Stories Shaped by
Music, Memory, Art,
And the Life Around them.
Robert Coe has spent his life in and around popular music, the performing arts, Downtown New York, the counterculture, and the musical artists who helped bring these worlds to life.
I was sitting alone at a restaurant bar in Jersey City one evening in the spring of 2024 when I began jotting down random images and anecdotes from my life in and around music. I am a writer, have been, mostly about and for the performing arts, but I had barely written about music at all. And yet I came up with fifty-plus musical memories to expand upon and fashion into an autobiography of sorts – an eccentric one, to be sure, but something others might find relatable.
Music enveloped our days and nights. Music empowered us, lifted us up, drowned us, kept us afloat, and turned us back to shore. Music, and the narratives music foster, is one version of the story of our lives.
Music is Time.
Artists in the book (in no particular order): Sam the Sham & Pharaohs, the Beatles, Donovan, The Doors, Joan Baez, guitarist John Fahey, folk legend Dave Van Ronk, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks not yet of Fleetwood Mac, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Laurie Anderson, Keith Richards and the Rolling Stones, Joy of Cooking, Country Joe & the Fish, The Plugz, UXA, Television, Blondie, Talking Heads, Hot Tuna, The 13th Floor Elevators, Kate Bush, the B-52s, Cape Breton master fiddler Buddy McMaster, The Ghana Police Band, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens, Fela, King Sunny Ade, Pauline Oliveros (a pioneering electronic and experimental musician), theater songwriter Des McAnuff, TV composer Garrett “Snuffy” Walden, Madonna, Three Dog Night, Spyro Gyra, John Philip Sousa, Cyndi Lauper, sound artist Helen Thorington, Sly and the Family Stone, sitarist Ravi Shankar, Patti Smith, R.E.M., Ike & Tina Turner, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Lou Reed, Pete Townshend of The Who, Paul Simon, Philip Glass, Oregon, and last but not least, the Chiffons.
About the Author
A journalist, award-winning playwright, author and screenwriter, “the protean Robert Coe” (Los Angeles Times) has worn many hats during his years in Downtown New York as a journalist, playwright, dancer, singer, novelist, performance artist and screenwriter.
Most recently Coe was a recipient of a 2025/26 Fellowship from the New York City Public Library at Lincoln Center to present a lecture on the early life and work of choreographer Bill T. Jones, who Coe danced with early in his career.
He presently lives in Jersey City, across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan, near the vanished Lenape seasonal village of “Gemoenepaen,” known as the best place to launch a canoe to Manhatta across the tidal waters of a river the Lenape called “Muhheakunnuk,” “The River that Runs Both Ways.”
Other books byRobert Coe
Memoir, cultural criticism and personal history told with a journalist’s eye and an artist’s curiosity.
Survivors of a Future
That Never Happened
SURVIVORS OF A FUTURE THAT NEVER HAPPENED – a cultural review, 1974-1994 is a collection of eighteen articles and essays, some previously published in Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, American Theater magazine, and Tricycle: the Buddhist Review, by Robert Coe, a journalist, author, award-winning playwright, and screenwriter.
“People usually have no idea of how significant some present events are until they are seen in hindsight. When the importance of these fixed moments in time is chronicled by a gifted storyteller such as Coe, the result is a treasure. The author’s book consists of a compelling series of first-person reflections by an artistic spirit frantically capturing the sights and sounds of an entire generation’s potential…. The author has written a truly personal opus and one that captivates as well as inspires.”
Robert Buccellato, The US Review of Books
JOCK: A Memoir of
the Counterculture
JOCK: A Memoir of the counterculture is a spiritual autobiography about collegiate track and field, major college football, Olympic swimming, and big-time college sports generally in the psychedelic/anti-war rebellion. While ultimately a personal coming-of-age story and the experience of being a Division I college distance runner, JOCK is also an unexpurgated account of how the counterculture – anti-authoritarianism, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll – interacted with a realm that was supposedly its polar opposite: big-time college athletics.
“What magnificent, important work… I can clearly imagine you and me continuing our talk about the meanings and paradoxes of sporting effort, community and service, and me inviting you to train in Eugene after the ’72 trials. Where I would have tried to shake you out of the provably erroneous assumption that four college years were all you were allowed for a career…”
Kenny Moore, Two-time Olympic Marathoner and a thirty-year veteran journalist covering the running scene for Sports Illustrated.