The Tracks of My Years
Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival.
Doug Bradley played basketball with the Miracles, shared a joint with Grace Slick, and held Dionne Warwick’s hand when he told her Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. He watched his Doo-Wop singing brother and World War II veteran father battle over the birth of rock and roll, brought the music of Stax and Motown to a small college in the West Virginia hills, and soaked in the sounds of CCR, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix as an Army journalist in the “air-conditioned jungle” in Vietnam.
In The Tracks of My Years: A Music-Based Memoir, the acclaimed co-author of Rolling Stone’s 2015 music book-of-the-year, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of Vietnam War, tells the story of a life lived with, and in, music. He provides a poignant, sometimes painful, series of portraits of a young man maneuvering the intricacies of family life, love and romance, and a complicated relationship with a high school teacher who inspired him but was a constant source of bewilderment. As Bradley discovers who he is and, crucially, who he isn’t, the soundtrack evolves from Sinatra and the Beatles to Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan.
The Tracks of My Years is a book for anyone who grew up in post-World War II America, and for their children and grandchildren trying to look beyond the haze of myths surrounding Baby Boomers. It opens windows into the echoes of the heart. Cue up Alexa, Siri, or Spotify and curl up for a journey through The Tracks of My Years.
In conversation with David Maraniss.
Doug Bradley
Doug Bradley is an author, educator, and veteran who splits his time with family in Wisconsin and Arizona. Professionally, Doug spent more than 30 years working for the University of Wisconsin in communications; media and public relations; marketing; and local, state, and federal stakeholder relations. For eight years he and UW-Professor Craig Werner taught a highly popular course at the UW entitled “The U. S. in Vietnam: Music, Media, and Mayhem.”
He has blogged for PBS’s Next Avenue and The Huffington Post, taught at UW-Madison, Baldwin-Wallace University, Edgewood College, and Arizona State University, and is the author of three books grounded in the Vietnam experience, including DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle, Who’ll Stop the Rain: Respect, Remembrance, and Reconciliation in Post-Vietnam America, and co-author of We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War, named the Best Music Book of 2015 by Rolling Stone magazine. Doug has been happily married to retired attorney Pam Shannon for 49 years. They are the parents of two grown children and four grandchildren.
David Maraniss
David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post and a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and was a finalist three other times. Among his bestselling books are biographies of Jim Thorpe, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi, and a trilogy about the 1960s—Rome 1960; Once in a Great City (winner of the RFK Book Prize); and They Marched into Sunlight.