Ball the Wall Nik Cohn in the Age of Rock
At the precise moment that Nik Cohn discovered Rock Dreams in 1957, his real life began - and. For the next twenty years the love-affair was total. From the first glimpse of Rock & Roll's demon snake, his consuming passion was "Magic - the pursuit of beautiful lies." By the '60s, described as 'the speed writer of pop: half martyr to his own myth, sprinting across the gilded landscape, feet bleeding inside the carefully dirtied-down sneakers' he not only pursued the Magic but made it. For Nik Cohn didn't ever merely write about Rock legend or Pop culture. As arbiter of style, dweller on the edge and scribe he, somehow, created his own. Pausing only to enshrine Rock's roots in its first history, the memorable Awobopaloobop Alopbamboom; to help inspire Pinball Wizard; to write the magazine story that led to Saturday Night Fever; to invent the 'Pepsi Generation'; and to survive, just barely, a final holocaust on Times Square, 24 on 42, he embodied the neon slogan: You Don't Have To Pay To Play. By 1978 the magic was used up and Cohn moved on, leaving the collected novels, histories, autobiographical ramblings, articles, polemics and tales. In Ball the Wall, the very best of these are collected to make a new and self-contained volume. The result is not merely a portrait of one writer's odyssey but of an entire age and its offspring - the sweet hello and long goodbye of Rock. As Gordon Burn points out in his introduction, Nik Cohn was pop's first chronicler and he remains among the very best. For all those whom the Rock Age touched, Ball the Wall is essential reading.