18 And Life On Skid Row

18 And Life on Skid Row tells the story of a boy who spent his childhood moving from Freeport, Bahamas to California and finally to Canada and who at the age of eight discovered the gift that would change his life. Throughout his career, Sebastian Bach has sold over twenty million records both as the lead singer of Skid Row and as a solo artist. He is particularly known for the hit singles I Remember You, Youth Gone Wild, & 18 & Life, and the albums Skid Row and Slave To The Grind, which became the first ever hard rock album to debut at #1 on the Billboard Top 200 and landed him on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. Bach then went on to become the first rock star to grace the Broadway stage, with starring roles in Jekyll & Hyde,Jesus Christ Superstar and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He also appeared for seven seasons on the hit television show The Gilmore Girls. In his memoir, Bach recounts lurid tales of excess and debauchery as he toured the world with Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Motley Crue, Soundgarden, Pantera, Nine Inch Nails and Guns N’ Roses. Filled with backstage photos from his own personal collection, 18 And Life on Skid Row is the story of hitting it big at a young age, and of a band that broke up in its prime. It is the story of a man who achieved his wildest dreams, only to lose his family, and then his home. It is a story of perseverance, of wine, women and song and a man who has made his life on the road and always will. 18 And Life On Skid Row is not your ordinary rock memoir, because Sebastian Bach is not your ordinary rock star.

City blue laws drove the liquor trade and its customers—hard-drinking lumberjacks, pensioners, farmhands, and railroad workers—into the oldest quarter of Minneapolis. In the fifty-cent-a-night flophouses of the city’s Gateway District, they slept in cubicles with ceilings of chicken wire. In rescue missions, preachers and nuns tried to save their souls. Sociology researchers posing as vagrants studied them. And in their midst John Bacich, aka Johnny Rex, who owned a bar, a liquor store, and a cage hotel, documented the gritty neighborhood’s last days through photographs and film of his clientele. The King of Skid Row follows Johnny Rex into this vanished world that once thrived in the heart of Minneapolis. Drawing on hours of interviews conducted in the three years before Bacich’s death in 2012, James Eli Shiffer brings to life the eccentric characters and strange events of an American skid row. Supplemented with archival and newspaper research and his own photographs, Bacich’s stories re-create the violent, alcohol-soaked history of a city best known for its clean, progressive self-image. His life captures the seamy, richly colorful side of the city swept away by a massive urban renewal project in the early 1960s and gives us, in a glimpse of those bygone days, one of Minneapolis’s most intriguing figures—spinning some of its most enduring and enthralling tales.

Michelle Cruz Gonzales played drums and wrote lyrics in the influential 1990s female hardcore band Spitboy, and now she’s written a book—a punk rock herstory. Though not a riot grrl band, Spitboy blazed trails for women musicians in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, but it wasn’t easy. Misogyny, sexism, abusive fans, class and color blindness, and all-out racism were foes, especially for Gonzales, a Xicana and the only person of color in the band. Unlike touring rock bands before them, the unapologetically feminist Spitboy preferred Scrabble games between shows rather than sex and drugs, and they were not the angry manhaters that many expected them to be. Serious about women’s issues and being the band that they themselves wanted to hear, a band that rocked as hard as men but sounded like women, Spitboy released several records and toured internationally. The memoir details these travels while chronicling Spitboy’s successes and failures, and for Gonzales, discovering her own identity along the way. Fully illustrated with rare photos and flyers from the punk rock underground, this fast-paced, first-person recollection is populated by scenesters and musical allies from the time including Econochrist, Paxston Quiggly, Neurosis, Los Crudos, Aaron Cometbus, Pete the Roadie, Green Day, Fugazi, and Kamala and the Karnivores.

The street racer meets the shy librarian. Luke grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, but that never stopped him from making his dreams a reality. When Violet stumbles into his shop, Luke knows he’s met his match. But Violet isn’t like most girls. She’s sheltered and quiet, content to live in the world provided by the books she loves so much. Both ruled by the lessons of their pasts, will their relationship ever get a chance at a future?

A tell-all memoir from the lead singer of the 1980s hair-metal band Ratt reveals all the aspects of rock star excess, including the groupies, the trashed hotel rooms, and the drugs.

Rory Gallagher is a hero and icon of rock music. He inspired guitar players from The Edge to Johnny Marr, Slash to Gary Moore, Johnny Fean to Philip Donnelly, Declan Sinnott to Brian May. He toured incessantly and sold over 30 million albums worldwide. Acknowledged as one of the world's leading guitarists, he collaborated with his boyhood hero Muddy Waters, and played with Jerry Lee Lewis, Albert King and Lonnie Donegan. In this compelling biography, contemporaries, fellow musicians, film maker Tony Palmer and Taste drummer John Wilson tell stories about Rory from his meteoric rise in the late 1960s with Taste to his remarkable solo career. This is a compelling testament to the musical life of a shy and retiring working-class hero, distinguished by his checked shirts and his astounding dexterity on acoustic and electric guitar – the guitarist and blues man who blazed a trail for others to follow.

“A well-supported critique of therapeutic policing and, by extension, of similar paternalistic efforts to help the poor by hassling them into good behavior.” —Los Angeles Times In his first year working in Los Angeles’s Skid Row, Forrest Stuart was stopped on the street by police fourteen times. Usually for doing little more than standing there. Juliette, a woman he met during that time, has been stopped by police well over one hundred times, arrested upward of sixty times, and has given up more than a year of her life serving week-long jail sentences. Her most common crime? Simply sitting on the sidewalk—an arrestable offense in LA. Why? What purpose did those arrests serve, for society or for Juliette? How did we reach a point where we’ve cut support for our poorest citizens, yet are spending ever more on policing and prisons? That’s the complicated, maddening story that Stuart tells in Down, Out & Under Arrest, a close-up look at the hows and whys of policing poverty in the contemporary United States. What emerges from Stuart’s years of fieldwork—not only with Skid Row residents, but with the police charged with managing them—is a tragedy built on mistakes and misplaced priorities more than on heroes and villains. At a time when distrust between police and the residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods has never been higher, Stuart’s book helps us see where we’ve gone wrong, and what steps we could take to begin to change the lives of our poorest citizens—and ultimately our society itself—for the better.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER A 2023 ROLLING STONE RECOMMENDED BOOK Shortlisted for the 2017 Legislative Assembly of Ontario Speaker's Book Award Nominated for the 2018 Heritage Toronto Award - Historical Writing: Book “The preeminent account of the late singer's life.” —Rolling Stone The definitive, full-access story of the life and songs of Canada's legendary troubadour Gordon Lightfoot’s name is synonymous with timeless songs about trains and shipwrecks, rivers and highways, lovers and loneliness. His music defined the folk-pop sound of the 1960s and ‘70s, topped charts and sold millions. He is unquestionably Canada’s greatest songwriter, and an international star who has performed on the world’s biggest stages. While Lightfoot’s songs are well known, the man behind them is elusive. He’s never allowed his life to be chronicled in a book—until now. Biographer Nick Jennings has had unprecedented access to the notoriously reticent musician. Lightfoot takes us deep inside the artist’s world, from his idyllic childhood in Orillia, the wild sixties, and his canoe trips into Canada’s North to his heady times atop the music world. Jennings explores the toll that success took on his personal life—including his troubled relationships, his battle with alcohol and his near-death experiences—and the extraordinary drive and tenacity that pulled him through it all. Rich in voices from fellow musicians, close friends, Lightfoot’s family and the singer’s own reminiscences, the biography tells the stories behind some of his best-known love songs, including “Beautiful” and “Song for a Winter’s Night,” as well as the infidelity and divorce that resulted in classics like “Sundown” and “If You Could Read My Mind.” Kris Kristofferson has called Lightfoot’s songs “some of the most beautiful and lasting music of our time.” Lightfoot is an unforgettable portrait of a treasured singer-songwriter, an artist whose work has been covered by everyone from Joni Mitchell, Barbra Streisand and Nico to Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley and Gord Downie. Revealing and insightful, Lightfoot is both an inspiring story of redemption and an exhilarating read.