The least authoritative rock reference book ever published!
FOR THE KINKY
USA $10 UK £8 CANADA $13 EU €9
Paypal: jnmfiction@gmail.com
“The funniest rock'n'roll writer OF ALL TIME
— Barney Hoskyns
The UK’s most decorated rock biographer and archivist
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I began writing about rock in Rolling Stone’s infancy, and along with St. Lester Bangs, became one of the co-kings of the magazine’s reviews section, this — insanely! — while also trying o become one about whom reviews were written. I was a minor rock star myself for a short while there, a pal and confidante of the likes of Pete Townshend and David Bowie. In a snit after Rolling Stone spoke unkindly of my own recording debut, I sneaked over to Creem, and continued to disarm, provoke, and even infuriate in equal measure. But don’t believe me. Believe Ira Robbins of Trouser Press:
"One of the most illustrious and provocative of my forebears in the rock writing swindle, a man who has continued to write and make music for more than a half-century, John Mendelssohn has had an incredible life. Hs story is an all-star cavalcade of loathing, brilliance, and disaster in and among the lions of popular music."
Rolling Stone described my Rhino Music-published 1995 autobiography, I, Caramba, as “like Portnoy’s Complaint as written by Pete Townshend.” (I couldn’t make heads or tails of. that either!) I continued performing original music even after the loss of my looks in a tragic aging accident, and then, during the darkest days of theCOVID pandemic, resolved to write the least authoritative, but most fun rock reference book ever published, mixing wild re-imaginings with lurid tales of the genre’s most resplendent megastars with amusing excoriations of all that had come to make me wonder, “What are they doing to the music that I used to love so much?
[Robbins again:] In Rock N’ Droll, Mendelssohn has tossed his own tale in a mixer with an uproariously inventive fictional chronicle of rock and pop that offers both Pythonesque farce and "wait, did that really happen?" uncertainty. Laugh-out-loud funny for those in the know and confounding to anyone hoping for a reliable lesson in the history of rock, this is what we old-timers (the ones who didn't take drugs) used to call a "mind-fuck." And I mean that in the best possible sense.
The Guardian’s Caroline Sullivan: “Rock N’ Droll,is every hilarious bit the equal of his fabled writing for Creem and Rolling Stone.” Not to be outdone, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Pam Grady gasped, “The history of rock ‘n’ roll as you’ve never seen it or imagined it emerges out of John Mendelssohn’s fever dream of a book.”
Funniest rock ’n’ roll writer OF ALL TIME that I am, I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy reading Rock N’ Droll, as I think countless tens of thousands of rock and even rawk fans will be too.
The story of one man's evolution from a traditional male dom with fierce high heels and long glove fetishes into an avid worshipper of glamrous older women. Sometimes funny, sometimes suspenseful, and always sexy!
USA $10 UK £8 CANADA $13 EU €9
Paypal: jnmfiction@gmail.com
In this 17,000-word novella (whose brevity is reflected in its price), two proud feminists learn to embrace their innate submissiveness in the bedroom with lovers who help them come to recognize their submission as indicative of strength, rather than weakness. Must reading for any woman ashamed of her inclination to deference. SEE VIDEOS.
USA $7 UK £5 CANADA $9 EU €8
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The vainglorious nincompoop populist ruler of what's been renamed Murka because his followers couldn't spell America has just announced his New Hope for Children initiative, which enables Latino refugee families to trade their children for green cards. The children are then given to Saudi, Russian, and Brazilian oligarchs whose own kids need various organ transplants. Everyone’s a winner, with the possible exception of the wee organ donors. But if the society as a whole seems hopelessly polarized, it’s even worse in the prisons. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. And then, with any luck, you’ll laugh again.
USA $10 UK £8 CANADA $13 EU €9
Paypal: jnmfiction@gmail.com
In the late 1980s, a Hollywood-based rock group called Wanton notices their competitors attracting large and fervent female audiences by dressing as the sort of young woman they hope to meet backstage. Fightng back embarrassment, they buy lipstick and hairspray and Size 12 high heels, and away they go, all the way to No. 2 in the singles chart.
Twenty-five years later, a billionaire fan they never even knew they had decides to throw himself a lavish birthday party, at which the Formerlies are offered $3 million to perform.
Too bad none of them has spoken to the others in 42 years, and the lead singer's had a sex change.
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The morning after performing a random act of kindness on the London Underground, a mild-mannered driving instructor who used long ago to play in a band wakes up to discover that he could teach Jimi Hendrix a thing or two. He reunites his old band, becomes the world's most celebrated guitar hero, and discovers that fame and fortune aren't nearly as much fun as they appear to those who don't have them.
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Paypal: jnmfiction@gmail.com
Gemma didn’t ask to have a very pretty face, or a figure unanimously perceived as spectacular. Mixed blessings, to be sure! Over the years, her beauty has opened a great penthouse doors, but also got me slobbered all over by an endless succession of men who were impatiently breast-fed in their infancies, or something.
At the beginning of her mordant memoir of misogyny, she's put her dreams of becoming a veterinary nurse on hold to become the sugar babe of a septuagenarian billionaire. It was either that or condemn her uninsured father to die of a rare genetic condition.
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In the world of WIKF, the star of the show is no longer the most important member of a concert tour. That distinction goes to the pollster who crunches numbers after every performance to ensure that, for instance, the African American backup vocalists the tour has hired to appease the NAACP aren’t…too black. Conversely, the Justin Bieber-ish white rapper on whose I Remember Martin [Luther King Jr.] television special Keri is invited to appear, employs a cadre of homeboy bodyguards whose principal duty is to keep assuring him that he’s actually the blackest motherfucker on the planet. “You the complete absence of light, yo.”
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Ira Perlstein starts as a singer in a white ska band, and before age 30 becomes the hottest young standup comedian in America. But for “Air Perilstone”, as he’s renamed himself, there’s no hiding from The Someone, as he calls the unseen force that terrified him in boyhood, and now returns to humiliate him at the worst possible moments in front of both concert audiences and his own children.
Indeed, the Someone is never not there.
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There are no crueler people on earth than children, especially those who doubt their parents' love. The main characters in this novel about bullying and the toxic masculinity that engenders it are the meek father who's trying in vain to relive his painful childhood through his irredeemably passive son, the wild, apparently doomed son of a drug-abusing biker, and a spoiled little bully to whom a succession of lowlifes are surrogate daddies.
USA $10 UK £8 CANADA $13 EU €9
Paypal: jnmfiction@gmail.com
Billy Sizemore, a follower of a populist politician, becomes a hero of the very far right after killing a “libtard” protester at a political rally. He records a horrible anthem of misguided patriotism that becomes the most downloaded track in the country, but is then killed by a drive-by assassin. A corrupt San Francisco Police Department detective strongarms a paralegal turned sex worker to help him find Billy’s murderers,
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Disounct priced!
USA $6 UK £5 CANADA $8 EU €6
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