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This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead
by Blair Jackson David GansIn This Is All a Dream We Dreamed, two of the most well-respected chroniclers of the Dead, Blair Jackson and David Gans, reveal the band’s story through the words of its members, their creative collaborators and peers, and a number of diverse fans, stitching together a multitude of voices into a seamless oral tapestry. Capturing the ebullient spirit at the group’s core, Jackson and Gans weave together a musical saga that examines the music and subculture that developed into its own economy, touching fans from all walks of life, from penniless hippies to celebrities, and at least one U.S. vice president. This definitive book traces the Dead’s evolution from its humble beginnings as a folk/bluegrass band playing small venues in Palo Alto to the feral psychedelic warriors and stadium-filling Americana jam band that blazed all the way through to the 90s. Along the way, we hear from many who were touched by the Dead—from David Crosby and Miles Davis, to Ken Kesey, Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia, and a host of Merry Pranksters, to legendary concert promoter Bill Graham, and others. Throughout their journey the Dead broke (and sometimes rewrote) just about every rule of the music business, defying conventional wisdom and charting their own often unusual course, in the process creating a business model unlike any seen before. Musically, too, they were pioneers, fusing inspired ideas and techniques with intuition and fearlessness to craft an utterly unique and instantly recognizable sound. Their music centered on collective improvisation, spiritual and social democracy, trust, generosity, and fun. They believed that you can make something real, spontaneous, and compelling happen with other musicians if you trust and encourage each other, and jam as if your life depended on it. And when it worked, there was nothing else like it.Whether you’re part of the new generation of Deadheads who are just discovering their music or a devoted fan who has traded Dead tapes for decades, you will want to listen in on the irresistible conversations and anecdotes shared in these pages. You’ll hear stories you haven’t heard before, possibly from voices that may be unfamiliar to you, and the tales that unfold will shed a whole new light on a long and inspiring musical odyssey.
This Is Christmas, Song by Song: The Stories Behind 100 Holiday Hits
by Annie ZaleskiCelebrate the merriest season of the year with award-winning author and music journalist Annie Zaleski's collection of the 100 most popular and beloved holiday songs of all time. 'Tis the season! Break out the eggnog, hang the mistletoe, blast those Christmas songs, and settle down in your favorite armchair with this beautifully illustrated volume exploring well-known and lesser-known behind-the-scenes stories of the 100 most cherished holiday songs of all time and their everlasting impact. From artists such as Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald all the way up to Mariah Carey and Ariana Grande, this all-encompassing collection of holiday favorites (called one of "the 25 best Christmas books of all time" by Book Riot) is sure to warm your heart during the merriest season of the year. What song was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the best-selling single of all time? Which popular Christmas tune was reportedly written to commemorate Thanksgiving? What holiday song led to a special meet-and-greet between the song's 10-year-old singer and a 700-pound hippopotamus? Spanning musical genres and decades of classics and modern hits, some of the featured songs include: &“White Christmas&” by Bing Crosby "All I Want for Christmas Is You" by Mariah Carey "Deck the Halls" by Mannheim Steamroller &“Christmas Tree Farm&” by Taylor Swift &“Christmas Time (Is Here Again)" by The Beatles &“Feliz Navidad&” by José Feliciano "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" by Gene Autry "You Make It Feel Like Christmas" by Gwen Stefani &“Santa Baby&” by Eartha Kitt &“Rockin&’ around the Christmas Tree&” by Brenda Lee &“Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays&” by NSYNC &“Run Rudolph Run&” by Chuck Berry And many more! Including full-color illustrations throughout, this gorgeously packaged compendium is the perfect gift for you and your loved ones to experience the holiday magic year after year.
This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography and Life Through the Distorted Lens of Nikki Sixx
by Nikki SixxThis Is Gonna Hurt is music, photography, and life through the distorted lens of Nikki Sixx, bassist for heavy metal rock band Mötley Crüe’s and the New York Times bestselling author of The Heroin Diaries. A combination of powerful prose and dramatic photographs, This Is Gonna Hurt is an arresting, deeply personal look through the eyes of a real rock star at a stark, post-addiction world.This Is Gonna Hurt chronicles Sixx's experiences—from his early years filled with toxic waste, to his success with Motley Crue, to his near death from an OD and his eventual rebirth through music, photography, and love. Love story, social commentary, family memoir, This Is Gonna Hurt offers the compelling insights of an artist and a man struggling to survive, connect, and find a happy ending—a search that fuels Sixx's being.
This Is Music: Drums
by Rekha S. RajanMake music with this hands-on introduction to the four instrument families: drums, horns, strings, and voice in this new board book series by a world-renown music educator.What do a set of bongos, a tambourine, and a cooking pot have in common? They are all drums! This first introduction to instruments in the drum family begins with a simple explanation of what defines a drum. Young readers are then invited on a global exploration of a variety of percussive instruments and are encouraged to find drums of their own in the world around them. Each title in the THIS IS MUSIC series features an interactive novelty musical element that invites the reader to "play" the book!
This Is Music: Horns
by Rekha S. RajanMake music with this hands-on introduction to the four instrument families: drums, horns, strings, and voice in this new board book series by a world-renown music educator.What do a trumpet, a tuba, and a conch shell have in common? They are all horns! This first introduction to instruments in the horn family begins with a simple explanation of what defines a horn. Young readers are then invited on a global exploration of a variety of brass and wind instruments and are encouraged to find horns of their own in the world around them. Each title in the THIS IS MUSIC series features an interactive novelty musical element that invites the reader to "play" the book!
This Is Our Music
by Iain AndersonThis Is Our Music, declared saxophonist Ornette Coleman's 1960 album title. But whose music was it? At various times during the 1950s and 1960s, musicians, critics, fans, politicians, and entrepreneurs claimed jazz as a national art form, an Afrocentric race music, an extension of modernist innovation in other genres, a music of mass consciousness, and the preserve of a cultural elite. This original and provocative book explores who makes decisions about the value of a cultural form and on what basis, taking as its example the impact of 1960s free improvisation on the changing status of jazz. By examining the production, presentation, and reception of experimental music by Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, and others, Iain Anderson traces the strange, unexpected, and at times deeply ironic intersections between free jazz, avant-garde artistic movements, Sixties politics, and patronage networks. Anderson emphasizes free improvisation's enormous impact on jazz music's institutional standing, despite ongoing resistance from some of its biggest beneficiaries. He concludes that attempts by African American artists and intellectuals to define a place for themselves in American life, structural changes in the music industry, and the rise of nonprofit sponsorship portended a significant transformation of established cultural standards. At the same time, free improvisation's growing prestige depended in part upon traditional highbrow criteria: increasingly esoteric styles, changing venues and audience behavior, European sanction, withdrawal from the marketplace, and the professionalization of criticism. Thus jazz music's performers and supporters--and potentially those in other arts--have both challenged and accommodated themselves to an ongoing process of cultural stratification.
This is the Sound of Irony: Music, Politics And Popular Culture (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)
by Katherine L. TurnerThe use of irony in music is just beginning to be defined and critiqued, although it has been used, implied and decried by composers, performers, listeners and critics for centuries. Irony in popular music is especially worthy of study because it is pervasive, even fundamental to the music, the business of making music and the politics of messaging. Contributors to this collection address a variety of musical ironies found in the ’notes themselves,’ in the text or subtext, and through performance, reception and criticism. The chapters explore the linkages between irony and the comic, the tragic, the remembered, the forgotten, the co-opted, and the resistant. From the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, through America, Europe and Asia, this provocative range of ironies course through issues of race, religion, class, the political left and right, country, punk, hip hop, folk, rock, easy listening, opera and the technologies that make possible our pop music experience. This interdisciplinary volume creates new methodologies and applies existing theories of irony to musical works that have made a cultural or political impact through the use of this most multifaceted of devices.
This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You
by Susan Rogers Ogi OgasNamed one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2022 by Boston Globe and Literary Hub A legendary record producer–turned–brain scientist explains why you fall in love with music. This Is What It Sounds Like is a journey into the science and soul of music that reveals the secrets of why your favorite songs move you. But it’s also a story of a musical trailblazer who began as a humble audio tech in Los Angeles, rose to become Prince’s chief engineer for Purple Rain, and then created other No. 1 hits ,including Barenaked Ladies' "One Week," as one of the most successful female record producers of all time. Now an award-winning professor of cognitive neuroscience, Susan Rogers leads readers to musical self-awareness. She explains that we each possess a unique “listener profile” based on our brain’s natural response to seven key dimensions of any song. Are you someone who prefers lyrics or melody? Do you like music “above the neck” (intellectually stimulating), or “below the neck” (instinctual and rhythmic)? Whether your taste is esoteric or mainstream, Rogers guides readers to recognize their musical personality, and offers language to describe one's own unique taste. Like most of us, Rogers is not a musician, but she shows that all of us can be musical—simply by being an active, passionate listener. While exploring the science of music and the brain, Rogers also takes us behind the scenes of record-making, using her insider’s ear to illuminate the music of Prince, Frank Sinatra, Kanye West, Lana Del Rey, and many others. She shares records that changed her life, contrasts them with those that appeal to her coauthor and students, and encourages you to think about the records that define your own identity. Told in a lively and inclusive style, This Is What It Sounds Like will refresh your playlists, deepen your connection to your favorite artists, and change the way you listen to music.
This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
by Daniel J. LevitinWhat can music teach us about the brain? What can the brain teach us about music? And what can both teach us about ourselves? In this groundbreaking union of art and science, rocker-turned-neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin (The World in Six Songs and The Organized Mind) explores the connection between music - its performance, its composition, how we listen to it, why we enjoy it - and the human brain. Drawing on the latest research and on musical examples ranging from Mozart to Duke Ellington to Van Halen, Levitin reveals:How composers produce some of the most pleasurable effects of listening to music by exploiting the way our brains make sense of the worldWhy we are so emotionally attached to the music we listened to as teenagers, whether it was Fleetwood Mac, U2, or Dr. DreThat practice, rather than talent, is the driving force behind musical expertiseHow those insidious little jingles (called earworms) get stuck in our headTaking on prominent thinkers who argue that music is nothing more than an evolutionary accident, Levitin poses that music is fundamental to our species, perhaps even more so than language. A Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist, This Is Your Brain on Music will attract readers of Oliver Sacks and David Byrne, as it is an unprecedented, eye-opening investigation into an obsession at the heart of human nature.
This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
by Daniel J. LevitinWhether you load your iPod with Bach or Bono, music has a significant role in your life - even if you never realized it. Why does music evoke such powerful moods? The answers are at last becoming clear, thanks to revolutionary neuroscience and the emerging field of evolutionary psychology. Both a cutting-edge study and a tribute to the beauty of music itself, This Is Your Brain on Music unravels a host of mysteries that affect everything from pop culture to our understanding of human nature, including: Are our musical preferences shaped in utero? Is there a cutoff point for acquiring new tastes in music? What do PET scans and MRIs reveal about the brain's response to music? Is musical pleasure different from other kinds of pleasure? This Is Your Brain on Music explores cultures in which singing is considered an essential human function, patients who have a rare disorder that prevents them from making sense of music, and scientists studying why two people may not have the same definition of pitch. At every turn, this provocative work unlocks deep secrets about how nature and nurture forge a uniquely human obsession.
This Is Your Song Too: Phish and Contemporary Jewish Identity (Dimyonot)
by Oren Kroll-Zeldin and Ariella Werden-GreenfieldPhish has a diehard fan base and a dedicated community of enthusiasts—called Phishheads—who follow the band around the country, some fans attending every show. What may be surprising is that a significant percentage of Phishheads are Jewish.Two members of the band—bassist Mike Gordon and drummer Jonathan Fishman—were raised in Jewish households, and Phish has been known to play Hebrew songs in concert. At live shows, many attendees, some wearing T-shirts emblazoned with “Phish” written in Hebrew letters, express feeling something special—even distinctly Jewish—during their performances. As this book shows, Phish is one avenue through which many Jews find cultural and spiritual fulfillment outside the confines of traditional and institutional Jewish life. In effect, Phish fandom and the live Phish experience act as a microcosm through which we see American Jewish religious and cultural life manifest in unique and unexpected spaces.Featuring an interview with Mike Gordon and a collection of fascinating photographs, This Is Your Song Too is an in-depth look at Jewishness in the Phish universe that also provides a deeper understanding of how spirituality, ritual, and identity function in the world of rock and roll.In addition to the editors, the contributors include Evan S. Benn, Dean Budnick, Jacob A. Cohen, Benjamin David, Jessy Dressin, Josh Fleet, Mike Greenhaus, Joshua S. Ladon, Noah Munro Lehrman, Caroline Rothstein, and Isaac Kandall Slone.
This Isn't Happening: Radiohead's "Kid A" and the Beginning of the 21st Century
by Steven HydenTHE MAKING AND MEANING OF RADIOHEAD'S GROUNDBREAKING, CONTROVERSIAL, EPOCHDEFINING ALBUM, KID A. In 1999, as the end of an old century loomed, five musicians entered a recording studio in Paris without a deadline. Their band was widely recognized as the best and most forward-thinking in rock, a rarefied status granting them the time, money, and space to make a masterpiece. But Radiohead didn't want to make another rock record. Instead, they set out to create the future. For more than a year, they battled writer's block, intra-band disagreements, and crippling self-doubt. In the end, however, they produced an album that was not only a complete departure from their prior guitar-based rock sound, it was the sound of a new era-and it embodied widespread changes catalyzed by emerging technologies just beginning to take hold of the culture. What they created was Kid A. Upon its release in 2000, Radiohead's fourth album divided critics. Some called it an instant classic; others, such as the UK music magazine Melody Maker, deemed it "tubby, ostentatious, self-congratulatory... whiny old rubbish." But two decades later, Kid A sounds like nothing less than an overture for the chaos and confusion of the twenty-first century. Acclaimed rock critic Steven Hyden digs deep into the songs, history, legacy, and mystique of Kid A, outlining the album's pervasive influence and impact on culture in time for its twentieth anniversary in 2020. Deploying a mix of criticism, journalism, and personal memoir, Hyden skillfully revisits this enigmatic, alluring LP and investigates the many ways in which Kid A shaped and foreshadowed our world.
This Jazz Man
by Karen EhrhardtIn this toe-tapping jazz tribute, the traditional "This Old Man" gets a swinging makeover, and some of the era's best musicians take center stage. The tuneful text and vibrant illustrations bop, slide, and shimmy across the page as Satchmo plays one, Bojangles plays two . . . right on down the line to Charles Mingus, who plays nine, plucking strings that sound "divine. " Easy on the ear and the eye, this playful introduction to nine jazz giants will teach children to count--and will give them every reason to get up and dance! Includes a brief biography of each musician.
This Land that I Love: Irving Berlin, Woody Guthrie, and the Story of Two American Anthems
by John ShawFebruary, 1940: After a decade of worldwide depression, World War II had begun in Europe and Asia. With Germany on the march, and Japan at war with China, the global crisis was in a crescendo. AmericaOCOs top songwriter, Irving Berlin, had captured the nationOCOs mood a little more than a year before with his patriotic hymn, ?God Bless America. OCO Woody Guthrie was having none of it. Near-starving and penniless, he was traveling from Texas to New York to make a new start. As he eked his way across the country by bus and by thumb, he couldnOCOt avoid BerlinOCOs song. Some people say that it was when he was freezing by the side of the road in a Pennsylvania snowstorm that he conceived of a rebuttal. It would encompass the dark realities of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, and it would begin with the lines: ?This land is your land, this land is my land?. OCO In "This Land That I Love," John Shaw writes the dual biography of these beloved American songs. Examining the lives of their authors, he finds that Guthrie and Berlin had more in common than either could have guessed. Though GuthrieOCOs image was defined by train-hopping, Irving Berlin had also risen from homelessness, having worked his way up from the streets of New York. At the same time, "This Land That I Love" sheds new light on our patriotic musical heritage, from ?Yankee DoodleOCO and ?The Star-Spangled BannerOCO to Martin Luther KingOCOs recitation from ?My Country OCOTis of TheeOCO on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963. Delving into the deeper history of war songs, minstrelsy, ragtime, country music, folk music, and African American spirituals, Shaw unearths a rich vein of half-forgotten musical traditions. With the aid of archival research, he uncovers new details about the songs, including a never-before-printed verse for ?This Land Is Your Land. OCO The result is a fascinating narrative that refracts and re-envisions AmericaOCOs tumultuous history through the prism of two unforgettable anthems. "
This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Life and Songs of Woody Guthrie
by Elizabeth Partridge<P>Before Springsteen and before Dylan, there was Woody Guthrie. With "This Machine Kills Fascists" scrawled across his guitar in big black letters, Woody Guthrie brilliantly captured in song the experience of twentieth-century America. Whether he sang about union organizers, migrant workers, or war, Woody took his inspiration from the plights of the people around him as well as from his own tragic childhood. <P>From the late 1920s to the 1950s, Guthrie wrote the words to more than three thousand songs--including "This Land is Your Land," a song many call America's unofficial national anthem. With a remarkable ability to turn any experience into a song almost instantaneously, Woody Guthrie spoke out for people of all colors and races, setting an example for generations of musicians to come. <P>But Woody didn't have the chance to find everything he was looking for. He was ravaged by Huntington's disease, just like his mother, and died in a mental institution at the age of fifty-five. <P>[This text is listed as an example that meets Common Core Standards in English language arts in grades 6-8 at http://www.corestandards.org.]
This Life I Live: One Man's Extraordinary, Ordinary Life and the Woman Who Changed It Forever
by Rory Feek**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER**Her story. His story. The love story of Joey and Rory.By inviting so many into the final months of Joey&’s life as she battled cancer, Joey and Rory Feek captured hearts around the world with how they handled the diagnosis; the inspiring, simple way they chose to live; and how they loved each other every step of the way. But there is far more to the story.&“My life is very ordinary,&” says Rory. &“On the surface, it is not very special. If you looked at it, day to day, it wouldn&’t seem like much. But when you look at it in a bigger context—as part of a larger story—you start to see the magic that is on the pages of the book that is my life. And the more you look, the more you see. Or, at least, I do.&”In this vulnerable book, he takes us for the first time into his own challenging life story and what it was like growing up in rural America with little money and even less family stability.This is the story of a man searching for meaning and security in a world that offered neither. And it&’s the story of a man who finally gives it all to a power higher than himself and soon meets a young woman who will change his heart forever.In This Life I Live, Rory Feek helps us not only to connect more fully to his and Joey&’s story but also to our own journeys. He shows what can happen when we are fully open in life&’s key moments, whether when meeting our life companion or tackling an unexpected tragedy. He also gives never-before-revealed details on their life together and what he calls &“the long goodbye,&” the blessing of being able to know that life is going to end and taking advantage of it. Rory shows how we are all actually there already and how we can learn to live that way every day.A gifted man from nowhere and everywhere in search of something to believe in. A young woman from the Midwest with an angelic voice and deep roots that just needed a place to be planted. This is their story. Two hearts that found each other and touched millions of other hearts along the way.
This Lullaby
by Sarah DessenA New York Times bestseller She's got it all figured out. Or does she? When it comes to relationships, Remy's got a whole set of rules. Never get too serious. Never let him break your heart. And never, ever date a musician. But then Remy meets Dexter, and the rules don't seem to apply anymore. Could it be that she's starting to understand what all those love songs are about? "Remy and Dexter jump off the pages into the hearts of readers, who will wish for a romance like this of their own." --Booklist Also by Sarah Dessen:Along for the RideDreamlandJust ListenKeeping the MoonLock and KeyThe Moon and MoreSomeone Like YouThat SummerThe Truth About ForeverWhat Happened to Goodbye
This Lullaby
by Sarah DessenA New York Times bestseller She's got it all figured out. Or does she? When it comes to relationships, Remy's got a whole set of rules. Never get too serious. Never let him break your heart. And never, ever date a musician. But then Remy meets Dexter, and the rules don't seem to apply anymore. Could it be that she's starting to understand what all those love songs are about? "Remy and Dexter jump off the pages into the hearts of readers, who will wish for a romance like this of their own." --Booklist Also by Sarah Dessen:Along for the RideDreamlandJust ListenKeeping the MoonLock and KeyThe Moon and MoreSomeone Like YouThat SummerThe Truth About ForeverWhat Happened to Goodbye
This Lullaby
by Sarah DessenRemy always knows the perfect time to give a boyfriend "The Speech" telling him it's over-after the initial romantic whirl, but before the reality of an actual relationship hits. Her friends tease that her boyfriend tally is nearing the triple digit mark, but she's a girl who knows just how to avoid any messy emotional entanglement. After all, she's had the example of her five-times-married mother to show her what not to do. So what, then, is it about Dexter that makes it so hard for her to follow her own rules? He's everything she hates: messy, disorganized, much too vulnerable, impulsive, and worst of all, a musician like her father: the father Remy never knew, the father who wrote a famous song for her, the father who disappeared from her life. Sarah Dessen's most captivating novel yet introduces readers to a girl who believes her heart is made of stone-and the boy who proves her wrong. .
This Must Be the Place: Music, Community and Vanished Spaces in New York City
by Jesse RifkinA fascinating history that examines how real estate, gentrification, community and the highs and lows of New York City itself shaped the city&’s music scenes from folk to house music. Take a walk through almost any neighborhood in Manhattan and you&’ll likely pass some of the most significant clubs in American music history. But you won&’t know it—almost all of these venues have been demolished or repurposed, leaving no record of what they were, how they shaped music scenes or their impact on the neighborhoods around them. Traditional music history tells us that famous scenes are created by brilliant, singular artists. But dig deeper and you&’ll find that they&’re actually created by cheap rent, empty space and other unglamorous factors that allow artistic communities to flourish. The 1960s folk scene would have never existed without access to Greenwich Village&’s Washington Square Park. If the city hadn&’t gone bankrupt in 1975, there would have been no punk rock. Brooklyn indie rock of the 2000s was only able to come together because of the borough&’s many empty warehouse spaces. But these scenes are more than just moments of artistic genius—they&’re also part of the urban gentrification cycle, one that often displaces other communities and, eventually, the musicians themselves. Drawing from over a hundred exclusive interviews with a wide range of musicians, deejays and scenesters (including members of Peter, Paul and Mary; White Zombie; Moldy Peaches; Sonic Youth; Treacherous Three; Cro-Mags; Sun Ra Arkestra; and Suicide), writer, historian and tour guide Jesse Rifkin painstakingly reconstructs the physical history of numerous classic New York music scenes. This Must Be the Place examines how these scenes came together and fell apart—and shows how these communal artistic experiences are not just for rarefied geniuses but available to us all.
This Must Be the Place: How Music Can Make Your City Better
by Shain ShapiroThis Must Be the Place explores how music can make cities better.This Must Be the Place introduces and examines music&’s relationship to cities. Not the influence cities have on music, but the powerful impact music can have on how cities are developed, built, managed and governed.Told in an accessible way through personal stories from cities around the world — including London, Melbourne, Nashville, Austin and Zurich — This Must Be the Place takes a truly global perspective on the ways music is integral to everyday life but neglected in public policy.Arguing for the transformative role of artists and musicians in a post-pandemic world, This Must Be The Place not only examines the powerful impact music can have on our cities, but also serves as a how-to guide and toolkit for music-lovers, artists and activists everywhere to begin the process of reinventing the communities they live in.
This Old Man
by Pam AdamsTen old men in colorful outfits are featured with the text of this traditional counting song. Each illustration features a die-cut through which the next old man can be seen. Picture descriptions and math formulas present.
This Thing Called Life: Prince's Odyssey, On + Off the Record
by Neal KarlenA warm and surprisingly real-life biography, featuring never-before-seen photos, of one of rock’s greatest talents: Prince.Neal Karlen was the only journalist Prince granted in-depth press interviews to for over a dozen years, from before Purple Rain to when the artist changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph. Karlen interviewed Prince for three Rolling Stone cover stories, wrote “3 Chains o’ Gold,” Prince’s “rock video opera,” as well as the star’s last testament, which may be buried with Prince’s will underneath Prince’s vast and private compound, Paisley Park. According to Prince's former fiancée Susannah Melvoin, Karlen was “the only reporter who made Prince sound like what he really sounded like.” Karlen quit writing about Prince a quarter-century before the mega-star died, but he never quit Prince, and the two remained friends for the last thirty-one years of the superstar’s life. Well before they met as writer and subject, Prince and Karlen knew each other as two of the gang of kids who biked around Minneapolis’s mostly-segregated Northside. (They played basketball at the Dairy Queen next door to Karlen’s grandparents, two blocks from the budding musician.) He asserts that Prince can’t be understood without first understanding ‘70s Minneapolis, and that even Prince’s best friends knew only 15 percent of him: that was all he was willing and able to give, no matter how much he cared for them. Going back to Prince Rogers Nelson's roots, especially his contradictory, often tortured, and sometimes violent relationship with his father, This Thing Called Life profoundly changes what we know about Prince, and explains him as no biography has: a superstar who calls in the middle of the night to talk, who loved The Wire and could quote from every episode of The Office, who frequented libraries and jammed spontaneously for local crowds (and fed everyone pancakes afterward), who was lonely but craved being alone. Readers will drive around Minneapolis with Prince in a convertible, talk about movies and music and life, and watch as he tries not to curse, instead dishing a healthy dose of “mamma jammas.”
This Was Toscanini: The Maestro, My Father, and Me
by Samuel Antek Lucy Antek Johnson“This unique, doubly moving memoir unites an outstanding musician with his invaluable impressions of the world-famous maestro.” —Sybil Steinberg, Contributing Editor and Former Book Review Editor for Publishers WeeklyArturo Toscanini is widely considered the greatest conductor of the modern age and remains a towering figure in the world of classical music. His explosive passions, dynamic music making, and legendary leadership continue to inspire and influence today’s musicians while still captivating new generations of enthusiastic fans as well. This Was Toscanini is an intimate, firsthand, behind-the-scenes musical portrait of the Maestro, told from the unique perspective of first violinist Samuel Antek, who was fortunate to play under Toscanini’s baton for seventeen years in the famed NBC Symphony Orchestra.In this expanded second edition of This Was Toscanini: The Maestro, My Father, and Me, Samuel Antek’s reflections on playing with the Maestro gain sparkling new facets of insight from his daughter, Lucy Antek Johnson, as she enlightens readers with vivid recollections about her father and his most memorable musical partnership. With a foreword from acclaimed author and music historian Harvey Sachs and featuring Robert Hupka’s iconic photographs throughout, this shining new edition will bring back the wonder of Toscanini’s powerful style and his singular pursuit to make beautiful music.“After the recordings, this book will probably remain the most enduring and endearing monument to the art of Arturo Toscanini.” —The New York Times“This book will fascinate everyone interested not only in Toscanini but in symphonic music and music making in general.” —Harvey Sachs, author and music historian
This Wheel's on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band
by Stephen Davis Levon HelmThe singer and drummer of the Band details, in this book, the history of one of the most influential groups of the 1960s. While their music evoked a Southern mythology with their beautifully crafted, image-rich songs, only their Arkansan drummer, Levon Helm, was the genuine article. This updated edition of his life story includes a new epilogue that covers the last dozen years of his life. From the cotton fields to Woodstock and from seeing Sonny Boy Williamson and Elvis Presley to playing for President Clinton, This Wheel's on Fire replays the tumultuous life of Levon Helm in his own unforgettable folksy drawl.