The Fine Wisdom and Perfect Teachings of the Kings of Rock and Roll: A Memoir

“Hilarious, harrowing, and ultimately inspiring.... Truly, there is something arresting and wonderful on every page.”
— Michael Pollan

“With sentences that sometimes astonish” (Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft), celebrated cultural critic Mark Edmundson has written a hip and hilarious coming-of-age memoir about one man’s miscues and false starts as he enters the world after college. Through exhilarating adventures, he attempts to answer the timeless question of who he is, while contemplating what role music, love, work, drugs, money, and books will play in his life.

"I was at a point of crossing in my life then—a liminal moment, as the anthropologists like to say. I was trying to figure out what the world was about and what my place in it was going to be. And somehow I got the idea that these characters, these kings, could help me along."

After graduating from college in 1974, Mark Edmundson leaves his small Vermont campus determined to fulfill his destiny—a quest he knows involves rock and roll and America's high court of mischief and ambition, New York City. Under the wing of a carousing, Marx-quoting friend, Edmundson moves into a grungy uptown apartment and embarks on a career lugging amps in a New Jersey arena for rock's biggest acts: the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, and the Allman Brothers.

But as his first year after college wears on, Edmundson finds himself increasingly at odds with life in his adopted city and drifts through a regimen of late-night cab driving and radical politics that leaves him cold and neglectful of the hopes he nursed back in school. Prodded and enlightened along the way by a cast of rogue mentors—his "Kings (and Queens) of Rock and Roll"—Edmundson checks out of New York, detouring through the Colorado mountains (in a hapless attempt to reconnect with nature), and tending the front door of a Northampton disco (witnessing the death throes of the sexual revolution), before landing in Vermont to teach English at a progressive boarding school.

It's here that Edmundson begins to grasp, with the help of the charismatic headmaster and the dazed student body, the inkling of a valuable lesson. It's here, rather surprisingly, that he finds his "it": the perfect vocation—his slightly crazy, ideal way of life.

A coming-of-age memoir that asks enduring questions about the world and our role in it, The Fine Wisdom and Perfect Teachings of the Kings of Rock and Roll is a soulful, whip-smart, and resonant testament of the postcollege years and the challenges of navigating one's own dreams.

“A compelling and accomplished memoir recounting the dissolution of the sixties and the beginning of the modern, more cynical era that followed. . . Candidly describes Mark Edmundson’s journey as a lost twenty-something seeking meaning through sex, drugs, Marxism, rock & roll, and ultimately, teaching.” - Philipp Meyer, author of American Rust

“Edmundson doesn’t just chronicle, he channels, the epoch of rock.... He makes us feel its hopes; its confusions; its genuine revelations…. Concert security dude, cabbie, bouncer: these jobs provide him critical lenses on a succession of cultural moments, and on the never-ending task of becoming an adult.” - Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft

“A near-perfect memoir.... In this erudite, coming-of-age riot, the author deftly navigates the purgatorial rites of passage between university and professional life, developing insightful social critiques and candid self-evaluations along the way.... [Edmundson is] an honest, poetic and hilariously entertaining narrator.” - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Not your typical rock tell-all. . . . An entertaining coming-of-age story that cloaks a social critique of post-Sixties USA.” - Rolling Stone (3 ½ stars)

“The Fine Wisdom and Perfect Teachings of the Kings of Rock and Roll has alert, rueful-earnest prose . . . A nice retrospective feel for youthful appetites (more metaphysical than sensual), though rock is primarily a signpost in his coming-of-age-in-the-1970s story. Edmundson may lean more toward Woody Allen than Warren Zevon, but in his wide-eyed receptivity to whatever fortune comes his way, his youthful self might have stepped out of a dozen early Jackson Browne tunes. . . . Through his droll quest-romance peregrinations, set on his eager way by the Stones and ‘The Faerie Queene,’ Edmundson has the alacrity and dumb pluck of a tenderfoot prospecting for gold. . . . It’s a charming if male-dominated book, a young man’s version of ‘An Education.’” - Howard Hampton, New York Times Book Review

“The epiphanies struck Edmundson at several beautifully rendered moments in an epic (and ultimately six-year-long) journey. . . . Many a serially reinvented boomer will relate.” - Charlie Clark, AARP The Magazine

“A compelling and accomplished memoir recounting the dissolution of the sixties and the beginning of the modern, more cynical era that followed, The Fine Wisdom and Perfect Teachings of the Kings of Rock and Roll candidly describes Mark Edmundson’s journey as a lost twenty-something seeking meaning through sex, drugs, Marxism, rock & roll, and ultimately, teaching.” - Philipp Meyer, author of American Rust

“Mark Edmundson doesn’t just chronicle, he channels, the epoch of rock. With sentences that sometimes astonish, he makes us feel its hopes; its confusions; its genuine revelations. Edmundson frames the glories of the 1970s and their latter day reckonings in a working life: concert security dude, cabbie, bouncer. These jobs provide him critical lenses on a succession of cultural moments, and on the never-ending task of becoming an adult.” - Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft

“Everything you want a coming-of-age book to be: hilarious, harrowing, and ultimately inspiring. . . . Brims with sparkling observations about everything from drugs, sex and rock and roll to movies, career, and friendship. Truly, there is something arresting and wonderful on every page.” - Michael Pollan, author of Food Rules: An Eater's Manual and The Omnivore's Dilemma