"I was at a point of crossing in my life then—a liminal moment, as the anthropologists like to say. I was trying to figure out what the world was about and what my place in it was going to be. And somehow I got the idea that these characters, these kings, could help me along." After graduating from college in 1974, Mark Edmundson leaves his small Vermont campus determined to fulfill his destiny—a quest he knows involves rock and roll and America's high court of mischief and ambition, New York City. Under the wing of a carousing, Marx-quoting friend, Edmundson moves into a grungy uptown apartment and embarks on a career lugging amps in a New Jersey arena for rock's biggest acts: the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, and the Allman Brothers.