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At the age of 23 I brought Bob Dylan to the Isle of Wight to play the 1969 festival. In my naivety when making the bid I knew nothing about the sixties superstar but by the time he accepted the invitation I had soaked up all that was generally known of his music and backstory. Through the decades since I have closely followed Dylan’s remarkable career and written about his indispensable place in the counterculture. I am an architect and author working in Oxford.
A timely anthology of 35 essays by an interestingly diverse array of contributors. A correspondingly diverse selection of aspects of the multi-dimensional Bob Dylan and his remarkable six-decade career is subjected to forensic scrutiny.
No Dylan book peaks beneath the cloak of so many of the mysteries surrounding the enigmatic ‘song and dance man.’
2021 marks Bob Dylan's 80th birthday and his 60th year in the music world. It invites us to look back on his career and the multitudes that it contains. Is he a song and dance man? A political hero? A protest singer? A self-portrait artist who has yet to paint his masterpiece? Is he Shakespeare in the alley? The greatest living exponent of American music? An ironsmith? Internet radio DJ? Poet (who knows it)? Is he a spiritual and religious parking meter? Judas? The voice of a generation or a false prophet, jokerman, and thief? Dylan is all these and…
I’m a singer/songwriter and I grew up in a rock’n’roll household. My family has always traded great books about music between us, memoirs, biographies, scientific studies, deep dives into subcultures, industry exposes – I love them all and find a good music book impossible to resist. I always get excited when I find books written by other obsessive music-loving kindred spirits––if I can feel the love I’m right in there with them. I especially love the behind-the-scenes stories and insights into the work and fascinations that helped forge an artist’s career.
A tender meditation on all the disparate threads, sounds, loves, conversations, and lessons that meld together to create an artist. Watching Bob trying to throw off the accolades and labels that want to pin him down like butterfly and explore whatever takes his fancy is my favorite part of this trip, weaving through all the stolen records and ghosts and signposts and colored lights beckoning.
Building on the success of Bob Dylan in His Own Words, an autobiographical portrait of the acclaimed musical performer recounts personal and professional experiences and features black-and-white photography. 250,000 first printing.
At the age of 23 I brought Bob Dylan to the Isle of Wight to play the 1969 festival. In my naivety when making the bid I knew nothing about the sixties superstar but by the time he accepted the invitation I had soaked up all that was generally known of his music and backstory. Through the decades since I have closely followed Dylan’s remarkable career and written about his indispensable place in the counterculture. I am an architect and author working in Oxford.
Among the 1,000 plus books about Bob Dylan this is the closest we have to a full authorised biography. Robert Shelton was with the artist from the beginning in 1961, witnessing all the controversial concerts.
No Direction Home is the definitive biography, written with Dylan’s blessing and cooperation and with favored access to original sources. This beautifully illustrated 2011 edition, edited By Elizabeth Thomson and Patrick Humphries, is an update of the original 1986 standard.
This lavishly illustrated and thoughtfully abridged edition of THE classic book on Dylan—published to coincide with Dylan’s 80th birthday (May 24, 1941)—is a must for all Dylan aficionados.
Robert Shelton met Bob Dylan when the young singer arrived in New York in 1960, becoming Dylan’s friend, champion, and critic. Shelton’s book No Direction Home, first published in 1986, was hailed as the definitive unauthorized biography of this complex, passionate genius, and is the only one written with the subject’s active cooperation. Dylan gave Shelton access to his parents, his brother, and his childhood friends, among others. No Direction Home took…
At the age of 23 I brought Bob Dylan to the Isle of Wight to play the 1969 festival. In my naivety when making the bid I knew nothing about the sixties superstar but by the time he accepted the invitation I had soaked up all that was generally known of his music and backstory. Through the decades since I have closely followed Dylan’s remarkable career and written about his indispensable place in the counterculture. I am an architect and author working in Oxford.
Not the best-known Dylan book but Jokerman is unusually productive in its scholarly analysis of many of the Nobel Laurette’s revered lyrics.
Investigating the writer’s use of ‘Identity’ in his work happens to coincide with 20 of his best-known and most loved songs. At one level, this might be seen as a book for anoraks, but it is much more likely to be of interest to anyone inclined to seek answers to questions raised in the apparent opacity of these Dylan classics.
Bob Dylan is described as one of the most startling, prolific and controversial contemporary song-writers. This book explores the complexity and subtlety of his lyrics and their themes, seeking to make intelligible that seems obscure and difficult. The author reviews the manner in which many of Dylan's lyrics treat fundamental questions concerning the nature of human identity. He argues that these lyrics represent a continuation of the experimental poetic practices of modernism. At the heart of Dylan's work are the discrepancies between the conscious, socialized self, born of language, and those potencies of personality that lie outside rational formulation. For…
I have two major passions in life: music and writing. I started learning guitar aged 16, and my friends and I formed a band as soon as we possibly could. My first professional job was writing about pop music for a monthly magazine, and much later in life, I discovered jazz. Now I’m a bass-player, jazz singer, and composer who works with some of the finest jazz musicians in London, and I play regularly at Ronnie Scott’s club. As well as the Donald Fagen biography, I’ve also written biographies of the great jazz singers Mark Murphy (for me, the greatest of them all) and Jon Hendricks.
I make no apology for including this immense and important work. So much of the music I love originated with the kidnapping of black people from Africa.
This book shows how not merely the music of Africa but whole swathes of culture now considered “American” were imported along with the slaves. How did they cope with being ripped from their homeland, transported across the Atlantic in chains, and forced to work in the fields of an alien land?
Levine lays it all out, including everything from Black religion to Black comedy, and despite what you might think, it’s a real page-turner.
When Black Culture and Black Consciousness first appeared thirty years ago, it marked a revolution in our understanding of African American history. Contrary to prevailing ideas at the time, which held that African culture disappeared quickly under slavery and that black Americans had little group pride, history, or cohesiveness, Levine uncovered a cultural treasure trove, illuminating a rich and complex African American oral tradition, including songs, proverbs, jokes, folktales, and long narrative poems called toasts-work that dated from before and after emancipation. The fact that these ideas and sources seem so commonplace now is in large part due this book…
I have two major passions in life: music and writing. I started learning guitar aged 16, and my friends and I formed a band as soon as we possibly could. My first professional job was writing about pop music for a monthly magazine, and much later in life, I discovered jazz. Now I’m a bass-player, jazz singer, and composer who works with some of the finest jazz musicians in London, and I play regularly at Ronnie Scott’s club. As well as the Donald Fagen biography, I’ve also written biographies of the great jazz singers Mark Murphy (for me, the greatest of them all) and Jon Hendricks.
I grew up in south-west London, and still live here.
My formative years were spent going to rock gigs in local clubs, pubs, and colleges, when bands like Genesis, Black Sabbath, the Soft Machine, and Pink Floyd were still playing in small venues. Queen’s Brian May went to my school, as did half of the Yardbirds.
This book reflects that era, particularly the amazing goings-on at Eel Pie Island in Twickenham, where gigs were held in a crumbling hotel infested with hippies and other ne’er-do-wells… including me and some of my closest friends.
I took piano lessons as a kid, but my teacher was imperious and boring. In my mid-30s I started thinking about it again, and my partner bought me a state-of-the-art Yamaha keyboard as a Valentine’s Day present. I found a wonderful teacher, Rafael Cortés, who worked at a community music school a few blocks from my office. Every piece we worked on began with a conversation about the composer, the period in which she/he wrote the piece, and the other artists–painters, sculptors, poets–who were working then. I fell in love with both playing and learning about music, and more than 30 years later, I’m still taking weekly lessons with Rafael.
This is the most fun you’ll ever have reading about music history, guaranteed. Gioia focuses on outsiders, renegades, and people at the margins of society who launched musical innovations that were later adopted – and legitimized – by leaders of mainstream culture.
“So don’t be surprised,” he warns early on, “if a woman’s erotic love song gets turned into a scriptural utterance by a king. That’s how the history of music unfolds, especially for anything innovative or transgressive.”
I especially appreciated how, in examining music’s 4,000-year history, Gioia never fails to highlight contributions by women, which sets his book apart.
The phrase "music history" likely summons up images of long-dead composers, smug men in wigs and waistcoats, and people dancing without touching. In Music: A Subversive History, Gioia responds to the false notions that undergird this tedium. Traditional histories of music, Gioia contents, downplay those elements of music that are considered disreputable or irrational-its deep connections to sexuality, magic, trance and alternative mind states, healing, social control, generational conflict, political unrest, even violence and murder. They suppress the stories of the outsiders and rebels who created musical revolutions and instead celebrate the mainstream assimilators who borrowed innovations, diluted their impact,…
I have two major passions in life: music and writing. I started learning guitar aged 16, and my friends and I formed a band as soon as we possibly could. My first professional job was writing about pop music for a monthly magazine, and much later in life, I discovered jazz. Now I’m a bass-player, jazz singer, and composer who works with some of the finest jazz musicians in London, and I play regularly at Ronnie Scott’s club. As well as the Donald Fagen biography, I’ve also written biographies of the great jazz singers Mark Murphy (for me, the greatest of them all) and Jon Hendricks.
You thought you knew everything there was to know about The Beatles. I thought I did. I was wrong.
Craig Brown somehow manages to tell a very familiar story with details that either you never knew or had forgotten. He isn’t scraping the barrel: the book is full of excellent stories about the Fab Four, and sheds new light on where the band came from and where they ended up. It’s more than 600 pages long, and beautifully written, but a very easy read.
SHORTLISTED for the Baillie Gifford Prize's 25th Anniversary Winner of Winners award
WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2020
A Spectator Book of the Year * A Times Book of the Year * A Telegraph Book of the Year * A Sunday Times Book of the Year
From the award-winning author of Ma'am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret comes a fascinating, hilarious, kaleidoscopic biography of the Fab Four.
John Updike compared them to 'the sun coming out on an Easter morning'. Bob Dylan introduced them to drugs. The Duchess of Windsor adored them. Noel Coward despised them. JRR Tolkien…
My earliest filmgoing memory is of a bad guy getting pushed down the stairs in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much. That shocking scene has stayed with me, leading me into a lifetime of exploring the dark visions of crime stories. It was only natural that my love of rock music, and in its interaction with other media would draw me to mystery writers whose books were fueled by their love of rock, blues and pop. "If not for music and movies, I wouldn't be a novelist," George Pelecanos once told me. "They have influenced me more than any author. I want to shout about it." Me too.
This novel by the author of Endless Love (fabulous novel, terrible movie adaptations) isn't a mystery novel in the strictest terms. But it's about one of the greatest human mysteries, Bob Dylan, represented by fictional singer-songwriter Luke Fairchild, and considering how little we know about Dylan, how can we not seize the chance to see him through the eyes of a great novelist? The novel is narrated by Fairchild's illegitimate son, who obsessively searches for his father after discovering he is a legendary artist. In an act of considerable nerve, Spencer punctuates the pages with Dylanesque lyrics.
A man’s impassioned search for his legendary rock star father becomes a journey of self-discovery in this masterful novel from bestselling author Scott Spencer
Billy Rothschild’s obsession with legendary ’60s folksinger Luke Fairchild could be considered fanatic, if not for the fact that Luke is actually Billy’s father. Raised by his beautiful, charismatic, former–flower child mother, Billy is a lost soul. Determined to learn something—anything—about his origins, he sets out on an illuminating quest to find and confront the father he always knew of but never knew.
Evocative and lyrical, The Rich Man’s Table is a moving portrait of a…
Where Are Your Boys is the book I always wanted to write. Watching emo bands like My Chemical Romance and Paramore soar from suburbs to stardom during my high school years inspired me to take writing seriously, that a kid like me growing up in New Jersey with few connections to the media industry could find a backdoor in, because those bands did, too. With its dense population, adjacency to New York City, and a multitude of record stores and all-ages shows, New Jersey was the setting for much of emo's 2000s boom and the home of My Chemical Romance and many other important bands.
This book gave me a drive. Goodman’s account of the Strokes’ debaucherous rise in 9/11-era New York City ignited my passion for oral history and to tell the story of the music that made me. Downtown cool kid garage rock shaped popular culture immensely, but so did My Chemical Romance and their cohort (even more so, I’d argue). Up to this point (MMITB was published in 2017), 2000s emo was frequently misconstrued by those too old to have understood its impact or left out of the conversation entirely.
As I conducted interviews for my book, I challenged my own hypotheses (and personal biases) about these two scenes. I learned they intermingled more than I thought. I talked to Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz about DJing the ultra-hip downtown party Misshapes and My Chemical Romance’s Mikey Way about trying to catch a glimpse of Madonna at the same place.
A SUNDAY TIMES, ROUGH TRADE, ROLLING STONE, MOJO AND UNCUT BOOK OF THE YEAR LONGLISTED FOR THE PENDERYN MUSIC BOOK PRIZE
New York, 2001. 9/11 plunges the US into a state of war and political volatility-and heralds the rebirth of the city's rock scene. As the old-guard music industry crumbles, a group of iconoclastic bands suddenly become the voice of a generation desperately in need of an anthem.
In this fascinating and vibrant oral history, acclaimed journalist Lizzy Goodman charts New York's explosive musical transformation in the early 2000s. Drawing on over 200 original interviews, Goodman follows the meteoric rise…
