Here are 91 books that The Rolling Stone Record Guide fans have personally recommended if you like
The Rolling Stone Record Guide.
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Music has obsessed me since I got my first record player, around age five, and learned how to play the stack of used Beatles records that seeded my collection. I could probably pick a favorite music book from every decade of my life, and this list isn’t far off.
Lester Bangs ranks as one of the great music writers and as a high priest of gonzo, the new-journalism approach that posited the writer as the dominant character in rambling, straight-from-the-typewriter pop-cultural manifestos published in Rolling Stoneand Creem and their ilk. I think Lester rivals Hunter Thompson and Joan Didion as the most potent and enduring voice of that era. He’s one of my favorite writers. I don’t think he wrote anything but record reviews.
Until his death aged thirty-three in 1982, Lester Bangs wrote wired, rock 'n' roll pieces on Iggy Pop, The Clash, John Lennon, Kraftwerk, Lou Reed. As a rock critic, he had an eagle-eye for distinguishing the pre-packaged imitation from the real thing; written in a conversational, wisecracking, erotically charged style, his hallucinatory hagiographies and excoriating take-downs reveal an iconoclast unafraid to tell it like it is. To his journalism he brought the talent of a great a renegade Beat poet, and his essays, reviews and scattered notes convey the electric thrill of a music junky indulging the habit of a…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
Music has obsessed me since I got my first record player, around age five, and learned how to play the stack of used Beatles records that seeded my collection. I could probably pick a favorite music book from every decade of my life, and this list isn’t far off.
This floppy paperback matched the dimensions of an actual record, a geometry that made you feel you were flipping through your Beatles albums as you read it. It came to me as a birthday or Christmas present, probably around age eight. I read it cover to cover, over and over, memorizing entire passages like biblical verses. It was pretty much my only book until I discovered Mad magazine, around age ten. You could do a lot worse.
A comprehensive critical guide to the recordings of the Beatles includes over two hundred photographs tracing the lives and careers of these legendary rock stars
It’s open, honest, and really helps you get inside the head of someone who wants to play guitar, maybe more than anything. There’s great insight into addiction, too. And, of course, it has the gossipy rock and roll stuff that can’t be avoided when you’re a member of The Rolling Stones.
The book covers many decades; it’s an intimate look at a long, creative life.
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…
The Guardian of the Palace is the first novel in a modern fantasy series set in a New York City where magic is real—but hidden, suppressed, and dangerous when exposed.
When an ancient magic begins to leak into the world, a small group of unlikely allies is forced to act…
I’m a piano technician who’s had the incredible fortune of getting to know and work for just about all my childhood heroes. I’m also a recording artist who’s produced several recordings that have made it into the Billboard Top 20, had two PBS specials, and whose music has been streamed over 75 million times around the globe. At the beginning of the pandemic, I began putting pen to paper to share some of the extraordinary experiences I’ve had with music icons and how being in that jet stream helped me tune in to my mission as an artist.
Right off the bat, I was gripped by Bruce’s vulnerability. In the opening pages, he intimately shares his early struggle with “impostor syndrome.” His willingness to reveal his humanity encouraged me as an author to dig deeper and “leave blood on the page.”
Bruce relates in great detail his countless early struggles in trying to get his music heard. I was deeply inspired by his candor and his “never take no for an answer” attitude. In the panoply of books about overcoming adversity to achieve a dream, this book is a stand-out.
"Writing about yourself is a funny business...But in a project like this, the writer has made one promise, to show the reader his mind. In these pages, I've tried to do this." -Bruce Springsteen, from the pages of Born to Run
In 2009, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed at the Super Bowl's halftime show. The experience was so exhilarating that Bruce decided to write about it. That's how this extraordinary autobiography began.
Over the past seven years, Bruce Springsteen has privately devoted himself to writing the story of his life, bringing to these pages the same honesty,…
Having been a professional singer for about five decades and having grown up with, and studied the early recordings of operatic singers for just as long, I feel that I am in an unusual position when it comes to analyzing their art. The ability to describe a singer’s voice on paper is a unique challenge but one that I enjoy solving–especially since each voice is a law unto itself. When done correctly, analysis like this should make the reader want to go and find the recording so that they can listen for themselves. This is especially true for my expanded Kindle version of Early 20th Century Opera Singers.
Herman Klein wrote for the magazine, Gramophone during the 1920s and his reviews of the then-current 78 r.p.m. recordings are among the best you can read. This book from Amodeus Press contains all his reviews and articles for that magazine and is a fascinating, essential read. This is another book that I have read and re-read over the years, scribbled in the margins, and quoted from in my own writing.
From Klein's comments on early recordings that remain available today, the reader can get a glimpse of what legendary singers such as Patti and Lind sounded like more than a century ago. The essays of Herman Klein that appeared in The Gramophone from 1924 until 1934 are indispensable sources of information on the singers of the Golden Age.
I grew up hearing jazz thanks to my dad, a big swing fan who allegedly played Duke Ellington for me in the crib. My father couldn’t believe it when I developed a taste for “modern jazz,” bebop, even Coltrane, but he never threw me out. Fifty years later I still love to play jazz on drums and listen to as much as I can. But along the way, I realized the world might be better served by me writing about the music than trying to make a living performing it. I had the great privilege of studying jazz in graduate school and wrote about big-band jazz for my first book, which helped launch my career.
Michael Denning was my dissertation advisor in grad school and one of the most impressive scholars of American culture that I know. What I like about Noise Uprising is that it gives us a whole new perspective on the beginnings of jazz. No longer is American jazz at the center of the universe. Instead, it’s a small piece of a larger mosaic of popular music that stretched from Havana and Rio to Seville, Cairo, Jakarta, and Honolulu. Before reading this book I had no idea that musical recording even went on in all these far-flung places, beginning in 1925, even before the great wave of recordings appeared from Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Jelly Roll Morton. We learn about the origin and first recordings of such major genres as samba, son, tango, flamenco, tarab, kroncong, and hula. All of these styles were deeply embedded in the social and political struggles…
In a handful of years between the development of electrical recording in 1925 and the outset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, the soundscape of modern music unfolded in a series of relatively unnoticed recording sessions around the world. These included the recording of tango in Buenos Aires, son in Havana, and samba in Rio; of hula in Honolulu, shidaiqu in Shanghai, and kroncong in Jakarta, and; of taraab in East Africa and marabi in Johannesburg. In this ground-breaking study, Michael Denning draws a global map of a musical revolution that had more profound consequences than the "modern"…
Aury and Scott travel to the Finger Lakes in New York’s wine country to get to the bottom of the mysterious happenings at the Songscape Winery. Disturbed furniture and curious noises are one thing, but when a customer winds up dead, it’s time to dig into the details and see…
I am not a rock star but I do play a mean (computer) keyboard. My debut picture book, How to Be a Rock Star, was inspired by my musical children and our endless hours jamming as a family band. I was always on the lookout for books to inspire my little rock star, and because they were hard to come by, I wrote one! These books will inspire your budding musician, or just help you embrace a spirit of creative play in any way they want to rock.
This picture book by jazz great Wynton Marsalis was one of my favorites to read to my little rock star when he was a baby. It’s musical without being sing-songy, and celebrates everyday sounds like washboards or squeaking doors that become musical if you listen right. My son was mesmerized by the noises and rhythm, and I felt more musical just by reading it.
The creators of Jazz ABZ are back for an encore! With infectious rhythm and rhyme, musical master Wynton Marsalis opens kids’ ears to the sounds around us.
What’s that sound? The back door squeeeaks open, sounding like a noisy mouse nearby — eeek, eeeek, eeeek! Big trucks on the highway rrrrrrrumble, just as hunger makes a tummy grrrrumble. Ringing with exuberance and auditory delights, this second collaboration by world-renowned jazz musician and composer Wynton Marsalis and acclaimed illustrator Paul Rogers takes readers (and listeners) on a rollicking, clanging, clapping tour through the many sounds that fill a neighborhood.
My interest in political economy dates back to my student years where I combined the study of the history of political economy, economics, and philosophy. Whether apologists or critics of capitalism, both groups appreciate the centrality of economic exchange among people who live in communities where absolute autonomy and self-sufficiency are unattainable. My concern with reframing political economy is also informed by the all too hushed scandal of capitalism, namely, the reliance on slavery for the accumulation of wealth for more than a century after the establishment of the USA. The reckoning with this atrocity animates much of my present thinking about political economy in general and capitalism in particular.
With numerous examples that range from comedy clubs, football strategies, recipes, and the fashion industry, this book explains how the myth of copyright protection as the hallmark of market capitalism makes no sense. Instead of the argument that the only way to incentivize people to invent and create, what this book outlines is the many cases in which not only this is not the case but instead a robust competitive environment thrives without capitalist ways of thinking. Notions of creative cooperation make up for ruthless competition, and the expectation of legal protection only shows that without regulatory powers market forces cannot function.
From the shopping mall to the corner bistro, knockoffs are everywhere in today's marketplace. Conventional wisdom holds that copying kills creativity, and that laws that protect against copies are essential to innovation-and economic success. But are copyrights and patents always necessary? In The Knockoff Economy, Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman provocatively argue that creativity can not only survive in the face of copying, but can thrive.
The Knockoff Economy approaches the question of incentives and innovation in a wholly new way-by exploring creative fields where copying is generally legal, such as fashion, food, and even professional football. By uncovering these…
Having started DJing at the age of 15 (my mum had to drive me to gigs!) and DJed professionally since 1991, I've seen and done most things in this game, from DJing at Privilege in Ibiza (at the time, the biggest nightclub in the world), to co-promoting an award-winning club night of my own in my home town of Manchester, England, for many years, to other types of DJing like playing on the radio, a stint as a mobile DJ, live streaming (in Covid), podcasting and—since 2010—running Digital DJ Tips, the world's largest online DJ school.
Rick has been the go-to expert in print on how to make dance music for many years, and while techniques and practices in music production change all the time, this book remains an invaluable reference on how to make music for yourself.
Nowadays, if you want success outside of your own town or city, it is practically essential that you make music as well as play it, so if being a "DJ/producer" rather than just a "DJ" is what you're gunning for, this is one you should definitely add to your bookshelf, which will give you the theory and background behind the skills that courses and videos can teach you when it comes to making music the modern way.
Dance Music Manual, aimed at the novice and seasoned professional alike, takes the reader through the software and hardware needed to create original, captivating, and professional sounding music.
Key features of Dance Music Manual include:
How to create compelling, professional-sounding original or remixed dance tracks.
The differences between different genres and how to produce them.
How to expose your tracks to their chosen audience and equip you with the skills to develop your career as a dance music producer and engineer.
Along with the book is a companion website, which provides examples of synthesis programming, compression, effects, MIDI files, and…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
Having started DJing at the age of 15 (my mum had to drive me to gigs!) and DJed professionally since 1991, I've seen and done most things in this game, from DJing at Privilege in Ibiza (at the time, the biggest nightclub in the world), to co-promoting an award-winning club night of my own in my home town of Manchester, England, for many years, to other types of DJing like playing on the radio, a stint as a mobile DJ, live streaming (in Covid), podcasting and—since 2010—running Digital DJ Tips, the world's largest online DJ school.
As a DJ tutor who's been in this game for 30+ years, I'm amazed at how often students really want me to tell them a bit about what it was like to DJ on the club scene "back in the day." When they do, I send them to this book.
Written by an anonymous DJ who toured the world playing in the best clubs for long enough to experience many highs and some considerable lows, it is part memoir, part Spinal Tap, as it lifts the lid on the hedonism, stupidity, and craziness of the club/rave scene at its height. Certainly harrowing in parts, but it is also laugh-out-loud funny - and is nothing if not brutally honest.
DISCOVER THE REALITY OF LIFE AS A SUPERSTAR DJ IN THIS SENSATIONAL EXPOSE OF WHAT REALLY GOES ON BEHIND THE BPMs.
The glamour, the parties, the excess, the highs and, of course, the lows. In The Secret DJ, a globally renowned DJ takes us on a breakneck journey, plunging us into a life lived in the hedonistic fast lane of club culture over the last thirty years, from the dawn of acid house to the dusk of EDM. Whether playing to ten thousand fans in Ibiza's superclubs or in a local pub function room, this DJ's experiences are a cautionary…
