Frankie is a bit of a chameleon, changing with the times as he grows to manhood during the turbulent North American mid-century A mulatto who wears race and colour on his sleeve as he grows up with his Jewish father in Spanish Harlem, Frankie is part of a street corner band that makes good in the heydays of rock 'n roll, a finger-picking itinerant folkie in the freewheeling sixties and a budding composer of serious music in the seventies in Canada Along the way, he passes by the margins of some of the key events of his time, his life illuminating that of a whole generation