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

[Jonathan Taplin] was the one who made Mean Streets and The Last Waltz possible, for which I will always be grateful. We had quite a few adventures on both projects, and theyre all chronicled in this memoir of his colorful life in show business. Martin Scorsese

The Magic Years reads like a Magical Mystery Tour of music, loss, beauty, family, justice, and social upheaval. Rosanne Cash

Jonathan Taplins extraordinary journey has put him at the crest of every major cultural wave in the past half century: he was tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band in the 60s, producer of major films in the 70s, an executive at Merrill Lynch in the 80s, creator of the Internets first video-on-demand service in the 90s, and a cultural critic and author writing about technology in the new millennium. His is a lifetime marked not only by good timing but by impeccable instinctsfrom the folk scene to Woodstock, Hollywoods rebellious film movement, and beyond. Taplin is not just a witness but a lifelong producer, the right-hand man to some of the greatest talents of both pop culture and the underground.

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 arts power to deliver us from passionless detachment and rekindle our humanism.