Bet My Soul On Rock N Roll

The life and career of Haitian American musician Jean Beauvoir, a member of the legendary New York City punk band the Plasmatics Jean Beauvoir joined the Plasmatics in 1979, playing bass and keyboards for the most notorious band to emerge out of the New York City punk scene. By 1982, he was a member of Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul, a retro-rock revival act headed by Steven Van Zandt. The Disciples of Soul videos played on MTV during the network's earliest years, making Beauvoir one of the first Black recording artists to cross the start-up music channel's "color line." Beauvoir went on to become a multi-platinum artist, producer, and songwriter. Bet My Soul on Rock 'n' Roll follows his ride through the American music industry, detailing his encounters with rock stars such as Bruce Springsteen, Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, and Lita Ford, as well as the actor Sylvester Stallone, the billionaire executive Richard Branson, and even Donald Trump. Beauvoir also considers the manner in which his Haitian heritage has shaped his public image, his music, and his role as an activist for the dispossessed and the poor. Beauvoir's collaborations—and stories—span genres, including work with KISS, Debbie Harry, Lionel Richie, and the Ramones

For 33 days in the summer of 1987, Divine Weeks set off on tour in a beat up old Ford Econoline Van, sleeping on strangers' floors, never sure they'd make enough gas money to get them to the next town. This deeply personal, coming of age, on the road memoir follows critically acclaimed 80s indie alt rock band Divine Weeks' first tour of the U.S. and Canada. Liberated from alcoholic upbringings and rigid cultural constraints, all they have is their music and each other's friendship. The road is filled with yuppies, brothels, riots, sleeping on floors, spiked drinks, DJs with no pants, and battles with racism. They set out on the road to discovery to drink in all they could and maybe sell a few records. They grew up instead.

The tale that follows is not another clichéd collection of rock'n'roll debaucheries (sorry) nor is it another tired fable of triumph over adversity (you're welcome).It's the story of a half-deaf kid from a tiny, remote village in South Wales who was hailed as a genius by the UK's biggest radio station and headhunted by major record labels, only for the music industry to collapse. It crashed hard, taking with it an entire generation of talented artists who would never now get their shot. CNN called it &‘music's lost decade'.Along the way, there are goodies, baddies, gun-toting label execs, life-saving surgeons, therapy, true love, loyalty, hope, breakdowns, suicidal managers, betrayal, drummers and way too many hangovers. James Kennedy shows that the best lessons are to be learned from good losers. It really is all about the journey.Part memoir, part exposé of the music world's murky underbelly, Noise Damage is emotional, painfully honest, funny, informative and ridiculous. It's also a celebration of the life-changing magic of music.

From Queen Latifa to Count Basie, Madonna to Monk, Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music traces popular music back to its roots in jazz, blues, country, and gospel through the rise in rock 'n' roll and the emergence of heavy metal, punk, and rap. Yet despite the vigor and balance of these musical origins, Martha Bayles argues, something has gone seriously wrong, both with the sound of popular music and the sensibility it expresses. Bayles defends the tough, affirmative spirit of Afro-American music against the strain of artistic modernism she calls 'perverse.' She describes how perverse modernism was grafted onto popular music in the late 1960s, and argues that the result has been a cult of brutality and obscenity that is profoundly anti-musical. Unlike other recent critics of popular music, Bayles does not blame the problem on commerce. She argues that culture shapes the market and not the other way around. Finding censorship of popular music "both a practical and a constitutional impossibility," Bayles insists that "an informed shift in public tastes may be our only hope of reversing the current malignant mood."

The year is 1969, but just yesterday it was 2001. Chuck Elliot is a forty-nine-year-old family man, but in the blink of an eye, he finds himself morphed into a seventeen-year-old, transported back to the sixties along with his brother and three high school buddies. The middle-aged, accidental time travelers are shocked and bewildered by their jump back in time. How did they get there? And more importantly, how do they get back? As they piece together a truly unbelievable reality, Chuck suspects it is somehow related to the translator—a handheld device his eccentric neighbor, Professor Jonathon Cornelius, left him mysteriously upon his death. Now the younger version of the professor is their only hope if they're ever to return to their lives and loved ones. In the meantime, the five friends hatch a plan to try and blend in, reliving their high school days and making the most of their time Twenty-Nine Years from Home. Astounded by their physical transformations from receding hairlines and bulging spare tires to the gangly, long-haired teenagers of their youth, some revel in the opportunity to be young again and right past wrongs, while others, like Chuck, want nothing more than the life left behind. But if their time travel alters the past, will life as he knew it be compromised?

The legendary critic and author of Mystery Train “ingeniously retells the tale of rock and roll” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Unlike previous versions of rock ’n’ roll history, this book omits almost every iconic performer and ignores the storied events and turning points everyone knows. Instead, in a daring stroke, Greil Marcus selects ten songs and dramatizes how each embodies rock ’n’ roll as a thing in itself, in the story it tells, inhabits, and acts out—a new language, something new under the sun. “Transmission” by Joy Division. “All I Could Do Was Cry” by Etta James and then Beyoncé. “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” first by the Teddy Bears and almost half a century later by Amy Winehouse. In Marcus’s hands these and other songs tell the story of the music, which is, at bottom, the story of the desire for freedom in all its unruly and liberating glory. Slipping the constraints of chronology, Marcus braids together past and present, holding up to the light the ways that these striking songs fall through time and circumstance, gaining momentum and meaning, astonishing us by upending our presumptions and prejudices. This book, by a founder of contemporary rock criticism—and its most gifted and incisive practitioner—is destined to become an enduring classic. “One of the epic figures in rock writing.”—The New York Times Book Review “Marcus is our greatest cultural critic, not only because of what he says but also, as with rock-and-roll itself, how he says it.”—The Washington Post Winner of the Deems Taylor Virgil Thomson Award in Music Criticism, given by the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers

From Aaliyah to ZZ Top, author Jimmy Correa covers it all in The Trivia Book of Rock 'N' Roll Music: The 80s and 90s-an essential guide to musical factoids. The easy-to-read multiple choice format makes trivia fun while you learn interesting tidbits about all types of music and artists from the 80s and 90s, including pop, country, R & B, one-hit wonders, and the British and foreign invasions. Enjoy questions such as the following: This romantic song by Chris DeBurgh was featured in the 1988 soundtrack of the movie Working Girl, starring Melanie Griffith Sir Mix-A-Lot, the male rapper, charted this song about the female body part that he likes the most Eric Clapton had a hit with this song in 1992 that was written in tribute to his son LeAnn Rimes, the talented, young country singer, gained her stardom by recording this song about loneliness at the tender age of fourteen Marc Cohn recorded this hit song in 1991 about a journey in the Delta Blues Correa draws on his extensive collection of music paraphernalia to share his love of music with others in The Trivia Book of Rock 'N' Roll Music: The 80s and 90s. Long live rock 'n' roll!