Rock History

Everything’s changing for twelve-year-old Marlee. Her brother’s gone off to college and her sister’s moved out of the room they’ve shared since Marlee was born. To Marlee, it feels like her whole world’s falling apart. On top of all that, she’s starting middle school and has...

Don’t miss the TV series, Dark Winds, based on the Leaphorn, Chee, & Manuelito novels, now on AMC and AMC+! Navajo Tribal cops Jim Chee and Bernadette Manuelito, and their mentor, the legendary Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, investigate two perplexing cases in this exciting Southwestern mystery...

In his tell-all, legendary Doors guitarist, Robby Krieger, one of Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time," opens up about his band's meteoric career, his own darkest moments, and the most famous black eye in rock 'n' roll. ​Few bands are as shrouded in the murky haze of rock...

From the acclaimed author of Rip It Up and Start Again and Retromania—“the foremost popular music critic of this era (Times Literary Supplement)—comes the definitive cultural history of glam and glitter rock, celebrating its outlandish fashion and outrageous stars, including David Bowie...

Mick Jagger, Jimmy Cliff, Roger Waters, Jimmy Page, Stevie Wonder, Bonnie Raitt, and many other leading artists reveal for the first time the emotions, inspirations, and techniques behind their influential works. Covering the history of rock, R&B, country, disco, soul, reggae, and pop, Anatomy of a Song is a love letter to the songs that have defined generations of listeners.

There's Always a Trail When a stranger named Handy offered to track down Cass Bailey's stolen money for a stake in the CB range, Bailey has nothing more to lose. But his pretty hot-tempered daughter, Ann, was certian that Handy couldn't find the money unless he'd had a hand in stealing it. So...

When it comes to mastering a foreign language, learning around your interests makes all the difference. But finding books designed for language learners can be hard! This book fixes that. For the first time, you’ll learn to improve your Spanish while learning about the history and theory of rock’n’roll.

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.

As an A&R man at Epic Records, Tom Werman helped introduce the world to REO Speedwagon, Boston, Ted Nugent, and Cheap Trick; he also discovered KISS, Rush, and Lynyrd Skynyrd, but his record label passed on all of them. Then, as an independent producer, he oversaw landmark albums by Mötley Crüe, Twisted Sister, Lita Ford, Jeff Beck, Poison, and many more. All in all, his record-making resume includes twenty-three gold- or platinum-selling albums and cumulative sales of more than fifty-two million copies.

The Art of the Straight Line captures the energy of Lou Reed’s worlds of Tai Chi, music, and meditation. It was edited by his wife, the artist Laurie Anderson, with Stephan Berwick, Bob Currie, and Scott Richman. Lou Reed was a musician, singer, songwriter, poet, and founding member of the...

A long time ago, in a suburban high school not so far away, a closeted nerd (me) and a closeted soccer star (Hutch) fell in love and planned to make their public debut at prom. Until Hutch bailed at the last minute, leaving me with a broken heart and unworn tuxedo. Tale as old as time, right? I spent the past ten years working to forget Hutch, returning to our old high school to teach and make new memories that could erase ones of him. I thought Hutch was ancient history, off living his professional athlete life.

In the follow-up to Anthem: Rush in the '70s, Martin Popoff brings together canon analysis, cultural context, and extensive firsthand interviews to celebrate Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart at the peak of their persuasive power. Rush was one of the most celebrated hard rock acts of the '80s, and the second book of Popoff's staggeringly comprehensive three-part series takes listeners from Permanent Waves to Presto, while bringing new insight to Moving Pictures, their crowning glory.

Performed by Jim Morrison, Patti Smith, Liz Phair, Oliver Ray, Tom Robbins, Frank Lisciandro, Anne Morrison Chewning, Sefton Graham, and Ian Morrison. Includes Jim Morrison’s final poetry recording, now available for the first time, at the Village Recorder in West Los Angeles on his 27th...

By turns fascinating, funny, and bizarre, this book offers insight into the peculiar choices and idiosyncratic psychologies of hundreds of top musicians from the 1960s to the present. Originally published more than two decades ago to great success, it's been out of print for years and has now been completely updated and expanded to feature dozens of exclusive interviews, including conversations with groups like The Black Keys, The Killers, Twenty One Pilots, Coldplay, Cage the Elephant, and Vampire Weekend.

Steely Dan's songs are exercises in fictional world-building. No one else in the classic-rock canon has conjured a more vivid cast of rogues and heroes, creeps and schmucks, lovers and dreamers and cold-blooded operators-or imbued their characters with so much humanity.

A complete and truly unique biography of Robert Smith and company, The Cure, chronicling their 40+ year history with hundreds of entries in A to Z fashion. Definitive and deeply researched, Curepedia will surprise and inform fans everywhere as they await The Cure's highly...

Drawing on contributions from remaining members, contemporaneous musicians, critics, filmmakers, and the generation of artists who emerged in their wake, this definitive oral history celebrates not only the impact of The Velvet Underground but their legacy, which burns brighter than ever in the...

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung contains the wild and brilliant writings of Lester Bangs—the most outrageous and popular rock critic of the 1970s—edited and with an introduction by the reigning dean of rock critics, Greil Marcus.

Iggy Pop's legendary career has been tumultuous, reaching great heights with mega-hits and then hitting rock-bottom lows in jail and mental institutions. Along the way, he's become a cult-rock hero, an inspiration for dozens of other famous rockers, and has had a pretty good time of it, too. But the image of Iggy Pop versus the man behind that image, James Newell Osterberg, Jr., is surprisingly contradictory.

Discovered at last, the legendary lost manuscript of Grateful Dead co-founder and primary lyricist Robert Hunter, written in the early 1960s—a wry, richly observed, and enlightening remembrance of “the scene” in Palo Alto that gave rise to an incredible partnership of Hunter and Jerry...