Rock Music Memoirs

From their beginnings as teenagers experimenting in a San Fernando Valley garage dubbed "The Hell Hole" to headlining major music festivals around the world, discover the whole story of Bad Religion's forty-year career in irreverent style.Do What You Want's principal storytellers are the four...

The Police have sold more than 50 million albums, made Rolling Stone's Greatest Artists of All Time list, and finished a triumphant world reunion tour in 2008. Now British journalist Chris Campion draws on extensive research and new interviews to trace the inside saga of this iconic group, including the unorthodox business strategies employed by manager Miles Copeland that took them to the top and the intense rivalry that drove Sting, Andy Summers, and Stewart Copeland to split at the height of their success in the 1980s.

Leaving school and starting his career at Decca Records in 1958 at the age of sixteen, Tony King would soon find himself becoming close friends with Elton John, rekindling John Lennon and Yoko Ono's relationship, mediating a quarrelsome Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and spending time with Freddie Mercury in his final days - a far cry from his childhood days in Eastbourne. Living in an era of seismic social, technological and cultural transformation, King experienced these defining moments as a stalwart in London and New York's gay scenes.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A fascinating behind-the-scenes account of the making of Bruce Springsteen’s ground-breaking album, Born to Run, one of the most iconic records in rock history “A lovely book about the making of Born to Run. It goes into great detail and great depth...

The definitive biography of the revolutionary band Nirvana and its star-crossed frontman Kurt Cobain, hailed by Rolling Stone as “the first [book] to comprehensively tell the band’s tale from Aberdeen, Wash., to world domination” “Amazingly raw and candid . . . an unsparing and...

Debbie Harry defined iconic band Blondie’s look. Chris Stein—her performing partner, lover, and lifelong friend—was its architect and defined its sound. “Parallel Lines”, their third album, catapulted to #1, sold 20 million copies, and launched singles like “Heart of Glass”, "Hangin' On the Telephone," and “One Way or Another”, providing the beat when Bianca Jagger and Halston danced at Studio 54 and the soundtrack to every 1970’s punk-soundtracked romance.

“One of the most casually insightful rock bios ever.”—Entertainment Weekly Told in the words of his musical accomplices, fellow-travelers, friends, and lovers, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead is an intimate and unusual biography of fabled singer–songwriter Warren Zevon, the musical force...

William and Jim Reid, brothers and founding members of The Jesus and Mary Chain—a band that bridged the gap between the punk explosion and the emergence of grunge and Britpop—chronicle the chaos, confusion, and stories behind their music. For five years after they’d swapped sought-after...

"Surely make you lose your mind . . ." So the Eagles warn us about the outrageous and ruthless lifestyle of the ambitious rock-n-roller. In fact, Don Henley could barely listen to the track "Life in the Fast Lane" when they were recording it. He was so high that it made him sick. The band that embodied the American dream with globe-straddling success, impossibly luxurious lives, and almost supernatural talent also descended into nightmare with betrayal, hate-filled hubris, the skeletons of perceived enemies, brutally discarded lovers and former band mates left unburied in the road behind them.

Exploding on the music scene in the early 1970s, the rock group KISS combined raw energy with theatrical showmanship—not to mention face painting! Founding member Gene Simmons—an outrageous star whose superlong tongue, legendary sexual exploits, and demonic makeup have made him a rock icon—recounts his own story as well as the history of the band. In KISS and Make-Up, Simmons shares a wild, shocking, and unbelievable tale about an immigrant boy from Israel who studied to be a rabbi but was saved by rock and roll and became one of the most notorious rock stars in the world.

From the world's leading authority on Bob Dylan comes the definitive biography that promises to transform our understanding of the man and musician—thanks to early access to Dylan's never-before-studied archives. In 2016 Bob Dylan sold his personal archive to the George Kaiser Foundation in...

Get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Megadeth’s iconic record, Rust in Peace, from the band’s lead vocalist and guitarist. When Rust in Peace was released in 1990, the future of Megadeth was uncertain. Fresh off their performance at the record-breaking Monsters of Rock festival, and...

It's 1982 and the Ramones are in a gutter-bound spiral. Following a run of inconsistent albums and deep in the throes of internal tensions, the legendary quartet is about to crash and burn. Enter Richie Ramone. Then a 26-year-old from New Jersey named Richard Reinhardt, he's snapped up by the group to be their new drummer and instantly goes from the obscurity of the underground club scene to membership in the most famous punk-rock band of all time, revitalizing the pioneering outfit with his powerful, precise, and blindingly fast beats.

A witty, revealing, sharply written work of memoir and criticism by the cofounder of Steely Dan Musician and songwriter Donald Fagen presents a group of vivid set pieces in his entertaining debut as an author, from portraits of the cultural figures and currents that shaped him as a youth to an...

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.

When Pete Shelley, lead singer of legendary punk band Buzzcocks, passed away in 2018, we lost one of music's brightest stars - as well as the chance to hear his story. Or so it seemed. Recordings have surfaced of a series of remarkable interviews in which Pete tells the story of his life, his band and his place at the beating heart of the punk explosion in fascinating detail. These remarkable recordings have now been brought back to life by professional actors in this audio edition of Ever Fallen in Love: The Lost Buzzcocks Tapes.

Unlike all previous versions of rock 'n' roll history, this book omits almost every iconic performer and ignores the storied events and turning points everyone knows. Instead, in a daring stroke, Greil Marcus selects 10 songs recorded between 1956 and 2008 and then proceeds to dramatize how each embodies rock 'n' roll as a thing in itself in the story it tells, inhabits, and acts out - a new language, something new under the sun.

For 6,557 miles, Chuck Klosterman thought about dying. He drove a rental car from New York to Rhode Island to Georgia to Mississippi to Iowa to Minneapolis to Fargo to Seattle, and he chased death and rock 'n' roll all the way. Within the span of 21 days, Chuck had three relationships end, one by choice, one by chance, and one by exhaustion. He snorted cocaine in a graveyard. He walked a half-mile through a bean field.

Bestselling author and legendary Doors drummer John Densmore offers a powerful exploration of the "greed gene"-that part of the human psyche that propels us toward the accumulation of more and more wealth, even at the expense of our principles, friendships, and the well-being of society. This is the gripping account of the legal battle to control The Doors's artistic destiny. In it, Densmore looks at his conflict with his bandmates over the right to use The Doors's name, revealing the ways in which this struggle mirrors and reflects a much larger societal issue.

The long-awaited, full-force autobiography of American punk music hero, Bob Mould. Bob Mould stormed into America's punk rock scene in 1979, when clubs across the country were filling with kids dressed in black leather and torn denim, packing in to see bands like the Ramones, Black Flag, and the...