This biography offers an all-encompassing look at the success of this controversial band.

    Through the years, the group's trademark razor-sharp choreography, finely tuned harmonies, and compelling vocals made them the exemplars of the Motown style. This is the frank, revealing story of the legendary supergroup, told by its founder.

    Formed in Burlington, Vermont, this determined foursome of high-IQ misfits developed their uniquely telepathic chemistry playing that college town's club scene. Vermont's best-kept secret rose to national prominence in the nineties, when they became the most obvious heirs to the Grateful Dead's legacy as onstage improvisers and touring Pied Pipers. With a raft of self-imposed challenges, Phish mapped out much new territory, as well. Wildly eclectic, endlessly resourceful, and ever unpredictable, Phish were at the forefront of the jam-band movement, an organic alternative to the mainstream status quo that caught the ears and imagination of millions. Drawing upon nearly 15 years of exclusive interviews with the members of Phish and those in their employ, veteran music journalist Parke Puterbaugh delivers an insightful and authoritative biography of this beloved band and their quixotic career. Phish: The Biography thoroughly traces the quartet's history from their formative years to their spectacular success as a prolific touring phenomenon. Puterbaugh examines the colorful chemistry - the unique mix of personalities, backgrounds and talents - that inspired the members of Phish to push their four-way experiment to the limit. He documents their rigorous work ethic, boundless creativity, and all of the resulting innovations, including a series of one-band festivals that served as the blueprint for Bonnaroo and a slew of latter-day rock festivals. Moreover, he details how Phish distilled classical discipline, jazz improvisation, and rock instrumentation and attitude into an intoxicating brew that kept hordes of fans coming back show after show, encouraging them to digest and debate every note and nuance. The book also candidly addresses the bumps in the road that followed Phish's ascent to popularity, as rock's hardest-working band also became one of its hardest-partying entities. Mounting excesses and internal dissent led to a two-year hiatus, a dramatic breakup, and a well-documented drug bust and courageous recovery from addiction for guitarist Trey Anastasio. The tale concludes with Phish's triumphant reunion in 2009, marking one of the greatest comebacks in music history. An intimate and fascinating portrait, Phish: The Biography is the definitive story of these Vermont jamband legends.

     The early 1980s were an exciting time for music. Hair metal bands were selling out stadiums, while clubs and house parties in New York City has spawned a new genre of music. At the time, though, hip hop's reach was limited, an artform largely ignored by mainstream radio deejays and the rock-obsessed MTV network.But in 1986, the music world was irrevocably changed when Run-DMC covered Aerosmith's hit "Walk This Way" in the first rock-hip hop collaboration. Other had tried melding styles. This was different, as a pair of iconic arena rockers and the young kings of hip hop shared a studio and started a revolution. The result: Something totally new and instantly popular. Most importantly, "Walk This Way" would be the first rap song to be played on mainstream rock radio.In Walk This Way, Geoff Edgers sets the scene for this unlikely union of rockers and MCs, a mashup that both revived Aerosmith and catapulted hip hop into the mainstream. He tracks the paths of the main artists--Steven Tyler, Joe Perry, Joseph "Run" Simmons, and Darryl "DMC" McDaniels--along with other major players on the scene across their lives and careers, illustrating the long road to the revolutionary marriage of rock and hip hop. Deeply researched and written in cinematic style, this music history is a must-read for fans of hip hop, rock, and everything in between.

    Epitomized by such classic, chart-topping bands as Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, and Emerson Lake Palmer, along with such successors as Rush, Marillion, Asia, Styx, and Porcupine Tree, prog sold hundreds of millions of records. It brought into the mainstream concept albums, spaced-out cover art, crazy time signatures, multitrack recording, and stagecraft so bombastic it was spoofed in the classic movie This Is Spinal Tap.With a vast knowledge of what Rolling Stone has called “the deliciously decadent genre that the punks failed to kill,” access to key people who made the music, and the passion of a true enthusiast, Washington Post national reporter David Weigel tells the story of prog in all its pomp, creativity, and excess.Weigel explains exactly what was “progressive” about prog rock and how its complexity and experimentalism arose from such precursors as the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper. He traces prog’s popularity from the massive success of Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” and the Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin” in 1967. He reveals how prog’s best-selling, epochal albums were made, including The Dark Side of the Moon, Thick as a Brick, and Tubular Bells. And he explores the rise of new instruments into the prog mix, such as the synthesizer, flute, mellotron, and—famously—the double-neck guitar.The Show That Never Ends is filled with the candid reminiscences of prog’s celebrated musicians. It also features memorable portraits of the vital contributions of producers, empresarios, and technicians such as Richard Branson, Brian Eno, Ahmet Ertegun, and Bob Moog.Ultimately, Weigel defends prog from the enormous derision it has received for a generation, and he reveals the new critical respect and popularity it has achieved in its contemporary resurgence.

    But radio came roaring back with a whole new concept. The war was over, the baby boom was on, the country was in clover, and a bold new beat was giving the syrupy songs of yesteryear a run for their money. Add transistors, 45 rpm records, and a young man named Elvis to the mix, and the result was the perfect storm that rocked, rolled, and reinvented radio.Visionary entrepreneurs like Todd Storz pioneered the Top 40 concept, which united a generation. But it took trendsetting “disc jockeys” like Alan Freed, Murray the K, Wolfman Jack, Cousin Brucie, and their fast-talking, too-cool-for-school counterparts across the land to turn time, temperature, and the same irresistible hit tunes played again and again into the ubiquitous sound track of the fifties and sixties. The Top 40 sound broke through racial barriers, galvanized coming-of-age kids (and scandalized their perplexed parents), and provided the insistent, inescapable backbeat for times that were a-changin’.Along with rock-and-roll music came the attitude that would literally change the “voice” of radio forever, via the likes of raconteur Jean Shepherd, who captivated his loyal following of “Night People”; the inimitable Bob Fass, whose groundbreaking Radio Unnameable inaugurated the anything-goes free-form style that would come to define the alternative frontier of FM; and a small-time Top 40 deejay who would ultimately find national fame as a political talk-show host named Rush Limbaugh.From Hunter Hancock, who pushed beyond the limits of 1950s racial segregation with rhythm and blues and hepcat patter, to Howard Stern, who blew through all the limits with a blue streak of outrageous on-air antics; from the heyday of summer songs that united carefree listeners to the latter days of political talk that divides contentious callers; from the haze of classic rock to the latest craze in hip-hop, Something in the Air chronicles the extraordinary evolution of the unique and timeless medium that captured our hearts and minds, shook up our souls, tuned in–and turned on–our consciousness, and went from being written off to rewriting the rules of pop culture.

    Author Mark Wilkerson interviewed Townshend himself and several of Townshend's friends and associates for this biography.

    This album marks the first time a British band topped the Billboard 200 chart with its debut release thanks in no small part to their blockbuster single "What Makes You Beautiful." Our matching folio features piano/vocal/guitar arrangements of all of their catchy songs, including that megahit and: Everything About You * Gotta Be You * I Want * I Wish * More Than This * One Thing * Same Mistakes * Save You Tonight * Stole My Heart * Taken * Tell Me a Lie * Up All Night.

    By experimenting with new concepts of time, integrating Eastern philosophies into Western music, and exploring multiphonics and other new sounds on his saxophone, he opened avenues of expression that influenced musicians and composers from jazz to rock to avant-garde.Bill Cole focuses on two aspects of John Coltrane in this provocative study: Coltrane the musician and Coltrane the religious person. Deeply interrelated, both aspects are bound up with Coltrane's identification as an African- American. Coltrane accepted the traditional African belief in the magical powers of sound and connected his music to its African roots via a devout religiosity. Cole shows how Coltrane's influences extended from tribal tone languages to speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr. -- he even adapted King's rhythmic inflections into a saxophone solo.Bill Cole offers a lengthy musical analysis of Coltrane's career; it also includes a detailed discography with recording data and personnel and over two dozen photographs. Cole draws on quotes from Coltrane himself, transcriptions of his improvisations, analyses of his music, research into West African religion, and his own personal reminiscences of the man, to offer a stimulating perspective on Coltrane's music, life, and thought.

    

    The Christians have broken the truce and the Fifth Crusade has begun, the irate Saracens are expelling Christians and Jews from their lands, and desperate refugees are pouring into Jerusalem's port city of Acre which is expected to fall. There are coins to be earned carrying those most favoured by God to safety, meaning those with the most coins to pay for a place on one of the company's galleys. And the French governor of Acre wants to leave his young wife behind and flee with the chests of coins he collected from the city's Saracen merchants before he expelled them despite the bribes they paid him. It is a rollicking good story and a very good read.

    She claimed the police had inserted a stick inside her… Swaranpreet realised that she had been cruelly violated; He spoke a single sentence but repeated it twice in chaste Punjabi: ‘Please give me a turban? I want nothing else…’ These are voices begging for deliverance in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in October-November 1984 in which 2,733 Sikhs were killed, burnt and exterminated by lumpens in the country. Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay walks us through one of the most shameful episodes of sectarian violence in post Independent India and highlights the apathy of subsequent governments towards Sikhs who paid a price for what was clearly a state-sponsored riot. Poignant, raw and most importantly, macabre, the personal histories in the book reveal how even after three decades, a community continues to battle for its identity in its own country.

     A secret cargo is headed for Japan. The Japanese High Command has entrusted it to a veteran destroyer captain - the best in the Imperial Navy - and he will stop at nothing to see that it reaches its final destination... Carrier-based dive bombers could not stop it, nor could the guerilla-commandos of the Philippine Islands. Now, the submarine Wolffish is the last ditch hope of the Allied Command. Still shaken by a recent tragedy, and desperately low on fuel, torpedoes, and morale, the war-weary submarine and her eighty-man crew must pull together to track down and destroy the cargo before it reaches Japan, and changes the course of the war...

    In this richly textured anthology, well-known scholar David Brackett brings together more than 100 readings from a wide range of sources and by writers who have played an integral part in the development of popular music criticism. Brackett includes articles from mainstream and specialized magazines, newspapers, and scholarly journals, as well as interviews and autobiographies of musicians and other music industry insiders. Organized into broad time periods, the chapters are divided into sections by genre, and these sections are organized chronologically. The chapter divisions parallel those found most frequently in textbooks on popular music. Representing a wide variety of time periods, styles, and genres--and including groundbreaking criticism on disco, hip-hop, rap, and techno--the selections introduce students to important social and cultural issues raised by the study of popular music. Topics covered include the role of race, class conflict, gender roles, regional differences in the reception of popular music, and the relative value of artistry versus commerce. Extensive editorial introductions and headnotes supply context for the selections, provide links between different eras and genres, clarify the issues raised by the documents, and explain their historical significance. The second edition of this captivating anthology features eleven new source readings and introductions, further reading and discography selections for each chapter, and a companion website containing student and instructor resources.

    The complete account of the Sex Pistols saga.