What's Exactly the Matter with Me?: Memoirs of a Life in Music - Paperback

by P. F. Sloan (Author), S. E. Feinberg (With), Rumer (Foreword by)

(Book). What's Exactly the Matter With Me? is a first-person account of an extraordinary life and pilgrimage through the most fascinating years of American and English musical culture. This is a story of dreams, success, destruction, and miraculous resurrection; the incredible, heartbreaking and inspiring story of one of the greatest songwriters in American music, as well as one of the most elusive and mysterious. P. F. Sloan was a prolific and influential genius from the golden age of the 1960s and a pioneer of folk-rock. Between 1965 and 1967, 150 of his songs were recorded by major acts; 45 of those made the charts. No other songwriter has ever come close to achieving so great a number of hits in such a short period of time. From his little studio at Dunhill Records, P. F. Sloan was a veritable hit-machine, writing for the Mamas & Papas (thats Sloan's infectious guitar lick on "California Dreamin'"), Jan & Dean (the falsetto you hear on most of their hits is Sloan's), Barry McGuire (the brilliant and controversial "Eve of Destruction"), Johnny Rivers ("Secret Agent Man"), the Turtles, the Fifth Dimension, and many, many more. He wrote so many songs in fact that Dunhill sold him as seven different acts. Unsurprisingly, he wound up exhausted and broken, thus beginning a long journey into the wilderness a journey of UFOs and psychiatric hospitals, survival, healing and, ultimately, redemption.

Author Biography

P.F. Sloan is a legendary songwriter and performer. Born Philip Gary Schlein in New York in 1945, he moved to California with his family in the late 50s and recorded his first single, 'All I Want Is Loving, ' at the age of fourteen. He soon became a key figure on the Los Angeles music scene, writing and appearing on dozens of hit records during pop's golden age in the mid 60s.

S.E. Feinberg grew up in Boston and was trained at the American Center for the Performing and Creative Arts, at Boston Center for the Arts, where he began a life of writing, directing, and producing plays. His play The Happy Worker was first produced at Actors Theatre of Louisville, later touring through Eastern Europe. His screenplay of The Happy Worker, executive produced by David Lynch, directed by Duwayne Dunham, and starring Thomas Haden Church and Josh Whitehouse, is now in postproduction. Steve is the co-author of What's Exactly The Matter With Me?, the memoir of P.F. Sloan, one of the most mysterious and elusive composers in the history of rock'n'roll. He recently completed The Last Yiddish Pachuco, a musical comedy about the last Yiddish theatre in the Boyle Heights district of East Los Angeles.