Jonathan Taplin in conversation with Greil Marcus, The Magic Years: Scenes from a Rock-and-Roll Life
July 13, 2021 | 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Jonathan Taplin and Greil Marcus discuss Taplin’s new book The Magic Years: Scenes from a Rock-and-Roll Life. Do not miss this virtual opportunity hosted by the San Francisco Public Library to hear these two giants of popular culture history.
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.
Register HereAbout the Speakers
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.
Greil Marcus
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.
