""The train jerks to a halt, and as I get out at Oxford Circus, Stewart gets out with me. We look at each other, laugh, and make the standard remark about it being a small world. But this is the brilliant collision, one train later and it might all have turned out differently."" In this extraordinary memoir, world-renowned guitarist Andy Summers provides a revealing and passionate account of a life dedicated to music. From his first guitar at age thirteen and his early days on the English music scene to the ascendancy of his band, the Police, Summers recounts his relationships and encount... View More...
Tony Bennett is one of the world's most loved musical legends. What many of his admirers may not know, however, is that Bennett, under the name of Anthony Benedetto, is also a successful painter whose works hang in major museums and galleries. In this text, Tony reflects on his career. View More...
does eminem matter? On assignment for his first cover story for Rolling Stone, the very first national cover story on Eminem, Anthony Bozza met a young blond kid, a rapper who would soon take the country by storm. But back in 1999, Eminem was just beginning to make waves among suburban white teenagers as his first single, "My Name Is," went into heavy rotation on MTV. Who could have predicted that in a mere two years, Eminem would become the most reviled and controversial hip-hop figure ever? Or that twelve months after that, Eminem would sit firmly at the pinnacle of American celebrity, a Gra... View More...
"My Father The Godfather" is a history changing book, but most importantly Daryl Brown will set the record straight about his dad, James Brown, The Godfather of Soul Stories that have NEVER been told such as: Did you know that James Brown, The Godfather of Soul was offered over ten million dollars to convert to a certain religion? Daryl Brown believes that his dad...James Brown, his brother-in-law and his older brother Teddy were murdered. Susie Brown did not abandon James Brown as the movie "Get on Up" would have you believe. The relationship turned deadly with a murder attempt. Leaving the ... View More...
Here is the national bestseller that Newsday called "the most authoritative and candid look yet at the personal lives...of the oft-scrutinized group." In The Love You Make, Peter Brown, a close friend of and business manager for the band--and the best man at John and Yoko's wedding--presents a complete look at the dramatic offstage odyssey of the four lads from Liverpool who established the greatest music phenomenon of the twentieth century. Written with the full cooperation of each of the group's members and their intimates, this book tells the inside story of the music and the madness, the ... View More...
"A virtuoso performance, the 508-page equivalent to one of Springsteen and the E Street Band's famous four-hour concerts: Nothing is left onstage, and diehard fans and first-timers alike depart for home sated and yet somehow already aching for more." --NPR "Richly rewarding...Bruce Springsteen proves that he has taken on life fully engaged both in living and examining it, and in doing so, he's delivered a story as profoundly inspiring as his best music...It's alternately brutally honest, philosophically deep, stabbingly funny, and, perhaps most important, refreshingly humble." --Los Angeles T... View More...
Ray Charles (1930-2004) led one of the most extraordinary lives of any popular musician. In Brother Ray, he tells his story in an inimitable and unsparing voice, from the chronicle of his musical development to his heroin addiction to his tangled romantic life. Overcoming poverty, blindness, the loss of his parents, and the pervasive racism of the era, Ray Charles was acclaimed worldwide as a genius by the age of thirty-two. By combining the influences of gospel, jazz, blues, and country music, he invented, almost single-handedly, what became known as soul. And throughout a career spanning mor... View More...
As a boy in post-War England, legendary Kinks' singer/songwriter Ray Davies fell in love with America--its movies and music, its culture of freedom, fed his imagination. Then, as part of the British Invasion, he toured the US with the Kinks during one of the most tumultuous eras in recent history--until the Kinks group was banned from performing there from 1965-69. Many tours and trips later, while living in New Orleans, he experienced a transformative event: the shooting (a result of a botched robbery) that nearly took his life. In Americana, Davies tries to make sense of his long love-hate r... View More...
World-renowned hip-hop artist Jason "Timbuktu" Diakit 's vivid and intimate journey through his own and his family's history--from South Carolina slavery to twenty-first-century Sweden.Born to interracial American parents in Sweden, Jason Diakit grew up between worlds--part Swedish, American, black, white, Cherokee, Slovak, and German, riding a delicate cultural and racial divide. It was a no-man's-land that left him in constant search of self. Even after his hip-hop career took off, Jason fought to unify a complex system of family roots that branched across continents, ethnicities, classes, ... View More...
"Poetic musings on a life well-lived--one that is still moving forward, always creating, always luminous. This isn't your typical autobiography. Garfunkel's history is told in flowing prose, bounding from present to past, far from a linear rags-to-riches story." --Bookreporter "It's hard to imagine any single word that would accurately describe this book . . . an entertaining volume that's more fun to read than a conventional memoir might have been." --The Wall Street Journal "A charming book of prose and poetry printed in a digitalized version of his handwriting . . . witty, candid, and wi... View More...
Mozart is the archetypal child prodigy whose genius triumphed over precociousness, and who later broke away from a loving but tyrannical father to pursue his vision unhampered. Peter Gay traces the development of the man and the composer who pushed every genre - especially opera - into new realms. View More...
One journalist's wild summer on the road with the world's most popular cult rock band, Phish. Despite their enormous success and their status as America's biggest cult rock and roll band, Phish remains an enigma. Each of their albums has sold more than 500,000 copies, and their concerts sell out instantly, but the band makes a virtue of ignoring the mainstream, and the fans rather prefer it that way. In Run Like an Antelope: On the Road with Phish, Sean Gibbon deftly and hilariously chronicles this unique musical subculture. Inspired by the offbeat road stories of Hunter S. Thompson and Bill B... View More...
This classic of music criticism provides detailed studies of 23 of Mozart's piano concertos. In addition to establishing the lines along which the genre developed, the concertos also shed light upon the technical and inspirational growth of their creator. The first full-length survey devoted to these works, this scholarly book presents a full, concrete musical analysis that makes liberal use of musical examples -- 417 in all -- and presents authoritative information on the concertos' form, tone, style, and balance as well as the circumstances of their composition. The author compares and contr... View More...
More than four decades after her death, Billie Holiday remains one of the most gifted artists of our time-and also one of the most elusive. Because of who she was and how she chose to live her life, Lady Day has been the subject of both intense adoration and wildly distorted legends. Now at last, Farah Jasmine Griffin, a writer of intellectual authority and superb literary gifts, liberates Billie Holiday from the mythology that has obscured both her life and her art. An intimate meditation on Holiday's place in American culture and history, If You Can't Be Free, Be A Mystery reveals Lady Day ... View More...
