Good Stories Well Told: Scenes from a Rock and Roll Life, with Jonathan Taplin and La Grua Center
August 26, 2021 | 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Jonathan Taplin will be discussing his memoir, The Magic Years: Scenes from a Rock-and-Roll Life. His 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 Internet’s 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 instincts―from the folk scene to Woodstock, Hollywood’s rebellious film movement, and more. Beyond insider glimpses into the lives of countless icons, including Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and Martin Scorsese, The Magic Years offers a clear-eyed roadmap of a nation turned from idealism to nihilism and makes a convincing case for art’s power to deliver us from “passionless detachment” and rekindle our humanism.
Free but registration is recommended.
Books provided by Bank Square Books will be available for signing and sale.
Co-sponsored by James Merrill House.
Masks required for all attendees, regardless of vaccination status.
Register HereAbout the Speaker
Jonathan Taplin
Jonathan Taplin is an author and director emeritus of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab. Taplin’s book Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy, published by Little, Brown & Company, was nominated by the Financial Times as one of the Best Business Books of 2017. Taplin has produced music and film for Bob Dylan and the Band, George Harrison, Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Gus Van Sant, and many others. He was the founder of Intertainer, the first streaming video-on-demand platform in 1996.
Taplin graduated from Princeton University. He was a professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism from 2003 to 2016. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He currently sits on the boards of the Authors Guild, the Americana Music Association, and Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti’s Technology and Innovation Council. His commentary has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, Medium, the Washington Monthly, and the Wall Street Journal.
