The story in this book is about a young man who left his home and family in Tyler, Texas at the age of twenty three and moved to Los Angeles to follow his dream of becoming a big band singer or to be another Nat King Cole or Billy Esktine. Like fate had it, instead, he became the lead singer and founder of the first vocal group to be inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, along with other members, Billy Guy, Will Jones and Cornell Gunter and has performed over five decades internationally before many large audiences. Today, due to poor health Carl has retired from show business but still controls the group he formed in 1955. Carl Gardner now resides with his wife Veta of nineteen years in Port St. Lucie, Florida.

When you hear the words yak or badger or bat, do you think of animals? Maybe you can imagine them while they are yakking, badgering, or batting! Duck into this book's playful pages to explore action words that sound like animal names and the dictionary definitions that help explain them.

Rock stars of the past thirty years, such as Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Lou Reed, Ice-T, and Chrissie Hynde, respond to whimsical and serious questions.

Yodel-odel-odel, yak yak yak! Yoko Yak can’t seem to stop chatting! And it makes her classmates wonder—what do you do with a yakety yak?

A couple of bumbling parents with a hungry baby seek help from a tricky little witch, but it is a sweet black-eyed yak who really helps them to live happily ever after.

Trash has been blowing across the rock'n'roll landscape since the first amplified guitar riff tore through American mass culture. Throwaway tunes, wasted fans, crappy reviews, junk bins of remaindered albums: much of rock's quintessence is handily conveyed in terms of disposability and impermanence. Steven L. Hamelman sums up these rubbishy affinities as rock's "trash trope." Trash is an obvious physical presence on the rock scene -- think of Woodstock's littered pastures or the many hotel rooms redecorated by the Who. More intriguingly, Hamelman says, trash is the catalyst for a powerful mode of rock composition and criticism. It is, for instance, both cause and effect when performers like the Ramones or Beck at once critique junk culture and revel in it. But Is It Garbage? spills over with challenging insights into how rock's creators, critics, and consumers transform, and are transformed by, trash as a fact and a concept. In the music's preoccupation with its own trashiness readers will perceive a wellspring of rock innovation and inspiration -- one largely overlooked and little understood until now.