We all know Little Richard’s great hits like "Long Tall, Sally", "Tutti Frutti" and "Good Golly Miss Molly" and Little Richard’s life was as wild as his records. It’s excess all areas as Spencer Leigh tells the story of Little Richard in Send Me Some Lovin. It is a biography of someone who transformed popular music. Spencer Leigh was born in 1945 and hearing Little Richard for the first time in 1956 changed his life. He is a world expert on the Beatles and he has written a series of music-based biographies – Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel – all of which are full of facts and opinions.
A two-volume biography of George Martin’s work as a record producer, full of colourful detail.
You get a full account of George’s work with the Beatles. The sound effects which George had to create for The Goons’ records helped him deal with the Beatles. I also loved reading about George’s spat with his fellow EMI producer, Norrie Paramor.
George Martin - the man, the mind, the music. This is the story of the legendary Beatles producer.
The first of two volumes, MAXIMUM VOLUME traces Martin's early life, from an impoverished childhood, through WWII, to becoming head of EMI's Parlophone Records.
There, he made waves in British comedy and saved Parlophone from ruin with records from the likes of Spike Milligan. Then one day he discovered a scruffy beat band from Liverpool...
As this dramatic story unfolds, the book transports you into the studio with Martin and the Beatles, exploring how his musical genius shaped their incredible body of…
I’ve had a love-hate relationship with pop music since I was a kid singing Britney Spear’s “Lucky” with my friends. Eventually, I evolved into a punk-ass cynical teenager who disavowed my love of pop, but the fascination remained. In college, I started a pop star romance that would–many, many years later–become my debut book Love in the Liner Notes. In the process, I read an obsessively large number of books touching on music, celebrities, musicians, and the entertainment industry. I hope you enjoy a selection of my favorites, mostly romances (what can I say, I have a type) that brought me the kind of joy only a pop star can.
I love reading about pop culture history and this was a technicolor burst of educational joy.
Written by a fan, this book was not a critical examination on the boy band industry but it was a delightful high-level look at male vocal groups from the Beatles to BTS. As someone with a fascination with fan culture, celebrity culture, and pop music, this book filled in some of the gaps in my knowledge, made me giggle, and brought back memories of my neighbor’s Tiger Beat posters.
The music, the fans, the choreography, the clothes, the merch, the hysteria... the hair. The pop phenomenon that dominated the 1990s and 2000s has left a long-lasting mark on culture, yet no book has fully celebrated them. Maria Sherman has a deep love of boy bands and has written extensively on them for Jezebel, where she currently works, as well as in Rolling Stone, Vulture, and more. In this book, her first, she celebrates the boy band revolution with a mix of serious fandom and a tongue-in-cheek attitude. Larger Than Life begins with a brief look at the history of…
I was too young to really appreciate the Beatles when they stormed the world, but I learned to appreciate what they did to the culture of rock and pop.
The two mainstays, John and Paul, had such a volatile love/hate relationship and I never got into the story until I was gifted this book. As with most biographies, it opened a world of unknown truths about them, some truths that I really didn't want to know. But for the die-hard Beatles fan, you have to read this book.
The relationship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney was the dynamic centre of all that the Beatles did, of all they achieved as musicians and as cultural icons. Noted rock biographer Geoffrey Giuliano delves into the little-known details of John and Paul's friendship to reveal how what was happening in their lives influenced their songs. He analyzes the songs and the albums, addressing each musician's respective contributions in writing and recording. In addition, Giuliano provides a discography, a chronology, and information on songs written for other artists that were never released commercially.
I’m a historian of China and Japan whose work has hewed close to the cultural interactions between Chinese and Japanese over recent centuries. I’m now working on the history of the Esperanto movement in China and Japan from the first years of the twentieth century through the early 1930s. The topic brings together my interests in Sino-Japanese historical relations, linguistic scholarship, and Jewish history (the creator of Esperanto was a Polish-Jewish eye doctor). Over the last couple of decades, I have become increasingly interested in Jewish history. I think by now I know what counts as good history, but I’m still an amateur in Jewish history. Nonetheless, these books all struck me as extraordinary.
The collection of essay on the Talmud and early rabbinic literature is part of the immense “Companion” series that Cambridge University Press has been bringing out for some time. I have read their volume on baseball and the Beatles and one or two more. Each one of the essays in the Talmud volume is astonishingly insightful and, not always concomitant, a delight to read. These are not the usual words associated with the Talmud. In short, I enjoyed it immensely.
This volume introduces students of rabbinic literature to the range of historical and interpretative questions surrounding the rabbinic texts of late antiquity. The editors, themselves well-known interpreters of Rabbinic literature, have gathered an international collection of scholars to support students' initial steps in confronting the enormous and complex rabbinic corpus. Unlike other introductions to Rabbinic writings, the present volume includes approaches shaped by anthropology, gender studies, oral-traditional studies, classics, and folklore studies.
I’m a student of biography. Artists, musicians, and comedians are what I read about. I crave to know what makes a great artist tick, how their ideas develop, and why they choose to pursue their craft at huge personal expense. I’m motivated to write more of my own. These biographies are informative, entertaining, and engaging reads, well worth your time. It’s a challenging and frustrating process to tell an artist’s story. Yet their roots, their influences, and how they shake up popular culture make for greater insight into our humanity. Artists take risks and I’m always impressed by the boldness of their vision.
One of the most misunderstood artists of the last century has to be Yoko Ono. Donald Brackett, whose written biographies of Amy Winehouse, Tina Turner, and Sharon Jones, has done an excellent job of telling Ono’s story, going way beyond the standard, reductive tales about Ono and her relationship with John Lennon. His book traces Ono’s roots in Japan, her early works of performance art, and her time in New York in the Fifties mixing with the city’s art scene in Soho. Brackett’s love and respect for Ono’s artistic achievements shines throughout its pages.
For more than sixty years, Yoko Ono has fascinated us as one of the world’s most innovative, radical artists. From a childhood of both extraordinary privilege and extreme deprivation in war-time Japan, she adopted an outsider’s persona and moved to America where, after a spell at Sarah Lawrence College, she made a place for herself in bohemian arts circles. She was already twice divorced and established as a performance artist in the Fluxus movement and in Tokyo’s avant-garde scene before her fortuitous meeting with the Beatles’ John Lennon at a London Gallery in 1966.
As a life coach and author of two dozen self-help books, I’ve spent the past twenty years helping people to be more creative. I love reading about the early lives of artists because it is an engaging way to learn about the creative process. Even rock stars have doubts, insecurities, regrets, and setbacks. Yet, fueled by their passions, they persist. They overcome their obstacles and pursue unique paths to success. These books are inspirational and informative for anyone with a creative dream.
In the space of one year (1970), the Beatles broke up, James Taylor became an overnight star, and Simon and Garfunkle reached the height of their popularity, Crosby Stills Nash & Young formed a wildly successful group and then disbanded. Their stories intertwine in unexpected ways, embroidered with interactions of dozens of other rock icons who would shape the music of the seventies.
Set against a backdrop of world-changing historical and political events, Fire and Rain tells the extraordinary story of one pivotal year in the lives and music of four legendary artists, and reveals how these artists and their songs both shaped and reflected their times. Drawing on interviews, rare recordings, and newly discovered documents, acclaimed journalist David Browne allows us to see,and to hear,the elusive moment when the '60s became the '70s in a completely fresh way" (Mark Harris, author of Pictures at a Revolution ).
I’m an MK, aka missionary’s kid, who ended up with more questions than answers about this thing called life. I nearly became an astrophysicist but chose finance as the safe bet, which led me to investing in over 150 early-stage tech startups. Along the way, I met and worked with people all over the world. Each with fascinating ideas about how and why we ended up on this waterlogged rock we call home. They say science fiction is the genre of philosophy, and I hope you agree if you get a chance to check out these fantastic books.
One girl. Four different lives. Set in the late 60s and full of musical reminders of that time period, a psychology professor investigates the reason behind meeting four different versions of the same girl. This exploration of the many worlds theory gets more into our brain and how it perceives strange phenomenon.
In the second half, no shocker, there are some experiments with psychedelics that help Garrett think through the idea of parallel worlds, what they might mean, and how that veil could be lifted, if only for a brief time and only by a few. This one makes you think!
Set in the 1960s, this novel exploring the mysteries of the multiverse—and of human identity—is “a rare page turner that avoids the obvious traps.” —The New York Times Book Review
Garrett Adams, an uptight behavioral psychology professor who refuses to embrace the 1960s, is in a slump. The dispirited rats in his latest experiment aren't yielding results, and his beloved Yankees are losing. As he sits at a New York City bar watching the Yanks strike out, he knows he needs a change. Then, at a bookstore, he meets a mysterious young woman, Daphne, who draws him into the turbulent…
This book will appeal to people who love
and know Shakespeare well or to people who don’t know Shakespeare very well but
would like to know more about his famous plays.
I loved this book because Smith
divides the book into relatively short chapters on each of the bard’s plays,
for each of which she provides a unique and interesting perspective.
Smith is
an entertaining and informative guide who looks for contemporary resonances,
none of which feel forced. Having written a book about the Beatles, I know how daunting
it can be to take up a subject about which much has already been said and
written and try to look at it in a fresh way.
I can only hope my effort was
half as successful as Smith’s is.
'The best introduction to the plays I've read, perhaps the best book on Shakespeare, full stop' Alex Preston, Observer
'It makes you impatient to see or re-read the plays at once' Hilary Mantel
A genius and prophet whose timeless works encapsulate the human condition like no others. A writer who surpassed his contemporaries in vision, originality and literary mastery. Who wrote like an angel, putting it all so much better than anyone else. Is this Shakespeare? Well, sort of.
But it doesn't really tell us the whole truth. So much of what…
Hi, my name is Nick, and I’m a recovering rockist. I’ve collected records and vintage gear; I’ve owned Ray Coleman biographies. I’ve played in garage bands that did terrible punk-rock covers of songs like Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love.” I even used to subscribe to Rolling Stone magazine. And most embarrassingly, I believed in the power of rock – to effect political change, to free people’s bodies and minds. But if once I was a true believer, today I’ve become a rock ’n’ roll skeptic. And I hope that this list might help you rethink everything you thought you knew about rock, too.
A provocative pre-history of rock music, written to provoke. (Don’t hold your breath waiting for John, Paul, George, and Ringo to show up.)
Wald crafts a fascinating alternative history of commercial popular music in the first half of the twentieth century, asking readers to focus not on big names or influential records but on the everyday practices, technologies, and contexts through which musicians and listeners actually experienced the music. Avoid if you don’t want to see a few sacred cows slaughtered.
"There are no definitive histories," writes Elijah Wald, in this provocative reassessment of American popular music, "because the past keeps looking different as the present changes." Earlier musical styles sound different to us today because we hear them through the musical filter of other styles that came after them, all the way through funk and hiphop. As its blasphemous title suggests, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll rejects the conventional pieties of mainstream jazz and rock history. Rather than concentrating on those traditionally favored styles, the book traces the evolution of popular music through developing tastes, trends and technologies-including…
I worked for 27 years at The Washington Post, where I won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. But when I returned home in 2006, I wanted to write about my own country, and what could be more American than the movies? They’re a wonderful looking glass into the past, and my books explore the making of an iconic movie and the historical era in which it was created. My recent ones have recounted the making of The Searchers, starring John Wayne, and High Noon, the Gary Cooper classic and its connection to the Hollywood blacklist, a time of vicious conflict eerily similar to our own troubled era.
As Hollywood’s Golden Age sputtered to a close and the old studio behemoths collapsed, United Artists became the Little Studio That Still Could, thanks largely to the discerning eye and risk-taking appetite of David Picker, its young head of marketing and production. Under his leadership, UA made deals that snagged the James Bond series, the Beatles’ two feature films, and Woody Allen’s best movies. Picker’s formula was simple—sign the most intriguing filmmakers in America and Europe to low-budget, one-movie contracts and then leave them alone to do their finest work. Picker praises his pals and lacerates his foes, including Robert Altman, Otto Preminger, and most especially Bill Cosby, whom he despised long before the sexual assault allegations. Anyone recall Cosby’s woeful Leonard Part 6?
