It’s a tale of success--and excess: great music, drugs (he overdosed and was pronounced dead three times), and resurrection.The Dead Boys, with roots in the band Rocket from the Tombs, came out of Cleveland to dominate the NYC punk scene in the mid-1970s. Their hit “Sonic Reducer” soon became a punk anthem. Now, for the first time, Cheetah dishes on the people he’s known onstage and off, including the Dead Boys’ legendary singer Stiv Bators, Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls, the Ramones, the Clash, Pere Ubu, and the Ghetto Dogs, as well as life at CBGBs, a year with Nico, and more.Straight from the man, these are the backstage stories that every punk fan will want to hear. Never mind the Sex Pistols, here’s Cheetah Chrome!

    . . . This is an intelligent, thoughtful look into the mind of an artist."--New York Times Book Review Since the release of his first best-selling album Look Sharp in 1979, Joe Jackson has forged a singular career in music through his originality as a composer and his notoriously independent stance toward music-business fashion. He has also been a famously private person, whose lack of interest in his own celebrity has been interpreted by some as aloofness. That reputation is shattered by A Cure for Gravity, Jackson's enormously funny and revealing memoir of growing up musical, from a culturally impoverished childhood in a rough English port town to the Royal Academy of Music, through London's Punk and New Wave scenes, up to the brink of pop stardom. Jackson describes his life as a teenage Beethoven fanatic; his early piano gigs for audiences of glass-throwing skinheads; and his days on the road with long-forgotten club bands. Far from a standard-issue celebrity autobiography, A Cure for Gravity is a smart, passionate book about music, the creative process, and coming of age as an artist.Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award Finalist

    If you don't know what you want, I'll do it for you."Few record producers possess the musical facility to back up such a bold promise, but in over forty-plus years behind the glass, Todd Rundgren has willed himself into becoming a not only a rock guitar virtuoso, an accomplished lead vocalist and vocal arranger and visionary keyboard player, not to mention a serviceable drummer. But arguably, Rundgren's greatest instrument of all is the recording studio itself. After learning his craft with Nazz, Rundgren engineered The Band's Stage Fright album and soon became the producer of a string of noteworthy albums for Sparks, Grand Funk, The New York Dolls, Badfinger, Hall & Oates, Meat Loaf, Patti Smith Group, Cheap Trick, The Psychedelic Furs and XTC. Meanwhile, Rundgren played almost every instrument on his solo albums such as Something/Anything?, A Wizard A True Star and Hermit Of Mink Hollow while collaborating on a series of albums by his band, Utopia. A Wizard A True Star: Todd Rundgren In The Studio by Paul Myers is a fascinating and authoritative trip through the land of flickering red lights inhabited by a studio wizard - and true star - who has rarely enjoyed a proper victory lap along the many trails that he has blazed. Researched and written with the participation and cooperation of Rundgren himself.

    It was such a radical idea that almost no one thought it would actually succeed, much less become a force in the worlds of music, television, film, fashion, sports, and even politics. But it did work. MTV became more than anyone had ever imagined.I Want My MTV tells the story of the first decade of MTV, the golden era when MTV's programming was all videos, all the time, and kids watched religiously to see their favorite bands, learn about new music, and have something to talk about at parties. From its start in 1981 with a small cache of videos by mostly unknown British new wave acts to the launch of the reality-television craze with The Real World in 1992, MTV grew into a tastemaker, a career maker, and a mammoth business. Featuring interviews with nearly four hundred artists, directors, VJs, and television and music executives, I Want My MTV is a testament to the channel that changed popular culture forever.

    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.

    There is so much that I have never said, so many incidents I have never spoken of and so many feelings I have never expressed: great love on one hand; pain, torment, and humiliation on the other. Only I know what really happened between us, why we stayed together, why we parted, and the price I have paid for being John’s wife. —From the Introduction