Enjoy or die..." --John LydonPunk has been romanticized and embalmed in various media. An English class revolt that became a worldwide fashion statement, punk's idols were the Sex Pistols, and its sneering hero was Johnny Rotten.Seventeen years later, John Lydon looks back at himself, the Sex Pistols, and the "no future" disaffection of the time. Much more than just a music book, Rotten is an oral history of punk: angry, witty, honest, poignant, crackling with energy. Malcolm McLaren, Sid Vicious, Chrissie Hynde, Billy Idol, London and England in the late 1970s, the Pistols' creation and collapse...all are here, in perhaps the best book ever written about music and youth culture, by one of its most notorious figures.

    As drummer for the British group Captain America, one of the two support bands on Nirvana's Nevermind UK tour, Andy Bollen had a ringside seat at the exact moment that Nirvana went massive. Afforded intimate access, Bollen wrote his own personal diary in Nirvana's dressing room, where he spoke candidly to Cobain—from his fears of losing original fans to his love of the Bay City Rollers. He saw firsthand how Nirvana worked, the relationships that made them tick, and the dynamic that made them one of the great bands. This is a warm, affectionate, funny, and, at times, brutally honest account, written by a guy on the periphery, perfectly positioned to observe. Drawing on the diaries he kept at the time, the book brings to life a pivotal moment in rock history, making it a must-read for Nirvana fans and lovers of iconic rock stories. The author also includes his own photographs which have never been seen before.

    It was the first Brian Eno album tobe composed almost completely in the confines of a recording studio,over a scant few months in the summer of 1975. The album was a proofof concept for Eno's budding ideas of "the studio as musicalinstrument," and a signpost for a bold new way of thinking aboutmusic.In this book, Geeta Dayal unravels Another Green World's abundantmysteries, venturing into its dense thickets of sound. How was analbum this cohesive and refined formed in such a seemingly ad hoc way?How were electronics and layers of synthetic treatments used to createan album so redolent of the natural world? How did a deck of cardsfigure into all of this? Here, through interviews and archivalresearch, she unearths the strange story of how Another Green Worldformed the link to Eno's future -- foreshadowing his metamorphosisfrom unlikely glam rocker to sonic painter and producer.

    The Doors weren’t just a soundtrack to that revolution. Their music gave it a voice. They lived by its ideals. And in a garage in Venice, CA, the four members of the band agreed to a business relationship that was also revolutionary; each member of the band would share equal songwriting credit and equal veto power. All for one, one for all. And for almost forty years, even after the death of lead singer Jim Morrison, that progressive 60s ethos guided the former band mates in all their decisions. Until one day the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll came up against its biggest nemesis—money—and the legendarily equal relationship between the remaining members of the Doors began to splinter.Drummer John Densmore’s THE DOORS: UNHINGED is the true story of the court case that put Jim Morrison’s legacy on trial and divided the former band mates in half, with Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger on one side, and John Densmore and the estate of Jim Morrison on the other.

    Following in the grand tradition of such Irish memoirs as Angela’s Ashes and Are You Somebody?, Liam Clancy relates his life’s story in a raucously funny and star-studded account of moving from provincial Ireland to the bars and clubs of New York City, to the cusp of fame as a member of Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers. Born in 1935, the eleventh out of as many children, young Liam was a naive and innocent lad of the Old Country. His memories of childhood include bounding over hills, streams, and the occasional mountain, getting lost, and eventually found, and making mischief in the way of a typical Irish boy.As an aimless nineteen-year-old, Clancy met a strange and wonderfully energetic lover of music, Ms. Diane Guggenheim, an American heiress. She and a colleague from America had set out to record regional Irish folk music, and their undertaking led them to Carrick-on-Suir in the shadow of Slievenamon, "The Mountain of the Women," where Mammie Clancy had been known to carry a tune or two in her kitchen. Guggenheim fell for young Liam and swept him along on her travels through the British Isles, the American Appalachians, and finally Greenwich Village, the undisputed Mecca for aspiring artists of every ilk in the late 1950s. Clancy was in New York to become an actor. But on the side, he played and sang with his brothers, Paddy and Tom, and fellow countryman Tommy Makem, in pubs like the legendary White Horse Tavern. In the heady atmosphere of the Village, Clancy’s life was a party filled with music, sex, and McSorley’s. His friendships with then-unknown artists such as Bob Dylan, Maya Angelou, Robert Redford, Lenny Bruce, Pete Seeger and Barbra Streisand form the backdrop of the charming adventures of a small-town boy making it big in the biggest of cities. In music circles, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem are known as the Beatles of Irish music. The band’s music continues to play on jukeboxes in pubs and bars, in living rooms of folk music fans, and in Irish American homes throughout the country. Liam Clancy’s lively memoir captures their wild adventures on the road to fame and fortune, and brings to life a man who never lets himself off the hook for his sins, and happily views his success as a blessing.From the Hardcover edition.

    A Time of Gifts is the first volume in a trilogy recounting the trip, and takes the reader with him as far as Hungary. It is a book of compelling glimpses - not only of the events which were curdling Europe at that time, but also of its resplendent domes and monasteries, its great rivers, the sun on the Bavarian snow, the storks and frogs, the hospitable burgomasters who welcomed him, and that world's grandeurs and courtesies. His powers of recollection have astonishing sweep and verve, and the scope is majestic. First published to enormous acclaim, it confirmed Fermor's reputation as the greatest living travel writer, and has, together with its sequel Between the Woods and the Water (the third volume is famously yet to be published), been a perennial seller for 25 years.

    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.

    Formed in Toronto in 1968, the rock trio Rush has gone on to multiplatinum success behind the distinctive high register and virtuosic bass-playing of frontman Geddy Lee, the legendary drumming and lyric-writing of Neil Peart, and the guitar heroics of Alex Lifeson. Despite having just four chart-topping singles since the release of their debut LP in 1974, Rush has nonetheless sold more than 25 million albums in the U.S. and more than 40 million worldwide. The Canadian trio may be the definition of an "album band," and this new book from prolific rock journalist and acknowledged Rush authority Martin Popoff pays tribute to the band's discography by moderating in-depth, frank, and entertaining conversations about all 20 of Rush's studio albums. Inside, the author gathers 20 rock journalists and authors who offer insights, opinions, and anecdotes about every release. Together, the conversations comprise a unique historical overview of the band, as well as a handsome discography. Popoff also includes loads of sidebars that provide complete track listings, details on album personnel, information on where and when the albums were recorded, and sidebar facts about the albums, their songs, and the band.

    "By turns moving, funny, appalling, disturbing. . . . There has never been anything like it".--"Rolling Stone". 80 b&w photos. 16-page color insert.In his twenty-nine years, rock idol Manson has experienced more than most people have (or would want to) in a lifetime. Now, in his shocking and candid memoir, he takes readers from backstage to gaol cells, from recording studios to emergency rooms, from the pit of despair to the top of the charts, and recounts his metamorphosis from a frightened Christian schoolboy into the most feared and revered music superstar in the country.

    She endured a catastrophic set of physical calamities as a child and young woman, was an active member of the Communist Party, and survived a tempestuous marriage to the artist Diego Rivera. This book includes many photographs of her life alongside her extraordinary paintings, and presents commentary by leading Mexican art historians, stunning reproductions of her most seminal works -- some never before reproduced, and nine gate-folds allowing the reader to examine in detail aspects of her larger works.

    But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else." So writes Bob Dylan in Chronicles: Volume One, his remarkable book exploring critical junctures in his life and career. Through Dylan's eyes and open mind, we see Greenwich Village, circa 1961, when he first arrives in Manhattan. Dylan's New York is a magical city of possibilities -- smoky, nightlong parties; literary awakenings; transient loves and unbreakable friendships. Elegiac observations are punctuated by jabs of memories, penetrating and tough. With the book's side trips to New Orleans, Woodstock, Minnesota and points west, Chronicles: Volume One is an intimate and intensely personal recollection of extraordinary times.By turns revealing, poetical, passionate and witty, Chronicles: Volume One is a mesmerizing window on Bob Dylan's thoughts and influences. Dylan's voice is distinctively American: generous of spirit, engaged, fanciful and rhythmic. Utilizing his unparalleled gifts of storytelling and the exquisite expressiveness that are the hallmarks of his music, Bob Dylan turns Chronicles: Volume One into a poignant reflection on life, and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art.

    Ed Bolian’s memoir recounts his path from a conversation in high school with Cannonball Run founder, Brock Yates to setting the fastest time ever for driving from New York to Los Angeles. The journey explores goal setting, criminal psychology, and spirituality in the pursuit of finding your true purpose and using what makes you unique to achieve something extraordinary.

    Biss doesn’t just love Beethoven more than other music, he loves it more than most things. It’s the lens through which he understands the world, and has been since he can remember. But in Unquiet Biss reveals the full extent to which Beethoven is also a ruthless lens through which he views himself.Biss provides listeners front and center access to his long overdue confrontation with a painful truth: Living with Beethoven has essentially amounted to severing all meaningful ties with himself. As we learn in rich detail, amidst the treasures Beethoven’s music has gifted Biss also lies searing self-doubt and heaps of crippling anxiety. Biss’s raw self-reflection is delivered through pitch-perfect prose, delving deep into the fascinating paradox that the greatest pleasure in his life is also responsible for imprisoning him. Beethoven’s defining personal characteristic, for example—his unwavering self-conviction and weapons-grade callousness—only served to mock Biss’s own perceived shortcomings and vulnerabilities. This captivating combination of wit and wisdom Biss readily shares is only interrupted by something even more extraordinary—his new interpretations of movements from seven of Beethoven's sonatas, including the Pathetique and Tempest, and his groundbreaking, awe-inducing final sonatas.Unquiet both begins and ends with Jonathan Biss staring down the daunting complexity and infinite majesty of Beethoven's last piano sonatas. But between these two points, the singular pianist has traversed a world of healing. An immeasurable weight has been lifted from him—by him. And we have witnessed its dramatic rise. While his journey is a fantastically unique one, if we listen close, we can hear ours too. An endless battle to confront and quiet our greatest pain so that we can embrace something even greater. Take a moment, and heed the sound.

    But a courageous and visionary young woman-Katharine Kuh-defied the odds and opened a gallery in Chicago, where she exhibited such relatively unknown artists as Fernand L ger, Paul Klee, Joan Mir, Ansel Adams, Marc Chagall, and Alexander Calder, to name but a few. Not only did Kuh survive these rocky early years but most of the artists became increasingly famous. In 1954, the Art Institute of Chicago named her its first curator of modern painting and sculpture. Kuh's prestigious position at the museum led to friendships with Marcel Duchamp, Mark Rothko, Mies van der Rohe, and Edward Hopper. In writing her memoir, she hoped to offer intimate portraits of these luminaries and contribute to a fuller understanding of their achievements. Her book also reveals how and why America became a major force in the world of contemporary art.After Katharine Kuh's death, Avis Berman-noted art historian and Kuh's close friend and literary executor-selected, edited, and completed her writings for this book.

    I was not a hiker and I wasn’t a Catholic. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I was a Christian. On the last government census when I had to state my religion, I said I was a Buddhist, mainly because they’ve had such a hard time in Tibet and I felt they needed my statistical support.”And so Bill Bennett, an Australian based film director, set off on an 800 kilometer walk across Spain to Santiago de Compostela, not sure why he was doing it, particularly when his knee gave out and the rest of the walk became a “pain management pilgrimage.” He kept his sense of humour though, and The Way, My Way takes you on a transformative spiritual journey that's both enlightening and also very funny.