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A chronicle of Adams’s rise from alt-country to rock stardom, featuring stories about the making of the albums Strangers Almanac and Heartbreaker. Before he achieved his dream of being an internationally known rock personality, Ryan Adams had a band in Raleigh, North Carolina. Whiskeytown led the wave of insurgent-country bands that came of age with No Depression magazine in the mid-1990s, and for many people it defined the era. Adams was an irrepressible character, one of the signature personalities of his generation, and as a singer-songwriter he blew people away with a mature talent that belied his youth. David Menconi witnessed most of Whiskeytown’s rocket ride to fame as the music c...
"This book is a love letter to North Carolina's popular music in all its many-splendored glory, from bluegrass, folk, and country to R&B, rock, and pop. Though the state's diverse music scenes have often operated in the shadows of better-known hubs for popular genres-New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Nashville, Austin, and Athens, Georgia-David Menconi shows North Carolina's influence on American popular music runs deep. He uses profiles of artists and their role in creating or shaping genres to reveal the richness of the state's musical landscape, with an arc that runs from the origin of recorded music in the state to the digital age"--
A six-foot-seven-inch Jewish hippie from Philadelphia starts a Western swing band in 1970, when country fans hate hippies and Western swing. It sounds like a joke but—more than forty years, twenty-five albums, and nine Grammy Awards later—Asleep at the Wheel is still drawing crowds around the world. The roster of musicians who’ve shared a stage with the Wheel is a who’s who of American popular music—Van Morrison, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, George Strait, Vince Gill, Lyle Lovett, and so many more. And the bandleader who’s brought them all together is the hippie that claimed Bob Wills’s boots: Ray Benson. In this hugely entertaining memoir, Benson looks back ove...
Take a volatile rock band, a kingmaking concert promoter, a downtrodden clubowner and a rock critic with questionable journalistic ethics, add one hit record, a drug problem, a couple of riots and shake well. There you have the essence of this book, the very unauthorized account of the rise and fall of the Tommy Aguilar Band. Off The Record will confirm your worst suspicions about the music business, an industry in which musicians are like the infantry -- the first to die, and the last to get paid. For further intrigue, visit the Off The Record website at www.offtherecordbook.com
A moving and essential exploration of what it takes to find your voice as a woman, a survivor, an artist, and an icon. The first time Lynn Melnick listened to a Dolly Parton song in full, she was 14 years old, in the triage room of a Los Angeles hospital, waiting to be admitted to a drug rehab program. Already in her young life as a Jewish teen in the 1980s, she had been the victim of rape, abuse, and trauma, and her path to healing would be long. But in Parton’s words and music, she recognized a fellow survivor. In this powerful, incisive work of social and self-exploration, Melnick blends personal essay with cultural criticism to explore Parton’s dual identities as feminist icon and ob...
The most compelling art form to emerge from the United States in the second half of the twentieth century, rock & roll stands in an edgy relationship with its own mythology, its own musicological history and the broader culture in which it plays a part. In Present Tense, Anthony DeCurtis brings together writers from a wide variety of fields to explore how rock & roll is made, consumed, and experienced in our time. In this collection, Greil Marcus creates a collage of words and pictures that evokes and explores Elvis Presley's grisly fate as an American cultural image, while Robert Palmer tells the gripping tale of the origins and meanings of the electric guitar. Rap music, MTV, and the issue...
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of alternative country music magazine "No Depression," this anthology contains 25 of the magazine's best and most representative feature articles on venerated artists and songwriters of genuine American roots music.
An October 2022 IndieNext pick ”[An] engaging and beautifully narrated quest for personal fulfillment and musical recognition...This is a fast-paced tale in which music and love always take center stage...A truly gifted musician, Price writes about her journey with refreshing candor.”—Kirkus, starred review ”Brutally honest...a vivid and poignant memoir.”—The Guardian Country music star Margo Price shares the story of her struggle to make it in an industry that preys on its ingenues while trying to move on from devastating personal tragedies. When Margo Price was nineteen years old, she dropped out of college and moved to Nashville to become a musician. She busked on the street, ...
2023 ARSC Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research, Association for Recorded Sound Collections An insider’s look at how Chicago’s underground music industry transformed indie rock in the 1990s. In the 1990s, Chicago was at the center of indie rock, propelling bands like the Smashing Pumpkins and Liz Phair to the national stage. The musical ecosystem from which these bands emerged, though, was expansive and diverse. Grunge players comingled with the electronic, jazz, psychedelic, and ambient music communities, and an inventive, collaborative group of local labels—kranky, Drag City, and Thrill Jockey, among others—embraced the new, evolving sound of indie “rock.”...
“Sobsey truly does deliver the goods with this biography . . . This work is as gloriously comprehensive as it gets on the subject of Chrissie Hynde.” —PopMatters A musical force across four decades, a voice for the ages, and a great songwriter, Chrissie Hynde is one of America’s foremost rockers. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005, she and her band The Pretenders have released ten albums since 1980. The Pretenders’ debut LP has been acclaimed as one of the best albums of all time by VH1 and Rolling Stone. In a business filled with “pretenders” and posers, Hynde remains unassailably authentic. Although she blazed the trail for countless female musicians, Hynde ...