99% TRUE

A writer recollects his journey from wayward youth to entrepreneurial accomplishment. 

While growing up in California during the 1950s and ’60s, debut author McGowan was relentlessly mischievous. He was shot by an angry neighbor for trespassing, illegally established a college radio station, and spent two weeks in jail for 14 vehicular violations and failure to appear in court once summoned. The author ebulliently depicts his self-destructive youth in his memoir. He fled to Canada to avoid the draft, but the military ultimately caught up with him. While he was assured by a recruiter that accepting a longer stint as a radio specialist would prevent his deployment to Vietnam in 1969, that’s precisely where the Army intended to send him. After attempting to fake a mental breakdown, McGowan managed to sidestep Vietnam, landing in West Germany, where he worked as a DJ for the Armed Forces Network. He narrowly avoided going to prison for drug smuggling. Along the way, the author became infatuated with the European music scene and turned into the kind of person he would entrepreneurially serve for the rest of his life: an audiophile. He was eventually compelled to move back to the United States—he got into trouble with his commanding officer for concealing his long hair under a wig. He started his own company, PS Audio, which would eventually fail and then return to life decades later. McGowan’s story is cinematically dramatic—it always seems as if his destiny was either to make an indelible mark on the world or rot in prison. He unflinchingly offers a strong self-critique. A hubristic imprudence often torpedoed his ambitions: “What had made me believe I had the chops to build the world’s first polyphonic synthesizer? I had no education, no degree, nothing but chutzpah and a dream. I felt like a fraud.” The author’s tale is one of indefatigable persistence combined with real vision, stirringly conveyed in this remarkably readable memoir that also recounts the birth of a new consumer, the audiophile. 

An engrossingly dramatic remembrance coupled with a keen history of the audiophile industry.