Take a Walk on the Dark Side: Rock and Roll Myths, Legends, and Curses »

Take a Walk on the Dark Side is the ultimate book for today's rock and roll fan: a fascinating compendium of facts, fictions, prophecies, premonitions, coincidences, hoaxes, doomsday scenarios, and other urban legends about some of the world's most beloved and mysterious pop icons.

Updating, revising, and expanding on material from his cult classic Hellhounds on Their Trail, Patterson offers up a delectable feast of strange and occasionally frightening rock and roll tales, featuring the ironies associated with the tragic deaths of many rock icons, unsolved murders, and other tales from the "fell clutch of circumstance."

Beginning with the fateful place where it all started — a deserted country crossroads just outside Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Robert Johnson made his deal with the devil — through the Buddy Holly curse (rock and roll's first great tragedy) and beyond, this incredible volume uncovers some of rock and roll's most celebrated murders, twists of fate, and decades-long streaks of bad luck that defy rational explanation. Inside you'll find:

• Facts about Jimmy Page and the Zeppelin Curse.
• Chilling quirks of fate in the fatalities in the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd.
• Facts about Jimmy Page and the Zeppelin curse
• Chilling quirks of fate surrounding the deaths of musicians in the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd
• A provocative look at "The Club," membership in which requires an untimely death at age twenty-seven and whose inductees include Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin
• Cryptic messages in song lyrics that have proved eerily prophetic

Carefully researched, wildly enjoyable, andoften harrowing, Take a Walk on the Dark Side takes the reader on a mysterious ride through rock and roll history.

Publishers Weekly

This enjoyably lurid slice of rock history extensively updates and expands the author's earlier Hellhounds on Their Trail: Tales from the Rock N Roll Graveyard. His book focuses on the "bizarre and unexplainable," anything smacking of death and often the satanic. Starting with the legend that bluesman Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his remarkable musicianship, Patterson details similar rumors about Led Zeppelin and its leader Jimmy Page's fascination with occult guru Aleister Crowley; the Rolling Stones' flirtation with witchcraft enthusiast and filmmaker Kenneth Anger; and the so-called satanic "back-masking" found on many recordings when played backwards. Much of this has been reported in various rock biographies, but Patterson's book is a complete recounting of details related to each event, such as Elvis Presley and Robert Johnson dying on the same day in the same month, 39 years apart. Patterson also expands on the "curse" of bad luck following anyone associated with Buddy Holly after his death in a plane crash and the similar string of tragic events suffered by the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. At one point, he posits that the lyrics in Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon seem to perfectly match the action in the first part of The Wizard of Oz. (July) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.