Jimi Hendrix book signing marks finale of Rowan University’s “Laser Hendrix” series

Philadelphia area writer Frank Moriarty, author of Modern Listener Guide: Jimi Hendrix, will sign copies of this new analysis of Hendrix’s career on Friday, March 15 at 6:30 p.m. at the Edelman Planetarium at Rowan University (Science Hall, 201 Mullica Hill Road, Glassboro, New Jersey).

The event is part of the final performance of Laser Hendrix, the colorful state-of-the-art laser light show set to the music of Hendrix. The show has been drawing crowds to Rowan’s Edelman Planetarium on Friday nights since its opening in January. No less an authority than Brian May, the founding guitarist of Queen, has noted, “There are some guys who continue to write out of a true passion for real rock music, and Frank Moriarty is one of this select bunch.”

Modern Listener Guide: Jimi Hendrix is Moriarty’s 15th nonfiction book. With informed commentary and spirited critical perspective, he expertly leads the way through Hendrix studio sessions, live concert recordings and myriad album and box set releases that comprise the imposing legacy of one of the world’s great guitarists and musical personalities. The book offers an up-to-date and historically accurate portrait of Hendrix’s life and career.

(Additional materials {including high-resolution images of the book cover and the cover photograph of Hendrix at Temple Stadium in Philadelphia in May 1970} and direct contact with author Frank Moriarty are available via: info@modernlistenerpublishing.com. Book website: www.ModernListenerPublishing.com. Edelman Planetarium website: https://sites.rowan.edu/planetarium/.)

About the Author

Frank Moriarty is a writer and guitarist. An admirer of Jimi Hendrix’s music from first listen, Moriarty was driven to become an expert on Hendrix’s work after seeing the guitarist and songwriter live in 1969 and 1970. This passion led to the publication of Moriarty’s first book about Hendrix’s life, Bold as Love: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, featuring a foreword by Experience bassist Noel Redding. Moriarty also has contributed to the Eyewitness: Jimi Hendrix reference book series and provided feature articles to the Hendrix family periodical Experience Hendrix as well as the magazines Jimpress and UniVibes: The International Jimi Hendrix Magazine.

A respected expert on the development and evolution of rock music, Moriarty also wrote Seventies Rock: The Decade of Creative Chaos, a wide-ranging overview of that turbulent sonic decade. Moriarty began writing about music in the early 1970s when he was a teenager, contributing articles to the legendary “underground” Philadelphia publication Distant Drummer. In the 1980s he began a decade-long stint as weekly rock music columnist for Philadelphia City Paper, and later wrote for Philadelphia Weekly. Aside from his career as an award-winning author of nonfiction books, Moriarty also has written on a variety of topics ranging from motorsports development programs and NASA spaceflight to R&B and rock and roll. Moriarty has met or interviewed musicians ranging from David Bowie and Pete Townshend to Joe Strummer and Patti Smith, and he has been a guitarist for more than four decades.

His band Informed Sources performed with groundbreaking U.S. punk bands, including Black Flag, X, the Replacements, Flipper, Dead Kennedy, and Bad Brains throughout the early 1980s. His career in music continued in later bands, including Bunnydrums and Third Stone Invasion as a label-mate with artists such as John Entwistle of The Who and Billy Squier.