Remembering Rock Dreams: Guy Peellaert and Nik Cohn

DO YOU STILL have a copy of Rock Dreams? If you were a rock fan in the early ‘70s, when it was first published, you probably do. If you’re a rock fan at all you carry with you the images by Guy Peellaert of a fur-collared Bob Dylan in the back of a limo; of James Brown getting out of his limo to greet his godchildren; of Elvis crying in the chapel; of Brian Wilson in his lonely room. Rock Dreams is one of the masterworks of Pop Art: an advertising-derived marriage of image and text, a marvelous mise en scène of collective fantasy. It remains radically truthful about rock, pop and soul music’s founding figures.