About Bruce Pollock

After winning the Jerome Lowell Dejur prize for fiction at The City College of NY and the Deems Taylor award for journalism from ASCAP, I have pursued a career as a journalist, columnist, novelist, humorist, essayist, archivist, liner notes writer and lyricist.

I served as an editor at Rock Magazine, Contemporary Music, The Funny Papers and Penthouse and contributed to such publications as The New York Times, Saturday Review, TV Guide, Cosmopolitan, Family Weekly, Musician, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, Playboy, The Gannett Westchester Newspapers and The Village Voice. I also edited the esteemed annual volume, Popular Music: An Annotated Index of American Popular Songs (Gale Research) for 16 years.

In 1983, I landed the dream assignment of creating a rock magazine. GUITAR: For The Practicing Musician would go on to become the most popular new music magazine launched in the 1980s. In the mid-nineties, with thirteen books and hundreds of essays and articles behind me, I came up with another dream job, that of compilation producer and music historian at BMG Entertainment in New York City (now Sony BMG) where I worked for the next 12 years.



"Pollock is perhaps the most important scholar of American pop music. He also wrote Hipper Than Our Kids, one of the best books about the "boomers" and their generation." Greg Shaw, Bomp Bookshelf

"Working Musicians is a marvelous, compulsively readable book - not only an invaluable resource (and an instant education) for any aspiring musician, but also a treasure trove of good reading and new insights and perspectives for any music lover. Few books about music come so close to the truth about how it really comes into existence." Paul Williams, founder of Crawdaddy magazine

"Whether for answering questions on music trivia or for developing a play list for an iPod, The Rock Song Index will provide any rock fan with plenty of satisfaction." (Lawrence Looks at Books)

"Popular Music is a spectacular series, invaluable to music researchers, record collectors, reviewers, composers, performers and fans. The scope and accuracy of information featured throughout these Gale research guides is superb."-- Popular Culture in Libraries