How to Read The Mansion on the Hill PDF

In 1965, Bob Dylan’s watershed electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival launched a musical revo­lution: rock music—until then a pop, essentially trivial, medium—was transformed overnight into the personal art form of a generation in search of authenticity and values, a generation that swore itself forever different. Thirty years later, rock music is the backbone of a $20 billion global business, its celebrity performers key assets for multinational entertainment firms like Time Warner and Sony. Rock and roll was supposed to change the world. How did the world change rock and roll? The Mansion on the Hill is the story of that seduction, a social and cultural history unlike any other book on rock or the entertainment business.Prior to the British invasion, the American main­stream music business shunned rock and roll. There was no Rolling Stone, no MTV, no rock-concert circuit, no such thing as rock management. Soon record companies like Warner Bros.—which had debuted in 1958 with a recording of Dragnet actor Jack Webb reciting love songs in front of an orches­tra—recast themselves as purveyors of the hip culture by signing underground bands like the Grateful Dead. Across the country, from the student coffeehouses of Boston to the canyons of the Hollywood Hills, a growing handful of insightful and ambitious entrepreneurs glimpsed rock's artis­tic and financial potential:•Albert Grossman, Dylan’s legendary manager, who com­bined a deep belief in the artistic worth of the new music with a cold-eyed assessment of the financial power at his clients’ fingertips and blazed a trail David Geffen would later transform into a superhighway;•Ray Riepen, a Harvard lawyer who became the first underground mogul as the owner of the club the Boston Tea Party, originator of groundbreaking FM rock station WBCN-FM, and publisher of the alternative weekly The Phoenix;•Paul Rothchild, a record salesman recording bluegrass bands in a coat closet who would help recast the small Elektra Records as a rock powerhouse and become the millionaire producer of the Doors and Janis Joplin;•Frank Barsalona, a struggling New York talent agent who envisioned a national empire of psychedelic rock ball­rooms that would make him a rock-and-roll kingmaker;