Dan LeRoy is the Director of Writing and Publishing at Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School, USA. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, The Village Voice, Esquireonline, and Alternative Press. He is the author of The Beastie Boys’ Paul's Boutique (Bloomsbury 2006), The Greatest Music Never Sold (2007), For Whom the Cowbell Tolls (2014), and Liberty’s Lions: The Catholic Revolutionaries Who Established America (2021).

• Foreword by Nick Rhodes: Timing is EverythingPrologue1. From Boats to Babies: How Drum Machines Began2. The Rhythm Aces3. Beat Brothers: Sly Stone and J.J. Cale 4. “The Machines Are Fighting Back”5. Teutonic Sonics: Germany and Programmed Rhythm 6. Turn the Beat Around: Eno, Disco and the Drum Machine 7. Our Drum Machine Could Be Your Band8. The Drum Machines That Weren’t 9. Punch the Clock: The Joy and Pain of Drum Programming10. Without Me, You Would Not Even Have Thought of Writing This Book 11. Give the (Electronic) Drummer Some12. Inside and Outside the Box: The Linn Revolution13. “Have You Seen This New Drum Machine? Shit!”14. 808 State 15. Hip Hop’s Electric Guitar 16. Worker Bees of the DMX 17. Destination Emulation18. Mr. K’s Last Laugh 19. The Mammals Arrive: The Linn 9000 and the End of the Drum Machine20. Computer Love21. Time Out of TimeAppendix: I Am EchoAcknowledgments

Dan LeRoy takes on a subject that could easily result in a dry, strictly-for-geeks read – the history of machine-rhythm - and turns out a juicy deep-dive that will appeal equally to the lay-person interested in the evolution of pop culture as to the gear-head and serious musician. What this richly researched and entertaining book shows is that far from dehumanizing and deskilling music, the drum machine depended on human imagination: the vision and dedication needed to create the technology in the first place, the ingenuity of amateur and professional musicians alike, as they struggled with these newfangled boxes and extracted magic from them. It’s a story that’s largely untold and LeRoy tells it with vivid clarity.