Lonn Friend was born on a planet that looks a lot like Earth but was one on which the music was heavier, the hair was longer, and the drugs, booze, and groupies were everywhere. After five years of helping Larry Flynt put out Hustler, Friend had had enough. He told Flynt that if he wasn't installed at the top of the masthead of RIP, the fledgling rock magazine in the pornographer's kingdom, he would walk. Thus began one of the great runs in music writing, rivaling the best work of Lester Bangs and Cameron Crowe. For the generation coming of age in the years from 1987 to 1994, RIP magazine was every bit as crucial as Rolling Stone. Life on Planet Rock describes how Friend became the Zelig-like chronicler of the biggest musical moments of that time, from introducing Guns N' Roses (in nothing but a top hat, underwear, and cowboy boots), to sitting in during the making of Metallica's "Black Album." Life on Planet Rock provides revealing portraits of artists as varied as Kurt Cobain, Gene Simmons, Alice Cooper, Axl Rose, Elvis Costello, and many more. Part oral history, part candid and humorous memoir, it is a wormhole back to a fast-moving time in music that saw tastes flash from new wave to hair metal to grunge, told as only someone who was there for all of it could tell it.