The Fine Wisdom and Perfect Teachings of the Kings of Rock and Roll

After graduating from college in 1974, Mark Edmundson leaves Vermont to seek his destiny--a quest he knows involves rock and roll and America's high court of mischief and ambition, New York City. Shepherded by a carousing, Marx-quoting friend, he moves into a grungy apartment and embarks on a dream career lugging amps for rock's biggest stars: the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, and the Allman Brothers. But as time wears on, Edmundson finds himself at odds with life in his adopted city and drifts through a regimen of late-night cab driving and radical politics, increasingly detached from the hopes he nursed back in school. Prodded and enlightened along the way by a cast of rogue mentors--his "Kings (and Queens) of Rock and Roll"--Edmundson checks out of New York and careens across the country in search of the elusive "it": the perfect vocation, his slightly crazy, ideal way of life.

Mark Edmundson is a professor at the University of Virginia and the prizewinning author of numerous works of cultural criticism, including Why Read?; Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida; and Teacher. He lives in Batesville, Virginia.