I Gotta Rock

Twenty Years of Tales 1965-1985

Aerosmith's Joe Perry put it this way, "The new singer, Cowboy Mach Bell, was a rock'n'roll guy who grew up in the next town over from me (Holliston, Massachusetts) and had a group called Thundertrain. He loved to rave and be in a band."

After the break-up of the Mechanical Onions, Cowboy sees the Jimi Hendrix Experience in a tent in Framingham MA. At fifteen Mach's at the Boston Tea Party debut of the Jeff Beck Group. Inspired, Bell, now sixteen, hitchhikes to Boulder CO where he finds Tommy Bolin (Zephyr) and Terry Reid jamming on a mountaintop. Mach returns east to play gigs with Black Sun and gets invited by Richard Cole to see the young Led Zeppelin ('69) at the half-filled Carousel tent. "As reflected in his diaries, Bell's life in the 70's was the ultimate celebration of rock'n'roll. A continuous round of Thundertrain club shows, concerts, rehearsals, parties, travel, recording dates and evenings spent at the Rat, CBGB's, the Club, Max's Kansas City and the Paradise. When the Boston Groupie News rolled off the press the next morning, Mach Bell had been where the action was the night before - and he was already writing all about it in his diary." With his trademark "you are there," conversational style, Mach writes about his dinner with the Monkee's Michael Nesmith and about the time in 1974 when he was held suspect in the Patty Hearst kidnapping investigation. Find out how Cowboy got involved in a wild homicide cover-up in 1981 and why Bell was fired from his job touring with Circus Vargas.

Musicians, rock stars, film stars, circus stars, strippers, cartooonists, designers, morticians, writers... Mach knew them all: people like The Runaways, Cheap Trick, Steven Tyler, DMZ, Barb Kitson, Danny Fields, The Cars, Tom Bosley, Alex Chilton, Leslie Palmiter, Lou Gramm, Reddy Teddy, John Hammond Jr, Jim Harold, David Johansen, Clifford Vargas, Maxanne, Red Buttons, Willie Alexander, Dee Dee Ramone, Oedipus, Mickey Rooney, the Dead Boy's Stiv Bators, Eddie Kent, Charo, and Thin Lizzy's Phil Lynott to mention but a few.

I Gotta Rock is an illuminating social chronicle. Enter the 60's world of teenage rock bands, crash on the Sunset Strip in 1974. Join Thundertrain onstage in '76 to record "Live at the Rat" and rock their biggest hit "Hot For Teacher." Hang at the Thundertrain Mansion in '77. Go everywhere else with the Wild Bunch and Joe Perry Project in the early 80's. Bell makes headlines, rocks hard, faces a prison sentence, chases girls, starts riots and fights for his freedom. In these pages, Cowboy reveals what he really thought about everybody. Including his own bandmates. Mach brings you Bobby Edwards, Steven Silva, Joe Perry, Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix and Marc Bolan as you've never seen them before.

I Gotta Rock 492 pages Nearly 200 photographs