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Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter
By Dionne Warwick, Randy L. Schmidt. 2010
An intimate profile of one of the most popular American singers of the 20th century, this first full-length biography of…
Karen Carpenter details every aspect of her life, from her modest Connecticut upbringing and her rise to stardom in southern California to the real story of her tragic, untimely death. This illuminating depiction of a 1970s icon covers her time as lead singer of the Carpenters--the top-selling American musical act of the decade--and provides insight into their string of 16 consecutive top-20 hits, including "Close to You," "We've Only Just Begun," "Top of the World," and "Superstar," as well as a critical review of her aborted solo career. A behind-the-scenes look into the life of a superstar, from the prolific recordings and the relentless touring to the awards, fame, and fortune, this history also chronicles her struggle with anorexia nervosa and gives important new details from her autopsy that shed new light on her death at age 32. Groups such as Sonic Youth and the Corrs and artists including k. d. lang and Madonna have cited Karen Carpenter among their major influences, and this definitive biography, based on exclusive interviews with nearly 100 of her friends and associates, is a testament to her brief yet remarkable life.Honky Tonk Angel: The Intimate Story of Patsy Cline
By Ellis Nassour, Dottie West. 2008
Earthy, sexy, and vivacious, the life of beloved country singer, Patsy Cline, who soared from obscurity to international fame to…
tragic death in just thirty short years, is explored in colorful and poignant detail. An innovator--and even a hell-raiser--Cline broke all the boys' club barriers of Nashville's music business in the 1950s and brought a new Nashville sound to the nation with her pop hits and torch ballads like "Walking After Midnight," "I Fall to Pieces" and "Crazy." She is the subject of a major Hollywood movie and countless articles, and her albums are still selling 45 years after her death. Ellis Nassour was the very first to write about Cline and did so with the cooperation of the stars who knew and loved her--including Jimmy Dean, Jan Howard, Brenda Lee, Loretta Lynn, Roger Miller, Dottie West, and Faron Young. He was the only writer to interview Cline's mother and husbands. This updated edition features not only a complete discography and a host of never-before-published photographs, but includes an afterword that details controversial claims about her birth, the battle between Cline's siblings for her possessions, the amazing influence Cline had on a new generation of singers and, in Cline's own words from letters to a devoted friend, her excitement as her career soared to new heights and her marriage descended to new depths.I, Doll: Life and Death with the New York Dolls
By Arthur Killer Kane. 2009
When the New York Dolls' bassist died suddenly at age 55 in 2004, he left behind not only their timeless…
music--and many thousands of fans and friends--but a memoir of the Dolls' early years. This distinctive and extroverted voice of an undisciplined showman is presented with an introduction and epilogue by his widow, Barbara. This up close and personal perspective of the band's early days and late nights--including an instance where he locks himself out of the studio in full drag while tripping on LSD--chronicles the glorious, glamorous era of high times, high drama, and low comedy that captures the music, the style, and the life of the all-too-brief existence of the New York Dolls.Gil Evans: His Life and Music
By Stephanie Stein Crease. 2002
The life (1912-1988) and career of Gil Evans paralleled and often foreshadowed the quickly changing world of jazz through the…
20th century. Gil Evans: Out of the Cool is the comprehensive biography of a self-taught musician whom colleagues often regarded as a mentor. His innovative work as a composer, arranger, and bandleader--for Miles Davis, with whom he frequently collaborated over the course of four decades, and for his own ensembles--places him alongside Duke Ellington and Aaron Copland as one of the giants of American music. His unflagging creativity galvanized the most prominent jazz musicians in the world, both black and white. This biography traces Evans's early years: his first dance bands in California during the Depression; his life as a studio arranger in Hollywood; and his early work with Claude Thornhill, one of the most unusual bandleaders of the Big Band Era. After settling in New York City in 1946, Evans's basement apartment quickly became a meeting ground for musicians. The discussions that took place there among Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, and others resulted in the "Birth of the Cool" scores for the Miles Davis Nonet and, later on, for Evans's masterpieces with Davis: "Miles Ahead," "Porgy and Bess," and "Sketches of Spain." This replaces 1556524250.The Turk Who Loved Apples: And Other Tales of Losing My Way Around the World
By Matt Gross. 2013
While writing his celebrated Frugal Traveler column for the New York Times, Matt Gross began to feel hemmed in by…
its focus on what he thought of as "traveling on the cheap at all costs." When his editor offered him the opportunity to do something less structured, the Getting Lost series was born, and Gross began a more immersive form of travel that allowed him to "lose his way all over the globe"--from developing-world megalopolises to venerable European capitals, from American sprawl to Asian archipelagos. And that's what the never-before-published material in The Turk Who Loved Apples is all about: breaking free of the constraints of modern travel and letting the place itself guide you. It's a variety of travel you'll love to experience vicariously through Matt Gross--and maybe even be inspired to try for yourself.The Time of My Life: A Righteous Brother's Memoir
By Bill Medley, Mike Marino Foreword by Billy Joel. 2014
From an early age, Bill Medley had a passion for music. School glee club and amateur singing contests soon gave…
way to the albums of Ray Charles and Little Richard. That raw R&B influence would profoundly shape Medley’s musical future. As the pioneering "blue-eyed soul” group the Righteous Brothers, Bill Medley and late partner Bobby Hatfield sang such huge hits as "(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration,” "Unchained Melody,” and "You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” the latter recognized by BMI as the most-played song of the twentieth century. Medley’s duet with Jennifer Warnes for the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, "(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life,” became a worldwide No. 1 single on its way to winning an Oscar, a Grammy, and a Golden Globe. But Medley’s story isn’t just about the hits and the awards. It’s about an immensely talented man who reached the pinnacle of fame, success, and excess, until the shocking murder of his wife, Karen. In time, this tragedy eventually helped him renew his commitment to both faith and family.Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera
By Rex Brown. 2013
Few heavy metal acts survived the turmoil of the early 1990s music scene. Pantera was different. Instead of humoring the…
market, the band instead demanded that the audience come to them by releasing a series of fiercely uncompromising, platinum albums, including Vulgar Display of Power and Far Beyond Driven-two #1 albums that, like Metallica's And Justice for All, sold millions of copies despite minimal airplay.Rex Brown's memoir is the definitive account of life inside one of rock's biggest bands, which succeeded against all odds but ultimately ended in tragedy when iconic lead guitarist Darrell "Dimebag" Abbott was murdered mid-performance by a deranged fan.This is a lucid account of the previously untold story behind one of the most influential bands in heavy metal history, written by the man best qualified to tell the truth about those incredible and often difficult years of fame and excess.An engrossing blend of travel writing and history, Drinking Arak off an Ayatollah's Beard traces one man's adventure-filled journey through…
today's Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, and describes his remarkable attempt to make sense of the present by delving into the past. Setting out to gain insight into the lives of Iranians and Afghans today, Nicholas Jubber is surprised to uncover the legacy of a vibrant pre-Islamic Persian culture that has endured even in times of the most fanatic religious fundamentalism. Everywhere--from underground dance parties to religious shrines to opium dens--he finds powerful and unbreakable connections to a time when both Iran and Afghanistan were part of the same mighty empire, when the flame of Persian culture lit up the world. Whether through his encounters with poets and cab drivers or run-ins with "pleasure daughters" and mujahideen, again and again Jubber is drawn back to the eleventh-century Persian epic, the Shahnameh ("Book of Kings"). The poem becomes not only his window into the region's past, but also his link to its tumultuous present, and through it Jubber gains access to an Iran and Afghanistan seldom revealed or depicted: inside-out worlds in which he has tea with a warlord, is taught how to walk like an Afghan, and even discovers, on a night full of bootleg alcohol and dancing, what it means to drink arak off an Ayatollah's beard.The Soul of It All: My Music, My Life
By Michael Bolton. 2012
After four decades in the music industry, Michael Bolton has become one the most successful musicians of our time. THE…
SOUL OF IT ALL is his backstage pass into his life lived thus far-into the venues, busses, limos, and hotel rooms of stardom, and finally into his home and heart. His story will go long and dive deep, not only into his self-proclaimed "vagabond vampire" life, but also into the belly of the beast that is the music industry, with its joys, follies, and torments.From a 14 year old kid performing in dive bars in his hometown of New Haven, CT, to struggling to provide for his wife and kids, to finally breaking through with the Soul Provider album, and going on to sell more than 53 million albums and singles worldwide, Bolton has fought for and earned a life most just dream of. THE SOUL OF IT ALL is his life, chock-full of all the incredible stories, and the star-studded cast you'd expect, including: Luciano Pavarotti, Paula Abdul, Cher, Bob Dylan, Barbara Streisand, Kanye West, Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, Otis Redding, Ray Charles, Placido Domingo, Renee Fleming, Bon Jovi, Wynonna Judd, BB King, Patti LaBelle, Carlos Santana, Nicolette Sheridan, Teri Hatcher and others...Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove
By Ben Greenman, Ahmir Questlove Thompson. 2013
"You have to bear in mind that [Questlove] is one of the smartest motherfuckers on the planet. His musical knowledge,…
for all practical purposes, is limitless." --Robert ChristgauMO' META BLUESThe World According to QuestloveMo' Meta Blues is a punch-drunk memoir in which Everyone's Favorite Questlove tells his own story while tackling some of the lates, the greats, the fakes, the philosophers, the heavyweights, and the true originals of the music world. He digs deep into the album cuts of his life and unearths some pivotal moments in black art, hip hop, and pop culture. Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson is many things: virtuoso drummer, producer, arranger, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon bandleader, DJ, composer, and tireless Tweeter. He is one of our most ubiquitous cultural tastemakers, and in this, his first book, he reveals his own formative experiences--from growing up in 1970s West Philly as the son of a 1950s doo-wop singer, to finding his own way through the music world and ultimately co-founding and rising up with the Roots, a.k.a., the last hip hop band on Earth. Mo' Meta Blues also has some (many) random (or not) musings about the state of hip hop, the state of music criticism, the state of statements, as well as a plethora of run-ins with celebrities, idols, and fellow artists, from Stevie Wonder to KISS to D'Angelo to Jay-Z to Dave Chappelle to...you ever seen Prince roller-skate?!? But Mo' Meta Blues isn't just a memoir. It's a dialogue about the nature of memory and the idea of a post-modern black man saddled with some post-modern blues. It's a book that questions what a book like Mo' Meta Blues really is. It's the side wind of a one-of-a-kind mind. It's a rare gift that gives as well as takes. It's a record that keeps going around and around.Poker Face: The Rise and Rise of Lady Gaga
By Maureen Callahan. 2010
In just a two-year span, Stefani Germanotta, a struggling performer in New York's Lower East Side burlesque scene, has become…
the global demographic-smashing pop icon known as Lady Gaga. She is a once-in-a-decade artist, a gifted singer, composer, designer, and performance artist who mixes high and low culture, the avant-garde with the accessible, authenticity with artifice.Who is Lady Gaga? She is a twenty-five-year-old woman whose stage mantra--"I'm a free bitch!"--is the polar opposite of who she is offstage: isolated, insecure, and unable to be alone. She is an outrÉ artist who wanted to be a sensitive singer-songwriter. She is a woman who says no man can ever compete with her career, but who goes back and forth with the ex-boyfriend who said she was too ambitious. She claims not to care what people think, but spends her downtime online, reading what people have to say about her. She claims to be a con artist and utterly authentic. She is never less than compelling.Based on more than fifty original interviews with friends, employees, rivals, and music industry veterans, Poker Face is the first in-depth biography of the extraordinary cultural phenomenon that is Lady Gaga.Nobody Likes You: Inside the Turbulent Life, Times, and Music of Green Day
By Marc Spitz. 2006
The full story of the rise and spectacular comeback of the band hailed as the saviors of punk rock and…
the next U2It's hard to believe that in early 2004 Green Day was considered over--the band was still together, but they were dismissed as a strictly 90s phenomenon, incapable of re-creating the success of their groundbreaking album Dookie. Then American Idiot debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts, stayed on the charts for nearly 18 months, and went on to sell more than four million records and to win Record of the Year (for "Boulevard of Broken Dreams") at this year's Grammy's.Combining unique access to Green Day with a seasoned journalist's nose for a great story, Marc Spitz gives the complete account of the band, from their earliest days to their most recent explosion of popularity and critical acclaim. Foremost, Nobody Likes You is a story of friendship and the transporting power of playing very loud music. It is the story of how high school dropout Billie Joe Armstrong came to write song lyrics that inflamed the political conscience of fans in a way that two Yale graduates couldn't. Green Day's story--from rise, to fall, to rise again--has never before been fully told.Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - The Definitive Life
By Tim Riley. 2011
In his commanding new book, the eminent NPR critic Tim Riley takes us on the remarkable journey that brought a…
Liverpool art student from a disastrous childhood to the highest realms of fame.Riley portrays Lennon's rise from Hamburg's red light district to Britain's Royal Variety Show; from the charmed naiveté of "Love Me Do" to the soaring ambivalence of "Don't Let Me Down"; from his shotgun marriage to Cynthia Powell in 1962 to his epic media romance with Yoko Ono. Written with the critical insight and stylistic mastery readers have come to expect from Riley, this richly textured narrative draws on numerous new and exclusive interviews with Lennon's friends, enemies, confidantes, and associates; lost memoirs written by relatives and friends; as well as previously undiscovered City of Liverpool records. Riley explores Lennon in all of his contradictions: the British art student who universalized an American style, the anarchic rock 'n' roller with the moral spine, the anti-jazz snob who posed naked with his avant-garde lover, and the misogynist who became a househusband. What emerges is the enormous, seductive, and confounding personality that made Lennon a cultural touchstone.In Lennon, Riley casts Lennon as a modernist hero in a sweeping epic, dramatizing rock history anew as Lennon himself might have experienced it.It Ain't No Sin to Be Glad You're Alive: The Promise of Bruce Springsteen
By Eric Alterman. 1999
This highly praised celebration of Springsteen's artistry & influence is the most perceptive portrait yet of the remarkably gifted musician…
who, since the media anointed him "the future of rock 'n' roll" in the mid-1970s, has redefined the image of the rock star & emerged an authentic American hero -- a man to whom millions of loyal fans look as a voice for their yearnings, hopes, fears, & dreams. "Part biography, part lyrical deconstruction, & part fan letter, Alterman's book locates the singer-songwriter's strength in his ability to connect the small struggles of the common man with the broad political & social forces that engulf us, & to do so with a human touch." --Time. "It Ain't No Sin to be Glad You're Alive celebrates Springsteen's enduring legacy & reaffirms his position as a recording artist & performer who personifies America in the same way that Woody Guthrie, Walt Whitman, John Steinbeck, & Bob Dylan have in their work." --Cleveland Plain Dealer. "Fascinating, well researched, & serious: three qualities not often found together in biographies of musicians. It Ain't No Sin to be Glad You're Alive ranks with Peter Guralnick's work & is an essential document in evaluating Springsteen's legacy." --Rosanne Cash.It's a Long Story: My Life
By David Ritz, Willie Nelson. 2015
The definitive autobiography of Willie Nelson "Unvarnished. Funny. Leaving no stone unturned." . . . So say the publishers about…
this book I've written. What I say is that this is the story of my life, told as clear as a Texas sky and in the same rhythm that I lived it. It's a story of restlessness and the purity of the moment and living right. Of my childhood in Abbott, Texas, to the Pacific Northwest, from Nashville to Hawaii and all the way back again. Of selling vacuum cleaners and encyclopedias while hosting radio shows and writing song after song, hoping to strike gold. It's a story of true love, wild times, best friends, and barrooms, with a musical sound track ripping right through it. My life gets lived on the road, at home, and on the road again, tried and true, and I've written it all down from my heart to yours. Signed,Willie NelsonEl Tono Universal: Sacando mi Historia a la Luz
By Ashley Kahn, Carlos Santana. 2015
The intimate and long-awaited autobiography of a legendIn 1967 in San Francisco, just a few weeks after the Summer of…
Love, a young Mexican guitarist took the stage at the Fillmore Auditorium and played a blistering solo that announced the arrival of a prodigious musical talent. Two years later -- after he played a historic set at Woodstock -- the world came to know the name Carlos Santana, his sensual and instantly recognizable guitar sound, and the legendary band that blended electric blues, psychedelic rock, Latin rhythms, and modern jazz, and that still bears his name.Carlos Santana's unforgettable memoir offers a page-turning tale of musical self-determination and inner self-discovery, with personal stories filled with colorful detail and life-affirming lessons. The Universal Tone traces his journey from his earliest days playing the strip bars in Tijuana while barely in his teens and brings to light the establishment of his signature guitar sound; his roles as husband, father, recording legend, and rock guitar star; his indebtedness to musical and spiritual influences -- from John Coltrane and John Lee Hooker to Miles Davis and Harry Belafonte; and his deep, lifelong dedication to a spiritual path that he developed from his Catholic upbringing, Eastern philosophies, and other mystical sources. It includes his recording some of the most popular and influential rock albums of all time, up to and beyond the 1999 sensation Supernatural, which garnered nine Grammy Awards and stands as arguably the most amazing career comeback in popular music history. It's a profoundly inspiring tale of divine inspiration and musical fearlessness that does not balk at finding the humor in the world of high-flying fame, or at speaking plainly of Santana's personal revelations and the infinite possibility he sees in each person he meets. "Love is the light that is inside of all of us, everyone," he writes. "I salute the light that you are and that is inside your heart."The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light
By Ashley Kahn, Carlos Santana. 2014
The intimate and long-awaited autobiography of a legendIn 1967 in San Francisco, just a few weeks after the Summer of…
Love, a young Mexican guitarist took the stage at the Fillmore Auditorium and played a blistering solo that announced the arrival of a prodigious musical talent. Two years later -- after he played a historic set at Woodstock -- the world came to know the name Carlos Santana, his sensual and instantly recognizable guitar sound, and the legendary band that blended electric blues, psychedelic rock, Latin rhythms, and modern jazz, and that still bears his name.Carlos Santana's unforgettable memoir offers a page-turning tale of musical self-determination and inner self-discovery, with personal stories filled with colorful detail and life-affirming lessons. The Universal Tone traces his journey from his earliest days playing the strip bars in Tijuana while barely in his teens and brings to light the establishment of his signature guitar sound; his roles as husband, father, recording legend, and rock guitar star; his indebtedness to musical and spiritual influences -- from John Coltrane and John Lee Hooker to Miles Davis and Harry Belafonte; and his deep, lifelong dedication to a spiritual path that he developed from his Catholic upbringing, Eastern philosophies, and other mystical sources. It includes his recording some of the most popular and influential rock albums of all time, up to and beyond the 1999 sensation Supernatural, which garnered nine Grammy Awards and stands as arguably the most amazing career comeback in popular music history. It's a profoundly inspiring tale of divine inspiration and musical fearlessness that does not balk at finding the humor in the world of high-flying fame, or at speaking plainly of Santana's personal revelations and the infinite possibility he sees in each person he meets. "Love is the light that is inside of all of us, everyone," he writes. "I salute the light that you are and that is inside your heart."Blue Highways: A Journey into America
By William Least Heat-Moon. 1999
Hailed as a masterpiece of American travel writing, Blue Highways is an unforgettable journey along our nation's backroads. William Least…
Heat-Moon set out with little more than the need to put home behind him and a sense of curiosity about "those little towns that get on the map-if they get on at all-only because some cartographer has a blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi." His adventures, his discoveries, and his recollections of the extraordinary people he encountered along the way amount to a revelation of the true American experience.Hank: The Short Life and Long Country Road of Hank Williams
By Mark Ribowsky. 2016
A heartbreaking and unforgettable portrait of country music's founding father. After he died in the backseat of a Cadillac at…
the age of twenty-nine, Hank Williams?a frail, flawed man who had become country music's most compelling and popular star?instantly morphed into its first tragic martyr. Having hit the heights in the postwar era with simple songs of heartache and star-crossed love, he would, with that outlaw swagger, become in death a template for the rock generation to follow. But unlike those other musical giants who never made thirty, no legacy endures quite like that of the "Hillbilly King." Now presenting the first fully realized biography of Hiram King Williams in a generation, Mark Ribowsky vividly returns us to the world of country's origins, in this case 1920s Alabama, where Williams was born into the most trying of circumstances, which included a dictatorial mother, a henpecked father, and an agonizing spinal condition. Forced by his overbearing matriarch to do odd jobs--selling peanuts, shining shoes--young Hank soon found respite in street-corner blues man Rufus "Tee Tot" Payne, who showed him how to make a guitar sing. It wasn't long before young Hank found his way onto those nascent American radio airwaves, where his melodic voice and timely tunes slowly garnered a following. On that dusty path to early stardom, Hank was indefatigably supported by his overbearing mother, who would shepherd his band, the Driftin' Cowboys, to shows along backroads of the Jim Crow South. Yet it was a different woman who would supply Hank with the fuel he needed to explode out of the local spotlight: his sometimes wife, Audrey Mae Sheppard. As Ribowsky brilliantly evokes, their fiery relationship--as abusive as it was passionate--would inform nearly every song he ever wrote, and provide a template for country music for generations to follow. In chronicling Hank's rise to stardom, Ribowsky also explores all those cautionary tales that have, until now, remained secreted beneath the grooves of his records. Drawing from new interviews, Ribowsky connects those seemingly eternal afternoons and nights spent choked in booze and desperation to the music that Williams would create. With remarkable nuance and insight, Ribowsky allows us to witness the man behind the tipped cowboy hat--the charismatic troubadour who hid the wounds of his domestic quarrels, relied on painkillers to get through the day, and was always teetering on the edge of tragedy, even when he saw the light. Tracing the singular rise of a music legend from the street corners of the Depression-era South to the now-immortal stage of the Grand Ole Opry, and finally to a haunting, lonely end on New Year's Day 1953, Hank uncovers the real man beneath the myths, reintroducing us to an American original whose legacy, like a good night at the honkytonk, promises to carry on and on.Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin
By David Ritz. 2014
The definitive biography of the Queen of Soul from acclaimed music writer David Ritz.Aretha Franklin began life as the golden…
daughter of a progressive and promiscuous Baptist preacher. Raised without her mother, she was a gospel prodigy who gave birth to two sons in her teens and left them and her native Detroit for New York, where she struggled to find her true voice. It was not until 1967, when a white Jewish producer insisted she return to her gospel-soul roots, that fame and fortune finally came via "Respect" and a rapidfire string of hits. She has evolved ever since, amidst personal tragedy, surprise Grammy performances, and career reinventions.Again and again, Aretha stubbornly finds a way to triumph over troubles, even as they continue to build. Her hold on the crown is tenacious, and in RESPECT, David Ritz gives us the definitive life of one of the greatest talents in all American culture.