Rock History

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.

The Great Book of Rock Trivia contains hundreds of riveting facts about your favorite rock songs. Whether you’re interested in what your favorite musicians like to do in their spare time, where they get the ideas for their music, or which artist had an exorcism in his home, you’re in for a treat. This book will satisfy your curiosity and help you impress your friends with your rock and roll knowledge.

In 1969, in Capitol Records' Hollywood studio, a blonde-haired troubadour named Larry Norman laid track for an album that would launch a new genre of music and one of the strangest, most interesting careers in modern rock. Having spent the bulk of the 1960s playing on bills with acts like The Who, Janis Joplin, and The Doors, Norman decided that he wanted to sing about the most countercultural subject of all: Jesus.

Long before she was one of the Little Rock Nine, Melba Pattillo Beals was a warrior. Frustrated by the laws that kept African Americans separate but very much unequal to whites, she had questions: Why couldn't she drink from a whites-only fountain? Why couldn't she feel safe beyond home - or even within the walls of church? Adults all told her: Hold your tongue. Be patient. Know your place. But Beals had the heart of a fighter - and the knowledge that her true place was a free one.

Evan Dando, front man of The Lemonheads and “poster boy—and prettiest boy—of Gen X” (The New York Times), spills the true story of his band’s tumultuous history and what it was like to be famous in the pre-internet days in this candid, colorful, and unputdownable memoir. His memoir will remind readers what was so great about the pre-internet ’90s: the innocence, the access, and the anonymity.

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.

When Lalibela, Priest King of Ethiopia, is murdered at the hands of his jealous step-brother and step-sister, and buried in the cleft of a rock face, he has a vision of the Archangel Michael, who instructs him how to build ten churches. Lalibela must rise from the dead in order to fulfill his mission of building the ten rock-hewn churches.

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.

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.

This book restores a little-known advocate of Indian rights to her place in history. In June 1889 a widowed Brooklyn artist named Catherine Weldon traveled to the Standing Rock Reservation in Dakota Territory to help Sitting Bull hold on to land that the government was trying to wrest from his people. Her efforts were counterproductive; she was ordered to leave the reservation, and the Standing Rock Sioux were bullied into signing away their land. But she returned with her teenage son, settling at Sitting Bull's camp on the Grand River.

The author of the critically acclaimed Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me offers an eye-opening and frank assessment of the state of classic rock, assessing its past and future, the impact it has had, and what its loss would mean to an industry, a culture, and a way of life.

Introducing John Wesley. Ned Carter, an eighteenth-century boy of thirteen, has been working in the dangerous coal mines in northern England since he was five. He desperately wants to save his little brother Pip from the same fate. Like so many poor English families of the day, even the young children of the Carter family must earn money to pay the bills. Now Pip is turning five and Ned must find a way to prevent his parents from sending Pip into the coal mines. But when Ned has an accident, Pip’s fate seems sealed—without Ned’s income, his father is sure to act. But instead of the ...

However you found your way into indie rock, once you were a listener, it felt like being part of a secret club of people who had discovered something special, something secret, something superior. In Such Great Heights, music journalist Chris DeVille brilliantly captures this cultural moment, from the early aughts and the height of indie rock, until the 2010s as streaming upends the industry and changes music forever.

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.

By the end of this audiobook, you will have found out just how much of a 90s music wizard you really are—and better yet, increased your knowledge even further so that any pub quiz team would be lucky to have you as their music round secret weapon!

Leaving school and starting his career at Decca Records in 1958 at the age of sixteen, Tony King would soon find himself becoming close friends with Elton John, rekindling John Lennon and Yoko Ono's relationship, mediating a quarrelsome Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and spending time with Freddie Mercury in his final days - a far cry from his childhood days in Eastbourne. Living in an era of seismic social, technological and cultural transformation, King experienced these defining moments as a stalwart in London and New York's gay scenes.

The soldiers of the Third US Infantry Division in World War I were outnumbered and inexperienced young men facing hardened veterans, but their actions proved to be a turning point during the last German offensive of World War I. In stopping three German divisions from crossing the Marne River, these heroic American soldiers blocked the road to Paris east of Château-Thierry, helped save the French capital, and, in doing so, played a key role in turning the tide of the war.

What is it about music and our love of it that means so much to us? How does an artist reach right into our emotions, stirring us to share the same feelings? Or just supply pure joy to our lives with sheer exuberance and musical skill? The answers are all personal to each of us. This is my journey back into my musical past - This is 1970s England. Music on vinyl that opened up a world of discovery - musically and personally. My father died recently leaving a vast vinyl collection. I knew & had heard them all and he loved them. It was a world of Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Bill Daniels, Kay ...

By turns fascinating, funny, and bizarre, this book offers insight into the peculiar choices and idiosyncratic psychologies of hundreds of top musicians from the 1960s to the present. Originally published more than two decades ago to great success, it's been out of print for years and has now been completely updated and expanded to feature dozens of exclusive interviews, including conversations with groups like The Black Keys, The Killers, Twenty One Pilots, Coldplay, Cage the Elephant, and Vampire Weekend.

Of all the musical developments of rock in the 1960s, one in particular fundamentally changed the music's structure and listening experience: the incorporation of extended improvisation into live performances. While many bands—including Cream, Pink Floyd, and the Velvet Underground—stretched out their songs with improvisations, no band was more identified with the practice than the Grateful Dead. In Get Shown the Light Michael Kaler examines how the Dead's dedication to improvisation stemmed from their belief that playing in this manner enabled them to touch upon transcendence.