Back in the late 70s and 80s we were struggling to make ends meet. I was looking for some way of pulling in extra money. As I had lived through the sixties and seen all the major bands and had around 500 albums spanning everything from Blues and Rock ‘n’ Roll to Punk I though it would be fun to earn a bit of cash and enjoy myself. So I put on an adult education History of Rock Music course.
It was very popular. Every week I’d deal with another genre or band, play some music and talk about the bands and my own experiences. It proved to be hard work, feeding all the interests and writing the hand-outs, but very enjoyable. Far from bringing in income it cost me a lot. Every weekend I’d be around all the second hand record shops buying albums to fill in the gaps. I loved it. Apart from everything else I learnt a lot and also came to love a lot of bands and styles that I had not previously entertained. By the end of two years I had accumulated 11,500 albums and an enthusiastic group of ‘students’.
Then I decided to write the notes up into a definitive history of Rock Music that I wittily called Rock Strata. It was four volumes and one thousand five hundred pages. I send it off and had a publisher interested. The only problem was that he said it was too long to publish. He told me that if I could get it down to two hundred pages he’d publish it.
That was a different book.
I spend the summer holiday pounding away on an old Remington typewriter and produced a book that was three hundred pages. This is it! The history of Rock Music from Blues to post-Punk. I called it Rock Routes.
Rock Routes: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781514873090: Books