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Depeche Mode: Black Celebration: The Biography by Steve Malins
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I Am Not Spock
Leonard Nimoy - 1979
Spock, an extraterrestrial. He is not. He is Leonard Nimoy. An actor. A teacher. A writer. A father. A husband. A real flesh-and-blood human being.Now while the phenomenal popularity of Star Trek still grows, Nimoy doffs the pointy ears and placid face and reveals himself totally—his relationship with fellow actors; the backstage frenzies; the near-cancellation of Star Trek; the lean years; the loneliness, the battles and the ultimate struggle to survive his own success!IF HE IS NOT SPOCK, WHO IS?IF HE IS NOT SPOCK, WHO IS HE?WHAT IS THE LOGICAL ANSWER?
It's So Easy: And Other Lies
Duff McKagan - 2011
In 1984, at the age of twenty, Duff McKagan left his native Seattle—partly to pursue music but mainly to get away from a host of heroin overdoses then decimating his closest group of friends in the local punk scene. In L.A. only a few weeks and still living in his car, he answered a want ad for a bass player placed by someone who identified himself only as “Slash.” Soon after, the most dangerous band in the world was born. Guns N’ Roses went on to sell more than 100 million albums worldwide. In It's So Easy, Duff recounts GN’R’s unlikely trajectory to a string of multiplatinum albums, sold-out stadium concerts, and global acclaim. But that kind of glory can take its toll, and it did—ultimately—on Duff, as well as on the band itself. As GN’R began to splinter, Duff felt that he himself was done, too. But his near death as a direct result of alcoholism proved to be his watershed, the turning point that led to his unique path to sobriety and the unexpected choices he has made for himself since. In a voice that is as honest as it is indelibly his own, Duff—one of rock’s smartest and most articulate personalities—takes readers on his harrowing journey through the dark heart of one of the most notorious bands in rock-and-roll history and out the other side.
John Prine: In Spite of Himself
Eddie Huffman - 2015
Across five decades, Prine has created critically acclaimed albums--John Prine (one of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time), Bruised Orange, and The Missing Years--and earned many honors, including two Grammy Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting from the Americana Music Association, and induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. His songs have been covered by scores of artists, from Johnny Cash and Miranda Lambert to Bette Midler and 10,000 Maniacs, and have influenced everyone from Roger McGuinn to Kacey Musgraves. Hailed in his early years as the "new Dylan," Prine still counts Bob Dylan among his most enthusiastic fans. In John Prine, Eddie Huffman traces the long arc of Prine's musical career, beginning with his early, seemingly effortless successes, which led paradoxically not to stardom but to a rich and varied career writing songs that other people have made famous. He recounts the stories, many of them humorous, behind Prine's best-known songs and discusses all of Prine's albums as he explores the brilliant records and the ill-advised side trips, the underappreciated gems and the hard-earned comebacks that led Prine to found his own successful record label, Oh Boy Records. This thorough, entertaining treatment gives John Prine his due as one of the most influential songwriters of his generation.
Sonic Youth Slept On My Floor: Music, Manchester, and More: A Memoir
Dave Haslam - 2018
He interviews Johnny Marr and John Lydon; Sonic Youth sleep on his floor; he meets writers including Raymond Carver and Jonathan Franzen; he discusses masturbation with Viv Albertine, and ecstasy with Roisin Murphy; he has a gun pulled on him at the Hacienda, a drug dealer threatens to slit his throat; and Morrissey comes to tea.In the late 1970s, a teenage John Peel listener and Joy Division fan, Haslam's face was pressed against a window, looking out at a world of music, books, ideas. In 2017, four decades later, he finds himself in the middle of that world, collaborating with New Order on a series of five shows in Manchester.Haslam builds a rich context to the story of those decades; a definitive portrait of Manchester as a music city; the impact of life-shaking events (from the nightmare of the Yorkshire Ripper to the shock of the Manchester Arena terror attack); and how music has soundtracked his life, his times, his generation.Sonic Youth Slept On My Floor is a masterful insider account of the Hacienda, the rise of Madchester and the birth of the rave era, and so much more . . .
One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time
Craig Brown - 2020
At that point, we will be at the same distance in time from 1970 as 1970 was from 1920, the year Al Jolson's ‘Swanee’ was the bestselling record and Gustav Holst composed The Planets.The Beatles continue to occupy a position unique in popular culture. They have entered people's minds in a way that did not occur before, and has not occurred since. Their influence extended way beyond the realm of music to fashion, politics, class, religion and ethics. Countless books have doggedly catalogued the minutiae of The Beatles. If you want to know the make of George Harrison's first car you will always be able to find the answer (a second hand, two-door, blue Ford Anglia 105E Deluxe, purchased from Brian Epstein's friend Terry Doran, who worked at a dealership in Warrington). Before she met John Lennon, who was the only Beatle Yoko Ono could name, and why? Ringo. Because ‘ringo’ means ‘apple’ in Japanese. All very interesting, but there is, as yet, no book about The Beatles that combines the intriguing minutiae of their day-to-day lives with broader questions about their effect – complicated and fascinating – on the world around them, their contemporaries, and generations to come.Until now. Craig Brown's 1-2-3-4: The Beatles in Time is a unique, kaleidoscopic examination of The Beatles phenomenon – part biography, part anthropology, part memoir, by turns humorous and serious, elegiac and speculative. It follows the unique “exploded biography” form of his internationally bestselling, Ma'am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret.
Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World
Rob Sheffield - 2017
It isn’t another exposé about how they broke up. It isn’t a history of their gigs or their gear. It is a collection of essays telling the story of what this ubiquitous band means to a generation who grew up with the Beatles music on their parents’ stereos and their faces on T-shirts. What do the Beatles mean today? Why are they more famous and beloved now than ever? And why do they still matter so much to us, nearly fifty years after they broke up?As he did in his previous books, Love is a Mix Tape, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, and Turn Around Bright Eyes, Sheffield focuses on the emotional connections we make to music. This time, he focuses on the biggest pop culture phenomenon of all time—The Beatles. In his singular voice, he explores what the Beatles mean today, to fans who have learned to love them on their own terms and not just for the sake of nostalgia.Dreaming the Beatles tells the story of how four lads from Liverpool became the world’s biggest pop group, then broke up—but then somehow just kept getting bigger. At this point, their music doesn’t belong to the past—it belongs to right now. This book is a celebration of that music, showing why the Beatles remain the world’s favorite thing—and how they invented the future we’re all living in today.
Birth School Metallica Death, Volume 1: The Biography
Paul Brannigan - 2013
The California quartet has sold more than 100 million albums worldwide, won nine Grammy Awards, and had five consecutive albums hit number one on the Billboard charts. But Metallica’s story, epic in scope, is a tale about much more than sales figures and critical acclaim, and their journey from scuzzy Los Angeles garages to the world’s most storied stadiums has been dramatic and painful, their gigantic successes often shot through with tension, tragedy, loss, and controversy.
Birth School Metallica Death
is the definitive story of the most significant rock band since Led Zeppelin. Volume 1 covers the band’s formation up to their breakthrough eponymous fifth album, aka “The Black Album.” The intense and sometimes fraught relationship between aloof-yet-simmering singer, chief lyricist, and rhythm guitarist James Hetfield and the outspoken and ambitious drummer Lars Ulrich is the saga’s emotional core. Their earliest years saw the release of three unimpeachable classics—Kill ’Em All, Ride the Lightning, and Master of Puppets—genre-defining masterpieces that took hard rock to a new level, both artistically and commercially. During these tumultuous times, the band persevered through line-up changes when guitarist Dave Mustaine was replaced by Kirk Hammet, and their bass player, the beloved Cliff Burton, was tragically killed in a bus crash while on tour in Europe.But it was the breakthrough of …And Justice for All that rent the fabric of the mainstream, hitting the top of the charts without benefit of radio airplay or the then-crucial presence on MTV. And finally in 1991, with the release of their fifth studio album, nicknamed “The Black Album,” Metallica hit the next level—five hit singles including their best-known songs “Enter Sandman” and “Nothing Else Matters”—and their first album atop the Billboard charts.In Birth School Metallica Death, veteran music journalists and Metallica confidants Paul Brannigan and Ian Winwood detail this meteoric rise to international fame in an epic saga of family, community, self-belief, the pursuit of dreams, and music that rocks. Told through first-hand interviews with the band and those closest to them, the story of Metallica’s rise to the mainstream has never been so vividly documented.
Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd
Mark Blake - 2007
From the moment the metronomic pulse of a heartbeat thudded out to begin "Speak to Me" to the soaring guitar solo that climaxed "Comfortably Numb," these self-effacing men in their late fifties stole the show. Almost a year later, the death of their troubled founder-member Syd Barrett made headline news worldwide. Both events signaled a kind of closure to the remarkable tale of one of the world's biggest bands. Now, in the first full-length history of the group for more than fifteen years, Mark Blake tells the story of how a group of middle-class Englishmen conquered the world. Drawing on his own interviews with all of the band members, interviews with the group's friends, road crew, producers, former housemates and university colleagues, as well as musical contemporaries including Pete Townshend and Alice Cooper, Comfortably Numb follows Pink Floyd all the way from the early psychedelic nights at UFO in the mid-sixties to the stadium-rock and concept-album zenith of the seventies, and finally the acrimonious schism that sundered the band in the '80s and '90s.
Three Dog Nightmare: The Chuck Negron Story
Chuck Negron - 1999
Like his fellow rockers, Chuck Negron, the lead singer of the 1960s rock group Three Dog Night, succumbed to drug abuse and could have easily been among those who lived hard and died young. But while the lives of so many other rock'n'roll singers ended in tragedy, his is a life of triumph.From 1968 through the early 1970s, Three Dog Night was one of the most popular rack bands in the world. With his sweet, soulful sound, Chuck Negron guided the group through eighteen consecutive Top Twenty hits: three hit the #1 spot, including "Joy to the World", and eleven broke into the Top Ten. But while Three Dog Night was hitting the high notes of critical and commercial success, Negron was sinking into the darkness of drug addiction.The singer's downward spiral continued for several years, and after the band's thirteenth album failed to go gold in 1975, they called it quits. For Negron, who was supporting a $2,000-a.day drug habit, the descent was fast and long-lasting, encompassing two decades of horrendous drug abuse and terrifying near-death experiences. That he survived the ordeal at all is a miracle; that he today has a new foothold on life and devotes. a great portion of his time to helping others avoid the pitfalls of drug abuse is an inspiration.Three Dog Nightmare graphically traces the life and times of Bronx-bred Chuck Negron, who used his talent on the basketball court to earn a college scholarship, and turned his for singing into an unforgettable career. For the first time, Negron tells his full story, hoping that itwill teach others the life lessons he had to learn the hard way.
The Evolution of a Cro-Magnon
John Joseph - 2007
A traumatic...see site for more info.
James Taylor Long Ago and Far Away: His Life and His Music
Timothy White - 2001
This new edition has been updated by his friend and former Rolling Stone comrade Mitch Glazer and includes an epilogue about the memorial concerts for Timothy that James Taylor helped organize.
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen
Sylvie Simmons - 2011
Cohen is also a man of complexities and seeming contradictions: a devout Jew, who is also a sophisticate and a ladies' man, as well as an ordained Buddhist monk whose name, Jikan—"ordinary silence"—is quite the appellation for a writer and singer whose life has been anything but ordinary.I'm Your Man is the definitive account of that extraordinary life. Starting in Montreal, Cohen's birthplace, acclaimed music journalist Sylvie Simmons follows his trail, via London and the Greek island of Hydra, to New York in the sixties, where Cohen launched his career in music. From there she traces the arc of his prodigious achievements to his remarkable retreat in the mid-nineties and his reemergence for a sold-out world tour almost fifteen years later. Whether navigating Cohen's journeys through the backstreets of Mumbai or his countless hotel rooms along the way, Simmons explores with equal focus every complex, contradictory strand of Cohen's life and presents a deeply insightful portrait of the vision, spirit, depth, and talent of an artist and a man who continues to move people like no one else.
In Search of the Pleasure Palace: Disreputable Travels
Marc Almond - 2004
In this volume, he is an observant guide to a world that he was once master of.
To Hell and Back
Meat Loaf - 1999
Meat Loaf was rock music's unlikeliest success: a 300-pound white artist signed to Motown records. He boostrapped his way out of hell, fleeing an abusive past, overcoming the scorn and skepticism of nearly everyone, and--through raw determination--he beat all odds and conquered the world.Twice.To Hell and Back is his story.
Manning
Archie Manning - 2000
They discuss organizational sports and why white youngsters aren’t out there playing the game like they used to; the college game as compared to the pros; coaches, good and bad; and why the quarterback position is the most difficult one in all of sports.This is the story of Peyton's dizzying rise to the elite of the NFL, and the story of his father, himself a #1 draft pick for the New Orleans Saints in 1971, who harkens back to a time when football and gallantry were one and the same. Archie helps guide Peyton through the money, the endorsements, and the everyday life in the NFL. Meanwhile, Archie’s youngest son, Eli, picks up the gauntlet as he begins playing quarterback for Archie's alma mater, Ole Miss.MANNING is a truly personal and inspiring story of a family, a tradition and a legacy, providing a stirring multigenerational — and at times controversial — look at football over the past 50 years.