Download or read book The Rock And Roll Book Of The Dead written by David Comfort and published by Kensington Publishing Corp.. This book was released on 2009-08-25 with total page 697 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once you're dead, you're made for life. --Jimi Hendrix Hendrix. Janis. Morrison. Elvis. Lennon. Cobain. Garcia. Their reckless brilliance held the key to their self-destruction. Their deaths had much in common--and, surprisingly, so did their lives. From lonely childhoods marred by loss to groundbreaking music and turbulent careers that ended tragically and suspiciously, David Comfort explodes the myths as he probes: • The sinister roles of Hendrix's manager and girlfriend in his death and subsequent cover-up • The bizarre odyssey of Jim Morrison's corpse • Why Kurt Cobain was worth more dead than alive to Courtney Love • The twisted motives that caused John Lennon to sail through the Devil's Triangle to Bermuda--nearly going down in a storm--shortly before he was fatally shot • The crippling disease and "miracle" drug that drove Elvis to suicide Charismatic and gifted, but also isolated and conflicted, these are not the rock icons you thought you knew. Here are their larger-than-life stories of turmoil and excess that led to their early deaths and ultimate immortality. It's a wild ride to the other side of fame. "Fame is the soul eater." --Jerry Garcia "Everybody loves you when you're six foot in the ground." --John Lennon Includes Rare Photos David Comfort is the author of three bestselling nonfiction books. His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines, including Eclectic Literary Forum, Pacific Review, Coe Review, and Belletrist Review. He has been the recipient of several literary prizes and a finalist for such prestigious awards as the Nelson Algren Award and America's Best. A former rock musician, he has spent over 30 years studying rock music, particularly the revolutionary and fatalistic pioneers of the 1960s. He lives in Santa Rosa, California.

Download or read book Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life written by Steve Almond and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-04-13 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drooling fanatic, n. 1. One who drools in the presence of beloved rock stars. 2. Any of a genus of rock-and-roll wannabes/geeks who walk around with songs constantly ringing in their ears, own more than 3,000 albums, and fall in love with at least one record per week. With a life that’s spanned the phonographic era and the digital age, Steve Almond lives to Rawk. Like you, he’s secretly longed to live the life of a rock star, complete with insane talent, famous friends, and hotel rooms to be trashed. Also like you, he’s content (sort of) to live the life of a rabid fan, one who has converted his unrequited desires into a (sort of) noble obsession. Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life traces Almond’s passion from his earliest (and most wretched) rock criticism to his eventual discovery of a music-crazed soul mate and their subsequent production of two little superfans. Along the way, Almond reflects on the delusional power of songs, the awkward mating habits of drooling fanatics, and why Depression Songs actually make us feel so much better. The book also includes: • sometimes drunken interviews with America’s finest songwriters • a recap of the author’s terrifying visit to Graceland while stoned • a vigorous and credibility-shattering endorsement of Styx’s Paradise Theater • recommendations you will often choose to ignore • a reluctant exegesis of the Toto song “Africa” • obnoxious lists sure to piss off rock critics But wait, there’s more. Readers will also be able to listen to a special free mix designed by the author, available online at www.stevenalmond.com, for the express purpose of eliciting your drool. For those about to rock—we salute you!

Download or read book Is Rock Dead written by Kevin J.H. Dettmar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rock and roll's death has been forecast nearly since its birth; the country song "The Death of Rock and Roll" appeared in September 1956, showing that the music had already outraged a more conservative listening audience. Is Rock Dead? sets out to explore the varied and sometimes conflicting ways in which the death of rock has been discussed both within the discourse of popular music and American culture. If rock is dead, when did it die? Who killed it? Why do rock journalists lament its passing? Has its academic acceptance stabbed it in the back or resuscitated an otherwise lifeless corpse? Why is rock music the music that conservatives love to hate? On the other side of the coin, how have rock's biggest fans helped nail shut the coffin? Does rock feed on its own death-and-rebirth? Finally, what signs of life are there showing that rock, in fact, is surviving? Is Rock Dead? will appeal to all those who take seriously the notion that rock is a serious musical form. It will appeal to students of popular music and culture, and all those who have ever spun a 45, cranked up the radio, or strummed an air guitar.

Download or read book Dead Man s Curve written by Mark A. Moore and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-08-02 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jan Berry, leader of the music duo Jan & Dean from the late 1950s to mid-1960s, was an intense character who experienced more in his first 25 years than many do in a lifetime. As an architect of the West Coast sound, he was one of rock 'n' roll's original rebels--brilliant, charismatic, reckless, and flawed. As a songwriter, music arranger, and record producer for Nevin-Kirshner Associates and Screen Gems-Columbia Music, Berry was one of the pioneering self-produced artists of his era in Hollywood. He lived a dual life, reaching the top of the charts with Jan & Dean while transitioning from college student to medical student, until an automobile accident in 1966 changed his trajectory forever. Suffering from brain damage and partial paralysis, Jan spent the rest of his life trying to come back from Dead Man's Curve. His story is told here in-depth for the first time, based on extensive primary source documentation and supplemented by the stories and memories of Jan's family members, friends, music industry colleagues, and contemporaries. From the birth of rock to the bitter end, Berry's life story is thrilling, humorous, unsettling, and disturbing, yet ultimately uplifting.

Download or read book The Mammoth Book of Sex Drugs Rock n Roll written by Jim Driver and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2010-04-29 with total page 792 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over 60 gripping accounts tracking the dark side of rock 'n' roll from the early days of the drugs-and-drink culture, and the birth of rock 'n' roll, through The Beatles, Stones, Sex Pistols, Madonna, Kurt Cobain and Oasis, to Amy Winehouse, Pete Doherty and other stars of the current rock-music scene. From trashed hotel rooms to cars in swimming pools, all rock 'n' roll's excesses are here, including murder and sexual deviancy, surprising brushes with the law that the stars thought they'd kept quiet, early and tragic deaths, drug overdoses, robbery, mis-marriages and groupies by the truckload

Download or read book Living with the Dead written by Rock Scully and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2001 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This memoir chronicles the Dead's seminal years: 1965-1985.

Download or read book The American Book of the Dead written by Oliver Trager and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1997-12-04 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains over 750 alphabetically-arranged entries that provide information about the rock group Grateful Dead, featuring profiles of band members and associated musicians, filmmakers, photographers, composers, and others, and descriptions of the band's albums and solo releases.

Download or read book Killing Yourself to Live written by Chuck Klosterman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2006-06-13 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author recounts his more than 6,500-mile journey across America, during which he visited the sites of famous rock star deaths and experienced philosophical changes of perspective.

Download or read book A Long Strange Trip written by Dennis McNally and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The complete history of one of the most long-lived and legendary bands in rock history, written by its official historian and publicist—a must-have chronicle for all Dead Heads, and for students of rock and the 1960s’ counterculture. From 1965 to 1995, the Grateful Dead flourished as one of the most beloved, unusual, and accomplished musical entities to ever grace American culture. The creative synchronicity among Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan exploded out of the artistic ferment of the early sixties’ roots and folk scene, providing the soundtrack for the Dionysian revels of the counterculture. To those in the know, the Dead was an ongoing tour de force: a band whose constant commitment to exploring new realms lay at the center of a thirty-year journey through an ever-shifting array of musical, cultural, and mental landscapes. Dennis McNally, the band’s historian and publicist for more than twenty years, takes readers back through the Dead’s history in A Long Strange Trip. In a kaleidoscopic narrative, McNally not only chronicles their experiences in a fascinatingly detailed fashion, but veers off into side trips on the band’s intricate stage setup, the magic of the Grateful Dead concert experience, or metaphysical musings excerpted from a conversation among band members. He brings to vivid life the Dead’s early days in late-sixties San Francisco—an era of astounding creativity and change that reverberates to this day. Here we see the group at its most raw and powerful, playing as the house band at Ken Kesey’s acid tests, mingling with such legendary psychonauts as Neal Cassady and Owsley “Bear” Stanley, and performing the alchemical experiments, both live and in the studio, that produced some of their most searing and evocative music. But McNally carries the Dead’s saga through the seventies and into the more recent years of constant touring and incessant musical exploration, which have cemented a unique bond between performers and audience, and created the business enterprise that is much more a family than a corporation. Written with the same zeal and spirit that the Grateful Dead brought to its music for more than thirty years, the book takes readers on a personal tour through the band’s inner circle, highlighting its frenetic and very human faces. A Long Strange Trip is not only a wide-ranging cultural history, it is a definitive musical biography.

Download or read book Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock n Roll Group written by Ian Svenonius and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Washington, D.C.-based rock 'n' roll antihero Ian F. Svenonius provides an unparalleled and exquisitely provocative how-to guide for rock bands.

Download or read book Old Gods Almost Dead written by Stephen Davis and published by Crown Archetype. This book was released on 2001-12-11 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed, bestselling rock-and-roll biographer delivers the first complete, unexpurgated history of the world’s greatest band. The saga of the Rolling Stones is the central epic in rock mythology. From their debut as the intermission band at London’s Marquee Club in 1962 through their latest record—setting Bridges to Babylon world tour, the Rolling Stones have defined a musical genre and experienced godlike adulation, quarrels, addiction, legal traumas, and descents into madness and death_while steadfastly refusing to fade away. Now Stephen Davis, the New York Times bestselling author of Hammer of the Gods and Walk This Way, who has followed the Stones for three decades, presents their whole story, replete with vivid details of the Stones’ musical successes_and personal excesses. Born into the wartime England of air-raid sirens, bombing raids, and strict rationing, the Rolling Stones came of age in the 1950s, as American blues and pop arrived in Europe. Among London’s most ardent blues fans in the early 1960s was a short blond teenage guitar player named Brian Jones, who hooked up with a lorry driver’s only son, Charlie Watts, a jazz drummer. At the same time, popular and studious Michael Philip Jagger–who, as a boy, bawled out a phonetic version of “La Bamba” with an eye-popping intensity that scared his parents–began sharing blues records with a primary school classmate, Keith “Ricky” Richards, a shy underachiever, whose idol was Chuck Berry. In 1962 the four young men, joined by Bill Perks (later Wyman) on bass, formed a band rhythm and blues band, which Brian Jones named the “the Rollin’ Stones” in honor of the Muddy Waters blues classic. Using the biography of the Rolling Stones as a narrative spine, Old God Almost Dead builds a new, multilayered version of the Stones’ story, locating the band beyond the musical world they dominated and showing how they influenced, and were influenced by, the other artistic movements of their era: the blues revival, Swinging London, the Beats, Bob Dylan’s Stones-inspired shift from protest to pop, Pop Art and Andy Warhol’s New York, the “Underground” politics of the 1960s, Moroccan energy and European orientalism, Jamaican reggae, the Glam and Punk subcultures, and the technologic advances of the video and digital revolution. At the same time, Old Gods Almost Dead documents the intense backstage lives of the Stones: the feuds, the drugs, the marriages, and the affairs that inspired and informed their songs; and the business of making records and putting on shows. The first new biography of the Rolling Stones since the early 1980s, Old Gods Almost Dead is the most comprehensive book to date, and one of the few to cover all the band’s members. Illustrated throughout with photos of pivotal moments, it is a celebration of the Rolling Stones as an often courageous, often foolish gang of artists who not only showed us new worlds, but new ways of living in them. It is a saga as raunchily, vibrantly entertaining as the Stones themselves.

Download or read book The Secret History of Rock n Roll written by Christopher Knowles and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Mystery religions got a secular reincarnation when a new musical form called rock 'n' roll burst onto the scene. The Secret History of Rock 'n' Roll traces the history of the Mysteries — their rise, their fall, and their survival through long centuries of repression. Knowles shows how the Mysteries prefigured subcultures as diverse as Santeria, Freemasonry, Mardi Gras and even the Holiness churches of the American frontier, and explains exactly how ancient rituals and music found their way to the New World. In the process, The Secret History of Rock 'n' Roll traces the development of rock's most popular genres such as punk and heavy metal, and reveals how many of rock's most iconic artists play the same archetypal roles as the ancient gods. You'll see how many of the rituals and customs and even musical styles of our postmodern society have stunning ancient parallels. You'll meet history's first pop

Download or read book Rock n Roll and the Cleveland Connection written by Deanna R. Adams and published by Kent State University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 650 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A useful resource for people of all ages who want to know more about rock history, Rock 'n' Roll and the Cleveland Connection links national and international events in music and the world, though the primary focus is on Cleveland. Rock 'n' Roll and the Cleveland Connection is the first in-depth look at the people, venues and artists that made Cleveland the "Rock 'n' Roll Capital of the World." Author Deanna Adams conducted personal interviews with more than 150 musicians, managers, DJ's, promoters, record executives, journalists, and club owners--all pioneers of this new musical movement--to compile these chapters of musical history.

Download or read book William S Burroughs and the Cult of Rock n Roll written by Casey Rae and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William S. Burroughs's fiction and essays are legendary, but his influence on music's counterculture has been less well documented—until now. Examining how one of America's most controversial literary figures altered the destinies of many notable and varied musicians, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll reveals the transformations in music history that can be traced to Burroughs. A heroin addict and a gay man, Burroughs rose to notoriety outside the conventional literary world; his masterpiece, Naked Lunch, was banned on the grounds of obscenity, but its nonlinear structure was just as daring as its content. Casey Rae brings to life Burroughs's parallel rise to fame among daring musicians of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, when it became a rite of passage to hang out with the author or to experiment with his cut-up techniques for producing revolutionary lyrics (as the Beatles and Radiohead did). Whether they tell of him exploring the occult with David Bowie, providing Lou Reed with gritty depictions of street life, or counseling Patti Smith about coping with fame, the stories of Burroughs's backstage impact will transform the way you see America's cultural revolution—and the way you hear its music.

Download or read book The 27s written by Eric Segalstad and published by Samadhi Creations, LLC. This book was released on 2008 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jimi Hendrix. Janis Joplin. Jim Morrison. Brian Jones. Kurt Cobain. Founding bluesman Robert Johnson. All died at 27. Their stories, as well as those of ill-fated members of the Grateful Dead, The Stooges, Badfinger, Big Star, Minutemen, Echo & the Bunnymen, and The Mars Volta, are here presented for the first time as a profound and interlocking web that reaches beyond coincidence to the roots of artistic causality and fate.

Download or read book Connecticut Rock n Roll written by Tony Renzoni and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2017-08-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long neglected in the annals of American music, the Nutmeg State's influence on the history of rock'n'roll deserves recognition. Connecticut's musical highlights include the beautiful harmonies of New Haven's Five Satins, Gene Pitney's rise to fame, Stamford's the Fifth Estate and notable rockers such as Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Rivers Cuomo of Weezer and Saturday Night Live Band's Christine Ohlman. Rock Hall of Famers include Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz of the Talking Heads and Dennis Dunaway of the Alice Cooper Band. Some events became legend, like Jimi Hendrix's spellbinding performance at Yale's Woolsey Hall, Jim Morrison's onstage arrest at the New Haven Arena and teenage Bob Dylan's appearance at Branford's Indian Neck Folk Festival. With in-depth interviews as well as rare, never-before-seen photos, author Tony Renzoni leads a sonic trip that captures the spirit and zenith of the local scene.

Download or read book The Little Book of Rock and Roll Wisdom written by Mike Katz and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-10-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the singing is over and the talking starts, that’s when the true, unvarnished wisdom of rock ‘n’ roll comes out. Built on first-hand experience, the gorgeous, illustrated Little Book of Rock ‘n’ Roll Wisdom offers the wise words of stars past and present on a variety of topics like love, breakups, rebellion, success, feeling good, being down-and-out, and even death to offer the big-picture view of rock ‘n’ roll. Rock stars can be outrageous, funny, in your face, and sometimes even oddly humanitarian. This collection includes wisdom from such icons as Elvis, Bowie, Jimi, Dylan, Bruce, Mick, Keith, Prince, Lennon, Ozzy, Clapton, Bono, Janis, and more.