Welcome to my website! My most recent book, Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats and Drugs (Da Capo Press, January 2017), tells the story of the evolution of jazz, its relationship to the Beat Generation, and how the use of drugs first entered the DNA of modern American popular culture. The book features vivid portraits of jazz icons like Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Jackie McLean and others, cross-cutting their stories with seminal Beat writers and figures like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. It also includes the never-before published story of Ruby Rosano, a heroin-addicted prostitute and junkie companion of Billie Holiday. At a time when marijuana legalization, an epidemic of fentanyl, and the gross racial disparities of mass incarceration are all hot topics, Bop Apocalypse takes the reader back to the time when the templates of modern drug law, policy, and culture were first established, along with the concomitant racial stereotypes--back to the time when the whole culture war over the use of drugs in America first began. I envisioned the book as a living history that would read like a novel, about a time that teaches us much about the conflicts and questions that surround drugs today. I’m very proud to say that the finished product achieves that vision.

My career began in New York at the age of twenty-two, when I was hired as Associate Editor of Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, which brought me into the literary world. I specialized in illustrated works of non-fiction like The Woody Guthrie Songbook, which became the definitive collection of Guthrie’s music, writing and art, and other books by or about figures as diverse as Reggie Jackson (The Reggie Jackson Scrapbook), and Liberace (The Things I Love). After leaving publishing to become a writer, I published a bestselling book about the final years of Elvis Presley, Elvis: We Love You Tender (Delacorte, 1980), which brought me to the attention of artist Andy Warhol. I became a Contributing Editor of Warhol’s magazine, Interview, where my cover stories about people like Jack Nicholson, Yoko Ono, Stevie Wonder and Joan Didion appeared until Warhol’s death in 1987. My next book, American Fool (St. Martin’s Press, 1986), a portrait of recording artist John Mellencamp, was awarded the ASCAP Deems Taylor Prize for excellence in music journalism. In 2004, after twelve years of research and writing, I published Can’t Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age (Simon & Schuster), a landmark cultural history of illicit drugs in America. In 2017, I published another critically acclaimed work of non-fiction about the drug culture in America, Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats and Drugs (Hachette)—the prequel to Can’t Find y Way Home. At present I’m developing a number of non-fiction books, television projects, and working on a memoir. Along the way I’ve been delighted to discover that I seem to have a natural ability to help other writers embrace and navigate great challenges and overcome monumental obstacles so I’m having a lot of fun working as a writing coach. I’ve become a kind of book whisperer…

Film and music was combusting into MTV when John Mellencamp invited me to work on a documentary about him. For a lifelong cinephile and music head like me, it was a golden opportunity to get behind the camera and I seized it. After which I directed a number of music videos, most notably Stevie Wonder’s “It’s Wrong (Apartheid)” from In Square Circle, but for the most part I became a well known practitioner of what was being called “the long form”: documentary and performance pieces in which I was able to use the camera to tell vivid stories about artists and the music they were creating. My work from 1983-89 as a writer and director ran the musical gamut from Prince to Ravi Shankar, and included some of the biggest and most diverse artists and groups in the world, many at critical personal junctures and creative transitional phases: Aerosmith, Billy Joel, Luther Vandross, Teddy Pendergrass, Phillip Glass, Julio Iglesias, the Highwaymen. In 1987 I collaborated with Alan and Susan Raymond to make ‘Elvis 56, a film about one year in Presley’s life that was acclaimed as one of the best pieces ever done on a rock and roll figure and cited by Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney as one of their personal favorites. I have since written, produced and directed many hours of television for broadcasters as diverse as VH-1, CNN, History, The Sundance Channel, HBO/Cinemax, and PBS. Among them are The Drug Years, which was based on my book, Can’t Find My Way Home—one of the most successful doc series in the history of VH1—followed by Sex-The Revolution and Lords of the Revolution. My last documentary, Planet Rock: The Story of Hip Hop and the Crack Generation, produced for VH1, was nominated for Emmys in Outstanding Arts & Culture Programming and Outstanding Achievement in a Craft: Writing.

My forty years of experience and expertise has equipped me to navigate the fast-moving currents of the present media climate, applying my understanding of American pop culture to projects that include articles, books, film, television, lectures, multimedia events, and advertising/promotion. You can follow me by reading my blog and on various social media accounts.