and the rock and roll life lifts from these pages with marvelous immediacy, in selections ranging from Bruce Springsteen on his experience of backing up Chuck Berry, to Joan Didion sitting in on a Doors recording session, to Henry Rollins on Madonna, to Roddy Doyle's The Commitments. Tom Wolfe, Patti Smith, Don DeLillo, John Lennon, Frank Zappa, Nick Hornby, and many others contribute to this portrait of the music and its culture from its ancestors in the blues to its latest variants beyond grunge and rap. The book is organized into sections that create provocative and eye-opening juxtapositions, from "Superstardom" to "Weirdness," from "Present at the Creation" to "Soul." A section on rock critics shows how these writers matched the music with their own sharp rhythm, while "Tributes" rounds off the volume by remembering in their glory some of the greats who are making noise in the hereafter.