Depicting the journey of fed-up record executive Mitchell Hertz, The Wild Times explores the counterculture of the 1970s. Perlich drew from his own personal career in radio broadcasting to help shape the novel.

“I came to Los Angeles in 1972 and started journaling,” Perlich said. “When I got a PC in the ‘80s, I started to enter the 1,500 pages of my journals and from there began to turn them into fiction.

“The media has created caricatures of everything that happened in the ‘60s and ‘70s,” he continued. “The novel does have humor, but it’s not a caricature or satire. It gives authenticity to the ‘70s and puts you on the scene in a more direct and experiential way. The novel has a unique ‘you are there’ quality to it; I hope I’ve created a character that is sympathetic enough he can be identified with.”

The Wild Times follows the success of Perlich’s non-fictional interviewing guide published in 2000, The Art of the Interview: A Step-by-Step Guide to Insightful Interviewing.

“For anyone who survived the ‘70s, or is curious about them, The Wild Times is the perfect guide book,” said playwright/director Ernest Thompson. “Writing in the jingle-jangle urgency of the decade, Martin Perlich has unerringly captured the birds-in-a–storm whimsy of a journey navigated on too many drugs and too little sense of direction but precisely the ideal combination of curiosity and lust, abandon and longing. What a ride the ‘70s were and what a funny, sad and compelling chronicle this novel is.”

The entirety of Perlich’s journals will be fictionalized in three subsequent novels: The Perfect Fool, Chop-Suey Side and Adequacy, completing his Adequacy Quartet. Perlich began his career in music at Columbia University, studying musicology with distinguished American composer Douglas Moore. At 24, he became the first intermission host of the internationally syndicated Cleveland Orchestra broadcasts, conducting interviews with Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland and Isaac Stern among others. Moving to Los Angeles in 1972, Perlich continued his broadcasting career at KMET, conducting interviews with guests such as Jane Fonda, Phil Ochs, members of the Black Panther Party, Attica prisoners and Frank Zappa.

Outside of the radio realm, Perlich has developed and produced dramatic, music and documentary television programming for public television stations KCET in Los Angeles and WNET in New York. In 1985, he collaborated with Lions Gate films on the feature film “Shooting for Change.”

Currently, Perlich acts as the program director for CSUN’s public radio station KCSN/88.5 FM, offering an extensive musical palette of arts and roots music including classical, blues, bluegrass, big band, new age and jazz. Host of the award-winning series “Martin Perlich Interviews” on KCSN, broadcast three times every weekday, Perlich conducts interviews with a variety of world-class composers, performers and conductors that in the past have included Pierre Boulez, Marcel Ophuls, Gore Vidal and John Adams.

For more information regarding Perlich visit www.martinperlich.com or call (818) 677-4567.