For more than three decades since then, Ronnie, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts have formed the core of the greatest rock 'n' roll band in history. This book is Ronnie's autobiography, and like the band it can only be talked about in superlatives: it's simply one of the biggest, most outrageous, most extraordinary and most fun rock 'n' roll memoirs ever to be published.From early 1960s Britain, when acts like The Yardbirds, The Kinks, The Who and The Rolling Stones crisscrossed the country's club scene in clapped-out vans, barely making ends meet but having the time of their lives, through to the global mega stadium concerts of the 21st century (in 2006 the Stones played live to more than two million people in Rio), Ronnie takes us on a journey through his life and through rock history. Filled with unforgettable characters and truly eye-popping stories, his autobiography reveals Ronnie the husband, father, grandfather, artist and rock star the way you have never seen any rock star before. Ronnie is an up-front and personal look at life as a Rolling Stone, from the inside, and at the Stones as the rest of the world has never seen them. After Ronnie , sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll will never be the same again.

    Mark Hodkinson's biography of Queen focuses on the band's formative years, and draws on interviews with over sixty friends and colleagues of Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon.

    Their sound was inventive and tetchy, and front man Jello Biafra’s lyrics were incisive and often scathing. This chronicle—the first in-depth book written about Dead Kennedys—uses dozens of firsthand interviews, photos, and original artwork to offer a new perspective on a group that was mired in controversy almost from its inception. It examines and applauds the band’s key role in transforming punk rhetoric, both polemical and musical, into something genuinely threatening and enormously funny. Author Alex Ogg puts the local and global trajectory of punk into context and, while not flinching from the wildly differing takes the individual band members have on the evolution of the band, attempts to be celebratory—if not uncritical.

    Mixerman lays out the many organizational and creative roles of an effective producer as budget manager, time manager, personnel manager, product manager, arranger, visionary, and leader, and without ever foregoing the politics involved in the process. As Mixerman points out, "Producing is an art in which reading and understanding people nearly always trumps any theoretical knowledge - whether musical or technical in nature." Whether you're currently positioned as musician, engineer, songwriter, DJ, studio owner, or just avid music fan, Mixerman delivers you a seemingly one-on-one, personal lesson on effective producing.

    I don’t just play around on the fringes.’ – Bob DylanIn 1979 there was… trouble in mind, and trouble in store for the ever-iconoclastic Dylan. But unlike in 1965-66, the artifactal afterglow – three albums in three years, Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love – barely reflected the explosion of faith and inspiration. One has to look elsewhere, and in Trouble In Mind, Clinton Heylin has; connecting the dots on the man’s gospel years by drawing on a wealth of new information, newly-found recordings and new interviews. His primary goal? To make the case for a wholesale re-evaluation of the music Bob Dylan produced in these inspiring times.

    in 1978. Punk kings who spread counterculture around the world, they’ve been cited as influences by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Green Day, Rancid and The Offspring; have toured with The Clash, The Ramones, The Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Nirvana, PiL, Minor Threat and others; and are the subject of two tribute albums. They are the band that introduced the term “hardcore” into punk lexicon and may have turned Nirvana’s lead singer Kurt Cobain onto a career in music.But punk is more than a style of music: it’s a political act, and D.O.A. have always had a social conscience, having performed in support of Greenpeace, women’s rape/crisis centres, prisoner’s rights, and antinuke and antiglobalization organizations. Twenty-five years later D.O.A. can claim sales of hundreds of thousands of copies of their 11 albums and tours in 30 different countries, and they are still going strong.I, Shithead is Joey’s personal, no-bullshit recollections of a life in punk, starting with the burgeoning punk movement and traversing a generation disillusioned with the status quo, who believed they could change the world: stories of riots, drinking, travelling, playing and conquering all manner of obstacles through sheer determination.Praise for D.O.A.:“They rock out. They blow the roof off. Some of the best shows I’ve seen in my life were D.O.A. gigs. I’ve never seen D.O.A. not be amazing.”—Henry Rollins (Black Flag, Rollins Band)“The proper medicine growing young minds needed.”—Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys)“Joey Shithead casts a long shadow.”—John Doe (X)“They’ve changed a lot of people’s lives.”—Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters)Joey “Shithead” Keithley has long been an activist, including as a candidate for the Green Party, and is the founder of Sudden Death Records (www.suddendeath.com). He lives in Vancouver with his wife and their three children.

    Kienzle meticulously sifted through archival material, government records, recollections by colleagues and admirers, interviewing many involved in Jones’s life and career. The result: an evocative portrait of this enormously gifted, tragically tormented icon called “the Keith Richards of country.”Kienzle chronicles Jones’s impoverished East Texas childhood as the youngest son of a deeply religious mother and alcoholic, often-abusive father. He examines his three troubled marriages including his union with superstar Tammy Wynette and looks unsparingly at Jones’s demons. Alcohol and later cocaine nearly killed him until fourth wife Nancy helped him learn to love himself. Kienzle also details Jones’s remarkable musical journey from singing in violent Texas honky tonks to Grand Ole Opry star, hitmaker and master vocalist whose raw, emotionally powerful delivery remains the Gold Standard for country singers.The George Jones of this heartfelt biography lived hard before finding contentment until he died at eighty-one—a story filled with whiskey, women and drugs but always the saving grace of music.Illustrated with eight pages of photos.

    After that he could describe his cars for three [LP] sides and get away with it." Christgau on Carly Simon: "If a horse could sing in a monotone, the horse would sound like Carly Simon, only a horse wouldn't rhyme 'yacht,' 'apricot,' and 'gavotte.'" Christgau on Van Morrison: "This is a man who gets stoned on a drink of water and urges us to turn our radios all the way into the mystic. Visionary hooks his specialty." Christgau on Lou Reed: "Reed Sounds like he's imitating his worst enemy, himself." (Lou Reed on Robert Christgau: "What a moron! Studying rock and roll. I can't believe it!") An indispensable book, Christgau's Rock Albums the '70s is the definitive guide to nearly 3,000 albums of the decade that brought us progressive rock, country rock, glam rock, funk, disco, punk, heavy metal, and new wave.

    In 1982, he retired to concentrate on painting, leaving the mythology he'd stoked himself to grow untamed over the years. John French is better qualified than anyone to talk about Beefheart, joining the Magic Band in 1966 at the age of 17 just before recording their Safe As Milk debut album, finding himself plunged into a tyrannical regime which would dominate his life for the next 14 years as he played a major role in eight subsequent albums, including translating the mindblowing avant-blues assault of 1969's Trout Mask Replica into readable music for the Magic Band from the Captain's piano poundings under torturous conditions he likens to a cult. French's remarkable memoir starts with a vivid description of the rarely-documented early 60s Lancaster garage-rock scene...

    disbanded in 2011. It offers by far the most detailed account of their formative years―the early lives of the band members, their first encounters with one another, their legendary debut show, early tours in the back of a van, initial recordings, their shrewdly paced rise to fame. The people and places of ‘the South’ are crucial to the R.E.M. story in ways much more complex and interesting than have been presented thus far, says Lurie, who explores the myriad ways in which the band’s adopted hometown of Athens, Georgia, and the South in general, have shaped its members and the character and style of their art. The South is more than the background to this story; it plays a major role: the creative ferment that erupted in Athens and gripped many of its young inhabitants in the late 70s and early 80s drew on regional traditions of outsider art and general cultural out-thereness, and gave rise to a free-spirited music scene that produced the B-52’s and Pylon, and laid the ground for R.E.M.’s subsequent breakout success. Lurie has tracked down and interviewed numerous figures in the band’s history who were under-represented in or even absent from earlier biographies, and they contribute previously undocumented stories as well as casting a fresh light on the familiar narrative.

    His credits include some of the most indelible songs of the '60s: The Ronettes' "Be My Baby," the Crystals' "Then He Kissed Me," and Ike and Tina Turner's "River Deep, Mountain High." Culled from more than 100 interviews with Spector's closest associates, and fully updated to include the firsthand details of the alleged murder of actress Lana Clarkson, He's a Rebel boldly explores Spector's legendary eccentricities, addictions, and violent, reclusive tendencies. This is the definitive, unflinching portrait of Phil Spector, the producer who transformed the airwaves and forever changed the sound of popular music.

    In 1979, Thatcher's Britain was a country crippled by strikes, joblessness, and economic gloom, divided by race and class—and skanking to a new beat: 2 Tone. The unruly offspring of white boy punk and rude boy ska, the Specials burst on to the scene. On stage they were electric, and at the heart of this energy was the vocal chemistry of the ethereal Terry Hall and Jamaican rude boy Neville Staple. In 1961, five-year-old Neville was sent to England to live with his father, a man for whom discipline bordered on child abuse. As he recounts here, growing up black in the Midlands of the 1960s and 1970s wasn't easy, and his youth was marked by scuffles with skins, compulsive womanizing, and a life of crime that led from shoplifting to burglary and eventually prison. But throughout there was music, and Nev reveals how he became part of the most important band of the 1980s. He remembers sound system battles; the legendary 2 Tone tour with the Selecter, Madness, and Dexy's, and their clashes with white nationalist thugs. He recalls the band's increasing tensions and eventual split; his subsequent foray into bubblegum pop with Fun Boy Three; and a newfound fame in America as godfather to Third Wave ska bands. Finally he reflects on the Specials' reunion and how even now, 30 years later, they can't help tearing themselves apart.

    Two days later he was playing his first show as bass player with AC/DC; within a week he was on Countdown, rocking out next to wildman Bon Scott, who was dressed as a pigtailed, cigarette-smoking schoolgirl - and waving a mallet - and Angus who was - of course - decked out as a schoolboy. And all for the princely wage of $60 a week!Then came nearly being burnt alive on the video shoot for 'Jailbreak', and working with legends Vanda and Young on the massive album TNT, on which Mark's take-no-prisoners basslines anchored such immortal hits as 'TNT' and 'It's a Long Way To the Top'. Within a year, the band had relocated to London and were on the road to rock 'n' roll stardom, living the life of rock gods and making the most of all that had to offer. Until the tragic death of his good friend Bon Scott changed everything.Dirty Deeds is the first book about AC/DC written from the inside, by an insider - which is gold for any AC/DC fan. It is an honest, gripping, sometimes laugh-out-loud account of a band that lived fast, played hard and broke every one of the rules - before they broke all the records. It is also a revealing and frank memoir of a man who's had to contend with everything life has thrown at him - a rough-as-guts upbringing, lucky breaks and soaring highs, as well as terrible personal tragedy and loss. The hard lessons Mark has learned along the way will inspire any reader.

    Lumped into the burgeoning alt-country movement, the band soon landed a major label deal and recorded an instant classic: Strangers Almanac. That's when tour manager Thomas O'Keefe met the young musician.For the next three years, Thomas was at Ryan's side: on the tour bus, in the hotels, backstage at the venues. Whiskeytown built a reputation for being, as the Detroit Free Press put it, "half band, half soap opera," and Thomas discovered that young Ryan was equal parts songwriting prodigy and drunken buffoon. Ninety percent of the time, Thomas could talk Ryan into doing the right thing. Five percent of the time, he could cover up whatever idiotic thing Ryan had done. But the final five percent? Whiskeytown was screwed.Twenty-plus years later, accounts of Ryan's legendary antics are still passed around in music circles. But only three people on the planet witnessed every Whiskeytown show from the release of Strangers Almanac to the band's eventual breakup: Ryan, fiddle player Caitlin Cary, and Thomas O'Keefe.

    Suspended for a few seconds, they float in their own space and time with their own hidden prospects. For want of a better term, we call these moments “magical” and when we remember them they are cloaked in a halo of special meaning.’For 14-year-old Johnny Clegg, hearing Zulu street music as plucked on the strings of a guitar by Charlie Mzila one evening outside a corner café in Bellevue, Johannesburg, was one such ‘magical’ moment. The success story of Juluka and later Savuka, and the cross-cultural celebration of music, language, story, dance and song that stirred the hearts of millions across the world, is well documented. Their music was the soundtrack to many South Africans’ lives during the turbulent 70s and 80s as the country moved from legislated oppression to democratic freedom. It crossed borders, boundaries and generations, resonating around the world and back again. Less known is the story of how it all began and developed. Scatterling of Africa is that origin story, as Johnny Clegg wrote it and wanted it told. It is the story of how the son of an unconventional mother, grandson of Jewish immigrants, came to realise that identity can be a choice, and home is a place you leave and return to as surely as the seasons change.