Since first becoming a true believer in the power and importance of rock & roll as a boy in the 1950s, Art Fein has been immersed in music and the music business, taking on many diverse roles: Journalist: onetime music editor of Variety, contributor to the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Rolling Stone, Billboard and other publicationsTV host: Art Fein's Poker Party, a talk-&-live-music public access cable show that ran for 24 years.Band manager: Blasters, CrampsRecord company staffer: Capitol, Elektra, CasablancaMusic Consultant for TV and film: Roadhouse 66, Tour of DutyAlbum Producer: L.A. RockabillyAuthor: The L.A. Musical History TourBlogger: Another Fein MessAnd: event promoter, photographer, record collector, and rock & roll historian.
In the memoir Rock's in My Head, drawing on 10,000 (!) pages of a journal he began keeping in the early 1970s, Fein recounts such incredible rock & roll adventures as: A week spent working with John Lennon and Yoko OnoTouring the UK with rockabilly legend Ray CampiThrowing wild New Year's Eve parties for hundreds of revelers with cars as door prizesCooking up an ill-fated album with Ringo Starr ("Twenty-six years later, I was chatting with Ringo and mentioned the rockabilly album we'd planned. He said, 'Did I do the album? Did I stay at your house? I was so drunk in those days.'")
In 1985, Fein did the one thing fans are always cautioned about: 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. Fein knows--and reports--startling and intimate details about Spector that have appeared nowhere else.
Advance praise for Rock's in My Head: "Art Fein knows records, and a lot of the people who made records. He interviewed hundreds of them on his long-running cable TV show. He was the DJ at my wedding reception, and the dance floor was always full! He's a great writer, too. Read this book!" [radio host Dr. Demento] "Edited from about a million words of his legendary journals by the one and only Art Fein of Hollywood, Rock's in My Head captures a lifetime of rock and roll obsession with all the fervor and fire of those rockabilly records Fein prized above all others. He is the Ersel Hickey of rock memoirists. You can buy this, you can read this, but you can never be as cool as Art Fein, so just dig it." [journalist and author Joel Selvin