Music Memoirs Bundle Four_12 Titles (Various) EPUB + MOBI -1xPDF

The definitive account of Whitney Houston’s astonishing life, ground-breaking career, and tragic death — complete with never-before-seen photographs — from the only one who truly knows the story behind the headlines: her mother, Cissy Houston.

Cissy has said little publicly about Whitney’s heart-breaking death. Now, for the first time, she opens up and shares the unbelievable story of her daughter’s life, as well as her own, and addresses Whitney’s brightest and darkest moments.

A legendary Grammy Award–winning gospel singer in her own right, Cissy Houston shows how the lessons from her own musical journey helped to shape Whitney’s career — from teaching Whitney to use her voice, to keeping her level-headed throughout her meteoric rise to fame.

With candor and respect, she sets the record straight about Whitney, exploring both her turbulent marriage and her misunderstood struggles with drug abuse. Cissy goes behind the tabloid headlines to show fans around the world the true, human side of a strong, successful — yet flawed — musical icon who died much too young.



Traces the story of The Sex Pistols, which was put together at the height of the punk rock explosion. Containing background notes and a biography of its manager Malcolm McLaren, it includes extracts from the Sex Pistols own secret diary. It also has a complete discography.



A fan from the moment the Doors’ first album took over KMPX, the revolutionary FM rock & roll station in San Francisco, Greil Marcus saw the band many times at the legendary Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom in 1967. Five years later it was all over. Forty years after the singer Jim Morrison was found dead in Paris and the group disbanded, one could drive from here to there, changing from one FM pop station to another, and be all but guaranteed to hear two, three, four Doors songs in an hour—every hour. Whatever the demands in the music, they remained unsatisfied, in the largest sense unfinished, and absolutely alive. There have been many books on the Doors. This is the first to bypass their myth, their mystique, and the death cult of both Jim Morrison and the era he was made to personify, and focus solely on the music. It is a story untold; all these years later, it is a new story.



Greil Marcus saw Bob Dylan for the first time in a New Jersey field in 1963. He didn't know the name of the scruffy singer who had a bit part in a Joan Baez concert, but he knew his performance was unique. So began a dedicated and enduring relationship between America's finest critic of popular music— "simply peerless," in Nick Hornby's words, "not only as a rock writer but as a cultural historian"— and Bob Dylan. In Like A Rolling Stone Marcus locates Dylan's six-minute masterwork in its richest, fullest context, capturing the heady atmosphere of the recording studio in 1965 as musicians and technicians clustered around the mercurial genius from Minnesota, the young Bob Dylan at the height of his powers.

But Marcus shows how, far from being a song only of 1965, "Like a Rolling Stone" is rooted in faraway American places and times, drawing on timeless cultural impulses that make the song as challenging, disruptive, and restless today as it ever was, capable of reinvention by artists as disparate as the comedian Richard Belzer and the Italian hip-hop duo Articolo 31. "Like a Rolling Stone" never loses its essential quality, which is directly to challenge the listener: it remains a call to arms and a demand for a better world. Forty years later it is still revolutionary as will and idea, as an attack and an embrace. How Does it Feel? In this unique, burningly intense book, Marcus tells you, and much more besides.



Catch a train to the heart of rock ‘n’ roll with this essential study of the quintessential American art form. First published in 1975, Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train remains a benchmark study of rock ‘n’ roll and a classic in the field of music criticism. Focusing on six key artists--Robert Johnson, Harmonica Frank, Randy Newman, the Band, Sly Stone, and Elvis Presley--Marcus explores the evolution and impact of rock ‘n’ roll and its unique place in American culture. This sixth edition of Mystery Train includes an updated and rewritten Notes and Discographies section, exploring the evolution and continuing impact of the recordings featured in the book.

Amazon.com Review

More than 20 years after its initial publication, Mystery Train remains one of the smartest, most provocative books ever written about rock-and-roll. Marcus puts his subjects--which include Robert Johnson, Elvis Presley, The Band, Randy Newman, and Sly Stone--into their proper context, which is the culture-at-large. He makes you understand why these musicians matter, and what they've contributed to the American imagination. In his introduction, Marcus confesses that he's no longer "capable of mulling over Elvis without thinking about Herman Melville"--to the benefit, I might add, of both parties.



A Special Edition with a New Introduction and an Updated Discography

This is Greil Marcus’s acclaimed book on the secret music made by Bob Dylan and the Band in 1967, which introduced a phrase that has become part of the culture: “the old, weird America.” It is this country that the book maps—the “playground of God, Satan, tricksters, Puritans, confidence men, illuminati, braggarts, preachers, anonymous poets of all stripes” (Luc Sante, New York magazine). In honor of Dylan’s seventieth birthday, this special edition includes a new introduction, an updated discography, and a cover featuring never-before-seen photographs of the legendary recording sessions.



Van Morrison,'' says Greil Marcus, ''remains a singer who can be compared to no other in the history of modern popular music.'' When Astral Weeks was released in 1968, it was largely ignored. When it was re-released as a live album in 2009 it reached the top of the Billboard charts, a first for any Van Morrison recording. The wild swings in the music, mirroring the swings in Morrison's success and in people's appreciation (or lack of it) of his music, make Van Morrison one of the most perplexing and mysterious figures in popular modern music, and a perfect subject for the wise and insightful scrutiny of Greil Marcus, one of America's most dedicated cultural critics. This book is Marcus's quest to understand Van Morrison's particular genius through the extraordinary and unclassifiable moments in his long career, beginning in 1965 and continuing in full force to this day. In these dislocations Marcus finds the singer on his own artistic quest precisely to reach some extreme musical threshold, the moments that are not enclosed by the will or the intention of the performer but which somehow emerge at the limits of the musician and his song.



Rockabilly had its roots in country, blues, folk, hillbilly, R&B, boogie-woogie and most other indigenous Deep South forms of popular song that you could strum three chords along to or howl down a cheap microphone. It was young people's music, made almost entirely by the first wave of teenagers, despised by adults in general and the country music establishment in particular. Its pioneer exponent, Elvis, eventually become respectable in the eyes of straight society but he was the exception. 1950s rockabilly was a spontaneous outburst of spirited three-chord songs, tiny record labels, primitive studios, fiercely partisan audiences and wild-eyed, driven performers who weren't even sure that their musical careers would last the week. The book charts the rise (and fall) of the original 50s wave of rockabillies. It will also follow the progress of the music, in clubs, on radio, TV and film, pinpointing the key record labels and important regional centres, showing how fashions eventually changed and left rockabilly high and dry, far too wild and primitive in an era of smoother sounds. Décharné traces the music to its Memphis roots.



It was the twang heard 'round the world: Rockabilly was born out of country, bluegrass, jazz, and the blues in the 1950s, becoming rock 'n' roll and ruling the world. Here's the story of Elvis Presley's first Sun records that inspired all. And here's Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and many more rockabillies from the golden years of 1955–1959, in a book chock full of photos, collectible memorabilia, movie posters, rare records, fashion, and rebel lifestyle. Includes contributions from noted music journalists Greil Marcus, Peter Guralnick, Luc Sante, Robert Gordon, and more.

The story continues today, with a rockabilly revival that began with stars, such as the Stray Cats and Robert Gordon, spreading around the globe from Europe to Japan. Today, rockabilly is better than ever, with bands like Rev. Horton Heat and others playing the music and living the life from Memphis to Helsinki to Tokyo. There's still good rockin'...



“One of the most exhilarating and important rock ’n’ roll stories ever told.”—Julian Cope

The trailblazing 13th Floor Elevators released the first “psychedelic” rock album in America, transforming culture throughout the 1960s and beyond. The Elevators followed their own spiritual cosmic agenda, to change society by finding a new path to enlightenment. Their battles with repressive authorities in Texas and their escape to San Francisco’s embryonic counterculture are legendary.

When the Elevators returned to Texas, the band became subject to investigation by Austin police. Lead singer Roky Erickson was forced into a real-life enactment of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and was put away in a maximum-security unit for the criminally insane for years. Tommy Hall, their Svengali lyricist, lived in a cave. Guitarist Stacy Sutherland was imprisoned. The drummer was involuntarily subjected to electric shock treatments, and the bassist was drafted into the Vietnam War.

This fascinating biography breaks decades of silence of band members and addresses a huge cult following of Elevators fans in the United States and Europe. The group is revered as a formative influence on Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, Patti Smith, Primal Scream, R.E.M, and Z.Z. Top.

Roky Erickson is the subject of a heralded recent documentary feature, You’re Gonna Miss Me; a box set of remastered Elevators CDs with liner notes by author Paul Drummond will be issued in fall 2007.



This subversively brilliant rock memoir, ingeniously styled as a biography, is the work of a nameless, faceless writer hired by an Orwellian entity called "the Corporation" to capture the essence of Ray Davies, lead singer and songwriter of The Kinks and one of the greatest rock 'n' rollers of all time. Tales of London and the swinging Sixties rock scene evolve as R.D. reveals his life and times to the writer, often passing his stories directly into the writer's consciousness. Carnaby Street, "Top of the Pops," the Cavern Club, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, and other fixtures of the period fade in and out of this compelling narrative. Part memoir, part social history, part psychological thriller, this elusive and daring book exposes rock stardom as the heaven, hell, and purgatory that it is.



The sharp, lyrical, and no-holds-barred autobiography of the iconoclastic writer and musician Richard Hell, charting the childhood, coming of age, and misadventures of an artist in an indelible era of rock and roll...

From an early age, Richard Hell dreamed of running away. His father died when he was seven, and at seventeen he left his mother and sister behind and headed for New York City, place of limitless possibilities. He arrived penniless with the idea of becoming a poet; ten years later he was a pivotal voice of the age of punk, starting such seminal bands as Television, the Heartbreakers, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids—whose song "Blank Generation" remains the defining anthem of the era. Hell was significantly responsible for creating CBGB as punk ground zero; his Voidoids toured notoriously with the Clash, and Malcolm McLaren would credit Hell as inspiration for the Sex Pistols. There were kinetic nights in New York's club demi-monde, descent into drug addiction, and an ever-present yearning for redemption through poetry, music, and art.

"We lived in the suburbs in America in the fifties," Hell writes. "My roots are shallow. I'm a little jealous of people with strong ethnic and cultural roots. Lucky Martin Scorsese or Art Spiegelman or Dave Chappelle. I came from Hopalong Cassidy and Bugs Bunny and first grade at ordinary Maxwell Elementary." How this legendary downtown artist went from a prosaic childhood in the idyllic Kentucky foothills to igniting a movement that would take over New York's and London's restless youth cultures—and spawn the careers of not only Hell himself, but a cohort of friends such as Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Debbie Harry—is just part of the fascinating story Hell tells. With stunning powers of observation, he delves into the details of both the world that shaped him and the world he shaped.

An acutely rendered, unforgettable coming-of-age story, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp evokes with feeling, clarity, and piercing intelligence that classic journey: the life of one who comes from the hinterlands into the city in search of art and passion.