Eve Babitz was the ultimate factory girl, a pure product of LA.The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Babitz posed in 1963, at age twenty, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The photograph, cheesecake with a Dadaist twist, made her an instant icon of art and sex. Babitz spent the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety. There were the album covers she designed: for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds, to name but a few. There were the men she seduced: Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford, to name but a very few.Then, at nearly thirty, her It girl days numbered, Babitz was discovered—as a writer—by Joan Didion. She would go on to produce seven books, usually billed as novels or short story collections, always autobiographies and confessionals. Under-known and under-read during her career, she’s since experienced a breakthrough. Now in her mid-seventies, she’s on the cusp of literary stardom and recognition as an essential—as the essential—LA writer. Her prose achieves that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, and is so sheerly enjoyable as to be mistaken for simple entertainment.For Babitz, life was slow days, fast company until a freak fire in the 90s turned her into a recluse, living in a condo in West Hollywood, where Lili Anolik tracked her down in 2012. Anolik’s elegant and provocative new book is equal parts biography and detective story. It is also on dangerously intimate terms with its subject: artist, writer, muse, and one-woman zeitgeist, Eve Babitz.

    Edie Sedgwick exploded into the public eye like a comet. She seemed to have it all: she was aristocratic and glamorous, vivacious and young, Andy Warhol’s superstar. But within a few years she flared out as quickly as she had appeared, and before she turned twenty-nine she was dead from a drug overdose.In a dazzling tapestry of voices—family, friends, lovers, rivals—the entire meteoric trajectory of Edie Sedgwick’s life is brilliantly captured. And so is the Pop Art world of the ‘60s: the sex, drugs, fashion, music—the mad rush for pleasure and fame. All glitter and flash on the outside, it was hollow and desperate within—like Edie herself, and like her mentor, Andy Warhol. Alternately mesmerizing, tragic, and horrifying, this book shattered many myths about the ‘60s experience in America.

    It has since become the longest-running children's show in history, and today reaches 8 million preschoolers on 350 PBS stations and airs in 120 countries. Street Gang is the compelling and often comical story of the creation and history of this media masterpiece and pop culture landmark, told with the cooperation of one of the show's cofounders, Joan Ganz Cooney. Sesame Street was born as the result of a discussion at a dinner party at Cooney's home about the poor quality of children's programming and hit the air as a big bang of creative fusion from Jim Henson and company, quickly rocketing to success. Street Gang traces the evolution of the show from its inspiration in the civil rights movement through its many ups and downs-from Nixon's trying to cut off its funding to the rise of Elmo-via the remarkable personalities who have contributed to it. Davis reveals how Sesame Street has taught millions of children not only their letters and numbers, but also cooperation and fair play, tolerance and self-respect, conflict resolution, and the importance of listening. This is the unforgettable story of five decades of social and cultural change and the miraculous creative efforts, passion, and commitment of the writers, producers, directors, animators, and puppeteers who created one of the most influential programs in the history of television.

    Prince was a musical genius, one of the most talented, beloved, accomplished, popular, and acclaimed musicians in history. He was also a startlingly original visionary with an imagination deep enough to whip up whole worlds, from the sexy, gritty funk paradise of “Uptown” to the mythical landscape of Purple Rain to the psychedelia of “Paisley Park.” But his most ambitious creative act was turning Prince Rogers Nelson, born in Minnesota, into Prince, the greatest pop star of his era. The Beautiful Ones is the story of how Prince became Prince—a first-person account of a kid absorbing the world around him and then creating a persona, an artistic vision, and a life, before the hits and fame that would come to define him. The book is told in four parts. The first is composed of the memoir he was writing before his tragic death, pages that brings us into Prince’s childhood world through his own lyrical prose. The second part takes us into Prince’s early years as a musician, before his first album released, through a scrapbook of Prince’s writing and photos. The third section shows us Prince’s evolution through candid images that take us up to the cusp of his greatest achievement, which we see in the book’s fourth section: his original handwritten treatment for Purple Rain—the final stage in Prince’s self-creation, as he retells the autobiography we’ve seen in the first three parts as a heroic journey.The book is framed by editor Dan Piepenbring’s riveting and moving introduction about his short but profound collaboration with Prince in his final months—a time when Prince was thinking deeply about how to reveal more of himself and his ideas to the world, while retaining the mystery and mystique he’d so carefully cultivated—and annotations that provide context to each of the book’s images. This work is not just a tribute to Prince, but an original and energizing literary work, full of Prince’s ideas and vision, his voice and image, his undying gift to the world.

    There he sought anonymity, taking an apartment in a run-down district with his sometime collaborator Iggy Pop, another refugee from drugs and debauchery, while they explored the city and its notorious nightlife. In this intensely creative period, Bowie put together three classic albums -- Low, "Heroes", and Lodger -- with collaborators who included Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, and Tony Visconti. He also found time to produce two albums for Iggy Pop--The Idiot and Lust For Life--and to take a leading role in a movie, the ill-starred Just A Gigolo. Bowie In Berlin examines that period and those records, exploring Bowie's fascination with the city, unearthing his sources of inspiration, detailing his working methods, and teasing out the elusive meanings of the songs. Painstakingly researched and vividly written, the book casts new light on the most creative and influential era in David Bowie's career.

    Many have written about Hendrix’s life and music, but Jimi Hendrix: A Brother’s Story provides a revealing and unprecedented look at this visionary icon: an intimate biography written by Jimi’s younger brother, Leon.Leon Hendrix takes us back to the days before Jimi’s amazing rise to fame, beginning with their tough childhood in Seattle, when their fascination with science fiction and UFOs helped them escape a difficult family life. (Jimi insisted his family call him “Buster,” after Flash Gordon actor Buster Crabbe.) The author reveals Jimi’s early fascination with sound, from his experiments with plucking wires attached to bedposts to the time when he got in trouble for taking apart the family radio (“I was looking for the music,” he explained) to Jimi’s purchasing his first guitar—a Sears, Roebuck and Co. acoustic, from a neighbor.Leon recounts Jimi’s early days performing on the “Chitlin’ Circuit,” when Jimi would call from the road to play early versions of tracks for the classic album Are You Experienced, and illuminates the biographical roots of Jimi’s most well-known songs. Readers learn about the heady days of sex and drugs that came with Jimi’s skyrocketing fame and how Leon felt Jimi’s management isolated him from the rest of the family. The author speaks of his own heartbreak, learning of his brother’s sudden death while incarcerated in Washington State’s Monroe Reformatory.Commemorating what would have been Jimi's seventieth birthday, Leon Hendrix’s poignant and captivating account sheds new light on a music legend.

    He was a millionaire with his own record label at twenty-two. He was, according to Tom Wolfe, “the first tycoon of teen.” Phil Spector owned pop music. From the Crystals, the Ronettes (whose lead singer, Ronnie, would become his second wife), and the Righteous Brothers to the Beatles (together and singly) and finally the seventies punk icons The Ramones, Spector produced hit after hit. But then he became pop music's most famous recluse. Until one day in the spring of 2007, when his name hit the tabloids, connected to a horrible crime. In Tearing Down the Wall of Sound, Mick Brown, who was the last journalist to interview Spector before his arrest, tells the full story of the troubled musical genius.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    Charts the amazing fifty-year history of the British music business, where bad behaviour is encouraged, and where drugs are sometimes as important as talent.

    It was an agenda mirrored in the Clash’s music, which swiftly evolved from ferocious punk rock to incorporate reggae, ska, funk, jazz, soul, and hip-hop. Passion Is a Fashion draws on over 70 interviews with the key participants in the story—roadies, producers, friends, and fans—and conversations with the Clash: Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, and Topper Headon. The first book to give real insight into what went on behind the scenes during the Clash’s ten-year career, it charts the Clash’s picaresque progress through the days of the early punk scene and their groundbreaking Rock Against Racism gigs, to the arduous touring, to their break out in America, and the making of the classic London Calling album, all the way to the band’s eventual dissolution and the sudden, sad death of frontman Joe Strummer. Gritty, compelling, and above all authoritative, Passion Is a Fashion is the biography the Clash has long deserved.

    Indeed, fist-pumping hits like Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It," Mötley Crüe's "Girls, Girls, Girls," and Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" are as inextricably linked to the era as Reaganomics, Pac-Man, and E.T.From the do-or-die early days of self-financed recordings and D.I.Y. concert productions that were as flashy as they were foolhardy, to the multi-Platinum, MTV-powered glory years of stadium-shaking anthems and chart-topping power ballads, to the ultimate crash when grunge bands like Nirvana forever altered the entire climate of the business, Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock's "Nothin' But a Good Time" captures the energy and excess of the hair metal years in the words of the musicians, managers, producers, engineers, label executives, publicists, stylists, costume designers, photographers, journalists, magazine publishers, video directors, club bookers, roadies, groupies, and hangers-on who lived it.

    While paintings of Picasso and Jackson Pollock sell for a hundred million dollars or more, and lines from T. S. Eliot are quoted on the yearbook pages of alienated teenagers across the land, twentieth-century classical music still sends ripples of unease through audiences. At the same time, its influence can be felt everywhere. Atonal chords crop up in jazz. Avant-garde sounds populate the soundtracks of Hollywood thrillers. Minimalism has had a huge effect on rock, pop, and dance music from the Velvet Underground onward.The Rest Is Noise shows why twentieth-century composers felt compelled to create a famously bewildering variety of sounds, from the purest beauty to the purest noise. It tells of a remarkable array of maverick personalities who resisted the cult of the classical past, struggled against the indifference of a wide public, and defied the will of dictators. Whether they have charmed audiences with sweet sounds or battered them with dissonance, composers have always been exuberantly of the present, defying the stereotype of classical music as a dying art. The narrative goes from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties, from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies. We follow the rise of mass culture and mass politics, of dramatic new technologies, of hot and cold wars, of experiments, revolutions, riots, and friendships forged and broken. The end result is not so much a history of twentieth-century music as a history of the twentieth century through its music.

    I partied in every capital in Europe and basked on all the world's most famous beaches'. Frank W Abagnale, alias Frank Williams, Robert Conrad, Frank Adams and Ringo Monjo, was one of the most daring con men, forgers, imposters and escape artists in history. In his brief but notorious career, Abagnale donned a pilot's uniform and co-piloted a Pan Am jet, masqueraded as a member of hospital management, practised law without a licence, passed himself off as a college sociology professor, and cashed over $2.5 million in forged checks all before he was twenty-one. Known by the police of twenty-six foreign countries and all fifty states as 'The Skywayman', Abagnale lived a sumptuous life on the run - until the law caught up with him. Now recognised as the nation's leading authority on financial foul play, Abagnale is a charming rogue whose hilarious, stranger-than-fiction international escapades and ingenious escapes - including one from an aeroplane - make CATCH ME IF YOU CAN an irresistable tale of deceit.

    Emphatically showcasing Tina’s signature blend of strength, energy, heart, and soul, this is a gorgeously wrought memoir as enthralling and moving as any of her greatest hits.

    The book focuses on the scene surrounding the extreme heavy metal subgenre black metal in Norway in the early 1990s, with a focus on the string of church burnings and murders that occurred in the country around 1993.

    In Living with the Dead, Scully gives a complete account of his outrageous experiences with the band, during years that saw the Grateful Dead transform from a folksy revivalist band to psychedelic explorers of outer space. In addition to close-up portraits of band members Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Pigpen, Phil Lesh, Micky Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, Scully brings into the story many of the people the Dead encountered in their journeys across America's musical landscape, including Ken Kesey, Janis Joplin, Etta James, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and the Jefferson Airplane. Scully tells the story of the band with genuine feeling; the tour disasters, acid trips, and burnouts, but most importantly the exaltation of delivering fantastic music.