Book picks similar to
Eye Mind: Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators by Paul Drummond
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Art Sex Music
Cosey Fanni Tutti - 2017
. . shortly before he was arrested for indecent exposure, and whose work continues to be held at the vanguard of contemporary art.And it is the story of her work as a pornographic model and striptease artiste which challenged assumptions about morality, erotica and art.Art Sex Music is the wise, shocking and elegant autobiography of Cosey Fanni Tutti.
Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music
David N. Meyer - 2007
The theft and burning of his body marked the end of Gram Parsons’ life and the beginning of the Gram Parsons legend.As a singer and songwriter, Gram Parsons stood at the nexus of countless musical crossroads, and he sold his soul to the devil at every one. Parson hung out with glamorous women and the coolest friends. His intimates and collaborators on his journey included Keith Richards, William Burroughs, Marianne Faithfull, Peter Fonda, Roger McGuinn, Clarence White, and Emmylou Harris. Parsons had everything–looks, charisma, money, style, the best drugs, the most heartbreaking voice–and threw it all away with both hands. His ballad is one of gigantic talent colliding with epic self-destruction.Parsons led the Byrds to create the seminal country rock masterpiece Sweetheart of the Rodeo. He formed the Flying Burrito Brothers, helped to guide the Rolling Stones beyond the blues in their appreciation of American roots music, and found his musical soul mate in Emmylou Harris. Parsons’ solo albums, GP and Grievous Angel, are now recognized as visionary masterpieces of the transcendental jambalaya of rock, soul, country, gospel, and blues Parsons named “Cosmic American Music.” Four months before Grievous Angel was released, Parsons died of a drug and alcohol overdose at age twenty-six.In this beautifully written, raucous, meticulously researched biography, David N. Meyer gives Parsons’ mythic life its due. From Parsons’ privileged Southern Gothic upbringing to his early career in Greenwich Village’s folk music scene to his Sunset Strip glory days, Twenty Thousand Roads paints an unprecedented portrait of the man who linked country to rock. Parsons’ creative genius gave birth to a new sound that was rooted in the past but heralded the future.From interviews with hundreds of the famous and obscure who knew and worked closely with Parsons–many who have never spoken publicly about him before–Meyer conjures a dazzling panorama of the artist and his era. Shedding new light and dispelling old myths, Twenty Thousand Roads is a breakthrough in rock-and-roll biography and more–a chronicle of creativity, drugs, excess, culture, and music in the ferment of late-1960s America.Visit the official website: www.twentythousandroads.comFrom the Hardcover edition.
Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper
Alice Cooper - 1976
It has been out of print since at least 1977 and was never published outside the USA.
Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now
Barry Miles - 1997
His fans have been treated to the best-selling Flaming Pie and Standing Stone albums, a full hour of Paul on "Oprah," and this thoughtful and comprehensive biography that brings us closer to the man than ever before. Based on hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews over a period of five years, and with complete access to Paul's own archives, Barry Miles has succeeded in letting Paul tell the story of his life as a Beatle in his own words. It includes Paul's recollection of the genesis of every song that he wrote with John Lennon and the fascinating details about their remarkable collaboration.
Whores: An Oral Biography of Perry Farrell and Jane's Addiction
Brendan Mullen - 2005
With a bracing combination of metal, punk, and psychedelia, coupled with lead singer Perry Farrell's banshee-ina- wind-tunnel vocals, Jane's Addiction helped put alternative music on the map. The band helped pave the way for the mainstream success of bands like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Nirvana. Along the way, Jane's Addiction released another classic album, Ritual de lo Habitual (with the hit "Been Caught Stealing"), founded the Lollapalooza festival, and openly celebrated a bacchanalian lifestyle that blurred all lines of gender and sexuality. Drawn from original interviews with the band, their friends, and their musical colleagues, Whores takes readers through Farrell's early sonic experiments with Psi-Com and the formative days of Jane's Addiction to their drug-addled break-up and controversial reunion with 2003's Strays. Along the way it provides a candid, often disturbing glimpse into the dynamic alternative rock scene of Los Angeles in the '80s and '90s.
What You Want Is in the Limo: On the Road with Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, and the Who in 1973, the Year the Sixties Died and the Modern Rock Star Was Born
Michael Walker - 2013
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.
Pearl Jam Twenty
Pearl Jam - 2011
Pearl Jam Twenty is an intimate and lavishly illustrated portrait of one of the world’s most influential and successful bands—by the band itself.
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen
Sylvie Simmons - 2011
Cohen is also a man of complexities and seeming contradictions: a devout Jew, who is also a sophisticate and a ladies' man, as well as an ordained Buddhist monk whose name, Jikan—"ordinary silence"—is quite the appellation for a writer and singer whose life has been anything but ordinary.I'm Your Man is the definitive account of that extraordinary life. Starting in Montreal, Cohen's birthplace, acclaimed music journalist Sylvie Simmons follows his trail, via London and the Greek island of Hydra, to New York in the sixties, where Cohen launched his career in music. From there she traces the arc of his prodigious achievements to his remarkable retreat in the mid-nineties and his reemergence for a sold-out world tour almost fifteen years later. Whether navigating Cohen's journeys through the backstreets of Mumbai or his countless hotel rooms along the way, Simmons explores with equal focus every complex, contradictory strand of Cohen's life and presents a deeply insightful portrait of the vision, spirit, depth, and talent of an artist and a man who continues to move people like no one else.
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
John Eric Cavanagh - 2003
He brings to life the stories behind each track, as well as Pink Floyd's groundbreaking live performances of the time.EXCERPTThe Piper at the Gates of Dawn is a wondrous creation often seen through the distorted view of later events. These things have served to overshadow the achievement of The Pink Floyd on their debut album: an outstanding group performance; a milestone in record production; and something made in much happier circumstances than I had expected to find...This is not another book about "mad Syd". This, instead, is a celebration of a moment when everything seemed possible, when creative worlds and forces converged, when an album spoke with an entirely new voice. "Such music I never dreamed of," as Rat said to Mole.
Let Fury Have the Hour: The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer
Antonino D'Ambrosio - 2004
The quintessential Rude Boy, punker, rebel musician, artist and activist, Strummer wrote some of the most important and influential music of the last century including "Guns of Brixton," "The Washington Bullets," "Spanish Bombs," "White Man in Hammersmith Palace," "London's Burning," "Lost in the Supermarket," and "Garageland." Effectively melding raw creativity with radical politics, Strummer transformed punk rock from its early associations with reactionary, right wing and nihilistic politics into a social movement. From Rock Against Racism to the Anti-Nazi League Festival to supporting the H-Block protests, Strummer and The Clash led the charge for human rights. Let Fury Have the Hour collects articles, interviews, essays and reviews that chronicle Strummer's life both as a musician and a political activist. Included in this collection are essays and interviews by Antonino D'Ambrosio, alongside contributions from Peter Silverton, Barry Miles, Anya Philips, Sylvia Simmons, Vic Garbarini, Caroline Coons, Todd Martens, Joel Schalit and others. This book also includes original lyrics, photography, art, posters, and flyers, and offers the first serious examination of the life of this extraordinary man.
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven
John Eliot Gardiner - 2013
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.
The Longest Cocktail Party
Richard DiLello - 1972
By the time Apple crumbled a few years later he was director of public relations. Along the way he noted many of the stoned conversations he heard and the insane bits of business he witnessed: one-man bands auditioning in the reception, Hell's Angels taking over Savile Row, and The Beatles playing on the roof. Full of period detail, this is a fast-paced, witty, and immensely poignant account of the demise of the Fab Four and the death of the '60s dream.
Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys
Viv Albertine - 2014
Her memoir tells the story of how, through sheer will, talent, and fearlessness, she forced herself into a male-dominated industry, became part of a movement that changed music, and inspired a generation of female rockers.After forming The Flowers of Romance with Sid Vicious in 1976, Albertine joined The Slits and made musical history in one of the first generations of punk bands. The Slits would go on to serve as an inspiration to future rockers, including Kurt Cobain, Carrie Brownstein, and the Riot Grrrl movement in the 1990s. This is the story of what it was like to be a girl at the height of punk: the sex, the drugs, the guys, the tours, and being part of a brilliant pioneering group of women making musical history. Albertine recounts helping define punk fashion, struggling to find her place among the boys, and her romance with Mick Jones, including her pregnancy and subsequent abortion. She also gives a candid account of what happened post-punk, beyond the break-up of The Slits in 1982, including a career in film, surviving cancer, and making music again, twenty-five years later.A truly remarkable memoir told in Viv’s frank, irreverent, and distinctive voice, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. is a raw, thrilling story of life on the frontier.
This Music Leaves Stains: The Complete Story of the Misfits
James Greene Jr. - 2013
Led by Glenn Danzig, a singer possessed of vision and blessed with an incredible baritone, the Misfits pioneered a death rock sound that would reverberate through the various musical subgenres that sprung up in their wake.This Music Leaves Stains now presents the full story behind the Misfits and their ubiquitous, haunting skull logo, a story of unique talent, strange timing, clashing personalities, and incredible music that helped shape rock as we know it today. James Greene, Jr., maps this narrative from the band's birth at the tail end of the original punk movement through their messy dissolve at the dawn of the 1980s right on through the legal warring and inexplicable reunions that helped carry the band into the 21st century.Music junkies of any stripe will surely find themselves engrossed in this saga that finally pieces together the full story of the greatest horror punk band that ever existed, though Misfits fans will truly marvel at the thorough and detailed approach James Greene, Jr. has taken in outlining the rise, fall, resurrection, and influence of New Jersey's most frightening musical assembly.