The Magic Years: Scenes from a Rock-and-Roll Life

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Jonathan Taplin and Greil Marcus will discuss Talpin’s new book The Magic Years: Scenes from a Rock-and-Roll Life. Do not miss this opportunity to hear these two giants of popular culture history.

Jonathan Taplin is a writer, film producer and scholar. He is the Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and was a Professor at the USC Annenberg School from 2003-2016 in the field of international communication management and digital media entertainment. Taplin began his entertainment career in 1969 as Tour Manager for Bob Dylan and The Band. In 1973 he produced Martin Scorsese’s first feature film, Mean Streets, which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Between 1974 and 1996, Taplin produced 26 hours of television documentaries (including The Prize and Cadillac Desert for PBS) and 12 feature films including The Last Waltz, Until The End of the World, Under Fire and To Die For. His films were nominated for Oscar and Golden Globe awards and chosen for The Cannes Film Festival five times.

With cameos by Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Martin Scorsese, and countless other icons, The Magic Years is both a rock memoir and a work of cultural criticism from a key player who watched a nation turn from idealism to nihilism. Taplin offers a clear-eyed roadmap of how we got here and makes a convincing case for art’s power to deliver us from “passionless detachment” and rekindle our humanism.

Greil Marcus is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a broader framework of culture and politics.

Marcus has been a rock critic and columnist for Rolling Stone (where he was the first reviews editor) and other publications, including Creem, the Village Voice, Artforum and Pitchfork. His book Mystery Train (published in 1975 and in its sixth revised and updated edition in 2015) is notable for placing rock and roll in the context of American cultural archetypes, from Moby-Dick to The Great Gatsby to Stagger Lee. In his book The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs, Marcus selected ten songs recorded between 1956 and 2008 and shows how each, embodies the story of rock ‘n’ roll—a new language and a new form of expression.

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