Here are 100 books that Behind the Hits fans have personally recommended if you like
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Rock music has been in my blood and my soul for as long as I can remember. I’ve recorded two albums, "Twice Upon a Rhyme" (1972) and "Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time" (2020). My most recent novel is It’s Real Life. I’m also Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, and my students will tell you that from time to time, I’ll sing a bar or two from a song in my class. A book about music is always a hard-to-resist temptation.
I’ve read many books about The Beatles. I have very high standards, given that The Beatles are easily my favorite rock band.
I love their music so much, I even wrote a science fiction alternate history novel in which John Lennon was never assassinated, and The Beatles were still together making great music in the 1990s.
Dreaming the Beatles by Rob Sheffield checks all of my boxes. Not only does it contain fabulous insights into The Beatles, laced with little-known facts about them, but the book is written in Sheffield’s inimitable style, in which he plays on the titles of Beatles songs with puns that have the punch of truth, like I would be doing if I said I always wanted to be a paperback writer.
An NPR Best Book of the Year • Winner of the Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism
“This is the best book about the Beatles ever written” —Mashable
Rob Sheffield, the Rolling Stone columnist and bestselling author of Love Is a Mix Tape offers an entertaining, unconventional look at the most popular band in history, the Beatles, exploring what they mean today and why they still matter so intensely to a generation that has never known a world without them.
Dreaming the Beatles is not another biography of the Beatles, or a song-by-song analysis of the best of John…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Rock music has been in my blood and my soul for as long as I can remember. I’ve recorded two albums, "Twice Upon a Rhyme" (1972) and "Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time" (2020). My most recent novel is It’s Real Life. I’m also Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, and my students will tell you that from time to time, I’ll sing a bar or two from a song in my class. A book about music is always a hard-to-resist temptation.
I’ve lived in New York City all of my life. I sang doo-wop in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village when I was a teenager, and then folk rock with my group, The New Outlook.
If ever there was a time-travel ticket to a past and a place that I knew so well I could still see the sun glinting through the tree leaves, hear the din of the eateries as I walked by, and, most important, still hear the music by people vastly more famous than me, music that actually defied any given time or place, it would be David Browne's book, Talkin' Greenwich Village.
Rock music has been in my blood and my soul for as long as I can remember. I’ve recorded two albums, "Twice Upon a Rhyme" (1972) and "Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time" (2020). My most recent novel is It’s Real Life. I’m also Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, and my students will tell you that from time to time, I’ll sing a bar or two from a song in my class. A book about music is always a hard-to-resist temptation.
Billy J. Kramer had some great hit records with songs written by Lennon and McCartney—my favorite is “From A Window,” actually written just by McCartney—and Kramer knew The Beatles first-hand. Turns out that Kramer (born William Howard Ashton) not only has an ear for music (he’s still rockin’) but an eye for detail.
His autobiography is chock-full of memorable details. I couldn’t put it down.
When Billy J. Kramer's "Do You Want To Know A Secret?" by Lennon and McCartney topped the charts in 1963, he was the first singer in the world to have a number one hit with a Beatles song, apart from the Fab Four themselves. This propelled the teenage Kramer into the fast lane, and he followed it with another five top twenty singles in the next two years.
In this autobiography, Billy J. Kramer (born William Ashton) tells his rags to riches story, from his working class childhood in Liverpool to the racy world of international pop music. Managed by…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
Rock music has been in my blood and my soul for as long as I can remember. I’ve recorded two albums, "Twice Upon a Rhyme" (1972) and "Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time" (2020). My most recent novel is It’s Real Life. I’m also Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, and my students will tell you that from time to time, I’ll sing a bar or two from a song in my class. A book about music is always a hard-to-resist temptation.
In addition to The Beatles, one of the great loves of my life has been the work of Marshall McLuhan.
In fact, I’ve written two books about him—Digital McLuhan (1999) and McLuhan in an Age of Social Media (2015/2024)—as well as numerous articles, and recorded audiobooks and podcasts about his explorations of media and their relevance to our current age.
I also had the pleasure of knowing McLuhan and his family, and working with him on several important projects. So, you can imagine my joy in discovering Thomas MacFarlane’s The Beatles and McLuhan.
In the 1960s, The Beatles would address like no other musical act a radical shift in the cultural mindset of the late twentieth century. Through tools of "electric technology," this shift encompassed the decline of visual modes of perception and the emergence of a "way-of-knowing" based increasingly on sound. In this respect, the musical works of The Beatles would come to resonate with and ultimately reflect Marshall McLuhan's ideas on the transition into a culture of "all-at-once-ness": a simultaneous world in which immersion in vibrant global community increasingly trumps the fixed viewpoint of the individual.
I often (half-) jokingly say that I'm a failed musician. Growing up in Montreal in the eighties, music was my deepest joy. I sang in choirs for years, and even fancied myself the next great baroque singer (I guess I was a nerd.) Nerves, however, got the best of me, and I turned to the next best thing, writing. In my family, music is a meeting place, a shared language; my kids have taught me as much about music as I have taught them. Nothing pleases me more than to see on a playlist of theirs a tune that I listened to before their birth. Music is the golden thread of my life.
The 7-to-10-year-old set will love this one. My own rock-loving son, who inspired the character of Truffle in our book, was addicted to this series of books (which also includesBlack Music Greats: 40 inspiring icons), originally published in France. Both informative and filled with fun facts about the 40 artists selected by the authors (readers will learn about Mod culture through The Who, about how ABBA got their name, or how the Wu-Tang Clan influenced hip hop), the book reads like a cheat sheet on pop and rock music, with vivid and colorful illustrations.
The biggest bands…the hugest hits…the 40 most memorable music legends of all time are here! In this fun, fact-packed book from the 40 Inspiring Icons series, learn how these musicians became the voice of their generation.
Meet the King of Pop, find out about the Fab Four, learn how Bob Dylan led a revolution, discover the different identities of David Bowie, and fall "Crazy in Love" with Beyoncé. From the Doors, whose single "Light My Fire" took them to #1 on the US charts after years in obscurity, to the Wu-Tang Clan, whose debut album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)…
Hi, my name is Nick, and I’m a recovering rockist. I’ve collected records and vintage gear; I’ve owned Ray Coleman biographies. I’ve played in garage bands that did terrible punk-rock covers of songs like Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love.” I even used to subscribe to Rolling Stone magazine. And most embarrassingly, I believed in the power of rock – to effect political change, to free people’s bodies and minds. But if once I was a true believer, today I’ve become a rock ’n’ roll skeptic. And I hope that this list might help you rethink everything you thought you knew about rock, too.
A provocative pre-history of rock music, written to provoke. (Don’t hold your breath waiting for John, Paul, George, and Ringo to show up.)
Wald crafts a fascinating alternative history of commercial popular music in the first half of the twentieth century, asking readers to focus not on big names or influential records but on the everyday practices, technologies, and contexts through which musicians and listeners actually experienced the music. Avoid if you don’t want to see a few sacred cows slaughtered.
"There are no definitive histories," writes Elijah Wald, in this provocative reassessment of American popular music, "because the past keeps looking different as the present changes." Earlier musical styles sound different to us today because we hear them through the musical filter of other styles that came after them, all the way through funk and hiphop. As its blasphemous title suggests, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll rejects the conventional pieties of mainstream jazz and rock history. Rather than concentrating on those traditionally favored styles, the book traces the evolution of popular music through developing tastes, trends and technologies-including…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
While it is tempting to insist that the reason we wrote a five-volume set on the history of local rock ‘n’ roll was as context for rescuing the famed 1976 “Backdoor Mural,” it’s not entirely true. Jaime and I love live music, mark major life events with important musical milestones, and delight in bizarre musical tangents. Music moves us, history matters, and the intersection of song and society is profound, elucidating, and eternally relevant.
Lighters in the Sky: The All-Time Greatest Concerts takes on the tall task of trying to chronicle the greatest live popular music concerts in history. Corbin Reiff offers intricacies of the cultural and historical context for the legendary shows as well as details about the specific performances. Designed to entertain fans of all genres and certain to foment a bevy of arguments among die-hard fans, this book is delightful.
"Passionate, personal, and articulated from the lens of a masterful historian with a sharp interest in the topic. . . . A book that feels immersive without being stuffy, authoritative without being dismissive, and historical without being boring. It takes a rare writer to cover acts as disparate as Van Halen, The Dixie Chicks, and NWA with equal gravitas and knowledge, but in Lighters in the Sky Reiff has done just that..” ―UPROXX
“Veteran music critic Corbin Reiff catalogs a well-researched, year-by-year breakdown of the most seminal concerts in each of the last six decades.” ―Business Insider
We all know Little Richard’s great hits like "Long Tall, Sally", "Tutti Frutti" and "Good Golly Miss Molly" and Little Richard’s life was as wild as his records. It’s excess all areas as Spencer Leigh tells the story of Little Richard in Send Me Some Lovin. It is a biography of someone who transformed popular music. Spencer Leigh was born in 1945 and hearing Little Richard for the first time in 1956 changed his life. He is a world expert on the Beatles and he has written a series of music-based biographies – Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel – all of which are full of facts and opinions.
Published in 1968, this is the only authorised biography of the Beatles.
Davies was in the room when Lennon and McCartney were songwriting, providing insights worth the price of admission alone. He could have interviewed more of the outriders but on the other hand, this is a brilliant account of their claustrophobic world.
There's only one book that ever truly got inside the Beatles and this is it. The landmark, worldwide bestseller that has grown with the Beatles ever since.
During 1967 and 1968 Hunter Davies spent eighteen months with the Beatles at the peak of their powers as they defined a generation and rewrote popular music. As their only ever authorised biographer he had unparalleled access - not just to John, Paul, George and Ringo but to friends, family and colleagues. There when it mattered, he collected a wealth of intimate and revealing material that still makes this the classic Beatles book…
Hi, my name is Nick, and I’m a recovering rockist. I’ve collected records and vintage gear; I’ve owned Ray Coleman biographies. I’ve played in garage bands that did terrible punk-rock covers of songs like Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love.” I even used to subscribe to Rolling Stone magazine. And most embarrassingly, I believed in the power of rock – to effect political change, to free people’s bodies and minds. But if once I was a true believer, today I’ve become a rock ’n’ roll skeptic. And I hope that this list might help you rethink everything you thought you knew about rock, too.
Over the past few decades, so much writing about rock has sought to overturn received wisdom about the music.
Feldman-Barrett’s excellent, funny, and beautifully written book – re-examining the Beatles in relation to the lives of women – is the best kind of alternative history. She turns the story of the Beatles upside down, and makes you rethink everything you thought you knew about the group.
Winner of the 2022 Open Publication Prize by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-ANZ)
A Women's History of the Beatles is the first book to offer a detailed presentation of the band's social and cultural impact as understood through the experiences and lives of women. Drawing on a mix of interviews, archival research, textual analysis, and autoethnography, this scholarly work depicts how the Beatles have profoundly shaped and enriched the lives of women, while also reexamining key, influential female figures within the group's history.
Organized topically based on key themes important to the Beatles story, each…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
From my earliest days I was surrounded by music, from Friday night family band to our musical Christmas card on a bright red record to trumpet trios played with my dad and brother. I went to the University of Southern California on a trumpet scholarship, then took a detour from music and tried writing. I liked it. To this day, one of my favorite things is combining these two interests to create novels, stories, and plays about music. Since moving to Nashville, I’ve immersed myself in American popular music and have loved returning to my roots.
In Memphis during the 1950s, there was Black and there was White, but the two rarely met. One of the few places where they did was in clubs and recording studios, and the sparks they struck started a fire that came to be called rock ’n’ roll.
In this wonderfully rich stew of a book, author and filmmaker Robert Gordon walks the streets of Memphis, exploring the sights and sounds and smells of a unique, endlessly fascinating world.
As Gordon’s publisher says, “This is a book about the weirdos, winos, and midget wrestlers who forged the rock ’n’ roll spirit.” As Rolling Stone says, “If you haven’t read this book, do it now.”
Vienna in the 1880s. Paris in the 1920s. Memphis in the 1950s. These are the paradigm shifts of modern culture. Memphis then was like Seattle with grunge or Brooklyn with hip-hop―except the change was more than musical: Underground Memphis embraced African American culture when dominant society abhorred it. The effect rocked the world. We’re all familiar with the stars’ stories, but It Came From Memphis runs with the the kids in that first rock and roll audience, where they befriended the older blues artists, the travails of blazing a rock and roll career path where one had not existed (nor…
