I started singing and playing guitar in garage bands in high school, about the same time that I began thinking of myself as a serious writer, so for me the two endeavors have always gone hand in hand. Over the decades, I’ve continued to write creatively—while teaching thousands of students along the way—and also to play in a number of bands that have specialized in everything from country-folk to raucous punk. Like many writer-musicians, I love reading good stories about the challenges and joys of people joining together, and falling apart, as they attempt to transcend ordinary life through the power of music.
On a September afternoon in Santa Barbara, a private jet carrying the members of Poor Ghost, one of America’s most storied rock bands, plunges into the backyard of Caleb Crane, a retired insurance salesman. Still mourning his wife’s death from COVID-19, Caleb finds himself navigating trauma, grief, and loss, all while his quiet neighborhood is invaded by pushy reporters and rabid Poor Ghost fans.
The novel moves back and forth between the impact of the plane crash on Caleb’s life and an oral history of Poor Ghost—from its beginnings as a working-class punk band to rock icons. As the twisting and turning strands of the plot converge, readers are shown what happens when different worlds (literally) collide with one another.
The musicians responsible for creating what we now think of as punk rock were a motley assortment of folks, many of them without much in the way of formal education. But they were all great storytellers, and they had plenty of wild, outrageous, and funny stories to tell.
Please Kill Me gathers some of those stories, from Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Debbie Harry, Dee Dee Ramone, Jim Carroll, and many others (the tales of Iggy Pop alone are worth the price of admission), and the editors do an outstanding job of bringing coherence to a scene that thrived on chaos.
This is the true story of a misunderstood culture phenomenon, one embracing Andy Warhol, Jim Morrison, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Patti Smith, The Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop, The New York Dolls, The Clash and The Damned. It is a story of sex, drugs and rock and roll, documenting a time of glorious self-destruction and perverse innocence - punk was possibly the last time so many people will have had so much fun killing themselves. Legs McNeil, founder of "Punk" magazine has interviewed those who were members of the punk scene, from the brightest stars to the most observant groupies.
Taylor Jenkins Reid is not the first or only person to adapt the nonfiction oral history format into a work of fiction, but she does it with the most panache.
Loosely based on the mid-seventies romance between Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham, Daisy Jones & the Six offers a nonstop procession of drama and conflict, but there’s a tender heart beating at its center and a heartbreaking reveal at the end.
For my money, the film version of this short novel is the greatest rock and roll movie, but the book itself is no slouch either. A bunch of working-class misfits from north Dublin are molded into a white soul band through the efforts of their manager, Jimmy Rabbitte, and their veteran trumpet player, Joey The Lips Fagan.
Told mostly in the hilariously bawdy demotic of the characters, it takes off from the first page and zips through the band’s rise and demise at the speed of, well…sound itself.
First published in 1988, THE COMMITMENTS follows a small band of musicians from the Barrytown area of Dublin as they try to make the big time. From the author of THE SNAPPER, THE VAN and PADDY CLARKE HA HA HA.
The book begins with short chapters on a couple of blues players—Harmonica Frank and the mysterious Robert Johnson, who allegedly sold his soul to the devil so he could play guitar—before moving to extended chapters on Elvis, and others.
Marcus’s project is to cross-reference American history with American music and to try and make sense of them both. It sounds like something an academic would get up to, and plenty of research went into the making of Mystery Train (at 224 pages, the Notes and Discographies section of the 2015 edition is considerably longer than the original book).
However, Marcus is one of the great rock writers, and he’s as keen on crafting unforgettable sentences as he is in explaining the meaning of rock and roll.
The perfect gift for music fans and anyone who loves artists like Elvis Presley, Randy Newman, Sly Stone, Robert Johnson, and Harmonica Frank.
In 1975, Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train changed the way readers thought about rock ’n’ roll and continues to be sought out today by music fans and anyone interested in pop culture. Looking at recordings by six key artists—Robert Johnson, Harmonica Frank, Randy Newman, the Band, Sly Stone, and Elvis Presley—Marcus offers a complex and unprecedented analysis of the relationship between rock ‘n’ roll and American culture. In this latest edition, Marcus provides an extensively updated and rewritten…
Keith Richards is a legend in large part because of his musicianship and the many timeless songs he has written with Mick Jagger for the Rolling Stones, but he’s also legendary for his consumption of alcohol and drugs.
“I’m glad to be here,” he has said on more than one occasion. “I’m glad to be anywhere.” Therefore, it’s astonishing how much he remembers of his life, including nearly a hundred pages on his youth before the formation of the Stones.
And what a life it is, full of celebrities and misadventures and close calls with the law and, above all, Keith’s unstoppable drive to make it to the next gig.
As lead guitarist of the Rolling Stones, Keith Richards created the riffs, the lyrics, and the songs that roused the world. A true and towering original, he has always walked his own path, spoken his mind, and done things his own way.Now at last Richards pauses to tell his story in the most anticipated autobiography in decades. And what a story! Listening obsessively to Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters records in a coldwater flat with Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, building a sound and a band out of music they loved. Finding fame and success as a bad-boy band, only…
I became fascinated with 16th-century and 17th-century Europe after reading Don Quixote many years ago. Since then, every novel or nonfiction book about that era has felt both ancient and contemporary. I’m always struck by how much our environment has changed—transportation, communication, housing, government—but also how little we as people have changed when it comes to ambition, love, grief, and greed. I doubled down my reading on that time period when I researched my novel, Dulcinea. Many people read in the eras of the Renaissance, World War II, or ancient Greece, so I’m hoping to introduce them to the Baroque Age.
Dolça Llull Prat, a wealthy Barcelona woman, is only 15 when she falls in love with an impoverished poet-solder. Theirs is a forbidden relationship, one that overcomes many obstacles until the fledgling writer renders her as the lowly Dulcinea in his bestseller.
By doing so, he unwittingly exposes his muse to gossip. But when Dolça receives his deathbed note asking to see her, she races across Spain with the intention of unburdening herself of an old secret.
On the journey, she encounters bandits, the Inquisition, illness, and the choices she's made. At its heart, Dulcinea is about how we betray the people we love, what happens when we succumb to convention, and why we squander the few chances we get to change our lives.
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