Since first becoming a true believer in the power and importance of rock & roll as a boy in the 1950s, Art Fein has been immersed in music and the music business, taking on many diverse roles:
- Journalist: onetime music editor of Variety, contributor to the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Rolling Stone, Billboard and other publications
- TV host: Art Fein's Poker Party, a talk-&-live-music public access cable show that ran for 24 years.
- Band manager: Blasters, Cramps
- Record company staffer: Capitol, Elektra, Casablanca
- Music Consultant for TV and film: Roadhouse 66, Tour of Duty
- Album Producer: L.A. Rockabilly
- Author: The L.A. Musical History Tour
- Blogger: Another Fein Mess
- And: event promoter, photographer, record collector, and rock & roll historian.
In the memoir Rock's in My Head, drawing on 10,000 (!) pages of a journal he began keeping in the early 1970s, Fein recounts such incredible rock & roll adventures as:
- A week spent working with John Lennon and Yoko Ono
- Touring the UK with rockabilly legend Ray Campi
- Throwing wild New Year's Eve parties for hundreds of revelers with cars as door prizes
- Cooking up an ill-fated album with Ringo Starr ("Twenty-six years later, I was chatting with Ringo and mentioned the rockabilly album we'd planned. He said, 'Did I do the album? Did I stay at your house? I was so drunk in those days.'")
In 1985, Fein did the one thing fans are always cautioned about: he befriended an idol, becoming part of legendary record producer Phil Spector's inner circle. That relationship--often gratifying, sometimes terrifying--lasted through Spector's murder conviction in 2009. Fein knows--and reports--startling and intimate details about Spector that have appeared nowhere else.