What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe History of Jazz
Ted Gioia · 480 pages
Tells the story of jazz as it has never been told before, in a book that brilliantly portrays the legendary jazz players, the breakthrough styles, and the world in which jazz evolved.
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven
John Eliot Gardiner · 650 pages
Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the most unfathomable composers in the history of music. How can such sublime work have been produced by a man who (when we can discern his personality at all) seems so ordinary, so opaque, and occasionally so intemperate? John Eliot Gardiner grew up passing one of the only two authentic portraits of Bach every morning and evening on the stairs of his parents' house
Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011
Lizzy Goodman · 622 pages
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
Alex Ross · 624 pages
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century is a 2007 nonfiction book by the American music critic, Alex Ross, first published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It received widespread critical praise in the U.S. and Europe, garnering a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guardian First Book Award, a Premio Napoli and the 2011 Grand Prix des Muses. The Rest is Noise also had a spot on the N
The Beatles: The Biography
Bob Spitz · 992 pages
Even before the Beatles hit the big time, a myth was created. This version of the Beatles legend smoothed the rough edges and filled in the fault lines, and for more than forty years this manicured version of the Beatles story has sustained as truth - until now. The product of almost a decade of research, hundreds of unprecedented interviews, and the discovery of scores of never-before-revealed
Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago's South Side to the World
Robert Palmer · 310 pages
Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore
Albert Mudrian · 336 pages
In 1986, it was unimaginable that death metal and grindcore would ever impact popular culture. Yet this shockingly fast and barbaric amalgam of hardcore punk and heavy metal would define the musical threshold of extremity for years to come. Initially circulated through an underground tape-trading network by scraggly, angry young boys, death metal and grindcore spread faster than a plague of undead
Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop
Bob Stanley · 776 pages
For fifty years, pop music was created and consumed like this: you heard a record on the radio, or read about it in a music paper; you bought it on Saturday; you lent it to, or taped it for, a friend; and they reciprocated with another record. This book covers the birth of rock, soul, punk, disco, hip hop, indie, house and techno.
The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs
Greil Marcus · 313 pages
Selects ten songs recorded between 1956 and 2008 that embody rock and roll as a thing in itself--in the story each song tells, inhabits, and creates in its legacy.
Blues People: The Negro Experience In White America And The Music That Developed From It
LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka · 244 pages
"...the first book on jazz by a negro writer...new and highly provocative conclusions bolstered by bothe history and sociology...a must for all who could more knowledgeably appreciate and better comprehend America's most popular music, Negros in origin -Blues based- but now belonging to everybody." Langston Hugues "*Blues people* is not only a fresh, incisively instructive reinterpretation of
Life
Keith Richards · 592 pages
Autobiography of the guitarist, songwriter, singer, and founding member of the Rolling Stones, Keith Richards. With the Rolling Stones, Keith Richards lived the original rock and roll life. He tells his story of life in the crossfire hurricane; his listening obsessively to Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters records, learning guitar and forming a band with Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, the Rolling Stones'
Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
Legs McNeil, Gillian McCain · 525 pages
A contemporary classic, **Please Kill Me** is the definitive oral history of the most nihilistic of all pop movements. Iggy Pop, Richard Hell, the Ramones, and scores of other punk figures lend their voices to this decisive account of that explosive era.
Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division
Deborah Curtis · 212 pages
Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements
Bob Mehr · 501 pages
The Wrecking Crew: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll's Best-Kept Secret
Kent Hartman · 304 pages
A fascinating look into the West Coast recording studio scene of the '60s and the inside story of the music you heard on the radio. If you always assumed the musicians you listened to were the same people you saw onstage, you are in for a big surprise! In Los Angeles in the 1960s-70s, if you wanted to record a chart-topping track or album, you called in the crack session musicians collectively kno
1971 - Never a Dull Moment: Rock's Golden Year
David Hepworth · 307 pages
The Beatles Anthology
The Beatles, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, John Lennon, George Harrison · 368 pages
"Here, for the first time in print, is the history of the Beatles--by the Beatles. The extraordinary project has been made possible because Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr have agreed to tell their combined story especially for this book. Together with Yoko Ono Lennon, they have also made available the full transcripts (including all the outtakes) of the television and video series
Rip it Up and Start Again
Simon Reynolds · 664 pages
Rip It Up and Start Again is the first book-length exploration of the wildly adventurous music created in the years after punk. Renowned music journalist Simon Reynolds celebrates the futurist spirit of such bands as Joy Division, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, and Devo, which resulted in endless innovations in music, lyrics, performance, and style and continued into the early eighties with the vide
Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles
Geoff Emerick, Howard Massey · 400 pages
A fascinating memoir featuring never-before-told stories from Beatles recording engineer Geoff Emerick—the industry legend who made music history by crafting the groundbreaking sound of the group’s most famous records, including Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, and Abbey Road Geoff Emerick was only fifteen years old when he began working with the Beatles as assistant engineer for their early classics "I Wan