They may not have invented rock & roll, but they were the ones who bought it, adopted it, adapted it, and embraced it. They were the baby boom's first wave, the bumper crop of circa 1945 to 1952, who invested their fondest hopes, deepest dreams, and most poignant identity crises in rock & roll, using the songs as a backdrop to their chosen succession of subcultures. It was an exotic and vocal crowd that stretched from Presley's Memphis to Dylan's MacDougal Street, from Monterey to Woodstock, and for a while it felt like a way to beat the odds and the system. But now that the system has grown up around all but the hardest-bitten boomers, has rock & roll let its generation down? Or is it the other way around? Or are change and disillusionment just another part of the message?

In this freewheeling account of rock & roll's place in our national subconsciousness, prizewinning music journalist and novelist Bruce Pollock assembles a personal soundtrack album to the unmade movie musical biography of the baby boom. Pollock's unconventional recollections, ruminations, and digressions are laced with exclusive quotes from more than two dozen of rock's most fascinating characters, from Bo Diddley to Bruce Springsteen, and informed by his unique slant on more than 2,000 of the best - and best known - rock & roll songs.

Who in this generation will ever forget years like 1958, when "That'll Be the Day" and "Teenager in Love" and "Yakety Yak" let the average privileged white kid imagine becoming as fearless as the rough-edged figures who made the records ... 1964, when Phil Ochs wrote about churches burning in Mississippi, and the Beatles arrived in New York with their portfolio of innocent love songs ... 1967, when LSD was legal, Cher was still with Sonny, and Joplin and Hendrix signed with the major labels ... 1972, when Roxy Music and David Bowie and Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman" made sexual redefinition the flavor of the year ... 1975, when baby boomers, experiencing their second childhood, fell under the spell of Donna Summer's "Love to Love You Baby," and Springsteen hit the covers of Time and Newsweek ... 1977, when the Ramones and the Sex Pistols set out to create a new generational Year Zero with their righteous three-chord attack ... 1981, when Big Brother turned out to be MTV, stuffing the collective memory bank with indelible video images ... 1985, when Madonna melded the teasing fifties with the feminist eighties in "Like a Virgin" ... 1990, when confrontational urban rappers and alienated suburban metalheads seemed to be carrying rock's protest tradition beyond the baby boomers' reach once and for all.