What's Exactly The Matter With Me?: Memoirs of a life in music

by P.F. Sloan, S.E. Feinberg (With), Rumer (Foreword by)

Overview

(Book). What's Exactly the Matter With Me? is a first-person account of an extraordinary life and pilgrimage through the most fascinating years of American and English musical culture. This is a story of dreams, success, destruction, and miraculous resurrection; the incredible, heartbreaking and inspiring story of one of the greatest songwriters in American music, as well as one of the most elusive and mysterious. P. F. Sloan was a prolific and influential genius from the golden age of the 1960s and a pioneer of folk-rock. Between 1965 and 1967, 150 of his songs were recorded by major acts; 45 of those made the charts. No other songwriter has ever come close to achieving so great a number of hits in such a short period of time. From his little studio at Dunhill Records, P. F. Sloan was a veritable hit-machine, writing for the Mamas & Papas (thats Sloan's infectious guitar lick on "California Dreamin'"), Jan & Dean (the falsetto you hear on most of their hits is Sloan's), Barry McGuire (the brilliant and controversial "Eve of Destruction"), Johnny Rivers ("Secret Agent Man"), the Turtles, the Fifth Dimension, and many, many more. He wrote so many songs in fact that Dunhill sold him as seven different acts. Unsurprisingly, he wound up exhausted and broken, thus beginning a long journey into the wilderness a journey of UFOs and psychiatric hospitals, survival, healing and, ultimately, redemption.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781908279576
Publisher:	Outline Press, Limited
Publication date:	06/01/2014
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

P.F. Sloan is a legendary songwriter and performer. Born Philip Gary Schlein in New York in 1945, he moved to California with his family in the late 50s and recorded his first single, 'All I Want Is Loving,' at the age of fourteen. He soon became a key figure on the Los Angeles music scene, writing and appearing on dozens of hit records during pop's golden age in the mid 60s.

S.E. Feinberg grew up in Boston and was trained at the American Center for the Performing and Creative Arts, at Boston Center for the Arts, where he began a life of writing, directing, and producing plays. His play The Happy Worker was first produced at Actors Theatre of Louisville, later touring through Eastern Europe. His screenplay of The Happy Worker, executive produced by David Lynch, directed by Duwayne Dunham, and starring Thomas Haden Church and Josh Whitehouse, is now in postproduction. Steve is the co-author of What’s Exactly The Matter With Me?, the memoir of P.F. Sloan, one of the most mysterious and elusive composers in the history of rock’n’roll. He recently completed The Last Yiddish Pachuco, a musical comedy about the last Yiddish theatre in the Boyle Heights district of East Los Angeles.
 

Table of Contents

Lllustrations 6

Foreword Rumer 17

Writing With Sloan, P.E S.E. Feinberg 19

Introduction P.E. Sloan 25

Book 1 (1945-1967)

Chapter 1 28

What's exactly the Matter with me?

I don't care if the sun don't shine

The fires of hell ain't no fun place to be

Chapter 2 36

The Garden of Allah

The most beautiful eyes I had ever see

Freddy, Big Jim, and jumping the moon

The cardboard man

Chapter 3 45

The only Thirteen-year-old Jewish R??B artist in town

Rock'n'roll high

I don't want anything to do with him

A mysterious package from Liverpool you can have her for a song

Chapter 4 62

Summer means Fun

Cowabunga dreamin'

You only get interested in your Wife when somebody else is

Baggys postscript

Chapter 5 71

A kaleidoscopic event

The hitmen

The Dancing Dunhills

Chapter 6 81

The night that changed my life 81

Chapter 7 90

Night of the lguanas

Mr. Terry, the tambourine MAN

The session

The Prince of Protest

Hanging on a scaffold

Chapter 8 111

Highway 61 on shag

The Grass Roots (take one)

It's Dunhill form here

Chapter 9 124

A tale of three cities

California dreamin'

Walking with Turtles

The onion truck

Chpater 10 139

From Crescent Heights to Laurel Canyon

Secret agent

A cry in the wilderness

Running with Turtles

Missing the best

Chapter 11 151

Twelve More Times

Four hippies in a bathtub

Precious times

The Black Plague

Little big songs

The Grass Roots (take tow)

Chapter 12 164

The 'Paint It Black' session

The millionaire's club

The infamous Sunset Strip riots

Chapter 13 176

Jimmy Webb (a prelude)

Let;s live for today

Grand Funk Knights in Cleveland

The golden key

Chapter 14 192

If you're going to San Francisco...

Secret plans and the Monterey Pop Festival

A gathering of beautiful things

A queen of rags

Beware...the Wolf King lurks

Your money of your life

Book 2 (1968-2014)

Chapter 15 210

No one will be able to leave once the door is closed

The loft

Sun Studios

Chapter 16 220

The angels of Greenwich Village

The magic dragon

Return from Egypt

Chapter 17 230

A Typical day

My life as a zombie

If the mailman comes with a letter for me, just forward it to Malibu

Chapter 18 242

Afternoon tea at the Chateau Marmont

Malibu lost

Home again, naturally

What is Pat Boone doing in my head?

Chapter 19 251

Sleep time

E.T.'s in the front yard

Bombay alley

Chapter 20 259

The bottom line

ER India

Chapter 21 267

Can you write another one just as good?

The big lie

Seven Sisters

Dr.Z and the reluctant rock star

Tokyo Phil

Chapter 22 280

The review

A picnic at the Greek

Afterword Creed Bratton 290

The P.F Sloan Songbook 291

Select Discography 313

Index 314