VIA PRESS RELEASE | “Folk music has a contradictory mission—to preserve tradition and to screw with it. In his incisive collection of interviews with key folk stars from the ‘60s through the ‘80s, Bruce Pollock captures both functions perfectly. His flowing conversations with the stars show the traditions they honored as well as the many ways they pushed them forward.”
—Jim Farber, music critic, editor, and writer
Trouser Press Books is proud to announce The Bleecker Street Tapes: Echoes Of Greenwich Village, a new collection of profiles and essays by veteran music journalist Bruce Pollock to be published in paperback and e-book on June 6. Pre-orders are available now.
From the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village to the stage at Woodstock, folksingers became a powerful cultural force in the 1960s. Mixing music and politics, tradition and innovation, romance and righteousness, these men and women were outspoken voices for their generation, each with a story to tell.
Now, more than a half-century later, The Bleecker Street Tapes sees Bruce Pollock, a Village resident and clubgoer during folk’s heyday, expertly capturing the extraordinary life and times of these legendary artists through insightful interviews and contemporary appraisals of such icons as Leonard Cohen, Loudon Wainwright III, Roger McGuinn, The Roches, Dave Van Ronk, Suzanne Vega, John Sebastian, Phil Ochs, Peter Tork, Maria Muldaur, Richie Havens, Janis Ian, Harry Chapin, Melanie, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Don McLean, Peter, Paul & Mary, Tuli Kupferberg, Eric Andersen, and more.
“The interviews and articles collected here speak for themselves,” writes Bruce Pollock in the book’s introduction, “about the highs and lows of the era as experienced by those on the ground, just as the music they gave us still speaks to a dimming memory as frustrating as a dream lost to the daylight.”
Bruce Pollock is an ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor Award-winning author, editor, rock historian, and record producer. He has published 15 books on rock music, including By the Time We Got to Woodstock: The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Revolution of 1969 and In Their Own Words. He was the founding Editor in Chief of the magazine Guitar for the Practicing Musician, an Executive A&R Producer at BMG and Sony BMG, and columnist for Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, Viva, Video Review, the Gannett Westchester Newspapers, and Songfacts.com. Pollock was recently a guest lecturer for two semesters at Fairfield University, teaching a course on the “History of Rock and Roll.” For more, please see brucepollockthewriter.com.
Trouser Press Books, a division of Trouser Press LLC, is an independent publisher based in New York City that specializes in music journalism and literary fiction. Editorial Director Ira Robbins co-founded the legendary rock magazine Trouser Press in 1974 and now operates its website. For more information, please visit www.trouserpressbooks.com.
