Dan LeRoy is the Director of Writing and Publishing at Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School, USA. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, The Village Voice, Esquireonline, and Alternative Press. He is the author of The Beastie Boys’ Paul's Boutique (Bloomsbury 2006), The Greatest Music Never Sold (2007), For Whom the Cowbell Tolls (2014), and Liberty’s Lions: The Catholic Revolutionaries Who Established America (2021).
Dan LeRoy takes on a subject that could easily result in a dry, strictly-for-geeks read - the history of machine-rhythm - and turns out a juicy deep-dive that will appeal equally to the lay-person interested in the evolution of pop culture as to the gear-head and serious musician. What this richly researched and entertaining book shows is that far from dehumanizing and deskilling music, the drum machine depended on human imagination: the vision and dedication needed to create the technology in the first place, the ingenuity of amateur and professional musicians alike, as they struggled with these newfangled boxes and extracted magic from them. It's a story that's largely untold and LeRoy tells it with vivid clarity. * Simon Reynolds, author of Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture and Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84 *