Here are 100 books that Machers and Rockers fans have personally recommended if you like
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My first interests in music were artists and bands that fell outside convenient genre pigeon-holing, and I wondered why conventional musical “histories” overlooked them. When I started to dig around, I discovered whole worlds of music that were far more compelling than anything that fit neatly into tidy narratives. It taught me to always look in the corners, between the cracks, beneath the floorboards, for the real weirdos and dreamers. With that healthy skepticism in hand, everything I did subsequently at my label ignored the pressures to conform to such silly and confining definitions. It was a way more fun, creative, and liberating way to run things.
DIY. Do-it-yourself. An ethos that seems simple enough now, but it was a revolution that started in underground music and eventually changed popular culture.
These in-the-trenches perspectives by bands that were immensely influential spoke directly to the eco-system of clubs, stores, bands, labels, and artists that I later tapped into with my label.
An almost inadvertent “How-To” primer for someone like me, who was disinterested in what the arbiters of popular culture were trying to sell.
Finally in paperback, the story of the musical revolution that happened right under the nose of the Reagan Eighties - when a small but sprawling network of bands, labels, fanzines, radio stations and other subversives re-energised American rock with punk rock's d-I-y credo and created music that was deeply personal, often brilliant, always challenging and immensely influential. OUR BAND COULD BE YOUR LIFE is a sweeping chronicle of music, politics, drugs, fear, loathing and faith that is already being recognized as an indie rock classic in its own right.
Among the legendary bands featured are: Black Flag, the Minutement, Mission…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
My first interests in music were artists and bands that fell outside convenient genre pigeon-holing, and I wondered why conventional musical “histories” overlooked them. When I started to dig around, I discovered whole worlds of music that were far more compelling than anything that fit neatly into tidy narratives. It taught me to always look in the corners, between the cracks, beneath the floorboards, for the real weirdos and dreamers. With that healthy skepticism in hand, everything I did subsequently at my label ignored the pressures to conform to such silly and confining definitions. It was a way more fun, creative, and liberating way to run things.
At a time when anything that smacked of “punk rock” was dismissed as prurient, insignificant, and, ultimately, irrelevant, Greil hit me as something of a philosopher king.
He lent legitimacy and heft to the premise that I intuitively felt—but couldn’t articulate—that punk rock was more than offending the masses with loud music, torn clothes, and spiky hair. Rather, it was a deeper phenomenon that reverberated throughout our cultural landscape with a rich history behind it.
This was a welcome affirmation for me that this music, this lifestyle, could be a genuine agent of lasting social change.
This book is about a single, serpentine fact: late in 1976 a record called 'Anarchy in the UK' was issued in London, and this event launched a transformation of pop music all over the world. The song distilled, in crudely poetic form, a critique of modern society once set out by a small group of Paris intellectuals.
In Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus's classic book on punk, Dadaism, the situationists, medieval heretics and the Knights of the Round Table (amongst others), the greatest cultural critic of our times unravels the secret history of the twentieth century.
My first interests in music were artists and bands that fell outside convenient genre pigeon-holing, and I wondered why conventional musical “histories” overlooked them. When I started to dig around, I discovered whole worlds of music that were far more compelling than anything that fit neatly into tidy narratives. It taught me to always look in the corners, between the cracks, beneath the floorboards, for the real weirdos and dreamers. With that healthy skepticism in hand, everything I did subsequently at my label ignored the pressures to conform to such silly and confining definitions. It was a way more fun, creative, and liberating way to run things.
Like most people, I thought songs were songs. They were just there, as they always had been. I didn’t think much of their provenance or their context.
This book popped my brain wide open and hipped me that all those benign, been-there-forever items in the Great American Songbook were haunted by the ghosts of a country founded under some troubling circumstances. It is an endlessly fascinating and eerie dig through the graveyards of our shared musical heritage.
I will never hear the songs he shines a lantern light on in the same way again.
For twenty years, Nick Tosches searched for facts about the life of Emmett Miller, a yodelling blackface performer whose songs prefigured jazz, country, blues and much of the popular music of the twentieth century.
Beginning with a handful of 78 rpm records and ending at a tombstone in a Macon, Georgia graveyard, Tosches pieces together a life - and illuminates the spirit of musicmarkers from Homer to the Rolling Stones.This is a brilliant, inspired journey by one of the most original writers at work today.
In 1913, a 15-year-old pregnant girl was found dead of apparent suicide. Dr. James Wilson, a new graduate and the first doctor ever to start a practice in this rural town, feels guilty over her death because of his delayed intervention.
My first interests in music were artists and bands that fell outside convenient genre pigeon-holing, and I wondered why conventional musical “histories” overlooked them. When I started to dig around, I discovered whole worlds of music that were far more compelling than anything that fit neatly into tidy narratives. It taught me to always look in the corners, between the cracks, beneath the floorboards, for the real weirdos and dreamers. With that healthy skepticism in hand, everything I did subsequently at my label ignored the pressures to conform to such silly and confining definitions. It was a way more fun, creative, and liberating way to run things.
As a kid, I thought, because that is what I was taught by simplified historic revisionism, that Rock n Roll was invented one day when Bill Haley perfected his spit curl, or when Elvis went on the Ed Sullivan Show to shake his hips.
Lost Highway fundamentally reshaped my understanding of the dynamics that shaped this music, and thus, ultimately, everything that followed.
By delving into headwaters that crossed race and genre, I learned of the elemental—and mythical—forces that had been percolating for decades (centuries?) beneath our feet, and unleashed an enormous cultural shift.
Winner of Ishmael Reed's Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award
This masterful explorationof American roots music--country, rockabilly, and the blues--spotlights the artists who created a distinctly American sound, including Ernest Tubb, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Elvis Presley, Merle Haggard, and Sleepy LaBeef. In incisive portraits based on searching interviews with these legendary performers, Peter Guralnick captures the boundless passion that drove these men to music-making and that kept them determinedly, and sometimes almost desperately, on the road.
I've been passionate about music for almost my entire life. Jazz music in particular speaks to me but not just jazz. I love music, full stop. I really discovered jazz when I attended a jazz club workshop in London and there, I had to join in or leave. I chose to join in and since then I have never looked back. I was introduced to more jazz musicians and now write about music for three major columns as well as Readers’ Digest. My Women In Jazz book won several awards. I have been International Editor for the Jazz Journalist Association and had my work commissioned by the Library of Congress.
Howard Goodall is one of those authors who explains things incredibly clearly.
I found this book an eye-opener, a way into a deeper understanding of music, and a book to have by my side, to dip into whenever I needed to get an idea straight of understand a concept. Because he writes in such an accessible manner, the complexity of music becomes clearer. There are eye-opening facts, historical stories, and facts alongside well written and informative passages.
Music is an intrinsic part of everyday life, and yet the history of its development from single notes to multi-layered orchestration can seem bewilderingly complex.
In his dynamic tour through 40,000 years of music, from prehistoric instruments to modern-day pop, Howard Goodall leads us through the story of music as it happened, idea by idea, so that each musical innovation-harmony, notation, sung theatre, the orchestra, dance music, recording-strikes us with its original force. Along the way, he also gives refreshingly clear descriptions of what music is and how it works: what scales are all about, why some chords sound…
My interests as a historian involve examining how Americans organize to
change policy or politics through affiliations beyond political parties
and, by extension, thinking about how culture is made and supported
through institutions and businesses. These messy networks and
relationships ultimately define how we relate to one another in the U.S.
Indie music scenes are one way to trace all of these relationships,
from federal policy governing radio stations and what goes out over the
airwaves to the contours of local music scenes, to the business of
record labels, to ordinary DJs and music fans trying to access
information and new sounds that they love.
No one combines the business of indie scenes – from production to labels to distribution – better than Holly Kruse. In this accessible yet rich book, she details the complicated structure of the alternative system that Azerrad nods to in his history of the bands that occupied the airwaves and whose products circulated through these systems.
To say that these independent music labels and distributors operated completely absent of the corporate music industry from the beginning is a canard, as Kruse demonstrates, but she also reveals the personal and particular practices that shaped these emerging commercial relationships and consumption patterns that undergirded music fans’ ability to participate in music scenes locally, as well as to access sounds from across the nation, and indeed the world.
Site and Sound: Understanding Independent Music Scenes examines how independent pop and rock music scenes of the 1980s and 1990s were constituted within social and geographical spaces. Those active in the production and consumption of «indie» pop and rock music thought of their practices as largely independent of the music mainstream – even though some acts recorded for major labels. This book explores the web of personal, social, historical, geographical, cultural, and economic practices and relationships involved in the production and consumption of «indie» music.
Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977, and Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977. Both began a historic journey with unique 'time capsules' on board intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record 12-inch gold-plated disk…
As a Gex Xer who came of age in the 80s, I haunted record stores, collected albums, and listened to music to gain insight into the bands I loved. As a musician I’ve always been fascinated by the creative process of songwriting. I’m intrigued by the interpersonal dynamics that make and break bands. I’m drawn to the business side of the music industry and the way iconic bands and music were marketed to us. The five books I’ve recommended are my personal favorites for highlighting how the music so many Gen Xers love was created and how years later it can still move us and give meaning to our everchanging lives.
Being a musician in a band has been a hallmark of my life. When I first read Roddy Doyle’s book, I was amazed at how he expertly captured the exhilarating emotional peaks that come with starting a band. The early days of being in a band are some of the best, and Doyle writes exquisitely about the joy of shared dreams, spontaneous creativity, and the camaraderie that comes as you create a new musical family.
He also illustrates the inevitable tensions that can and do arise—egos clash, personalities differ, and the pressures of maintaining unity. But like Doyle, I agree that, in the end, the effort and energy are their own reward. The goal should always be making art for art’s sake.
First published in 1988, THE COMMITMENTS follows a small band of musicians from the Barrytown area of Dublin as they try to make the big time. From the author of THE SNAPPER, THE VAN and PADDY CLARKE HA HA HA.
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.
David Hewitt’s On the Road: Recording the Stars in a Golden Era of Live Music is an important contribution to the extensive annals of popular music history in that it focuses on the business of live recording that was an integral component to the explosion of rock ‘n’ roll from the 1960s through the 1980s. Hewitt was a top live recording engineer and his expertise permeates the pages of the richly detailed book.
This book tells the story of a life spent on the road recording the rich diversity of music in America when it was a major part of our lives, not just digital background noise. For music fans, there was a golden era of live music, stretching from the 1960s through the 1980s, and even evolving into the 1990s, if you want to be generous.
In the pre-digital era, music fans spent a large part of their free time (and money) listening to their favorite artist’s recordings. It was an analog world so if they wanted to hear the music, they…
When I was a kid, my biggest escape was my father’s record collection. Growing up in 1990s NJ, music was a huge part of my experience. Springsteen was from a few miles south, Bon Jovi was from the town next to mine, and Whitney Houston was from the same state but a different county. Music told stories. Inspired my the music of my youth, I now make my living as a storyteller— I tell stories onstage, write books about storytelling and teach others how to tell stories effectively. I have no musical gifts except for the mass consumption of any book with juicy tales about the world of music. Here are a few of my favorites.
Well, no one ever said Guns N Roses was boring. Slash’s book is one that could be read in one sitting then quickly passed to a friend so you can dish the behind-the-scenes details together. Slash is a fun narrator for a story that is wild, tragic, and inspiring all at once.
It seems excessive...but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
The mass of black curls. The top hat. The cigarette dangling from pouty lips. These are the trademarks of one of the world's greatest and most revered guitarists, a celebrity musician known by one name: Slash.
Saul "Slash" Hudson was born in Hampstead to a Jewish father and a black American mother who created David Bowie's look in The Man Who Fell to Earth. He was raised in Stoke until he was 11, when he and his mother moved to LA. Frequent visitors to the house were David Bowie,…
Deputy Jenna Hart has only been working in her sleepy hometown of Pearl Springs for seven months when city officials begin to be targeted by a killer. Twenty years ago, the construction of a dam caused people to lose their land to eminent domain. That wound has not healed with…
I’m a historian of the senses. When I first traveled to the United States, I was fascinated and overwhelmed by the smell and sound of the streets entirely different from my hometown in Japan. Since then, every time I go abroad, I enjoy various sensory experiences in each country. The first thing I always notice is the smell of the airport which is different from country to country. We all have the senses, but we sense things differently—and these differences are cultural. I wondered if they are also historical. That was the beginning of my inquiry into how our sensory experience has been constructed and changed over time.
Why do certain tunes become popular and others fail? What is music that sells? In Selling Sounds, Suisman explains how the music industry has shaped the culture of listening to music and how they capitalized on it, creating an entirely new music culture in the early-twentieth-century United States. This emergence of the music industry and culture involved not just the creation of novel sounds by a genius musician, but rather commercial, technological, and cultural changes, which are still with us today.
From Tin Pan Alley to grand opera, player-pianos to phonograph records, David Suisman's "Selling Sounds" explores the rise of music as big business and the creation of a radically new musical culture. Around the turn of the twentieth century, music entrepreneurs laid the foundation for today's vast industry, with new products, technologies, and commercial strategies to incorporate music into the daily rhythm of modern life. Popular songs filled the air with a new kind of musical pleasure, phonographs brought opera into the parlor, and celebrity performers like Enrico Caruso captivated the imagination of consumers from coast to coast. "Selling Sounds"…
