Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Music

It was that voice, those eyes, that hair, the cars, the girls. Elvis Presley revolutionized American pop culture when, at age 21, he became a modern superstar. A Memphis Beau Brummel even before he found fame, Elvis had a personal style that, like his music, had an immediate impact on his audience that continues to influence us today.

Miles to Go is a frank and intimate exploration of Miles Davis' eccentric working life, drug habits, paranoia, depression, and subsequent recovery. Murphy explores Davis' troubled relationship with his children and the controversial role Cicely Tyson played in his life. The book also delves into the dynamics that made Davis' band work so well together, placing Davis' work in a historic, literary, and musical framework.

Beau Phillips was an insider and occasional accomplice who witnessed the legends of classic rock in their heyday and takes listeners inside the dressing rooms, hotel suites, and private planes of Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, AC/DC, Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, and dozens more to enjoy funny, decadent, and never-been-told stories of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The book's foreword was written by Sammy Hagar, former lead singer for Van Halen.

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.

Reggae superstar Bob Marley is one of the world’s most important and influential artists. Exodus, named by Time magazine as “Album of the Century,” is Bob Marley’s masterpiece of spiritual exploration. Recorded in London after an assassination attempt on his life sent Marley into exile from Jamaica, Exodus is the most lasting testament to his social conscience. Now, in The Book of Exodus, Goldman chronicles the making of this album, from its conception in Jamaica to the raucous but intense all-night studio sessions in London.

What was it about a small, humble folk instrument that allowed it to become an American icon? The guitar represents freedom, the open road, protest and rebellion, the blues, youth, lost love, and sexuality. Tim Brookes explores with adoration these ideas and how they became entwined with the history of America.

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.

A world-renowned composer of symphonies, operas, and film scores, Philip Glass has, almost single-handedly, crafted the dominant sound of late twentieth-century classical music. Rapturous in its ability to depict the creative process, Words without Music allows listeners to experience that sublime moment of creative fusion when life merges with art. Biography lovers will be inspired by the story of a precocious Baltimore boy who entered college at age fifteen before traveling to Paris to study under the legendary Nadia Boulanger; Glass devotees will be fascinated by the stories behind Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha, among so many other works.

The year that changed everything for the Beatles was 1966 - the year of their last concert and of Revolver, their first album created to be listened to rather than performed. This was the year the Beatles risked their popularity by retiring from live performances, recording songs that explored alternative states of consciousness, experimenting with avant-garde ideas, and speaking their minds on issues of politics, war, and religion. Music journalist and Beatles expert Steve Turner investigates the enormous changes that took place in the Beatles' lives and work during 1966.

Opera is the fastest growing of all the performing arts, attracting audiences of all ages who are enthralled by the gorgeous music, vivid drama, and magnificent production values. If you've decided that the time has finally come to learn about opera and discover for yourself what it is about opera that sends your normally reserved friends into states of ecstatic abandon, this is the book for you.

"The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music - through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel, development, jazz...[If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music." So says Amiri Baraka in the introduction to Blues People, his classic work on the place of jazz and blues in American social, musical, economic, and cultural history.

Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker is the first installment in the long-awaited portrait of one of the most talented and influential musicians of the twentieth century, from Stanley Crouch, one of the foremost authorities on jazz and culture in America. Throughout his life, Charlie Parker personified the tortured American artist: A revolutionary performer who used his alto saxophone to create a new music known as bebop even as he wrestled with a drug addiction that would lead to his death at the age of thirty-four.

Dave Van Ronk was one of the founding figures of the 1960s folk revival, but he was far more than that. A pioneer of modern acoustic blues, a fine songwriter and arranger, a powerful singer, and one of the most influential guitarists of the ’60s, he was also a marvelous storyteller, a peerless musical historian, and one of the most quotable figures on the Village scene. The Mayor of MacDougal Street is a firsthand account by a major player in the social and musical history of the ’50s and ’60s.

No singer has been more mythologized and more misunderstood than jazz legend Billie Holiday, who helped to create much of the mystique herself with her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues - and this authentic biography sets the record straight. Donald Clarke was given unrivaled access to a treasure trove of interviews from the 1970s with those who knew Lady Day in all stages of her short, tragic life - from her childhood in the streets and good-time houses of Baltimore, through the early days of success in New York and the years of fame, to her tragic decline.

Roger Keith “Syd” Barrett was the definition of a golden boy. With good looks and an aptitude for music, he was a charismatic child who fast became a teenage leader in 1960s England. Along with three school chums - Roger Waters, Richard Wright, and Nick Mason - he formed what would become Pink Floyd.

Now it can be told! The true, behind-the-scenes story of Casablanca Records, from an eyewitness to the excess and insanity. Casablanca was not a product of the 1970s, it was the 1970s. From 1974 to 1980, the landscape of American culture was a banquet of hedonism and self-indulgence, and no person or company in that era was more emblematic of the times than Casablanca Records and its magnetic founder, Neil Bogart.

On their 50th anniversary comes a groundbreaking rock-and-roll memoir by one of the founding members of the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead are perhaps the most legendary American rock band of all time. For 30 years, beginning in the hippie scene of San Francisco in 1965, they were a musical institution, the original jam band that broke new ground in so many ways.

As he finds himself within spitting distance of middle age, journalist Eric Spitznagel feels acutely the loss of...something. Freedom? Maybe. Coolness? Could be. The records he sold in a financial pinch? Definitely. To find out for sure, he sets out on a quest to find the original vinyl artifacts from his past. Not just copies. The exact same records.

The Rest Is Noise takes the listener inside the labyrinth of modern music, from turn-of-the-century Vienna to downtown New York in the '60s and '70s. We meet the maverick personalities and follow the rise of mass culture on this sweeping tour of 20th-century history through its music.

Cowboys and Indies is the definitive record-business bible, chronicling the pioneers who set the stylus on the most important labelsand musical discoveries of the last century. The narrative follows all the musical trends and developments from the phonograph to the Internet age as it delves behind the big business of corporate hit machines and the diligent industry of small, curated labels.