"Waiting for the Sun: A Rock n' Roll History of Los Angeles" reissued in paperback

Waiting for the Sun
by Barney Hoskyns
Published by Backbeat Books, an imprint of Hal Leonard
April / $16.99 / Paperback / ISBN: 978-0-87930-943-5440 pages / two 8-page B&W photo inserts
http://www.backbeatbooks.com/feature/viewProduct.do?itemId=332764

Waiting for the Sun: A Rock ‘N’ Roll History of Los Angeles is finally available again! First published in 1996, this book peels back the Los Angeles smog to reveal the city’s long and twisted rock ‘n’ roll history in all its glamorous and debauched glory.

Author Barney Hoskyns uncovers the drugs and glitter, the inspiration, violence, sex and artistic excess that has made Los Angeles the spawning ground for outlaws as diverse as the Doors, Guns N’ Roses and Ice Cube. The book “crisscross[es] race, space, time, genre and politics,” according to Hoskyns, and its pages are populated by hordes of hair bands, rappers, punks and other assorted freaks, fans, demigods, groupies, and rock ‘n’ roll visionaries.

And this just-released Backbeat Books edition (ISBN 978-0-87930-943-5; Paperback; $16.99) features a new section bringing the story up to date.

As Barney says, “What I’m really attempting in Waiting for the Sun is a study of the peculiarly Californian interplay between light and darkness, or good and evil. If the history of the LA music scene can be traced partway along a line that stretches from Doris Day to Charles Manson via Day’s son Terry Melcher and his sometime-surfer pals the Beach Boys, then the book’s aim is to explore the reasons why such an unlikely chain of relationships should unfold there. It will become clear as the narrative progresses that my own LA heroes are the ones whose music most obviously combines the light with the dark: the Brian Wilsons and Phil Spectors and Arthur Lees of the world.”

Publication coincides with the release of Hoskyns’s book, Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits, in hardcover from Broadway Books.

About the author:
Barney Hoskyns is the co-founder and editorial director of the online library Rock’s Backpages as well as the author of many books, including Hotel California: The True-Life Adventures of Crosby, Stills,Nash, Young, Mitchell, Taylor, Browne, Ronstadt, Geffen, the Eagles and Their Many Friends and Across the Great Divide: The Band and America