The sound of 'Wichita Lineman' was the sound of ecstatic solitude, but then its hero was the quintessential loner. What a great metaphor he was: a man who needed a woman more than he actually wanted her. Written in 1968 by Jimmy Webb, 'Wichita Lineman' is the first philosophical country song: a heartbreaking torch ballad still celebrated for its mercurial songwriting genius fifty years later. It was recorded by Glen Campbell in LA with a legendary group of musicians known as 'the Wrecking Crew', and something about the song's enigmatic mood seemed to capture the tensions in America at a moment of crisis. Fusing a dribble of bass, searing strings, tremolo guitar and Campbell's plaintive vocals, Webb's paean to the American West describes a telephone lineman's longing for an absent lover, who he hears 'singing in the wire' - and like all good love songs, it's an SOS from the heart. Mixing close-listening, interviews and travelogue, Dylan Jones explores the legacy of...

In Paris's Père-Lachaise cemetery, Jim Morrison's graffiti-scrawled tombstone is a place of pilgrimage for local devotees, adolescent hedonists and wayward backpackers alike. Found dead in his bathtub aged only 27 having achieved worldwide stardom as lead singer of The Doors, Morrison was quickly immortalised amongst the rock and roll deity such as Hendrix and Joplin. In death, however, this debauched 'rock poet' remained more stubbornly enigmatic than ever.Who was the real Jim Morrison? Nihilist, egoist, shaman: he was a master of self-creation. A mosaic mythology of new-age hippy rhetoric, French poetry and Nietszchean symbolism obscured a man trapped by the mythology that he had so carefully constructed around himself.In this colourful and intimate biography, Dylan Jones strips bare the skin-tight leather suit of Jim Morrison's Lizard King persona, and offers a frank and honest appraisal of a much beloved and often-romanticised counter-cultural icon....