When he finally is resettled in the United States, he finds a life full of promise, but also heartache and myriad new challenges. Moving, suspenseful, and unexpectedly funny, What Is the What is an astonishing novel that illuminates the lives of millions through one extraordinary man.-back cover

    Chapin is known for his ballads and "story songs," among them his signature song, the hugely popular "Taxi." He died in an auto crash in 1981, just as his fame was burgeoning and his albums were selling out in record stores. Though the broader recognition due him has been late in coming, his music, his beliefs, and his social activism are now widely appreciated by increasing numbers of fans here and abroad.

    His father died when he was seven, and at seventeen he left his mother and sister behind and headed for New York City, place of limitless possibilities. He arrived penniless with the idea of becoming a poet; ten years later he was a pivotal voice of the age of punk, starting such seminal bands as Television, the Heartbreakers, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids—whose song "Blank Generation" remains the defining anthem of the era. Hell was significantly responsible for creating CBGB as punk ground zero; his Voidoids toured notoriously with the Clash, and Malcolm McLaren would credit Hell as inspiration for the Sex Pistols. There were kinetic nights in New York's club demi-monde, descent into drug addiction, and an ever-present yearning for redemption through poetry, music, and art."We lived in the suburbs in America in the fifties," Hell writes. "My roots are shallow. I'm a little jealous of people with strong ethnic and cultural roots. Lucky Martin Scorsese or Art Spiegelman or Dave Chappelle. I came from Hopalong Cassidy and Bugs Bunny and first grade at ordinary Maxwell Elementary." How this legendary downtown artist went from a prosaic childhood in the idyllic Kentucky foothills to igniting a movement that would take over New York's and London's restless youth cultures—and spawn the careers of not only Hell himself, but a cohort of friends such as Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Debbie Harry—is just part of the fascinating story Hell tells. With stunning powers of observation, he delves into the details of both the world that shaped him and the world he shaped.An acutely rendered, unforgettable coming-of-age story, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp evokes with feeling, clarity, and piercing intelligence that classic journey: the life of one who comes from the hinterlands into the city in search of art and passion.

    Later, this Bermondsey boy would become known as Tommy Steele . In this engaging memoir Tommy recalls his childhood years growing up in Bermondsey. He relives with great fondness Saturdays as a young boy, spent gazing at the colourful posters for the Palladium and days spent wandering up Tower Bridge Road to Joyce's Pie Shop for pie and mash. But he also brings to life with extraordinary vividness what it was like to live through the devastation of the Blitz. Yet it was once he joined the merchant navy and began singing and performing for his fellow seamen that his natural ability as an entertainer marked him out as a favourite. And it was while ashore in America that he became hooked on rock'n'roll and a legend was born . From Tommy's humble beginning to life at sea and finally as a performer, Bermondsey Boy is a colourful, charming and deeply engaging memoir from a much-loved entertainer.

    He continued to make great music while slowly returning to his Catholic roots. His hard-won wisdom filters through his stories whether he's recalling how he went shopping with John Lennon and ended up on the cover of Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band or what it was like to travel in the Jim Crow South with Sam Cooke.Praise for Dion... "To this day nobody, nobody can rock like Dion."—Lou Reed "He always had the name that said it all...Dion."—Bruce Springsteen "If you want to hear a great singer, listen to Dion. His genius has never deserted him."—Bob DylanThe audio edition of this book can be downloaded via Audible.

    has done it. In this sprawling, revealing, lively second autobiography (following the bestseller Yes, I Can , also coauthored with the Boyars) stories of money, sex, violence, drugs, booze, fame, luxury and extravagance spill out relentlessly. Superstardom, admits Davis, has always been his be-all and end-all, and the almost obligatory downside--failed marriages, sickness, age, his own personal IRS auditor--are featured heavily here, along with insider show-biz gossip. More up-tone tales involve life-long buddy and supporter Frank Sinatra, the Rat Pack, the Kennedys, Richard Nixon. At the core of the book is the extraordinary black experience of the last 50 years. Davis became a star in the '40s at a Vegas hotel where he could headline but not sleep. In the '70s, he slept in Lincoln's bed in the White House, guest of the president. Even Mr. Wonderful (Davis's first Broadway smash hit) couldn't top that.

    While still a teenager she headed to the UK and later the US to work for a who's who of bands and artists. Life on the road was exhilarating, hard work, occasionally surreal but never dull, particularly when you're the only woman in the road crew and the #metoo movement is still 40 years away.Whether wrangling Iggy Pop across Europe, climbing trusses while seven months pregnant, drinking shots of JD with Bon Scott backstage at Wembley, or donning a tailor-made suit to do lights for Elton at Windsor Castle, Tana did it all.Loud is rock 'n' roll like you've never seen it before, by a woman who not only survived the all-male world on the road but climbed to the top and lived to tell the tale.AC/DC * Deep Purple * ELO * Elton John * Ice Cube * Ice-T * Iggy Pop* INXS * Iron Maiden * Lenny Kravitz * Neil Diamond * Ozzy Osbourne * Patti Smith * Pearl Jam * Rage Against the Machine * Red Hot Chili Peppers * Santana * Status Quo * Suzi Quatro * The Offspring * The Police * The Runaways * The Who * Vanda & Young and more!

    If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn." — Charlie Parker"What is jazz? The rhythm — the feeling." — Coleman Hawkins"The best sound usually comes the first time you do something. If it's spontaneous, it's going to be rough, not clean, but it's going to have the spirit which is the essence of jazz." — Dave BrubeckHere, in their own words, such famous jazz musicians as Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Fletcher Henderson, Bunk Johnson, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Clarence Williams, Jo Jones, Jelly Roll Morton, Mezz Mezzrow, Billie Holiday, and many others recall the birth, growth, and changes in jazz over the years. From its beginnings at the turn of the twentieth century in the red-light district in New Orleans (or Storyville, as it came to be known), to Chicago's Downtown section and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and Chicago's South Side to jam sessions in Kansas City to Harlem during the Depression years, the West Coast and modern developments, the story of jazz is vividly and colorfully documented in hundreds of personal interviews, letters, tape recorded and telephone conversations, and excerpts from previously printed articles that appeared in books and magazines.There is no more fascinating and lively history of jazz than this firsthand telling by the men who made it. It should be read and re-read by all jazz enthusiasts, musicians, students of music and culture, students of American history, and other readers. "A lively book bearing the stamp of honesty and naturalness." — Library Journal. "A work of considerable substance." — The New Yorker. "Some of the quotations are a bit racy but they give the book a wonderful flavor." — San Francisco Chronicle.

    Great rock 'n' roll Babylon stuff."- Booklist (Starred Review)"The epic tale of an obsessive teenager who launched a Rolling Stones fanzine and spent the next two decades capturing the band’s whirlwind metamorphosis from behind the scenes….First-rate, firsthand account of the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band, and a disenchanted chronicle of its increasingly crass commercialization."- Kirkus ReviewsAs a teenager, Bill German knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life: chronicle the career and adventures of his favorite rock band, the Rolling Stones. And in 1978, on his sixteenth birthday, he set out to make his dream a reality. Feverishly typed in his Brooklyn bedroom, and surreptitiously printed in his high school’s mimeograph room German’s Stones-only newsletter, Beggars Banquet, was born. His teachers discouraged it, his parents dismissed it as a phase, and his disco-loving classmates preferred the Bee Gees, but, for German, this primitive, pre-Internet fanzine was a labor of love. And a fateful encounter with his idols on the streets of New York soon proved his efforts weren’t in vain.Impressed with Beggars Banquet, the Stones gave the ’zine instant cred on the rock scene by singing its praises–and by inviting German to hang with the band. At first a fish out of water in the company of rock royalty, German found himself spilling orange juice on a priceless rug in Mick Jagger’s house and getting pegged as a narc by pals of Keith Richards and Ron Wood. But before long he became a familiar fixture in the inner sanctum, not just reporting Stones stories but living them. He was a player in the Mick-versus-Keith feud and was an eyewitness to Keith’s midlife crisis and Ron’s overindulgences. He even had a reluctant role in covering up Mick’s peccadilloes. “In the span of a few months,” German recalls, “I’d gone from wanting to know everything about my favorite rock stars to knowing too much.”In this warts-and-all book, which includes many never-before-seen photographs, German takes us to the Stones’ homes, recording sessions, and concerts around the world. He charts the band’s rocky path from the unthinkable depths of a near breakup to the obscenely lucrative heights of their blockbuster tours. And ultimately, German reveals why his childhood dream come true became a passion he finally had to part with.Under Their Thumb is an up-close and extremely personal dispatch from the amazing, exclusive world of the Rolling Stones, by someone who was lucky enough to live it–and sober enough to remember it all.

    Except it wasn’t that simple. Self-confessed latch-key kids, theirs was far from an easy ride.Inspired by both the energy of British punk bands like the Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks and cult American bands such as Dead Kennedys and Husker Du, Green Day formed in 1989. The band gigged relentlessly across the US, quickly selling out every underground club that booked them, and their 1994 major label debut Dookie was a 10-million-selling worldwide hit album that seized the zeitgeist while rock music was still reeling from the death of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain. They toured the world, headlined all the big festivals, won countless awards and released multi-million selling albums.In 2004 Green Day reached a career pinnacle with the concept album American Idiot, a sophisticated commentary on modern life—not least dissatisfaction with their president and America’s continued cultural and economic imperialism. The No. 1 success of the Grammy-winning album extended Green Day's fan base even further—from pre-teen kids to previously skeptical critics.This book is the world’s first full biography on Green Day. An authority on punk and hardcore, author Ben Myers charts the band members’ difficult childhoods, the context of the band within the US and world punk scene and their glittering rise to success. Myers has also interviewed the band for various magazines at different stages of their career.

    Top Forty jocks screamed and yelled and sounded mightier than God on millions of transistor radios. But on FM radio it was all spun out for only you. On a golden web by a master weaver driven by fifty thousand magical watts of crystal clear power . . . before the days of trashy, hedonistic dumbspeak and disposable three-minute ditties . . . in the days where rock lived at many addresses in many cities."–from FMAs a young man, Richard Neer dreamed of landing a job at WNEW in New York–one of the revolutionary FM stations across the country that were changing the face of radio by rejecting strict formatting and letting disc jockeys play whatever they wanted. He felt that when he got there, he’d have made the big time. Little did he know he’d have shaped rock history as well.FM: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio chronicles the birth, growth, and death of free-form rock-and-roll radio through the stories of the movement’s flagship stations. In the late sixties and early seventies–at stations like KSAN in San Francisco, WBCN in Boston, WMMR in Philadelphia, KMET in Los Angeles, WNEW, and others–disc jockeys became the gatekeepers, critics, and gurus of new music. Jocks like Scott Muni, Vin Scelsa, Jonathan Schwartz, and Neer developed loyal followings and had incredible influence on their listeners and on the early careers of artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Genesis, the Cars, and many others.Full of fascinating firsthand stories, FM documents the commodification of an iconoclastic phenomenon, revealing how counterculture was coopted and consumed by the mainstream. Richard Neer was an eyewitness to, and participant in, this history. FM is the tale of his exhilarating ride.

    He writes openly about his film career, the huge success of The Krays, his tremendous fight against brain cancer and on to today with fame again in EastEnders. This is a stunningly written account of a fascinating life written with candour and wit. 'There are tears and laughter, and it's all told with honesty, style and unexpected humour. This inspiring tale reveals his hopes and fears as he battled for his life while trying to get his career back into the groove. It will have you glassy-eyed, torn between the Kleenex and digging out your old Spandau Ballet albums' The Mirror

    Now, at last, the man himself tells us the story of life in the crossfire hurricane.

    This version of the Beatles legend smoothed the rough edges and filled in the fault lines, and for more than forty years this manicured version of the Beatles story has sustained as truth - until now.The product of almost a decade of research, hundreds of unprecedented interviews, and the discovery of scores of never-before-revealed documents, Bob Spitz's The Beatles is the biography fans have been waiting for -- a vast, complete account as brilliant and joyous and revelatory as a Beatles record itself. Spitz begins in Liverpool, a hard city knocked on its heels. In the housing projects and school playgrounds, four boys would discover themselves -- and via late-night radio broadcasts, a new form of music called rock 'n roll.Never before has a biography of musicians been so immersive and textured. Spitz takes us down Penny Lane and to Strawberry Field (John later added the s), to Hamburg, Germany, where -- amid the squalor and the violence and the pep pills -- the Beatles truly became the Beatles. We are there in the McCartney living room when Paul and John learn to write songs together; in the heat of Liverpool's Cavern Club, where jazz has been the norm before the Beatles show up; backstage the night Ringo takes over on drums; in seedy German strip clubs where George lies about his age so the band can perform; on the lonely tours through frigid Scottish towns before the breakthrough; at Abbey Road Studios, where a young producer named George Martin takes them under his wing; at the Ed Sullivan Show as America discovers the joy and the madness; and onward and upward: up the charts, from Shea to San Francisco, through the London night, on to India, through marmalade skies, across the universe...all the way to a rooftop concert and one last moment of laughter and music.It is all here, raw and right: the highs and the lows, the love and the rivalry, the awe and the jealousy, the drugs, the tears, the thrill, the magic never again to be repeated. Open this book and begin to read -- Bob Spitz's masterpiece is, at long last, the biography the Beatles deserve.

    The portrait that emerges is a life during a time of turmoil that is just reaching creative renewal, only to be cut short by an act of delusional violence.Rosen’s work reveals a very human side of this beloved cultural icon, giving the reader a compelling account of John’s solitary struggle to create a meaningful life in the glaring spotlight of fame. The addition of photos throughout the book places the reader in Lennon’s environs, adding a strong visual dimension.