What's Exactly the Matter With Me?

ebook Memoirs of a life in music

By P.F. Sloan

cover image of What's Exactly the Matter With Me?

Sign up to save your library

With an OverDrive account, you can save your favorite libraries for at-a-glance information about availability. Find out more about OverDrive accounts.

   Not today
Libby_app_icon.svg

Find this title in Libby, the library reading app by OverDrive.

app-store-button-en.svg play-store-badge-en.svg
LibbyDevices.png

Search for a digital library with this title

Title found at these libraries:

Loading...

"I have been seeking P.F. Sloan, but no one knows where he's gone" 'P.F. Sloan' by Jimmy Webb

"Absolutely none of 'em could beat ol' P.F." Lester Bangs, Rolling Stone magazine

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 ultimately inspiring story of one of the greatest songwriters in American music—and also one of the most elusive and mysterious.

P.F. Sloan was one of the most prolific and influential geniuses to emerge from the golden age of the 60s, and a pioneer of folk-rock. Between 1965 and 1967, 150 of his songs were recorded by major acts, and 45 of those made the charts. No other songwriter has ever come close to achieving so great 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 & The Papas (that's 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, healing and survival, and, ultimately, redemption.

What's Exactly the Matter With Me?