European Rock & the Second Culture: Eurock (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780972309806)

Eurock has become a trade name analogous with Archie Patterson's work over the years. Its beginnings were as a FM radio show in 1971 in Central California. In 1973, it morphed into a musical "fanzine". Subsequent to that throughout the mid 1970's he headed up two of the first international import retail mail-order businesses - Intergalactic Trading Company and Paradox Music Mailorder. During the 1980's he consulted on film scores in LA, including compiling source tapes for Michael Mann that resulted in Tangerine Dream doing the music score for his film Thief, as well as teaching music history classes at a public high school for five years called "Roots of Rock". From 1973 through 1992 Archie published 45 issues of Eurock. They read like a veritable who's who of experimental alternative music... name bands and the obscure were ALL covered in Eurock... as it was happening. In 1996 Archie produced the 5-CD box set Supernatural Fairy Tales for Rhino Records, chronicling "The Progressive Rock Era", 1967- 1976. In 2000, he published a multi-media CD-ROM, written/ audio/ video documentation of his work and the Euro scene entitled The Golden Age. In late 2002, he published the "Book of Eurock". It contains interviews, articles and reviews written for the most part when the music was in its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. It colourfully captures the writer's sense of discovery, excitement, confusion, even disappointment, as they respond to the flood of new names, releases and paraphernalia of a movement in the making. In that sense, it is a cultural history as experienced through the music of a generation. The book's later chapters contain interviews done in the 1990's and 2000/02, with many new and old artists who continue to this day exploring the edges of the mainstream in music and commerce. In effect these later chapters tie together the past, present and future into a continuous thread Archie interprets as a "Second Culture".