David Walley

WALLEY-David. G. was an influential music critic and iconoclastic cultural historian, best known as the father of the contemporary rock and roll biography. Born 1945 in New Jersey, after graduating Rutgers in 1967 he became a columnist for Jazz and Pop magazine and the East Village Other and wrote reviews in Zygote, Fusion, and Changes. He was also Arts editor of the LA Free Press and ghosted books on Bob Dylan, David Bowie, and Bobby Darin. His interviews with Iggy Pop and the MC5 are considered classics. In recent years, Walley's columns appeared on-line in Cosmik Debris and New Partisan and he guest lectured at Williams College. Walley's books include ``No Commercial Potential: The Saga of Frank Zappa'' (1972), the first biography of the avant garde musician, which remains in print over thirty years later; ``Nothing in Moderation: The Ernie Kovacs Story'' (1975), a seminal biography of television's first surrealist comedian, republished as ``The Ernie Kovacs Phile''; and ``Teenage Nervous Breakdown: Music and Politics in the Post-Elvis Age'' (1998), a critique of American culture, which also remains in print. To be published posthumously is `` The Shackled Historian: The Life and Times of Herbert Feis,'' a biography of the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. Sample chapters are on Walley's website.