Little did he know when he opened his club under a flophouse on the Bowery that it would become the birthplace of a new era of music in New York City - Punk. While the letters CBGB ultimately didn't describe the music the club was renowned for, OMFUG (Other Music for Uplifting Gourmandizers) still represents what the club provides for all voracious consumers of music. These pages pay homage to a musical and cultural landmark. It is a spectacular photography compilation which features some of the most celebrated artists in musical history and chronicles the last 30 years of rock and roll. It also showcases photographs of famous patrons, including Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg and Jim Jarmusch.

    Her fascination with the handsome, domesticated creatures that have shared her flats and her life in London remained undiminished, and grew into real love with the awkwardly lovable El Magnifico, the last cat to share her home.On Cats is a celebrated classic, a memoir in which we meet the cats that have slunk and bullied and charmed their way into Doris Lessing's life. She tells their stories—their exploits, rivalries, terrors, affections, ancient gestures, and learned behaviors—with vivid simplicity. And she tells the story of herself in relation to cats: the way animals affect her and she them, and the communication that grows possible between them—a language of gesture and mood and desire as eloquent as the spoken word. No other writer conveys so truthfully the real interdependence of humans and cats or convinces us with such stunning recognition of the reasons why cats really matter.

    This book details his return to live performance, and the journey that took him from an early retirement to his position as the most critically acclaimed stand-up in Britain.

    . . Naturally, Shane MacGowan is the book's focus and fascination, a mixture of personal awfulness and great charm, but this isn't a biography of Shane (though his quote on the front is worth the money alone - 'It's just how I'd imagine I'd remember it') . . . Fearnely also makes sure that this is his book, with great honesty . . . In the end it is the I-was-there insights that make Here Comes Everybody such a good book . . . not just an essential purchase for Pogues fans, but for anyone interested in the reality of being in a band. And what a band.' - David Quantick, Word magazine'Fearnley's descriptions of Shane MacGowan, the front man of the Irish folk-rock band the Pogues, suppurate with pure deliciousness . . . By 1991, Fearnley 'had ended up hating' the 'Miss Havisham' figure who sat in a darkened hotel room, painting his face silver and refusing to go on stage - and yet his memoir is funny and affectionate, a cackling expectoration of a mad decade as part of the band . . . In his own way, MacGowan is the ideal protagonist - talented, inspired, and halitotic, but flawed. 'My dreams have featured Shane more often than my dad for some time now,' writes Fearnely, touchingly. Read it, and exhale.' --Camilla Long, Sunday Times'Fearnley is brilliant at conjuring the milieu from which the Pogues sprang, a lost, down-at-heel demimonde of King's Cross squats and housing association flats. If he can't or won't tell you why MacGowan's decline occurred, he describes it in harrowing detail: the screaming fits, the vomiting, his skin 'the colour of grout' . . .Fearnley's book fits perfectly with the Pogues: for all their earthiness, they were a band concerned with myths, from the Irish legends MacGowan's lyrics relocated to the back streets and pubs of north London to the persistent rock'n'roll fable of the damned, beautiful loser. There's nothing romantic about alcoholic self-destruction, as Here Comes Everybody makes clear, but a song as beautiful as A Pair of Brown Eyes can make you believe there is at least while it's playing. In the process, MacGowan became a mythic figure himself: a myth, despite the unsparing detail that Fearnley ends up burnishing.' --Alexis Petridis'If you think all rock-music memoirs are a mixture of PR fluff, second-hand observations and strategically selected memories, then Here Comes Everybody: The Story of The Pogues is the book to make you change your mind . . . That Fearnley hasn t been quarantined for writing such a warts-and-all tale says much about the band and the bond formed across 30 fractious years. A band of brothers to the very end, then, and with a fine, salty memoir to raise a glass to.' -- Irish Times'An enjoyable and charming read ... The book whizzes by in a blur of more gigs, more hits, more alcohol-fuelled triumphs and disasters. Fearnely is especially good on the band's eventful 1985 US tour ... Like the Pogue's best work, Here Comes Everybody is anything but streamlined and orderly, and its endless twists and turns pack a mightly wallop.' -- Sunday Business Post'A frank and funny account of wild times and shattered friendships by the folk-punk outfit's accordion player, James Fearnely. It kicks off as the rest of the group agree to throw out their shambolic frontman.' --Metro

    How can such sublime work have been produced by a man who (when we can discern his personality at all) seems so ordinary, so opaque—and occasionally so intemperate? John Eliot Gardiner grew up passing one of the only two authentic portraits of Bach every morning and evening on the stairs of his parents’ house, where it hung for safety during World War II. He has been studying and performing Bach ever since, and is now regarded as one of the composer’s greatest living interpreters. The fruits of this lifetime’s immersion are distilled in this remarkable book, grounded in the most recent Bach scholarship but moving far beyond it, and explaining in wonderful detail the ideas on which Bach drew, how he worked, how his music is constructed, how it achieves its effects—and what it can tell us about Bach the man. Gardiner’s background as a historian has encouraged him to search for ways in which scholarship and performance can cooperate and fruitfully coalesce. This has entailed piecing together the few biographical shards, scrutinizing the music, and watching for those instances when Bach’s personality seems to penetrate the fabric of his notation. Gardiner’s aim is “to give the reader a sense of inhabiting the same experiences and sensations that Bach might have had in the act of music-making. This, I try to show, can help us arrive at a more human likeness discernible in the closely related processes of composing and performing his music.” It is very rare that such an accomplished performer of music should also be a considerable writer and thinker about it. John Eliot Gardiner takes us as deeply into Bach’s works and mind as perhaps words can. The result is a unique book about one of the greatest of all creative artists.

    It chronicles his humble beginnings in the Midwest, his early days with the Jackson 5, and his unprecedented solo success. Giving absolutely unrivalled insight into the King of Pop's life, it details his songwriting process for hits like Beat It, Rock With You, Billie Jean, and We Are the World; describes how he developed his signature dance style, including the Moon Walk; and opens the door to his very private personal relationships with his family, including sister Janet, and stars like Diana Ross, Berry Gordy, Marlon Brando, Quincy Jones, Paul McCartney, and Brooke Shields. At the time of its original publication in 1988, MOONWALK broke the fiercely guarded barrier of silence that surrounded Michael Jackson. Candidly and courageously, Jackson talks openly about his wholly exceptional career and the crushing isolation of his fame, as well as the unfair rumors that have surrounded it. MOONWALK is illustrated with rare photographs from Jackson family albums and Michael's personal photographic archives, as well as a drawing done by Michael exclusively for the book. It reveals and celebrates, as no other book can, the life of this exceptional and beloved musician.

    It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.

    Street life, drugs, art and nature, family, AIDS, politics, friendship and acceptance: Wojnarowicz challenges us to examine our lives -- politically, socially, emotionally, and aesthetically.

    During that tumultuous period, however, his record also included several arrests for drugs and DUI. Since breaking his addiction to heroin in 2002, the California-born musician has performed with the multiplatinum group Velvet Revolver and reunited with the group he helped make famous. Not Dead & Not for Sale is Weiland's starkly honest memoir of the highs and lows of his bipolar life. This book is timely, arriving on the heels of Stone Temple Pilots tour and the release of their first album since 2001. The memoir was written with the assistance of David Ritz, the only four-time winner of the Gleason Music Book Award.

    No writer on rock ‘n’ roll ever lived harder or wrote better–more passionately, more compellingly, more penetratingly. He lived the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, guzzling booze and Romilar like water, matching its energy in prose that erupted from the pages of Rolling Stone, Creem, and The Village Voice. Bangs agitated in the seventies for sounds that were harsher, louder, more electric, and more alive, in the course of which he charted and defined the aesthetics of heavy metal and punk. He was treated as a peer by such brash visionaries as Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Captain Beefheart, The Clash, Debbie Harry, and other luminaries.Let it Blurt is a scrupulously researched account of Lester Bangs’s fascinating (if often tawdry and unappetizing) life story, as well as a window on rock criticism and rock culture in their most turbulent and creative years. It includes a never-before-published piece by Bangs, the hilarious "How to Be a Rock Critic," in which he reveals the secrets of his dubious, freeloading trade.

    Iggy may have been the godfather of punk, but The Ramones defined, lived it and breathed in its noxious fumes. Now we see what life was like on the road (where they arguably gave their finest performances) and the memories of the man who took charge of every adventure they had - Monte Melnick. days in the 1970s to their farewell gigs in 1996. He was often cited as the fifth Ramone and acted as, in his own words, their babysitter to psychiatrist, booking agent to travel agent, paymaster to van driver.

    Nowhere else is the man and musician so convincingly deconstructed and so compellingly humanized.

    Here, in their own words and images, is the life of a band who for the last forty years have been playing the soundtrack of our lives.

    What's not to love?"-Nick Cave, author of The Sick Bag Song and The Death of Bunny MunroWhen Mark Lanegan first arrived in Seattle in the mid-1980s, he was just "an arrogant, self-loathing redneck waster seeking transformation through rock 'n' roll." Little did he know that within less than a decade, he would rise to fame as the front man of the Screaming Trees, then fall from grace as a low-level crack dealer and a homeless heroin addict, all the while watching some of his closest friends rocket to the forefront of popular music.In Sing Backwards and Weep, Lanegan takes readers back to the sinister, needle-ridden streets of Seattle, to an alternative music scene that was simultaneously bursting with creativity and dripping with drugs. He tracks the tumultuous rise and fall of the Screaming Trees, from a brawling, acid-rock bar band to world-famous festival favorites that scored a hit #5 single on Billboard's Alternative charts and landed a notorious performance on David Letterman, where Lanegan appeared sporting a fresh black eye from a brawl the night before. This book also dives into Lanegan's personal struggles with addiction, culminating in homelessness, petty crime, and the tragic deaths of his closest friends. From the back of the van to the front of the bar, from the hotel room to the emergency room, onstage, backstage, and everywhere in between, Sing Backwards and Weep reveals the abrasive underlining beneath one of the most romanticized decades in rock history-from a survivor who lived to tell the tale. Gritty, gripping, and unflinchingly raw, Sing Backwards and Weep is a book about more than just an extraordinary singer who watched his dreams catch fire and incinerate the ground beneath his feet. Instead, it's about a man who learned how to drag himself from the wreckage, dust off the ashes, and keep living and creating.

    Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy. Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies. These three unprecedented tours—and the albums that inspired them—were the most ambitious of these artists’ careers, and they forever changed the landscape of rock and roll: the economics, the privileges, and the very essence of the concert experience. On these juggernauts, rock gods—and their entourages—were born, along with unimaginable overindulgence and the legendary flameouts. Tour buses were traded for private jets, arenas replaced theaters, and performances transmogrified into over-the-top, operatic spectacles. As the sixties ended and the seventies began, an altogether more cynical era took hold: peace, love, and understanding gave way to sex, drugs, and rock and roll.   But the decade didn’t become the seventies, acclaimed journalist Michael Walker writes, until 1973, a historic and mind-bogglingly prolific year for rock and roll that saw the release of countless classic albums, from The Dark Side of the Moon to Goat’s Head Soup; Goodbye Yellow Brick Road; Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.; and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle. Aerosmith, Queen, and Lynyrd Skynyrd released their debut albums. The Roxy and CBGB opened their doors. Every major act of the era—from Fleetwood Mac to Black Sabbath—was on the road that summer, but of them all, Walker writes, it was The Who, Led Zeppelin, and Alice Cooper who emerged as the game changers.   Walker revisits each of these three tours in memorable, all-access detail: he goes backstage, onto the jets, and into the limos, where every conceivable wish could be granted. He wedges himself into the sweaty throng of teenage fans (Walker himself was one of them) who suddenly were an economic force to be reckoned with, and he vividly describes how a decade’s worth of decadence was squeezed into twelve heart-pounding, backbreaking, and rule-defying months that redefined, for our modern times, the business of superstardom.