I was a Brooklyn kid who grew up on Long Island. I started hitting the bars and clubs in NYC when I was still a teenager. I found my way to CBGB in 1975, moved to Bleecker St in 1976, and in a right place/right time moment I found myself working the Mudd Club door in early 1979. That moment was a life changer. The Mudd Club book tells the story.
The best book written about 1960’s Pop-Culture madness and mayhem. As founding member of The Fugs and a unique literary voice, Ed Sanders tells this tale brilliantly. The warning signs, the goosebumps, and knowing when it’s time to stop are all there in The Family.
Or Just Kidding as friends like to call it, is a classic, a fast read, and a romanticized and fantasized rewrite of a unique and incredible love affair.
It inspired me to write my own book. More straightforward than her 1975 groundbreaking record Horses but with the same ability to make you cry and laugh out loud at the same time.
“Reading rocker Smith’s account of her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, it’s hard not to believe in fate. How else to explain the chance encounter that threw them together, allowing both to blossom? Quirky and spellbinding.” -- People
It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation.
Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence…
Never Ready is a story about the complexity of friendship and belonging, their fluidity and inherent loss.
As she curates her life, Henri discovers the mysterious strength of her families, the one she was born into, and the one she finds—but no one is ever really ready for goodbye.
I read Acid Testas a child and it showed me and told me about everything I wanted or thought I wanted—and some of it I actually did. The book took me from a Junior High School dream of being cool and dropped me off at Punk’s front door nearly a decade later.
I looked around and people's faces were distorted...lights were flashing everywhere...the screen at the end of the room had three or four different films on it at once, and the strobe light was flashing faster than it had been...the band was playing but I couldn't hear the music...people were dancing...someone came up to me and I shut my eyes and with a machine he projected images on the back of my eye-lids...I sought out a person I trusted and he laughed and told me that the Kool-Aid had been spiked and that I was beginning my first LSD experience...
I fell for the whole package when I was 12 years old and listening to High Tide and Green Grass, the Rolling Stones' 1966 Big Hits album. As for Life, I don’t really care if Keith just spoke it all into a tape recorder and someone else transcribed it and wrote it. He’s an icon, a survivor, and one of the greatest faces of Pop Culture and Rock ‘n’ Roll. Between the songs, the guitar, the sense of style, and his enduring relationships with Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, and Patti Hansen, Lifeis a story like no other.
As lead guitarist of the Rolling Stones, Keith Richards created the riffs, the lyrics, and the songs that roused the world. A true and towering original, he has always walked his own path, spoken his mind, and done things his own way.Now at last Richards pauses to tell his story in the most anticipated autobiography in decades. And what a story! Listening obsessively to Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters records in a coldwater flat with Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, building a sound and a band out of music they loved. Finding fame and success as a bad-boy band, only…
Hope, Laughter, Survival on the Refugee Trail
by
Eileen Kay,
Dramatic true story with a wacky sense of humor.
Retired English teacher in Budapest meets foreign medical students fleeing the war in Ukraine, producing a sweet and unlikely friendship, spicy soup, and wicked joking. A sense of humor, however dark, can keep us from despair.
Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth are one of the great rhythm sections and one of the great love affairs in modern music. Chris lives large in my own book and the music of Talking Heads was making me dance and cheer way back in 1976. Remain in Love is the real story, beautifully told and written by Chris Frantz.
'As the Brits say: I'm gobsmacked. I devoured this book... one of the most potent examples of living the dream' DEBBIE HARRY
'A great drummer who has written a great book' BILL MURRAY
'A revealing inside account of the highs and lows of a band who looked and sounded like nobody else' OLIVIA LAING, Guardian
Chris Frantz's memoir tells the story of his life with Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club and his life-long love affair with Tina Weymouth. He remembers the early performances at CBGB alongside the Ramones, Patti Smith, Television and Blondie and recording the…
A memoir and history of the legendary Mudd Club as told by the club’s longtime doorman. Opening on Halloween 1978, Mudd Club became an underground mecca for artists, musicians, filmmakers, and assorted troublemakers. Whether it was Bowie or Johnny Thunders, Basquiat, Rauschenberg, Nan Goldin, or the Hells Angels, it was theplace to drink and drug, dance, and hook-up. It was a golden time and there were no rules.
Lolita Firestone, struggling Hollywood actress, visits Sedona, Arizona, catches so-called Red Rock Fever and establishes the Center for Cosmic Consciousness. Alas, when small groups of black men from African countries on the U.S. terrorism watchlist come to Sedona to attend the Cosmic Center's weekend workshops, the CIA takes notice and…
Family Recipes is the story of Vinny Marciano, owner of the most fabulously successful Italian restaurant in all of Upstate New York. All is pretty much hunky dory at Marciano’s Mangia House until the safe in the restaurant's business office is breached and the Marciano family’s secret heirloom recipes are…
