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Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America

Jonathan Gould

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 34 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Nearly twenty years in the making, Can’t Buy Me Love is a masterful work of group biography, cultural history, and musical criticism. That the Beatles were an unprecedented phenomenon is a given. In Can’t Buy Me Love, Jonathan Gould seeks to explain why, placing the Fab Four in the broad and tumultuous panorama of their time and place, rooting their story in the social context that girded both their rise and their demise.

Beginning with their adolescence in Liverpool, Gould describes the seminal influences––from Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry to The Goon Show and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland––that shaped the Beatles both as individuals and as a group. In addition to chronicling their growth as singers, songwriters, and instrumentalists, he highlights the advances in recording technology that made their sound both possible and unique, as well as the developments in television and radio that lent an explosive force to their popular success. With a musician’s ear, Gould sensitively evokes the timeless appeal of the Lennon-McCartney collaboration and their emergence as one of the most creative and significant songwriting teams in history. And he sheds new light on the significance of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as rock’s first concept album, down to its memorable cover art.

Behind the scenes Gould explores the pivotal roles played by manager Brian Epstein and producer George Martin, credits the influence on the Beatles’ music of contemporaries like Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, and Ravi Shankar, and traces the gradual escalation of the fractious internal rivalries that led to the group’s breakup after their final masterpiece, Abbey Road. Most significantly, by chronicling their revolutionary impact on popular culture during the 1960s, Can’t Buy Me Love illuminates the Beatles as a charismatic phenomenon of international proportions, whose anarchic energy and unexpected import was derived from the historic shifts in fortune that transformed the relationship between Britain and America in the decades after World War II.

From the Beats in America and the Angry Young Men in England to the shadow of the Profumo Affair and JFK’s assassination, Gould captures the pulse of a time that made the Beatles possible—and even necessary. As seen through the prism of the Beatles and their music, an entire generation’s experience comes astonishingly to life. Beautifully written, consistently insightful, and utterly original, Can’t Buy Me Love is a landmark work about the Beatles, Britain, and America.


From the Hardcover edition.

Things the Grandchildren Should Know

Mark Oliver Everett

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Growing up in the Virginia suburbs, Mark Oliver Everett was to roam unsupervised with his sister, Liz, while his mother combated depression and his father, the eccentric and acclaimed quantum physicist Hugh Everett, remained distant and obsessed by parallel universes of his own creation.  (Everett writes, "As a little kid, I had a hard time with the realization that inanimate objects didn't have feelings or thoughts. I remember being on the verge of tears, standing there in the bathroom, as my mom tried to make me understand that the bathroom cabinet wasn't going to be hurt if I closed it too hard. I thought of the bathroom cabinet as one of my friends. Maybe I was confused because I thought of my father as a piece of furniture.") First, the author lost his father to heart failure, and then—in a staggeringly short period of time—his sister to schizophrenia and suicide and his mother to cancer. The author drew upon the relentless tragedies in his life for inspiration in writing highly acclaimed music with his indie rock group, the Eels.  Yet this is much more than a musician's tale. A true gem of a memoir, Everett’s story is a rich and poignant narrative on coming of age, love, death, and the creative vision.

Grateful Dead 365

Holly George-Warren

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In 1965, the Grateful Dead came to life in the heart of San Francisco’s hippie counterculture. Founding members Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, Phil Lesh, and Bill Kreutzmann (and soon after, Mickey Hart) created a unique blend of improvisational rock, folk, blues, and psychedelia, and the Dead went on to become one of the greatest jam bands of all time, releasing more than ten studio albums and touring constantly for legions of Deadheads.

 

In Grateful Dead 365, five decades of intimate portraits, candid backstage shots, and colorful performance images take readers on the band’s remarkable journey from the mid-sixties to the twenty-first century. Accompanied by the band’s distinctive graphics, these photographs capture memorable moments, including the band’s trip to the Great Pyramid of Egypt; scenes with colorful, trippy Deadheads; and tributes to Garcia. Written by award-winning music writer, Holly George-Warren, Grateful Dead 365 celebrates the evolution of one of the world’s most beloved bands.

Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain

Charles R. Cross

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 226 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Engrossing and disturbing 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I think this book is a very captivating read. It gives alot of detail about Cobain's childhood, rocky adolescence, the forming of Nirvana, all the way through to his death. By the end of the book, it's pretty easy to understand why he killed himself. Alot of people are going to say that it's not true, that it's the "Courtney sanctioned" version of what happened, that Cross is making it up to cover up a murder, but this is nonsense. Overall, Courtney Love is not portrayed in an overly-flattering way, neither is Cobain portrayed in a bad light. People who say that Cross makes Love look great and Cobain look bad either have not read the book or are reading that interpretation into the book.

Alot of people complain about the end, when Cross fictionalizes Cobain's last hours, but he never says that it's fact - to the contrary, Cross points out that that chapter is a fictionalization of what it might have been like. Does fiction have a place in a biography? In "Heaver Than Heaven," I say yes. It would have been a huge letdown if his death had been muddied over - even though we don't know what happened for sure.

I give the book four stars because it's a very engrossing read. My understanding of Kurt Cobain increased greatly after reading this book, and I think my appreciation for Nirvana's music also deepened. It's a haunting, sometimes disturbing portrait of one of rock music's most mythical legends.

Editorial Review:

This is the first in-depth biography of the troubled genius Kurt Cobain. Based on exclusive access to Cobains unpublished diaries, more than 400 interviews, four years of research, and a wealth of documentation, Heavier Than Heaven traces Cobains life from his early days in a double-wide trailer outside of Aberdeen, Washington, to his rise to fame, fortune, and the adulation of a generation.

Hammer of the Gods

Stephen Davis

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 70 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

As Overblown as the Band Itself 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Davis' profile of Led Zepplin is probably a reliable protrait of the band. If you are like me and you don't care too much for Led Zep music, you will still find the book an interesting read as a slice of pop culture history and biography of at least one fairly interesting guy (Jimmy Page).

Davis' use of language is sometimes preposterously overblown. His diction is sometimes questionable, too, as when he describes Bonham flying into a rage. Bonham "apotheosized into the Beast." (Here you have an example of both hyperbole and poor diction.)

The book is filled with this type of writing, which makes it exciting to read while casting a shadow of doubt as to its veracity.

Davis doesn't call Page out on his affected interest in black magic and sorcery. Davis seems to take it all seriously. The other side of that story is Page was a young man, in his 20s, with excess cash and a deficit in maturity, dabbling in a silly hobby.

Overall, this was a good read for the uninitiated. A bit of a guilty pleasure really.

Editorial Review:

The members of Led Zeppelin are major deities in the pantheon of rock gods. The first and heaviest of the heavy metal monsters, they violently shook the foundations of rock music and took no prisoners on the road. Their tours were legendary, their lives were exalted—and in an era well known for sex and drugs, the mighty Zeppelin set an unattainable standard of excess and mythos for any band that tried to follow them. They were power, they were fantasy, they were black magic. No band ever flew as high as Led Zeppelin or suffered so disastrous a fall. And only some of them lived to tell the tale.

Hammer of the Gods is the New York Times bestselling epic saga of the hard reign of Page, Plant, Jones, and Bonham—a spellbinding, electrifying, no-holds-barred classic of rock 'n' roll history that has now been updated to include the continuing adventures of the band.

Walk This Way: The Autobiography of Aerosmith

Aerosmith, Stephen Davis

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 142 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Walk This Way 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Excellent reading. Great to hear about life on the road. The ups and downs etc.

Great Read 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This is a great read for any fan of rock n' roll though it's definitely geared more towards Aerosmith fans themselves. It provides a very in-depth look at their drug-filled beginnings and how they progressed to a more sobered-up version. But it definitely focuses on their drug years. As a hard-core Aerosmith fan myself, it's all I could want and more. But for casual fans, it almost has too much. It provides very detailed descriptions of how songs were thought up, where the band toured, etc. Things that casual fans don't especially care about. However, it provides a great look at how a rock band functioned and really portrayed the rise, fall, and resurrection of Aerosmith well. Highly recommended.

Editorial Review:

Hang on, it's a hell of a ride!

From the band that lived by the motto "Anything worth doing was worth overdoing" -- Steven Tyler, Joe Perry, Tom Hamilton, Brad Whitford, and Joey Kramer -- comes a quarter century of rock godhood: the life, the music, the truth, the hell, the lost years, and the raunchy, unsafe sex.

And, of course, the drugs.

But after crashing in a suffocating cloud of cocaine, crystal meth, and heroin, Aerosmith rose up from the ashes to become clean and sober -- and reclaim their rightful title as World Champion Rockers. Learn how they did it in a book that is pure Aerosmith unbound: where they came from, what they are now, and what they will always be -- a great American band.

AC/DC: Maximum Rock & Roll: The Ultimate Story of the World's Greatest Rock-and-Roll Band

Murray Engleheart, Arnaud Durieux

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 21 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Lots of Information Without Much Insight 2 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

First off, AC/DC are my favorite band and have been for years. It took me some time to get around to reading this because it's unauthorized and the band are notoriously mum about what goes on behind the scenes. Still, other reviews gave this high marks, so I gave it a shot.

It's unclear to me at whom this book is aimed. It's a bit maddening because for someone to undertake a read of this size, they would most likely already be an established fan of the band. Therefore, a book that undertakes the history of AC/DC to this level of detail should deliver some new information, impressions, stories, themes, etc., that an existing fan might appreciate. Instead, it reads like an end-to-end string of Wikipedia articles, devoid of any personality, irony, or passion. Where the book falls short therefore, is in its dry exploration of facts that are well-known to most AC/DC fans. Some AC/DC fans will pick up a few bits of new info here and there, but for the most part, this is a clinical history of the band, interspersed with harmless anecdotes that don't give any new insight into the personality of the musicians.

Every once in awhile, the authors will hint at something interesting, or some insightful behind-the-scenes info, but they never deliver. They gloss over Phil Rudd's departure by simply mentioning there was an unspecified problem between him and an unnamed person in "the Youngs circle." Or halfway through the book, a point is made that Angus and Malcolm had a fiery relationship that wasn't always civil during the creative process. But he doesn't expound on how or why that tension existed. It is implied that Bon and possibly other members of the band battled substance abuse, which might have given a new depth to appreciating some of the lyrics and/or stories behind the records. However, such information is withheld or ignored. This is not to say that the book would be improved by the inclusion of lurid and embarrassing stories about the band. Quite the opposite, a respectful examination of such themes and events could deliver a stunning new appreciation of musicians of such high caliber.

For those readers who enjoyed the likes of rock biographies such as "No One Here Gets Out Alive," (Jim Morrison and The Doors), "Hammer of the Gods" (Led Zeppelin), or "The Dirt" (Motley Crue), due to the endless tales of drugs, sex, drugs, sex, drugs, sex, drugs and rock and roll, you will be disappointed. There is none of that here.

For those readers who are looking for a more respectful consideration of the band, this book will be overkill. Find a Mojo, Uncut, or Classic Rock magazine that has done a comprehensive piece on AC/DC and you will be just as satisfied.

I left this book feeling slightly more informed, but without much additional understanding or appreciation of AC/DC.

Editorial Review:

After more than three decades and 150 million albums, AC/DC has established itself as much more than just a great rock band. For millions of fans spanning several generations across the world, they are an ear-bleedingly loud, sweat-soaked religion.

Now, in a book of astonishing breadth and scope, comes the complete story of AC/DC. Everything you ever wanted to know and plenty more you never dreamt of is all here, the ultimate balls-out adventure, laced with sex, drunken escapades, and brawls—topped off with rare intimate photos to create the ultimate portrait of the ultimate rock band.

A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties

Suze Rotolo

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Total reviews: 33 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A Freewheelin’ Time is Suze Rotolo’s firsthand, eyewitness, participant-observer account of the immensely creative and fertile years of the 1960s, just before the circus was in full swing and Bob Dylan became the anointed ringmaster. It chronicles the back-story of Greenwich Village in the early days of the folk music explosion, when Dylan was honing his skills and she was in the ring with him.

A shy girl from Queens, Suze Rotolo was the daughter of Italian working-class Communists. Growing up at the start of the Cold War and during McCarthyism, she inevitably became an outsider in her neighborhood and at school. Her childhood was turbulent, but Suze found solace in poetry, art, and music. In Washington Square Park, in Greenwich Village, she encountered like-minded friends who were also politically active. Then one hot day in July 1961, Suze met Bob Dylan, a rising young musician, at a folk concert at Riverside Church. She was seventeen, he was twenty; they were young, curious, and inseparable. During the years they were together, Dylan was transformed from an obscure folk singer into an uneasy spokesperson for a generation.

Suze Rotolo’s story is rich in character and setting, filled with vivid memories of those tumultuous years of dramatic change and poignantly rising expectations when art, culture, and politics all seemed to be conspiring to bring our country a better, freer, richer, and more equitable life. She writes of her involvement with the civil rights movement and describes the sometimes frustrating experience of being a woman in a male-dominated culture, before women’s liberation changed the rules for the better. And she tells the wonderfully romantic story of her sweet but sometimes wrenching love affair and its eventual collapse under the pressures of growing fame.

A Freewheelin’ Time is a vibrant, moving memoir of a hopeful time and place and of a vital subculture at its most creative. It communicates the excitement of youth, the heartbreak of young love, and the struggles for a brighter future.

The Beatles Anthology

Beatles, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr

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Total reviews: 218 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

From their years growing up in Liverpool through their ride to fame to their ultimate breakup, here’s the inside story. Interwoven with The Beatles’ own memories are the recollections of such associates as road manager Neil Aspinall, producer George Martin, and spokesman Derek Taylor. The Beatles Anthology is a once-in-a-lifetime volume: warm, frank, funny, poignant, and bold-just like the music that’s been a part of so many of our lives. The Beatles Anthology is, for the first time, the story of The Beatles by The Beatles. Created with the full cooperation of Paul, George, Ringo, and Yoko Ono Lennon, it also includes the words of John, painstakingly compiled from sources worldwide. The Beatles Anthology is, in effect, The Beatles’ autobiography. The Beatles Anthology features over 1300 images, most previously unpublished. Paul, George, Ringo, and Yoko Ono Lennon all opened their own archives just for this project, as did Apple, EMI, and others long associated with The Beatles, allowing the unprecedented release of photographs, documents, and other memorabilia from their homes and offices. The result is an extraordinary wealth of visual material brimming on each and every page.

Journals

Kurt Cobain

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 194 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

A Moral Quandary 2 out of 5 stars.
5 of 9 people found this review helpful.

I can definitely see both sides of the issue of the moral quandary concerning this book. However, I think it's really pathetic that people on both sides are trying to assume what Kurt would or wouldn't want. I don't think that by reading these journals you somehow aren't a true fan of Nirvana just as not reading them somehow makes you a true fan. That's absurd. I will say, though, that in my personal opinion this book is a blatant and disgusting invasion of privacy. I think that it's rather obvious that Courtney Love is lacking scruples with her obviously cavalier attitude about releasing things that probably should have stayed private. I'm sure she will suffer some sort of karmic retribution (if she hasn't already) for doing so.

Regardless, I personally have never read these journals, nor will I ever do so. I'm not trying to be elitist by pretending to have any kind of moral high ground. It's a personal choice. I'm genuinely not interested to see what is in them. I think that the music kind of speaks for itself. That is, after all, why I personally am a fan of Nirvana and of Kurt. I don't think that reading some personal journal entries is going to suddenly give me or anyone insight into his genius or what led to his death. The story surrounding his death is tragic enough without crap like this being commercialized and his overall image being exploited and sold, which is really why he despised being famous to begin with. I think stuff like this is further evidence that far too much attention is being paid to the personal lives of celebrities as opposed to their work. This is precisely why people like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears are famous.

I don't think that by reading these journals anyone is going to be less of a fan or suffer any karmic retribution. I think that will be reserved for the person who allowed it to be released to the public in the first place. Regardless, I can also definitely understand the curiosity that people have and I don't think they should be judged for having a thirst for more information about a very important and brilliant musician.

Editorial Review:

Now in paperback, Journals includes never-before-seen material that will keep everyone talking.

Kurt Cobain filled dozens of notebooks with lyrics, drawings, and writings about his plans for Nirvana and his thoughts about fame, the state of music, and the people who bought and sold him and his music. His journals reveal an artist who loved music, who knew the history of rock, and who was determined to define his place in that history. Here is a mesmerizing, incomparable portrait of the most influential musician of his time.