Book picks similar to
Tin Pan Alley: An Encyclopedia of the Golden Age of American Song by David A. Jasen
music
pop-culture
music-pop-rock
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Factory: The Story of the Record Label
Mick Middles - 1996
At the height of the label's success in the late 1980s, it ran its own club, the legendary Haçienda, had a string of international hit records, and was admired and emulated around the world. But by the 1990s the story had changed. The back catalogue was sold off, top bands New Order and Happy Mondays were in disarray, and the Haçienda was shut down by the police. Critically acclaimed on its original publication in 1996, this book tells the complete story of Factory Records' spectacular history, from the label's birth in 1970s Manchester, through its '80s heyday and '90s demise. Now updated to include new material on the re-emergence of Joy Division, the death of Tony Wilson and the legacy of Factory Records, it draws on exclusive interviews with the major players to give a fascinating insight into the unique personalities and chaotic reality behind one of the UK's most influential and successful independent record labels.
The Beatles Lyrics: The Stories Behind the Music, Including the Handwritten Drafts of More Than 100 Classic Beatles Songs
Hunter Davies - 2014
For the Beatles, writing songs was a process that could happen anytime -- songs we all know by heart often began as a scribble on the back of an envelope or on hotel stationery. These original documents have ended up scattered across the world at museums and universities and with collectors and friends. Many have never been published before. More than 100 songs and lyrics are reproduced in The Beatles Lyrics, providing Hunter Davies a unique platform to tell the story of the music. The intimacy of these reproductions -- there are sections crossed out and rewritten, and words tossed into the final recordings that were never written down -- ensures that The Beatles Lyrics will be a treasure for musicians, scholars, and fans everywhere.
All Gates Open: The Story of Can
Rob Young - 2018
It consists of two books.In Book One, Rob Young gives us the full biography of a band that emerged at the vanguard of what would come to be called the Krautrock scene in late sixties Cologne. With Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay - two classically trained students of Stockhausen - at the heart of the band, CAN's studio and live performances burned an incendiary trail through the decade that followed: and left a legacy that is still reverberating today in hip hop, post rock, ambient, and countless other genres. Rob Young's account draws on unique interviews with all founding members of CAN, as well as their vocalists, friends and music industry associates. And he revisits the music, which is still deliriously innovative and unclassifiable more than four decades on. All Gates Open is a portrait of a group who worked with visionary intensity and belief, outside the system and inside their own inner space.Book Two, Can Kiosk, has been assembled by Irmin Schmidt, founding member and guiding spirit of the band, as a 'collage - a technique long associated with CAN's approach to recording. There is an oral history of the band drawing on interviews that Irmin made with musicians who see CAN as an influence - such as Bobby Gillespie, Geoff Barrow, Daniel Miller, and many others. There are also interviews with artists and filmmakers like Wim Wenders and John Malkovitch, where Schmidt reflects on more personal matters and his work with film. Extracts of Schmidt's notebook and diaries from 2013-14 are also reproduced as a reflection on the creative process, and the memories, dreams, and epiphanies it entails. Can Kiosk offers further perspectives on a band that have inspired several generations of musicians and filmmakers in the voices of the artists themselves.CAN were unique, and their legacy is articulated in two books in this volume with the depth, rigour, originality, and intensity associated with the band itself. It is illustrated throughout with previously unseen art, photographs, and ephemera from the band's archive.
Oasis: The Truth: My Life as Oasis's Drummer
Tony McCarroll - 2011
What started as five young men with a common dream of becoming rock stars eventually disintegrated into in-fighting, ego clashes, and financial disputes, until in 1995, following the release of Definitely Maybe, things came to a head and Tony left the band. Here, Tony reveals the truth about the early years before the band was formed. He discusses the drug consumption, the sexual activities, his much-publicized rift with Noel Gallagher, and how he was duped into signing a less-than-favorable record contract. His recollections include stories involving David Beckham, Prince, Eric Cantona, and John McEnroe. Witty, revealing, and fascinating, this book is a must-read for Oasis fans.
Björk: Wow and Flutter
Mark Pytlik - 2000
Contains a detailed songbook and over 30 exclusive interviews with Björk's associates, family members, and industry professionals.
Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991
Paul Tingen - 2001
Readers will discover a new perspective on Miles's working methods, as well as in in-depth, chronological understanding and analysis of the music produced from 1967 to 1991 - a period that's been both neglected and misunderstood.
Excavate!: The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall
Bob Stanley - 2021
This is not even a book about Mark E Smith. This is a book about The Fall group - or more precisely, their world.
'To 50,000 Fall Fans: please buy this inspired & inspiring, profound & provocative, beautiful & bonkers Book of Revelations.'DAVID PEACE'Mind blowing . . . there is so much to enjoy in this brilliant book.'TIM BURGESS'A container sized treasure trove . . . I strongly advise you to buy it.'MAXINE PEAKE'The most wonderful, unashamedly intellectual, pretentious, ridiculous, exciting hymn to this incredible group.'ANDY MILLER, BACKLISTEDOver a prolific forty-year career, the Fall created a world that was influential, idiosyncratic and fiercely original - and defied simple categorisation.Their frontman and lyricist Mark E. Smith spun opaque tales that resisted conventional understanding; the Fall's worldview was an education in its own right. Who wouldn't want to be armed with a working knowledge of M. R. James, shipping-dock procedures, contemporary dance, Manchester City and Can? The group inspired and shaped the lives of those who listened to and tried to make sense of their work.Bringing together previously unseen artwork, rare ephemera and handwritten material, alongside essays by a slate of fans, EXCAVATE! is a vivid, definitive record - an illumination of the dark corners of the Fall's wonderful and frightening world.
The Beatles: The Biography
Bob Spitz - 2005
This version of the Beatles legend smoothed the rough edges and filled in the fault lines, and for more than forty years this manicured version of the Beatles story has sustained as truth - until now.The product of almost a decade of research, hundreds of unprecedented interviews, and the discovery of scores of never-before-revealed documents, Bob Spitz's The Beatles is the biography fans have been waiting for -- a vast, complete account as brilliant and joyous and revelatory as a Beatles record itself. Spitz begins in Liverpool, a hard city knocked on its heels. In the housing projects and school playgrounds, four boys would discover themselves -- and via late-night radio broadcasts, a new form of music called rock 'n roll.Never before has a biography of musicians been so immersive and textured. Spitz takes us down Penny Lane and to Strawberry Field (John later added the s), to Hamburg, Germany, where -- amid the squalor and the violence and the pep pills -- the Beatles truly became the Beatles. We are there in the McCartney living room when Paul and John learn to write songs together; in the heat of Liverpool's Cavern Club, where jazz has been the norm before the Beatles show up; backstage the night Ringo takes over on drums; in seedy German strip clubs where George lies about his age so the band can perform; on the lonely tours through frigid Scottish towns before the breakthrough; at Abbey Road Studios, where a young producer named George Martin takes them under his wing; at the Ed Sullivan Show as America discovers the joy and the madness; and onward and upward: up the charts, from Shea to San Francisco, through the London night, on to India, through marmalade skies, across the universe...all the way to a rooftop concert and one last moment of laughter and music.It is all here, raw and right: the highs and the lows, the love and the rivalry, the awe and the jealousy, the drugs, the tears, the thrill, the magic never again to be repeated. Open this book and begin to read -- Bob Spitz's masterpiece is, at long last, the biography the Beatles deserve.
The Phish Book
Phish - 1998
The first and only authorized book about the band, The Phish Book is an extraordinary verbal and visual chronicle of a year in the life of Phish, featuring extensive interviews with the four band members--Trey Anastasio, Jon Fishman, Mike Gordon, and Page McConnell--conducted by writer Richard Gehr, who also serves as guide to the history, mythology, musical context, and unique audience-band relationship in which the Vermont quartet flourishes. While it contains many of the trappings of other lavish rock monuments--including more than two hundred pieces of previously unpublished art and photography from the band's private archive--The Phish Book elevates the form by means of an innovative roundtable-style discussion format. Richard Gehr and Phish use the events of 1997 as a jumping-off point from which the band members free-associate about themselves, their music, and the dedicated and colorful community that springs up wherever they perform. Beginning with the backstage scene at Boston's Fleet Center on New Year's Eve, 1996, The Phish Book explores the band's earliest days in Burlington, Vermont; their musical influences, which include James Brown, Frank Zappa, and the Grateful Dead; their legendary Halloween shows; the two European and two American tours the group undertook in 1997; the stories behind their 1996 studio album, Billy Breathes, and the following year's live Slip Stitch and Pass; life onstage and off; the sixty-thousand-fan Maine campout and art project known as the Great Went; and the experimental recording and performing techniques that informed the band's most recent studio album, The Story of the Ghost. More than a retrospective journal of the group's evolution, The Phish Book is a glorious snapshot of a band much bigger than its parts and at the height of its collective power.
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel
Sherill Tippins - 2013
Sherill Tippins, author of the acclaimed February House, delivers a masterful and endlessly entertaining history of the Chelsea and of the successive generations of artists who have cohabited and created there, among them John Sloan, Edgar Lee Masters, Thomas Wolfe, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Sam Shepard, Sid Vicious, and Dee Dee Ramone. Now as legendary as the artists it has housed and the countless creative collaborations it has sparked, the Chelsea has always stood as a mystery as well: Why and how did this hotel become the largest and longest-lived artists’ community in the known world? Inside the Dream Palace is the intimate and definitive story.Today the Chelsea stands poised in limbo between two futures: Will this symbol of New York's artistic invention be converted to a profit-driven business catering to the top one percent? Or will the Chelsea be given a rebirth through painstaking effort by the community that loves it? Set against these two competing possibilities, Inside the Dream Palace could not be more fascinating or timely.
Time Between: My Life as a Byrd, Burrito Brother, and Beyond
Chris Hillman - 2020
He went on to record and perform in various configurations, including as a member of Stephen Stills’s Manassas and as a co-founder of The Souther-Hillman-Furay Band. In the 1980s he formed The Desert Rose Band, scoring eight Top 10 Billboard country hits. He’s released a number of solo efforts, including 2017’s highly acclaimed Bidin’ My Time—the final album produced by the late Tom Petty. In Time Between, Hillman shares his quintessentially Southern Californian experience, from an idyllic, rural 1950s childhood; to achieving worldwide fame thanks to hits such as “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Turn! Turn! Turn!” and “Eight Miles High”; to becoming the first musician to move to Laurel Canyon. Featuring behind-the-scenes insights on his time in The Byrds, his productive but sometimes complicated relationship with Gram Parsons, his role in launching the careers of Buffalo Springfield and Emmylou Harris, and the ups and downs of life in various bands, music is only part of his story. Within the pages of Time Between, Hillman reveals the details of his personal life with candor and vulnerability, writing honestly about the shocking tragedy that struck his family when he was a teenager, his subsequent struggles with anger, and how his spiritual journey led him to a place of deep faith that allowed him to extend forgiveness and experience wholeness. Chris Hillman is much more than a rock star. He is truly a founding father of American music and a man who has faced down the challenges of life to discover what really matters.
Torso: The Story of Eliot Ness and the Search for a Psychopathic Killer
Steven Nickel - 1989
Ness follows up his Untouchables fame with a search for America's first serial killer in Cleveland, Ohio
Meow! My Groovy Life with Tiger Beat’s Teen Idols
Ann Moses - 2017
The only difference between Ann and every other eighteen-year-old in the United States was that she was the editor of Tiger Beat, the hottest teen magazine in the country. Ann traveled the world, interviewing the Monkees, Paul Revere and The Raiders, David Cassidy, Bobby Sherman, the Bee Gees and the Osmonds. She schmoozed with the rich and famous in Hollywood, Hawaii and London, visited Elvis on the set of one of his movies, and joined the hottest rock stars in the recording studio. As a correspondent for the London-based New Musical Express, Ann covered America’s “British Invasion” from these shores. She jetted to San Francisco with Jefferson Airplane, and photographed the Rolling Stones and the Who. She made dinner for Harry Nilsson, rode in Bobby Sherman’s Rolls Royce, and had her heart broken by a superstar—a story she’s kept to herself until now. In Meow! My Groovy Life with Tiger Beat’s Teen Idols, Ann Moses is breaking her silence—about that heartbreaking rock-star romance, as well as what it was like to spend every day with the stars we all loved as kids, besides. She’ll squeal on Bobby Sherman (was he really that nice?), David Cassidy (was he really that snotty?), and the Monkees (which of them was a big meanie?). She’ll tell you everything she couldn’t tell you in the pages of Tiger Beat, back when it was her job to fuel your fantasy about your fave raves.
The Secret History of Rock: The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard
Roni Sarig - 1998
The secret history of rock and roll is the story of lesser-known artists whose work has shaped modern rock. Investigating 15 separate genres and influences, this book discusses, identifies and annotates the most significant, if not the most celebrated, rock and roll talents of all time.
The Hippest Trip in America: Soul Train and the Evolution of Culture & Style
Nelson George - 2014
The brainchild of radio announcer Don Cornelius, the show’s producer and host, Soul Train featured a diverse range of stars, from James Brown and David Bowie to Christina Aguilera and R. Kelly; Marvin Gaye and Elton John to the New Kids on the Block and Stevie Wonder.The Hippest Trip in America tells the full story of this pop culture phenomenon that appealed not only to blacks, but to a wide crossover audience as well. Famous dancers like Rosie Perez and Jody Watley, performers such as Aretha Franklin, Al Green, and Barry White, and Cornelius himself share their memories, offering insights into the show and its time—a period of extraordinary social and political change. Colorful and pulsating, The Hippest Trip In America is a fascinating portrait of a revered cultural institution that has left an indelible mark on our national consciousness.