisco and their role in defining the sound and culture of 1960s and 1970s rock 'n' roll.

The most successful and influential rock band to emerge from San Francisco during the 1960s, Jefferson Airplane created the sound of a generation. Their smash hits "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit" virtually invented the era's signature pulsating psychedelic music and, during one of the most tumultuous times in American history, came to personify the decade's radical counterculture and paved the way for other Bay Area music greats, including the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin.

Having worked closely with Jefferson Airplane for more than a decade, Tamarkin had unprecedented access to the band members, their families, friends, lovers, crew members, fellow musicians, cultural luminaries, even the highest-ranking politicians of the time. More than just a definitive history, Got a Revolution! is a rock legend unto itself.

Review Quotes

"Finally! A book about Jefferson Airplane that restores them to their rightful place of importance in history...Tamarkin has done a remarkable job."
-- Pete Fornatale, WFUV, New York

"Jeff Tamarkin is an able guide through the tangled history of one of the Sixties' most musically visionary bands."
-- Rolling Stone

"Jeff Tamarkin knows more about me and the band than I do."
-- Grace Slick, Jefferson Airplane singer

"This book brings it all back: Good rocking; good reading."
-- Ben Fong-Torres, former senior editor of Rolling Stone and author of Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll

About the Author

For nearly five decades, Jeff Tamarkin has been one of the most respected and prolific music journalists in the country. For fifteen years he was editor of Goldmine, the bible of record/CD collectors. Prior to that, he served as the first editor of CMJ and as editor of Relix magazine. He was also the first editor of Grateful Dead Comix and associate editor of JazzTimes magazine. He has written for dozens of publications, including Billboard, Newsweek, Playbill, Creem, Mojo, Newsday, New York Daily News, and others, and has contributed to the Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music and the All-Music Guide. He has written the liner notes for more than eighty CDs, including most of the Jefferson Airplane albums and those of related bands, as well as albums by the Beach Boys, Merle Haggard, J. Geils Band, Dean Martin, and others. Jeff has also served on the Nominating Committee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and as a consultant to the Grammys and has written for the Library of Congress. As a consultant to the Music Club CD label, he assisted in releasing over 180 reissues and compilations, in styles ranging from jazz to country to pop. Got a Revolution! The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane (Atria Books) was his first book. He is also the coauthor of Shell Shocked: My Life with the Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Frank Zappa, etc., by Howard Kaylan, and the author of Carlos Santana: Love, Devotion, Surrender: The Illustrated Story of His Music Journey. He is currently the Editor of BestClassicBands.com, a classic rock website. He lives in Hoboken, NJ, with his wife, the novelist and book critic Caroline Leavitt.