Lillian Roxon: Mother of Rock

By Robert Milliken

Book Overview

From the pubs of the Sydney Push to New York's legendary nightclubs, Lillian Roxon set the pace for an era that changed the world. Audacious, independent and fiercely intelligent, by eighteen she was cutting her writing teeth in the colourful world of Sydney tabloid journalism. She moved to New York in 1959, just in time for a cultural revolution that celebrated youth, sexual freedom, women's liberation - and rock and roll. Roxon quickly became the centre of a circle that included Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Jim Morrison and David Bowie. Linda Eastman confided in her about her first dates with Paul McCartney. Germaine Greer dedicated The Female Eunuch to her. Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia, published in 1969, was the first book of its kind and established her as a leading chronicler of rock and youth culture. When she died suddenly in 1973, she left behind a collection of work full of the energy, irreverence and idealism of her times.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0369370562
• ISBN13: 9780369370563
• Release Date: November 2010
• Publisher: ReadHowYouWant
• Length: 808 Pages
• Weight: 2.21 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.0" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

From Oz She Came

Robert Milliken has written a fine biography of the pioneering journalist Lillian Roxon, author of ROCK ENCYCLOPEDA (1969). On one hand anyone would feel sorry for Roxon, who died alone in a crumby New York apartment surrounded by giant cockroaches, and so young, only 41, and she died of asthma which thank God very few people die of. One has the feeling that if only she felt able to share her life with someone she might have lived; as Milliken hints there are some unanswered questions about her death. However on the whole the book is a colonnade of sustained joy, for Roxon's life was an extraordinary one and she seems on every turn to have found the most fun available. Plus she lived during a great period in Australian history, finding herself at a very young age (as a schoolgirl) part of Brisbane's chic, avant-garde "Pink Elephant" crowd, a young girl in a wild scene of poetry, homosexuality and small, intensive galleries and late night cafes and bars. She never looked back, becoming a top journalist in Sydney where she worked for the city's top paper, the Morning Herald, where eventually the corporation sent her to New York City. In 1960, just in time for Camelot and the Kennedys and the beginning of the Twist and Nureyev and Fonteyn and, finally, the scene where she found her niche, the rock/art back room at Max's Kansas City. Nearly everyone loved her, for she was not only beautiful and brainy but she had a shrewd, native generosity, and helped out her fellow writers wherever she could. She befriended Linda Eastman, who broke her heart by ignoring her after her marriage to Paul McCartney was brokeraged. And she encountered another Australian wild woman, the provovateuse Germaine Greer, who wrote THE FEMALE EUNUCH in 1971, dedicating it to Lillian as most of us have forgotten by now. All these tangled stories and scenes Milliken lays out like the pro he is, and yet never losing sight of his main thread, the way Roxon took to innovation and the experimental like a dog to water. As a bonus, Milliken included a shrewd selection of some of the highlights of Roxon's famous ENCYCLOPEDIA, now apparently sadly out of print, as well as some pertient and previously uncollected articles that were published before her death. This small anthology of Roxon's work makes us long for an edition of her critical slash gossip writing in toto.