Entertainment History

The story of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair begins with Michael Lang, a kid out of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, who liked to smoke a joint and listen to jazz. He would find his way to Florida, open a head shop, and produce his first festival - Miami Pop, featuring Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, and others - then travel to Woodstock, where, after meeting Artie Kornfeld, his vision for a festival where folks could come and stay for a few days amid the rural beauty of upstate New York would become a reality.

A central figure in the Hollywood Ten and one of the most successful screenwriters in Hollywood history, Trumbo epitomized the spirit of American capitalism, yet he went to jail refusing to talk about his membership in the Communist party.

Here is a gripping, behind-the-scenes look inside the classic suspense shocker Psycho - and the creative genius who revolutionized filmmaking. First released in 1960, Psycho altered the landscape of horror films forever. But just as compelling as the movie itself is the story behind it. Stephen Rebello brings to life the creation of one of Hollywood’s most iconic films, from the story of Wisconsin murderer Ed Gein, the real-life inspiration for the character of Norman Bates, to Hitchcock’s groundbreaking achievements in cinematography, sound, editing, and promotion.

Bowie has long been haunted by the angst-ridden, emotional work of the Die Brucke movement and the Expressionists. Berlin is their spiritual home, and after a chaotic world tour, Bowie adopts this city as his new sanctuary. Immediately he sets to work on Low, his own expressionist mood-piece.

Much has been written about the work of David Lynch and existential fear in relation to Americana and the American Dream-as-American Nightmare in terms that are circular and artistically self-referential—or Lynchian. With reference to the 1983 television phenomenon The Day After, Lynch's work is newly situated in a resurgence of works reassessing the legacy of Trinity. With David Lynch's Part 8, a cultural circuit is completed, from the idiosyncratic and personal—or Lynchian—to the shared space of what theorist Paul Virilio describes as "cosmic fear"—or an emergency of social media.

From the sugar rush of Tokyo’s idol subculture to the discordant polyrhythms of its experimental punk and indie scenes, this audiobook by Japan Times music columnist Ian F. Martin offers a witty and tender look at the issues that shape Japanese music today. With insights into the evolution of J-pop as well as its history, infrastructure, and (sub)cultures, Martin deconstructs an industry that operates very differently from counterparts overseas.

Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in June 1963 in Soho's French House to request an interview for a student magazine he was editing. Bacon invited him to lunch, and over oysters and Chablis they began a friendship and a no-holds-barred conversation that would continue until Bacon's death 30 years later. Fascinated by the artist's brilliance and charisma, Peppiatt accompanied him on his nightly round of prodigious drinking from grand hotel to louche club and casino, seeing all aspects of Bacon's 'gilded gutter life' and meeting everybody around him.

"Why don't you come up and see me sometime?" Mae West invited and promptly captured the imagination of generations. Even today, years after her death, the actress and author is still regarded as the pop archetype of sexual wantonness and ribald humor. But who was this saucy starlet, a woman who was controversial enough to be jailed, pursued by film censors, and banned from the airwaves for the revolutionary content of her work, and yet would ascend to the status of film legend?

In the '80s, the Birmingham, England, band Duran Duran became closely associated with new wave, an idiosyncratic genre that dominated the decade's music and culture. No album represented this rip-it-up-and-start-again movement better than the act's breakthrough 1982 LP, Rio. A cohesive album with a retro-futuristic sound—influences include danceable disco, tangy funk, swaggering glam, and Roxy Music's art-rock—the full-length sold millions and spawned smashes such as "Hungry Like the Wolf" and the title track.

DJ Fat Tony has been described as 'the closest thing that club culture has to a national treasure' and the 'unlikely cult hero of quarantine'. Few people have crammed so many lives into one: when your first line of cocaine is aged 16 with Freddie Mercury, where do you go from there? I Don't Take Requests is Fat Tony's breathtakingly candid and outrageous memoir of a life of extremes.

The definitive oral history of the 1967 novel for teens, turned blockbuster film turned Tony-winning musical, and commemorated with a newly opened museum. This groundbreaking story has managed to stay gold for nearly sixty years. *Includes interviews with Rob Lowe, Ralph Macchio, C. Thomas...

All They Will Call You is the harrowing account of "the worst airplane disaster in California's history", which claimed the lives of 32 passengers, including 28 Mexican citizens - farmworkers who were being deported by the US government. Outraged that media reports omitted only the names of the Mexican passengers, American folk icon Woody Guthrie penned a poem that went on to become one of the most important protest songs of the 20th century.

“Leaps at the throat of television history and takes down the patriarchy with its fervent, inspired prose. When Women Invented Television offers proof that what we watch is a reflection of who we are as a people.” —Nathalia Holt, New York Times bestselling author of Rise of the...

From the author's first glimpse of a magical recording studio in the mid-1960s up through a busy career that continues to the present day, this rollicking story can only be told by those that were there. As the young tape operator on sessions for the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and Joe Cocker at the famed Olympic Sound Studios in London, Phill learned the ropes from experienced engineers and producers such as Glyn Johns and Eddie Kramer.

Rolling Stone contributing editor Steve Knopper delves deeply into Michael Jackson's music and talent. From the artist's early days with the Jackson 5, to his stratospheric success as a solo artist, to "Beat It" and "Thriller", "Bad", and "The Man in the Mirror", to his volatile final years, his attempted comeback, and his untimely death, Knopper explores the beguiling and often contradictory forces that fueled Michael Jackson's genius.

John Glatt tells the story of the Fillmores through the lives of Bill Graham, Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Carlos Santana, and an all-star supporting cast. Chronicling the East and West Coast cultures of the late 1960s and early 1970s-New York City with its speed, heroin, and the Velvet Underground versus San Francisco with the LSD-drenched Summer of Love - Glatt reveals how Graham made it all possible. But why did Graham shutter both Fillmores within weeks of each other in 1971, during the height of their popularity?

Punk rock and hip-hop, disco and salsa, the loft jazz scene and the downtown composers known as Minimalists—in the mid-1970s, New York City was a laboratory where all the major styles of modern music were reinvented, all at once, from one block to the next, by musicians who knew, admired, and borrowed from one another.

For the first time, Appetite for Self-Destruction recounts the story of the precipitous rise and fall of the recording industry over the past three decades, when the incredible success of the CD turned the music business into one of the most glamorous, high-profile industries in the world - and the advent of file sharing brought it to its knees.

20th Century Ambient details a crucial period in which ambient music became a fully realized idea and is secretly one of the most popular genres in the world. This book walks through ambient's ambiguous timeline to uncover not just the genre's evolution but to understand why it resonates so deeply with the human spirit.

Known as “Hitler's Filmmaker,” Leni Riefenstahl directed two of the most innovative and effective propaganda documentaries ever made, Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938), which glorified the Third Reich. In this definitive biography, Steven Bach illuminates the truths and lies regarding the self-proclaimed apolitical artist's involvement with Hitler and other Nazi leaders who financed and advanced her career. Probing the borders that divide art and beauty from truth and humanity, Bach untangles the past and gives an objective but unsparing appraisal.