Catskill Cowgirl

Holly George-Warren Rocks Around the Clock

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, February 25, 2011

Holly George-Warren gets out of her blue Mini Cooper in front of the Phoenicia Belle Bed & Breakfast, surveying a muddy Main Street full of snowplows and bulldozers. “Snow-moving day in Phoenicia, the perfect time for a photo shoot,” she says with a grin.

George-Warren is one of those infectiously energetic people who lights up any room she enters. Beneath her fur-trimmed hat and winter coat, her getup is pure vintage cowgirl: embroidered western shirt twinkling with rhinestones, black cowboy boots with multicolored cutouts. It’s appropriate garb for the author of The Cowgirl Way (Houghton Mifflin, 2010) and co-author of How the West Was Worn (Abrams, 2001), but it’s hardly the only look she’s rocked.

As “Holly Hemlock,” guitarist of ’80s cult band Das FÜrlines, she opened for Frank Zappa and played CBGB in costumes befitting the group’s Teutonic “all-girl punk rock polka band” aesthetic. And since 1996, she’s had the enviable challenge of deciding what to wear to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s induction ceremonies, for which she compiles an annual book of tributes and essays.

Now she’s assembled a greatest hits anthology entitled The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: The First 25 Years , just released in softcover by Collins Design. It was a massive project. George-Warren screened hundreds of hours of footage to cull excerpts from live speeches, edited induction book essays, and assembled a mix of stock shots and photos from induction ceremonies. Her first draft ran 130,000 words, which she “had to edit like a documentary film” to fit the designer’s template.

Luckily, she was already an old hand at writing and editing music retrospectives such as Grateful Dead 365 (Abrams, 2008), Punk 365 (Abrams, 2007) and more than 30 other titles, including Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues (HarperCollins, 2003) and two editions of the The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll .