100 Unhip albums contains mini-essays on a selection of the uncoolest (but musically superb) records ever released. From famous albums which have since become uncool such as Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band to unhip bands such as Status Quo and Queen who became crap at some point in the past few decades. Then there are the unfavoured folk, soul and jazz artists who are criminally overlooked in favour of bigger names and the downright obscure bands who put out superb records only to disappear without trace. Ian’s amusing and fact-drenched book is a must for anyone in need of new sounds to spice up their listening pleasure!

    Script of Whiplash.A promising young drummer enrolls at a cut-throat music conservatory where his dreams of greatness are mentored by an instructor who will stop at nothing to realize a student's potential.

    But their story is one of many ups and downs, trials and tribulations, and periods of good and bad luck. This authorized biography examines and explores all aspects of their history, both personally and professionally. Comprised of extensive interviews conducted by author and longtime King’s X fan Greg Prato, King’s X: The Oral History allows the band’s three members - singer/bassist Doug Pinnick, guitarist Ty Tabor, and drummer Jerry Gaskill - to tell their full story for the first time. It also opens the floor to friends and collaborators, plus some of the many top rock names who are also fans of the band, including Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament, The Police’s Andy Summers, Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan, Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil, Pantera’s Rex Brown, Mötley Crüe’s Mick Mars, and many more. In addition, King’s X explores the stories behind every single song the band has recorded over the years, while also detailing the creation of each of their twelve albums and offering insight into the influence of religion on their work. It also features memories of the band’s tours with some of rock’s biggest names - including AC/DC, Pearl Jam, and Mötley Crüe - and the events that led to their show-stopping performance at the mammoth Woodstock ’94 festival. Packed full of rare and never-before-seen photographs from throughout their career, King’s X is the definitive companion to the band and their music.

    Disco and salsa. The loft jazz scene and the downtown composers known as Minimalists. In the mid-1970s, New York City was a laboratory where all the major styles of modern music were reinvented--all at once, from one block to the next, by musicians who knew, admired, and borrowed from one another. Crime was everywhere, the government was broke, and the city's infrastructure was collapsing. But rent was cheap, and the possibilities for musical exploration were limitless.Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is the first book to tell the full story of the era's music scenes and the phenomenal and surprising ways they intersected. From New Year's Day 1973 to New Year's Eve 1977, the book moves panoramically from post-Dylan Greenwich Village, to the arson-scarred South Bronx barrios where salsa and hip-hop were created, to the Lower Manhattan lofts where jazz and classical music were reimagined, to ramshackle clubs like CBGBs and The Gallery, where rock and dance music were hot-wired for a new generation. As they remade the music, the musicians at the center of the book invented themselves: Willie Colón and the Fania All-Stars renting Yankee Stadium to take salsa to the masses, New Jersey locals Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith claiming the jungleland of Manhattan as their own, Grandmaster Flash transforming the turntable into a musical instrument, David Byrne and Talking Heads proving that rock music "ain't no foolin' around." Will Hermes was there--venturing from his native Queens to the small dark rooms where the revolution was taking place--and in Love Goes to Buildings on Fire he captures the creativity, drive, and full-out lust for life of the great New York musicians of those years, who knew that the music they were making would change the world.

    The guitarist and de facto leader of the Grateful Dead was a gregarious talker, keenly engaged with the new world exploding around him. In 1972, Garcia was visited by Charles Reich, a Yale law professor, and Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone. Garcia was just thirty-one years old but already viewed--to his lasting dismay--as a social avatar for the new sensibility sweeping the land, an anarchist streak with a populist undercurrent that had roots in Ken Kesey's pranksters, the writers of the Beat Generation, and the libertine tradition of the American transcendentalists. In this interview, Garcia reveals how he is a combination of these and other influences, a high-school dropout and autodidact blessed with a gift for eloquent turns of phrase and a refreshing directness. He speaks of the saga of the Grateful Dead and his hoodlum youth growing up in San Francisco's Mission district. He delves into fascinating discourses on the music that shaped his own playing and writing, and freely discusses his use of drugs and explains why he felt it was important to stay high. Like the Grateful Dead's best music, Garcia: A Signpost to New Space is familiar, friendly, and inviting.

    When they sing “the wipers on the bus go swish-swish-swish,” children can move their hands from side to side like windshield wipers! Each character cleverly illustrates how to move hands and arms to simulate the actions throughout the book. What makes this book so much fun is that the children will be singing, learning, and moving with their favorite Baby Genius characters!

    Having sold over 30 million albums since its triumphant 1991 debut 10, Pearl Jam brought the hard-edged, estranged and oftentimes angry sound of Seattle to the musical forefront. They pioneered a movement in music and culture that quickly became known as grunge. Imitators followed, and the band could have quickly lost touch with its fans and unpretentious ideals and become simply a money-making celebrity group. Instead, Eddie Vedder and the members of Pearl Jam took on the establishment: challenging Ticketmaster's control over concert venues and ticket prices and refusing media any access to the band--even through music videos--during the peak of their success. Pearl Jam's disappearance from media and from traditional touring has intensified the loyalty of its fans and has refocused the band's attention on its original musical center. Despite the lack of advertising and recent shifts in musical trends, Pearl Jam concerts repeatedly sell out within hours for the hundreds of thousands who remain devoted to a group that continues to uphold its musical and political integrity. Allowed access to the concerts, jam sessions, and private moments of Pearl Jam's members, photographers Charles Peterson and Lance Mercer provide a heretofore unseen record of the Pearl Jam experience for new and diehard fans alike.

    Johnson’s hard-hitting investigative series won a Pulitzer Prize, inspired a screenplay by Arthur Miller, and prompted Elia Kazan’s Oscar-winning film On the Waterfront. And yet J. Edgar Hoover denied the existence of organized crime - even as the government’s dramatic hearings into waterfront misdeeds became mustsee television.Nathan Ward tells this archetypal crime story as if for the first time, taking the reader back to a city, and an era, at once more corrupt and more innocent than our own.

    Paperback Book

    David Gans, a self-professed Deadhead and host of "The Grateful Dead Hour," asked Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and the rest of the band the questions their fans would have asked if given the chance. And Gans reaches far beyond the musicians, talking with such often-overlooked key players as the recording engineer, sound man, and road crew—those who have had the coveted opportunity to witness the Dead's decades of music-making. This updated and expanded edition includes a rare, never-before-published interview with Seastones composer Ned Lagin and a new introduction by the author. With a readable combination of intensity, inquisitiveness, and candor, Gans has created an unprecedented portrait of a band who, after more than thirty years of music-making, has earned a unique place in American culture.

    Draper's history is an intelligent and witty behind-the-scenes look at this cultural icon and its course from its hippie beginnings to a high-profile magazine. 16 pages of photographs.

    Artists discuss their individual approach to writing, the inspiration behind their most successful songs, and the techniques and methods they have independently developed. It is an incredible musical journey spanning fifty years, from ‘Waterloo Sunset’ by Ray Davies to ‘The Beast’ by Laura Marling, with many lyrical and melodic secrets revealed along the way.Original handwritten lyrics from personal archives and notebooks (many never-before-seen) offer a unique glimpse into the heart of the creative process, and some of the greatest names in photography, including Jill Furmanovsky, Pennie Smith and Sheila Rock, have contributed stunning portraits of each artist.The combination of individual personal insights and the breadth and depth of knowledge in their collected experience makes Isle of Noises the essential word on classic British songwriting – as told by the songwriters themselves.

    Seth is awkward and shy. Carter is glamorous and the heir to one of America's great fortunes. They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Seth is desperate to reach for the future. Carter is slipping back into the past. When Seth accidentally records an unknown singer in a park, Carter sends it out over the Internet, claiming it's a long lost 1920s blues recording by a musician called Charlie Shaw. When an old collector contacts them to say that their fake record and their fake bluesman are actually real, the two young white men, accompanied by Carter's troubled sister Leonie, spiral down into the heart of the nation's darkness, encountering a suppressed history of greed, envy, revenge, and exploitation. White Tears is a ghost story, a terrifying murder mystery, a timely meditation on race, and a love letter to all the forgotten geniuses of American music.

    The pages give life to the o beat artists, gonzo filmmakers, punk musicians, and rock-and-roll drag queens who created change, and while some aren’t well known, others like Patti Smith, Andy Warhol, and Debbie Harry did become icons. Ambitious in scope and scale, the book is largely fueled by the actual voices of many of the pivotal characters who broke down the entrenched cultural divisions between high and low, gay and straight, and art and commerce—and whose impact is still largely felt today.

    Her surprisingly attractive new neighbor, Hector, warns her to stay out of the basement at night. Tenants have reported strange noises after midnight—laughter, clinking glasses, jazz piano—even though the space has been empty for decades. Back in the Roaring Twenties, the place hid a speakeasy.In 1924, Geneva "Gin" Kelly, a smart-mouthed flapper from the hills of western Maryland, is a regular at this Village hideaway known as the Christopher Club. Caught up in a raid, Gin becomes entangled with Prohibition enforcement agent Oliver Anson, who persuades her to help him catch her stepfather Duke Kelly, one of Appalachia’s most notorious bootleggers.Headstrong and independent, Gin is no weak-kneed fool. So how can she be falling in love with the taciturn, straight-arrow Revenue agent when she’s got Princeton boy Billy Marshall, the dashing son of society doyenne Theresa Marshall, begging to make an honest woman of her? While anything goes in the Roaring Twenties, Gin’s adventures will shake proper Manhattan society to its foundations, exposing secrets that shock even this free-spirited redhead—secrets that will echo from Park Avenue to the hollers of her Southern hometown.As Ella discovers more about the basement speakeasy, she becomes inspired by the spirit of her exuberant predecessor, and decides to live with abandon in the wicked city too. . . .