The Boy Who Cried Freebird

Book excerpt: Wedding the American oral storytelling tradition with progressive music journalism, Mitch Myers' The Boy Who Cried Freebird is a treatise on the popular music culture of the twentieth century. Trenchant, insightful, and wonderfully strange, this literary mix-tape is authentic music history . . . except when it isn't. Myers outrageously blends short fiction, straight journalism, comic interludes, memoirs, serious artist profiles, satire, and related fan-boy hokum—including the classic stories he first narrated on NPR's All Things Considered. Focusing on iconic recordings, events, communities, and individuals, Myers riffs on Deadheads, sixties nostalgia, rock concert decorum, glockenspiels, and all manner of pop phenomena. From tales of rock-and-roll time travel to science fiction revealing Black Sabbath's power to melt space aliens, The Boy Who Cried Freebird is about music, culture, legend, and lore—all to be lovingly passed on to future generations.