The Invisible Hit Parade

A shadow history of music told through the unofficial tapes and bootlegs shared among obsessive music fans, from Charlie Parker to Bob Dylan to the Grateful Dead to Grandmaster Flash to Radiohead, by the acclaimed host of The Good Ol’ Grateful Dead Podcast.

The Invisible Hit Parade: A Taper’s History of Music is an alternative history of music told through influential grey area and noncommercial recordings. With compelling narratives, an epic scope, and galaxy-brain perspective, it challenges the filters through which music’s importance is usually measured, how its history is told, and how its cultural heritage is understood. Instead of quantifying itself through charts or sales, The Invisible Hit Parade looks at the bigger picture of music history through the way unofficial recordings played a constant, vital counterpoint to traditional commercial hits in every era, a long historical trail of radical and influential music. Instead of studios and producers and mega-stars. The Invisible Hit Parade is a people’s history of music, a continuous thread of recordists, colorful fans, rogue scholars, and music too powerful to be contained by traditional means.

The Invisible Hit Parade tells the shadow history of music in America via an underground network of tapers, tape traders, collectors, and hoarders of unofficial recordings that thrived via an obsessive fanbase that rejected the approach—and especially the canon—of the major record labels. Along the way, it details an incredible saga that includes artists like Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, Elvis Presley, Charlie Parker, Bob Dylan, Grandmaster Flash, Radiohead, Kanye West, and more.