Book picks similar to
Hound Dog by Jerry Leiber


music
non-fiction
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biographies

Walk This Way: The Autobiography of Aerosmith


Aerosmith - 1997
    And, of course, the drugs. But after crashing in a suffocating cloud of cocaine, crystal meth, and heroin, Aerosmith rose up from the ashes to become clean and sober — and reclaim their rightful title as World Champion Rockers. Learn how they did it in a book that is pure Aerosmith unbound: where they came from, what they are now, and what they will always be — a great American band.

Remembering Whitney: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Night the Music Stopped


Cissy Houston - 2013
    Over the weeks and months that followed, family, friends, and fans alike tried to understand how such a magnificent talent and beautiful soul could have been taken so early and so unexpectedly.Glamorous and approachable, captivating and sweet, Whitney had long ago won the hearts of America, but in recent years her tumultuous personal life had grabbed as many headlines as her soaring vocal talents. Her sudden death left behind not only a legacy of brilliance, but also painful questions with no easy answers.Now, for the first time, the beloved superstar's mother, Cissy Houston — a gospel legend in her own right—relates the full, astonishing scope of the pop icon's life and career. From Whitney's earliest days singing in the church choir to her rapid ascent to the pinnacles of music stardom, from her string of number one hits to her topping the Hollywood box office, Cissy recounts her daughter's journey to becoming one of the most popular and successful artists of all time. Setting the record straight, Cissy also speaks candidly about Whitney's struggles in the limelight, revealing the truth about her turbulent marriage to singer Bobby Brown, her public attempts to regain her celebrated voice, and the battle with drugs that ultimately proved too much.In this poignant and tender tribute to her "Nippy," Cissy summons all her strength to reveal not only Whitney the superstar, but also Whitney as a sweet girl, a bright-eyed young woman, and a deeply caring mother.Complete with never-before-seen family photographs, Remembering Whitney is an intimate, heartfelt portrait of one of our most revered artists, from the woman who cherished her most.

Cowboy Song: The Authorised Biography Of Philip Lynott


Graeme Thomson - 2016
    Leading music writer Graeme Thompson explores the fascinating contradictions between Lynott's unbridled rock star excesses and the shy, sensitive 'orphan' raised in working class Dublin. The mixed-race child of a Catholic teenager and a Guyanese stowaway, Lynott rose above daunting obstacles and wounding abandonments to become Ireland's first rock star. Cowboy Song examines his key musical alliances as well as the unique blend of cultural influences which informed Lynott's writing, connecting Ireland's rich reserves of music, myth and poetry to hard rock, progressive folk, punk, soul and New Wave. Published on the thirtieth anniversary of Lynott's death in January 1986, Thompson draws on scores of exclusive interviews with family, friends, band mates and collaborators. Cowboy Song is both the ultimate depiction of a multi-faceted rock icon, and an intimate portrait of a much-loved father, son and husband.

Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell


David Yaffe - 2017
    In Reckless Daughter, the music critic David Yaffe tells the remarkable, heart-wrenching story of how the blond girl with the guitar became a superstar of folk music in the 1960s, a key figure in the Laurel Canyon music scene of the 1970s, and the songwriter who spoke resonantly to, and for, audiences across the country.A Canadian prairie girl, a free-spirited artist, Mitchell never wanted to be a pop star. She was nothing more than “a painter derailed by circumstances," she would explain. And yet, she went on to become a talented self-taught musician and a brilliant bandleader, releasing album after album, each distinctly experimental, challenging, and revealing. Her lyrics captivated listeners with their perceptive language and naked emotion, born out of Mitchell's life, loves, complaints, and prophecies. As an artist whose work deftly balances narrative and musical complexity, she has been admired by such legendary lyricists as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and beloved by such groundbreaking jazz musicians as Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, and Herbie Hancock. Her hits—from “Big Yellow Taxi" to “Both Sides, Now" to “A Case of You"—endure as timeless favorites, and her influence on the generations of singer-songwriters who would follow her, from her devoted fan Prince to Björk, is undeniable.In this intimate biography, drawing on dozens of unprecedented in-person interviews with Mitchell, her childhood friends, and a cast of famous characters, Yaffe reveals the backstory behind the famous songs—from Mitchell's youth in Canada, her bout with polio at age nine, and her early marriage and the child she gave up for adoption, through the love affairs that inspired masterpieces, and up to the present—and shows us why Mitchell has so enthralled her listeners, her lovers, and her friends. Reckless Daughter is the story of an artist and an era that have left an indelible mark on American music.

There’s No Bones in Ice Cream: Sylvain Sylvain’s Story of the New York Dolls


Sylvain Sylvain - 2018
    A cross between the Rolling Stones and the Sex Pistols, the Dolls became the link in the chain between them, offering a crash course in mischief, cross-dressing and anarchy, but like unheralded prophets of Biblical times they were cast aside until the world finally caught up.“Other people turned the New York Dolls into legends. We just went along for the ride.”

Dwight Yoakam: A Thousand Miles from Nowhere


Don McLeese - 2012
    An electrifying live performer, superb writer, and virtuosic vocalist, he has successfully bridged two musical worlds that usually have little use for each other--commercial country and its alternative/Americana/roots-rocking counterpart. Defying the label "too country for rock, too rock for country," Yoakam has triumphed while many of his peers have had to settle for cult acceptance. Four decades into his career, he has sold more than 25 million records and continues to tour regularly, with an extremely loyal fan base.In Dwight Yoakam, award-winning music journalist Don McLeese offers the first musical biography of this acclaimed artist. Tracing the seemingly disparate influences in Yoakam's music, McLeese shows how he has combined rock and roll, rockabilly, country, blues, and gospel into a seamless whole. In particular, McLeese explores the essential issue of "authenticity" and how it applies to Yoakam, as well as to country music and popular culture in general. Drawing on wide-ranging interviews with Yoakam and his management, while also benefitting from the perspectives of others closely associated with his musical success (including producer-guitarist Pete Anderson, Yoakam's partner throughout his most popular and creative decades), Dwight Yoakam pays tribute to the musician who has established himself as a visionary beyond time, an artist who could title an album Tomorrow's Sounds Today and deliver it.

The Boy In 7 Billion: A True Story of Love, Courage and Hope


Callie Blackwell - 2017
     A powerful true story revealing a remarkable relationship between a dying son - and a mother that refuses to let him go. At the age of 10, Deryn was diagnosed with Leukaemia. Then 18 months later he developed another rare form of cancer called Langerhan’s cell sarcoma. Only five other people in the world have it. He is the youngest of them all and the only person in the world known to be fighting it alongside another cancer, making him one in seven billion. Told there was no hope of survival, after four years of intensive treatment, exhausted by his fight and with just days left to live, Deryn planned his own funeral. But, Deryn’s desperate mother, Callie would not let him give in. Battling medical errors, impossible odds and years of hardship as the cancer consumed his body and their world, they looked for more answers. After making some startling discoveries and taking massive chances - something began to change… Would their lives as a family ever be the same again?

Memoirs of a Geezer: Music, Mayhem, Life


Jah Wobble - 2009
    Jah Wobble begins by offering the most authentic insider's account of the beginning of punk rock yet written, but there's much more to him than that. His is an eventful life, as the celebrated ups - PiL's The Metal Box, 90s hit Visions Of You with Sinead O'Connor - are balanced by major downs - chronic alcoholism and marital breakdown. It begins with an East End childhood in a London barely recovered from the War and ends with Wobble finally turning his back on London that no longer feels like home. Through the book Wobble tell it like he sees it: his opinions of the great and good from Malcolm Mclaren to Peter Gabriel to Brian Eno to Iain Sinclair are refreshingly disrespectful. Oh and if you ever wondered how got his name, the answer is here: his teenage pal Sid Vicious gave it to him when he drunkenly slurred Wobble's real name, John Wardle.

Behind The White Ball


Jimmy White - 1998
    Aged 16, White was the youngest player to win the English Amateur Championship. At 18, he won the World Amateur title. By 1984, he's a professional success, married but not at all settled. He's the kind of man who goes out for a packet of cigarettes and comes home two weeks later. Gambling, women, marathon binges with showbiz friends like Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones, have threatened the stability of his marriage. But somehow White has survived, to tell in candid detail, a most unusual, often outrageous story of a very sporting life.

Juke Box Hero: My Five Decades in Rock 'n' Roll


Lou Gramm - 2013
    Songs such as “Cold As Ice,” “I Want to Know What Love Is,” “Waiting for a Girl Like You,” “Double Vision,” “Urgent,” and “Midnight Blue” are among 20 Gramm songs that achieved Top 40 status on the Billboard charts and became rock classics still played often, nearly three decades after they first hit the airwaves and the record store shelves. Juke Box Hero: The My Five Decades in Rock 'n' Roll chronicles, with remarkable candor, the ups and downs of this popular rocker’s amazing life—a life which saw him achieve worldwide fame and fortune, then succumb to its trappings before summoning the courage and faith to overcome his drug addiction and a life-threatening brain tumor. Gramm takes the reader behind the scenes—into the recording studio, back stage, on the bus trips and beyond—to give an insider’s look into the life of the man Rolling Stone magazine referred to as “the Pavarotti of rock.”

The Train in the Night: A Story of Music and Loss


Nick Coleman - 2012
    The Train in the Night is an account of one man's struggle to recover from the loss of his greatest passion in life - and to go one step further than that: to restore his ability not only to hear but to think about and feel music.Of all our relationships with art, the one we enjoy with music is the most complex, the most mysterious and, for reasons that cannot be explained by science alone, the most emotionally charged. Nothing about that relationship is simple. And yet it is perhaps through music that we make the most intimate contact with our sense of who we really are, at our most naked, unsophisticated, honest, and simplified. Through psalms, symphonies, love songs, ballads, boogie...Where to start, though, for the newly deaf? Well, you can start, suggested a famous neurologist, by trying to remember every beautiful piece of music you've ever heard and then by thinking about that music over and over again until it begins to assume a new kind of form in your brain. You never know what might happen after that. And so that's what the author did. He went back to the origins of his passion - the series of big bangs which kicked off his musical universe - and then worked his way forwards through the back catalogue.The Train in the Night is a memoir not quite like any other. It is about growing up, obviously. But it is also about becoming young again and trying to see the world for what it is, whether through the eyes of a teenage punk or those of a middle-aged music critic and father of two. It is about taste and love and suffering and delusion. It is about longing to be Keith Richards. It is funny, heartbreaking and, above all, true. It is a hymn to music.

Live At the Brixton Academy: A riotous life in the music business


Simon Parkes - 2014
    Over the next fifteen years he turned it into Britain's most iconic music venue. And now he's telling his story: full of fond - and wild - reminiscences of the famous musicians who played at the venue, including Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, Lou Reed, The Ramones, New Order, the Beastie Boys and The Smiths.This is about one man's burning desire for success against the odds, his passion for live music and the excitement of those wilderness years, a far cry from the corporate world that controls the scene today. From rock-star debauchery and mixing it up with Brixton gangsters to putting on the first legal raves in the UK and countless backroom business deals, this is the story of how to succeed in business with no experience and fulfil your teenage fantasies.

Fallopian Rhapsody: The Story of the Lunachicks


The Lunachicks - 2021
    More than that, this is a story about the enduring friendship among the book's three central voices: Theo Kogan, Sydney Silver, and Gina Volpe. They formed the Lunachicks at LaGuardia High School (of "Fame" fame) in the late '80s and had a record deal with Blast First Records as teenagers, whisked into the studio by Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore.Over the course of thirteen-ish years, the Lunachicks brought their brand of outrageous hard-rockin' rebelliousness around the world countless times, simultaneously scaring conservative onlookers and rescuing the souls of wayward freaks, queers, and outcasts.Their unforgettable costume-critiques of pop culture were as loud as their "Marsha[ll]" amps, their ferocious tenacity as lasting as their pre-internet mythology. They toured with bands like the Go-Go's, Marilyn Manson, No Doubt, Rancid, and The Offspring; played the Reading Festival with Nirvana; and rocked the main stage at the Warped tour twice.Yet beneath all the makeup, wigs, and hilarious outfits were three women struggling to grow into adulthood under the most unorthodox of conditions. Together onstage they were invincible B-movie superheroes who kicked heaps of ass—but apart, not so much. Depression, addiction, and identity crises loomed overhead, not to mention the barrage of sexist nonsense they faced from the music industry.Filled with never-before-seen photos, illustrations, and ephemera from the band's private archive, and featuring contributions from Lunachicks drummer Chip English, founding member Sindi B., and former bandmate Becky Wreck, Fallopian Rhapsody is a bawdy, gripping, warts-and-all account of how these city kids relied on their cosmic creative connection to overcome internal strife and external killjoys, all the while empowering legions of fans to shoot for the moon.For readers of Carrie Brownstein's Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, Kim Gordon's Girl in a Band, and Chrissie Hynde's Reckless, Fallopian Rhapsody is the literary equivalent of diving headfirst into a moshpit and slowly but surely venturing up to the front of the stage.

Boys in the Trees


Carly Simon - 2015
    Don't miss it." - People Magazine"One of the best celebrity memoirs of the year." -The Hollywood ReporterRock Star. Composer and Lyricist. Feminist Icon. Survivor.Simon's memoir reveals her remarkable life, beginning with her storied childhood as the third daughter of Richard L. Simon, the co-founder of publishing giant Simon & Schuster, her musical debut as half of The Simon Sisters performing folk songs with her sister Lucy in Greenwich Village, to a meteoric solo career that would result in 13 top 40 hits, including the #1 song "You're So Vain." She was the first artist in history to win a Grammy Award, an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award, for her song "Let the River Run" from the movie Working Girl.The memoir recalls a childhood enriched by music and culture, but also one shrouded in secrets that would eventually tear her family apart. Simon brilliantly captures moments of creative inspiration, the sparks of songs, and the stories behind writing "Anticipation" and "We Have No Secrets" among many others. Romantic entanglements with some of the most famous men of the day fueled her confessional lyrics, as well as the unraveling of her storybook marriage to James Taylor.

The Lightless Sky: My Journey to Safety as a Child Refugee


Gulwali Passarlay - 2018
    Fast delivery through DHL/FedEx express.