“I have a lot in common with Frank Moriarty. We have many of the same heroes and share the same enduring love of the first waves of musical wonder that swept over us when we were kids... There are some guys who continue to write out of a true passion for real rock music, and Frank Moriarty is one of this select bunch.”
Frank Moriarty is a writer and guitarist. Modern Listener Guide: Jimi Hendrix is his 15th nonfiction book.
An admirer of Jimi Hendrix’s music from first listen, Frank was driven to become an expert on Hendrix’s work after seeing the guitarist and songwriter live in 1969 and 1970. This passion led to the publication of Frank’s first book about Hendrix’s life, Bold as Love: The Jimi Hendrix Experience (MetroBooks, 1996) featuring a foreword by Experience bassist Noel Redding. Frank has also contributed to the acclaimed Eyewitness: Jimi Hendrix reference book series and provided feature articles to the Hendrix family periodical Experience Hendrix as well as the magazines Jimpress and UniVibes: The International Jimi Hendrix Magazine.
A respected expert on the development and evolution of rock music, Frank also wrote Seventies Rock: The Decade of Creative Chaos (Taylor Trade, 2003), a wide-ranging overview of that turbulent sonic decade.
Frank began writing about music in the early 1970s when he was teenager, contributing articles to the legendary “underground” Philadelphia publication Distant Drummer. In the 1980s he began a decade-long stint as weekly rock music columnist for Philadelphia City Paper, and later wrote for Philadelphia Weekly. Aside from his career as an award-winning author of nonfiction books, Moriarty has also written on a variety of topics ranging from motorsports development programs and NASA spaceflight to R&B and rock ‘n’ roll. Frank has met or interviewed musicians ranging from David Bowie and Pete Townshend to Joe Strummer and Patti Smith
Frank has been a guitarist for more than four decades. His band Informed Sources performed with groundbreaking US punk bands including Black Flag, X, the Replacements, Flipper, Dead Kennedys, and Bad Brains throughout the early 1980s. His career in music continued in later bands including Bunnydrums and Third Stone Invasion as a label-mate with artists including John Entwistle of The Who and Billy Squier.
Friends to canines and adopters of an ever-growing string of rescue dogs saved from homelessness, Frank and his wife Leigh Anne reside in Historic New Castle, Delaware.
