Touched By Magic - Greg Prato

JS-NYC likes themselves some Greg Prato. His oral history of the grunge era and Eric Carr bio have received high marks from our discriminating scribes here. I knew of Tommy Bolin through magazine subscriptions and general obscurist guitar nerdery, but hadn't heard too much of his material and didn't have too much conception of him beyond the fact that he died pretty young and played with Deep Purple. Given my other alternative was a Prato book on the Blind Melon dude, Touched By Magic was an easy choice to make. Prato does his usual excellent job of recounting the Bolin story through the people that were closest to him personally and musically. It's ridiculous to think that he could have played on seminal works by Billy Cobham, The James Gang and Deep Purple and still died at age 25. It's a compelling, albeit tragic story. Pick it up here from Prato.

R