Download or read book Last Chance Texaco written by Rickie Lee Jones and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A candid and colorful memoir by the singer, songwriter, and “Duchess of Coolsville” (Time). This troubadour life is only for the fiercest hearts, only for those vessels that can be broken to smithereens and still keep beating out the rhythm for a new song . . . Last Chance Texaco is the first-ever no-holds-barred account of the life of two-time Grammy Award-winner and Rickie Lee Jones in her own words (Hilton Als). It is a tale of desperate chances and impossible triumphs, an adventure story of a girl who beat the odds and grew up to become one of the most legendary artists of her time, turning adversity and hopelessness into timeless music. With candor and lyricism, she takes us on a singular journey through her nomadic childhood, her years as a teenage runaway, her legendary love affair with Tom Waits, and ultimately her longevity as the hardest working woman in rock and roll. Rickie Lee’s stories are rich with the infamous characters of her early songs—“Chuck E’s in Love,” “Weasel and the White Boys Cool,” “Danny’s All-Star Joint,” and “Easy Money”—but long before her notoriety in show business, there was a vaudevillian cast of hitchhikers, bank robbers, jail breaks, drug mules, and a pimp with a heart of gold, and tales of her fabled ancestors. This intimate memoir by one of the most trailblazing and tenacious women in music is filled with never-before-told stories of the girl in the raspberry beret, whose songs defied categorization and inspired American pop culture for decades. “A striking, distinctive self-portrait.” —The New York Times “Terrific . . . Jones is as fearless in prose as she is on stage.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune “Men leave, fame fizzles, family breaks your heart . . . but Jones knows a good story and how to tell it.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “[The] premiere song-stylist and songwriter of her generation.” —Hilton Als, Pulitzer Prize–winner and author of White Girls

Download or read book The Best of Rickie Lee Jones written by Rickie Lee Jones and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Piano/Vocal/Guitar Artist Songbook). 15 favorites from the Duchess of Coolsville, including: Chuck E.'s in Love * Coolsville * Danny's All-Star Joint * It Must Be Love * Stewart's Coat * and more. Includes photos, a biography and notes on each song from Jones herself.

Download or read book A Fine Romance written by Candice Bergen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a follow-up to Knock Wood, the Emmy Award-winning actress traces the milestone events of her life, including her first marriage, the birth of her daughter, her work on Murphy Brown and her struggles with widowhood.

Download or read book My Reading Life written by Pat Conroy and published by Nan A. Talese. This book was released on 2010-11-02 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling author Pat Conroy acknowledges the books that have shaped him and celebrates the profound effect reading has had on his life. Pat Conroy, the beloved American storyteller, is a voracious reader. Starting as a childhood passion that bloomed into a life-long companion, reading has been Conroy’s portal to the world, both to the farthest corners of the globe and to the deepest chambers of the human soul. His interests range widely, from Milton to Tolkien, Philip Roth to Thucydides, encompassing poetry, history, philosophy, and any mesmerizing tale of his native South. He has for years kept notebooks in which he records words and expressions, over time creating a vast reservoir of playful turns of phrase, dazzling flashes of description, and snippets of delightful sound, all just for his love of language. But for Conroy reading is not simply a pleasure to be enjoyed in off-hours or a source of inspiration for his own writing. It would hardly be an exaggeration to claim that reading has saved his life, and if not his life then surely his sanity. In My Reading Life, Conroy revisits a life of reading through an array of wonderful and often surprising anecdotes: sharing the pleasures of the local library’s vast cache with his mother when he was a boy, recounting his decades-long relationship with the English teacher who pointed him onto the path of letters, and describing a profoundly influential period he spent in Paris, as well as reflecting on other pivotal people, places, and experiences. His story is a moving and personal one, girded by wisdom and an undeniable honesty. Anyone who not only enjoys the pleasures of reading but also believes in the power of books to shape a life will find here the greatest defense of that credo. BONUS: This ebook edition includes an excerpt from Pat Conroy's The Death of Santini.

Download or read book How I Became Hettie Jones written by Hettie Jones and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A thoughtful, intimate memoir of life in the burgeoning movement of new jazz, poetry, and politics . . . in Lower Manhattan in the late 1950s and early 1960s” (Alix Kate Shulman, The Nation). Greenwich Village in the 1950s was a haven to which young poets, painters, and musicians flocked. Among them was Hettie Cohen, who’d been born into a middle-class Jewish family in Queens and who’d chosen to cross racial barriers to marry African American poet LeRoi Jones. This is her reminiscence of life in the awakening East Village in the era of the Beats, Black Power, and bohemia. “As the wife of controversial black playwright-poet LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), Hettie Cohen, a white Jew from Queens, NY, plunged into the Greenwich Village bohemia of jazz, poetry, leftish politics and underground publishing in the late 1950s. Their life together ended in 1965, partly, she implies, because of separatist pressures on blacks to end their interracial marriages. In this restrained autobiographical mix of introspection and gossip, the author writes of coping with racial prejudice and violence, raising two daughters, and of living in the shadow of her husband. When the couple divorced, she became a children’s book author and poet. The memoir is dotted with glimpses of Allen Ginsberg, Thelonious Monk, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, Franz Kline, among others.” —Publishers Weekly

Download or read book Ice written by Linda Howard and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2009-11-10 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On holiday leave from the service, Gabriel McQueen is sent into a brewing ice storm to make sure that his father’s distant neighbor, Lolly Helton, who has fallen out of contact, is safe and sound. It’s a trip that Gabriel would rather not make, given the bitter winter weather—and the icy conditions that have always existed between him and Lolly. Arriving at Lolly’s home, Gabriel spots strangers through the windows—one of them packing a weapon—and kicks into combat mode. But once Lolly is rescued, the heat—and the hunt—are on. Snowbound, unarmed, and literally under the gun, Gabriel and Lolly must depend on each other to endure the merciless forces of nature and evade the ruthless enemy out in the blackness of the silent night—and out for their blood.

Download or read book True Prep written by Lisa Birnbach and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of "The Official Preppy Handbook" evaluates the world of preppies thirty years later, tracing how this generation has adapted to such modern challenges as the Internet, cell phones, and political correctness.

Download or read book Songwriters On Songwriting written by Paul Zollo and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2003-06-19 with total page 764 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic collection of candid interviews with the greatest songwriters of our time, including Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Patti Smith, Paul Simon, Tom Petty, and dozens more This expanded fourth edition of Songwriters on Songwriting includes ten new interviews--with Alanis Morissette, Lenny Kravitz, Lou Reed, and others. In these pages, sixty-two of the greatest songwriters of our time go straight to the source of the magic of songwriting by offering their thoughts, feelings, and opinions on their art. Representing almost every genre of popular music, from blues to pop to rock, here are the figures that have shaped American music as we know it.

Download or read book Reckless Daughter written by David Yaffe and published by Sarah Crichton Books. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "She was like a storm." —Leonard Cohen Reckless Daughter is the story of an artist and an era that have left an indelible mark on American music. Joni Mitchell may be the most influential female recording artist and composer of the late twentieth century. In Reckless Daughter, the music critic David Yaffe tells the remarkable, heart-wrenching story of how the blond girl with the guitar became a superstar of folk music in the 1960s, a key figure in the Laurel Canyon music scene of the 1970s, and the songwriter who spoke resonantly to, and for, audiences across the country. A Canadian prairie girl, a free-spirited artist, Mitchell never wanted to be a pop star. She was nothing more than “a painter derailed by circumstances,” she would explain. And yet, she went on to become a talented self-taught musician and a brilliant bandleader, releasing album after album, each distinctly experimental, challenging, and revealing. Her lyrics captivated listeners with their perceptive language and naked emotion, born out of Mitchell’s life, loves, complaints, and prophecies. As an artist whose work deftly balances narrative and musical complexity, she has been admired by such legendary lyricists as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and beloved by such groundbreaking jazz musicians as Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, and Herbie Hancock. Her hits—from “Big Yellow Taxi” to “Both Sides, Now” to “A Case of You”—endure as timeless favorites, and her influence on the generations of singer-songwriters who would follow her, from her devoted fan Prince to Björk, is undeniable. In this intimate biography, drawing on dozens of unprecedented in-person interviews with Mitchell, her childhood friends, and a cast of famous characters, Yaffe reveals the backstory behind the famous songs—from Mitchell’s youth in Canada, her bout with polio at age nine, and her early marriage and the child she gave up for adoption, through the love affairs that inspired masterpieces, and up to the present—and shows us why Mitchell has so enthralled her listeners, her lovers, and her friends.

Download or read book Conversations With Tom Petty written by Paul Zollo and published by Omnibus Press. This book was released on 2012-02-23 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “...the notoriously media-wary Petty responds...about his life, career, and craft…” Publishers Weekly Conversations with Tom Petty is the first authorized book to focus solely on the life and work of the man responsible for some of the most memorable rock anthems of our generation, including: American Girl, Breakdown, Don’t Come Around Here No More, I Won’t Back Down, Free Fallin’, Runnin’ Down a Dream, You Don’t Know How It Feels , and many others. He was inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002 and his work with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, as well as his solo albums and those with the Traveling Wilburys, have been critically acclaimed the world over and have earned numerous Platinum-status awards from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), as well as Grammys, MTV Awards, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and many other honours. Author, Paul Zollo, conducted a series of in-depth discussions with Tom about his career, with special focus on his song writing. The conversations are reprinted with little or no editorial comment alongside rare photographs of the legend and represent a unique perspective on Tom’s entire career.

Download or read book The World of Bob Dylan written by Sean Latham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book features 27 integrated essays that offer access to the art, life, and legacy of one of the world's most influential artists.

Download or read book Endpapers written by Alexander Wolff and published by Atlantic Monthly Press. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A powerfully told story of family, honor, love, and truth . . . the beautiful and haunting stories told in this book transcend policy and politics.” —Beto O’Rourke A literary gem researched over a year the author spent living in Berlin, Endpapers excavates the extraordinary histories of the author’s grandfather and father: the renowned publisher Kurt Wolff, dubbed “perhaps the twentieth century’s most discriminating publisher” by the New York Times Book Review, and his son Niko, who fought in the Wehrmacht during World War II before coming to America. Born in Bonn into a highly cultured German-Jewish family, Kurt became a publisher at twenty-three, setting up his own firm and publishing Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, Karl Kraus, and many other authors whose books would soon be burned by the Nazis. After fleeing Germany in 1933, Kurt and his second wife, Helen, founded Pantheon Books in a small Greenwich Village apartment. Pantheon would soon take its own place in literary history with the publication of Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, and as the conduit that brought major European works to the States. But Kurt’s taciturn son Niko, offspring of his first marriage to Elisabeth Merck, was left behind in Germany, where despite his Jewish heritage he served the Nazis on two fronts. As Alexander Wolff visits dusty archives and meets distant relatives, he discovers secrets that never made it to the land of fresh starts, including the connection between Hitler and the family pharmaceutical firm E. Merck. With surprising revelations from never-before-published family letters, diaries, and photographs, Endpapers is a moving and intimate family story, weaving a literary tapestry of the perils, triumphs, and secrets of history and exile.

Download or read book This Will End in Tears written by Adam Brent Houghtaling and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Will End in Tears is the first ever and definitive guide to melancholy music. Author Adam Brent Houghtaling leads music fans across genres, beyond the enclaves of emo and mope-rock, and through time to celebrate the albums and artists that make up the miserabilist landscape. In essence a book about the saddest songs ever sung, This Will End in Tears is an encyclopedic guide to the masters of melancholy—from Robert Johnson to Radiohead, from Edith Piaf to Joy Division, from Patsy Cline to The Cure—an insightful, exceedingly engaging exploration into why sad songs make us so happy.

Download or read book Unbecoming Travolta a memoir of mania and multiple personalities written by Rikki Lee Travolta and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine waking up one day and being told that everything you believe to be true is a lie - your name, your family, your world. Known throughout the world as John Travolta's talented nephew, in 2008 Rikki Lee Travolta suffered a nervous breakdown. While hospitalized he learned that he wasn't a member of the famous Travolta entertainment family, but was rather a broken man who through years of psychological and physical trauma had developed alternate personalities - one of them being "Rikki Lee Travolta." Unbecoming Travolta bravely chronicles Rikki Lee Travolta's heartbreaking battle with Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder), Bipolar Disorder (Manic Depression), Borderline Personality Disorder, Paranoid Schizophrenia, and severe Anxiety.

Download or read book The Octopus Museum written by Brenda Shaughnessy and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021-06-29 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, this collection of bold and scathingly beautiful feminist poems imagines what comes after our current age of environmental destruction, racism, sexism, and divisive politics. Informed as much by Brenda Shaughnessy's worst fears as a mother as they are by her superb craft as a poet, the poems in The Octopus Museum blaze forth from her pen: in these pages, we see that what was once a generalized fear for our children is now hyper-reasonable, specific, and multiple: school shootings, nuclear attack, loss of health care, a polluted planet. As Shaughnessy conjures our potential future, she movingly (and often with humor) envisions an age where cephalopods might rule over humankind, a fate she suggests we may just deserve after destroying their oceans. These heartbreaking, terrified poems are the battle cry of a woman who is fighting for the survival of the world she loves, and a stirring exhibition of who we are as a civilization.

Download or read book The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic written by Jessica Hopper and published by Featherproof Books. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jessica Hopper's music criticism has earned her a reputation as a firebrand, a keen observer and fearless critic not just of music but the culture around it. With this volume spanning from her punk fanzine roots to her landmark piece on R. Kelly's past, The First Collection leaves no doubt why The New York Times has called Hopper's work "influential." Not merely a selection of two decades of Hopper's most engaging, thoughtful, and humorous writing, this book documents the last 20 years of American music making and the shifting landscape of music consumption. The book journeys through the truths of Riot Grrrl's empowering insurgence, decamps to Gary, IN, on the eve of Michael Jackson's death, explodes the grunge-era mythologies of Nirvana and Courtney Love, and examines emo's rise. Through this vast range of album reviews, essays, columns, interviews, and oral histories, Hopper chronicles what it is to be truly obsessed with music. The pieces in The First Collection send us digging deep into our record collections, searching to re-hear what we loved and hated, makes us reconsider the art, trash, and politics Hopper illuminates, helping us to make sense of what matters to us most.

Download or read book Rickie Lee Jones written by Rickie Lee Jones and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: