Electric Ladyland

Professor of American studies at Temple University, Pennsylvania, Lisa Rhodes is also a musician who has recorded in her own right and has collaborated with the renowned New Orleans band, the Neville Brothers. ELECTRIC LADYLAND, her study of women`s roles in the tumultuous 1960s music scene, therefore carries the weight of both academic and personal experience. Here, with the aid of excerpted articles from various contemporaneous counterculture publications, she examines the effects of women`s increased self confidence--embodied by musicians like Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin, and Joni Mitchell--on the largely male-dominated rock hierarchy during that decade. She also chronicles the roles of previously unsung participants, such as female rock journalists(among them, the New York Daily News`s Lillian Roxon--also the author of the influential ROCK ENCYCLOPEDIA--and The New Yorker`s Ellen Willis), as well as, more controversially, the rock muses otherwise known as groupies. Using richly sourced material, Rhodes elegantly deconstructs the Sixties` myth of permissiveness, and scrutinizes both the exploitation of women and the ways in which they turned it to their advantage. Copyright (C) Muze Inc. 2005. For personal use only. All rights reserved.