Rock Art

Take a Walk on the Dark Side is the ultimate book for today's rock and roll fan: a fascinating compendium of facts, fictions, prophecies, premonitions, coincidences, hoaxes, doomsday scenarios, and other urban legends about some of the world's most beloved and mysterious pop icons. Updating, revising, and expanding on material from his cult classic Hellhounds on Their Trail, Patterson offers up a delectable feast of strange and occasionally frightening rock and roll tales.

Take a tour behind the scenes at the NBC television special that relaunched Elvis Presley’s career as a stage musician. Author Steve Binder—who directed the TV special—provides exclusive “backstage” access that gives fans even more insight into the performance that many see as a high point in the King of Rock’s reign of American music. Learn how Binder gave us in this Comeback Special, the first MTV Unplugged with Elvis performing in an intimate acoustic musical setting.

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung contains the wild and brilliant writings of Lester Bangs—the most outrageous and popular rock critic of the 1970s—edited and with an introduction by the reigning dean of rock critics, Greil Marcus.

The Show That Never Ends is the behind-the-scenes story of the extraordinary rise and fall of progressive ("prog") rock, epitomized by such classic, chart-topping bands as Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, and Emerson Lake & Palmer, and their successors Rush, Styx, and Asia. With inside access to all the key figures, Washington Post national reporter David Weigel tells the story with the gusto and insight prog rock's fans (and its haters) will relish.

The Punk Rock Manifesto by Jinx is a radical philosophical work that challenges modern society's systems of control and conformity. This isn't just an analysis of punk culture—it's an intellectual assault on how power structures shape human consciousness through fear, comfort, and manufactured meaning.

Throughout her career, spanning more than two decades, Jessica Hopper, a revered and pioneering music critic, has examined women recording and producing music, in all genres, through an intersectional feminist lens. The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic features oral histories of bands like Hole and Sleater Kinney, interviews with the women editors of 1970s-era Rolling Stone, and intimate conversations with iconic musicians such as Björk, Robyn, and Lido Pimienta.

Sex. Drugs. Loud music. Wild costumes. Dazzling light shows. These words can all describe a great rock concert or a hot dance club, but they were also part and parcel of the ancient cultural phenomenon known as the "Mystery religions". In this book, author Christopher Knowles shows how the long-dead Mystery religions got a secular reincarnation when a new musical form called rock 'n' roll burst onto the scene.

When Pete Shelley, lead singer of legendary punk band Buzzcocks, passed away in 2018, we lost one of music's brightest stars - as well as the chance to hear his story. Or so it seemed. Recordings have surfaced of a series of remarkable interviews in which Pete tells the story of his life, his band and his place at the beating heart of the punk explosion in fascinating detail. These remarkable recordings have now been brought back to life by professional actors in this audio edition of Ever Fallen in Love: The Lost Buzzcocks Tapes.

Acquired wisdom has always put Sgt. Pepper at the head of the class, but it was Revolver that truly signaled The Beatles' sea change from a functional band to a studio-based ensemble. These changes began before Rubber Soul but came to fruition on Revolver, which took an astonishing 300 hours to produce, far more than any rock record before it.

Songs that sell the most copies become hits, but some of those hits become something more—iconic recordings that not only inspire a generation but also change the direction of music. In Anatomy of 55 More Songs, based on his column for the Wall Street Journal, music journalist and historian Marc Myers tells the story behind fifty-five rock, pop, R&B, country, and soul-gospel hits through intimate interviews with the artists who wrote and recorded them.

Lisa Robinson has interviewed the biggest names in music--including Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, John Lennon, Patti Smith, U2, Eminem, Lady Gaga, Jay Z and Kanye West. She visited the teenage Michael Jackson many times at his Encino home. She spent hours talking to John Lennon at his Dakota apartment - and in recording studios just weeks before his murder.

Seattle band, The Gits and their charismatic front person Mia Zapata were on the verge of international rock stardom but on July 7, 1993, days before their third United States tour, Mia Zapata, The Gits twenty-seven-year-old singer-songwriter, was brutally assaulted and murdered by a stranger. Zapata's death sent chilling ripples through progressive communities throughout the United States. She became a cause-celebre for women's rights activists outraged by the brutal killing and lack of law enforcement support.

Jon Fine spent nearly 30 years performing and recording with bands that played various forms of aggressive and challenging underground rock music. And, as he writes in this memoir, at no point were any of those bands "ever threatened, even distantly, by actual fame". Yet when members of his first band, Bitch Magnet, reunited after 21 years to tour Europe, Asia, and America, diehard longtime fans traveled from far and wide to attend those shows.

Beau Phillips was an insider and occasional accomplice who witnessed the legends of classic rock in their heyday and takes listeners inside the dressing rooms, hotel suites, and private planes of Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, AC/DC, Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, and dozens more to enjoy funny, decadent, and never-been-told stories of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The book's foreword was written by Sammy Hagar, former lead singer for Van Halen.

From behind the walls of a handful of well-hidden, unlikely recording studios in the Los Angeles area, legends-in-waiting created masterpiece albums. It was a time of astonishing creativity and unprecedented fame and fortune. It was also a time of unfettered excess that threatened to unravel everything along the way. With access that only a longtime music business insider can provide, Kent Hartman packs Goodnight, L.A. with never-before-told stories about the most prolific time and iconic place in rock 'n' roll history.

Have you always felt a certain nostalgia to the 1980s even if you didn’t grow up in it? Were you a child, teenager, or young adult in the '80s and want to relive the best years of your life? Well now you can travel back in time and embrace your over the top fashion sense that’s dying to come out!

Learn about the early lives and exciting careers of the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Elton John, Bob Marley, Bruce Springsteen, and Bono. The Rock Box! celebrates the musicians who have made us sing along to their songs for decades.

Yes, this book is designed entirely to share those secrets that will inspire you to write that great song that you know you can! And once the creativity really starts flowing, we'll create great habits and write even more, each and every day. Get down to writing the music and the lyrics you know that you can because writer's block is a fantasy. You just need inspiration.

The '80s were about big ideas writ large - new money, new style, gender fluidity, gay pride, attritional politics, the 'special relationship', nuclear fear, AIDS, cocaine, ecstasy, tabloid royalty, the rise of urban pop and ultimately geopolitical chaos. Using a big narrative approach, Dylan Jones' history of the decade in pop frames the decade through some of its most important and popular hits, choosing records that either epitomised their time or ushered in a new cultural shift.

This isn't another boring book filled with confusing audio mumbo-jumbo. By providing the actual real-world techniques that professionals use every day, this book will give you the most effective tips for mixing heavy music that you can apply immediately to your own mixes.