The following week, however, On the Road was acclaimed a masterpiece by Gilbert Millstein in The New York Times, Jack Kerouac was suddenly a national figure, and Lustig's play was never mentioned again - although Joyce, as Joyce Johnson, later wrote an interesting chronicle of the period, Minor Characters (1983).Jo Lustig's life changed at the end of the 1950s, as the result of a traffic accident. Sure enough, some time later a roll of paper was delivered to the office, containing Kerouac's single- draft script.As he read the rambling scenes, written for a cast of thousands, Lustig's visions of I Am a Camera were quickly dispelled It was, he realised, unproduceable. There she introduced him to a couple of poets, Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg, and to her current boyfriend, an unknown novelist named Jack Kerouac, with whom Lustig fell into a conversation that lasted several hours. One evening she took her new employer to a Greenwich Village bar, the Cedar Tavern, to meet her friends. He knew his way round the Brill Building, where all the music publishers had their office, he toured with Louis Armstrong, he publicised George Wein's Newport Jazz Festival, and he became good friends with a struggling young stand-up comic named Mel Brooks, who always remembered the way Jo, the only one of their circle with a steady job, would often pay for their meals.By 1957 he was doing well enough to need an assistant, and hired Joyce Glassman, a bright young woman who needed the work to pay for her studies at Barnard College. Among Lustig's early clients were Nat King Cole, the Birdland jazz club and the Weavers folk group. "So what are you, such a big shot?"Those were the days of the great Broadway press agents - men like George Evans, who organised the "spontaneous" Times Square bobby-soxer riots that made Frank Sinatra a star, and David Lipsky, Lustig's mentor.

"Who pays you? The newspapers and radio?" No, mom, the people pay me. Jo was the youngest of their five children, and after war service as a medical orderly in the South Pacific he found his way to Broadway, where he became apprenticed to a press agent, learning how to drum up business for theatres, night-clubs and restaurants.One day his sceptical Yiddish mother asked him what it was, exactly, that he did for a living. Well, mom, he said, people pay me to get their names and addresses into the newspapers and on to the radio. "You get people's names and addresses into the newspapers and on to the radio?" Yes, mom "And you get paid for it?" That's right, mom. He was an extraordinary man - tough, sentimental, calculating, warm, irascible, persuasive, enthusiastic, pugnacious, thoughtful, with a talent for friendship that was more than the equal of his readiness for the sort of row that would melt a telephone.

The names of Nat King Cole, Jack Kerouac, John Cassavetes, Gloria Swanson, Miles Davis, Lenny Bruce, Frank Sinatra, Herman Leonard, Billie Holiday, Mel Brooks, Nico, the Chieftains, Steeleye Span, Louis Armstrong, Donovan and Anita Ekberg would be no more than a tiny representation of those with whom he came into significant contact during a long career as a New York press agent, a London-based manager of folk and pop singers, and an international television and film producer. IT WAS possible to know Jo Lustig for 30 years without being aware of more than a fraction of his unusually well-populated life. And it's in the gaps between intention and result, artifice and essence, the real and the fake, that Exotica plants its most fertile seeds.This book finds its truest magic in everyday struggles: from the pulp film sound-track legend Les Baxter - his commercial instincts doing daily battle, in Toop's memorable phrase, "with an innocent need to be regarded as serious" - to the Pacific islanders Tau Moe's Tropical Stars, who somehow sustained an ideal of Hawaiian identity through 56 years of international touring; because the greatest mystery of all is that there are no mysteries, except the heroic endeavours of "People too ordinary for their own liking, reinventing themselves as characters in a parallel universe".. Yet it has enough respect for the strange sounds it celebrates not to overlook their roots in everyday experience.Anthony Seeger, the curator of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (purveyors of such vital sonic documents as "Sounds of the Bowels: a normal hungry man smoking a cigarette before dinner"), explains how a lot of his label's most exotic products "were prepared by people who had something else in mind for them".