Detroit Rocks

Joe Perry exposes his unrepentant, unbridled life as the lead guitarist of Aerosmith. He delves deep into his volatile, profound, and enduring relationship with singer Steve Tyler and reveals the real people behind the larger-than-life rock-gods on stage. The nearly five-decade saga of Aerosmith is epic, at once a study in brotherhood and solitude that plays out on the killing fields of rock and roll. With record-making hits and colossal album sales, Aerosmith has earned their place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But theirs is ultimately a story of endurance, and it starts almost half a century ago with young Perry, the rebel whose loving parents wanted him to assimilate, but who quits school because he doesn't want to cut his hair. He meets Tyler in a restaurant in New Hampshire, sways him from pop music to rock-and-roll, and it doesn't take long for the "Toxic Twins" to skyrocket into a world of fame and utter excess. From the mega-successful song and music video with Run DMC, "Walk This Way," to the realization that he can't pay his room service bill, Perry takes a personal look into the human stories behind Aerosmith, the people who enabled them, the ones who controlled them, and the ones who changed them.

Driving Identities examines long-standing connections between popular music and the automotive industry and how this relationship has helped to construct and reflect various socio-cultural identities. It also challenges common assumptions regarding the divergences between industry and art, and reveals how music and sound are used to suture the putative divide between human and non-human. This book is a ground-breaking inquiry into the relationship between popular music and automobiles, and into the mutual aesthetic and stylistic influences that have historically left their mark on both industries. Shaped by new historicism and cultural criticism, and by methodologies adapted from gender, LGBTQ+, and African-American studies, it makes an important contribution to understanding the complex and interconnected nature of identity and cultural formation. In its interdisciplinary approach, melding aspects of ethnomusicology, sociology, sound studies, and business studies, it pushes musicological scholarship into a new consideration and awareness of the complexity of identity construction and of influences that inform our musical culture. The volume also provides analyses of the confluences and coactions of popular music and automotive products to highlight the mutual influences on their respective aesthetic and technical evolutions. Driving Identities is aimed at both academics and enthusiasts of automotive culture, popular music, and cultural studies in general. It is accompanied by an extensive online database appendix of car-themed pop recordings and sheet music, searchable by year, artist, and title.

A Pictorial History of Motor City Rock and Roll 1965 to 1975

By the early 1970s, practically everyone under a certain age liked rock music, but not everyone liked it for the same reasons. We typically associate the sounds of classic rock 'n' roll with youthful rebellion by juvenile delinquents, student demonstrators, idealistic hippies, or irreverent punks. But in this insightful and timely book, author George Case shows how an important strain of rock music from the late 1960s onward spoke to and represented an idealized self-portrait of a very different audience: the working-class 'Average Joes' who didn't want to change the world as much as they wanted to protect their perceived place within it. To the extent that "working-class populism" describes an authentic political current, it's now beyond a doubt that certain musicians and certain of their songs helped define that current. By now, rock 'n' roll has cast a long shadow over hundreds of millions of people around the world not just over reckless kids, but over wage-earning parents and retired elders; not just over indignant youth challenging authority, but over indignant adults challenging their own definition of it. Not only have the politics of rock fans drifted surprisingly rightward since 1970; some rock, as Case argues, has helped reset the very boundaries of left and right themselves. That God, guns, and Old Glory can be understood to be paid fitting tribute in a heavy guitar riff delivered by a long-haired reprobate in blue jeans but that #Me Too, Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter might not hints at where those boundaries now lie.