What's Exactly the Matter with Me?

What's Exactly the Matter with Me? (Memoirs of a Life in Music). Book. Softcover. 320 pages. Published by Jawbone Press.

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 inspiring story of one of the greatest songwriters in American music, as well as one of the most elusive and mysterious. P. F. Sloan was a prolific and influential genius from the golden age of the 1960s and a pioneer of folk-rock. Between 1965 and 1967, 150 of his songs were recorded by major acts; 45 of those made the charts. No other songwriter has ever come close to achieving so great a 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 & 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, survival, healing and, ultimately, redemption.