Easy Riders Rolling Stones

Easy Riders, Rolling Stones delves into the history of twentieth century American popular music to explore the emergence of 60s “road music.” This music—which includes styles like blues and R&B——took shape at pivotal moments in history and was made by artists and performers who were, in various ways, seekers after freedom. Whether journeying across the country, breaking free from real or imaginary confines, or in the throes of self-invention, these artists incorporated their experiences into scores of songs about travel and movement, as well as creating a new kind of road culture. Starting in the Mississippi Delta and tracking the emblematic routes and highways of road music, John Scanlan explores the music and the life of movement it so often represented, identifying “the road” as the key to an existence that was uncompromising. He shows how the road became an inspiration for musicians like Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan and how these musicians also drew stimulus from a Beat movement that was equally enthralled with the possibilities of travel. He also shows how the quintessential American concepts of freedom and travel influenced English bands such as the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. These bands may have been foreigners in the US, but they also found their spiritual home there—of blues and rock ‘n’ roll––and glimpsed the possibility of a new kind of existence, on the road. Easy Riders, Rolling Stones is an entertaining, rich account of a key strand of American music history, and will appeal to both road music fans and music scholars who want to “head out on the highway.”

In 1969, a low-budget biker movie, Easy Rider, shocked Hollywood with its stunning success. An unabashed celebration of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll (onscreen and off), Easy Rider heralded a heady decade in which a rebellious wave of talented young filmmakers invigorated the movie industry. In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind takes us on the wild ride that was Hollywood in the '70s, an era that produced such modern classics as The Godfather, Chinatown, Shampoo, Nashville, Taxi Driver, and Jaws. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls vividly chronicles the exuberance and excess of the times: the startling success of Easy Rider and the equally alarming circumstances under which it was made, with drugs, booze, and violent rivalry between costars Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda dominating the set; how a small production company named BBS became the guiding spirit of the youth rebellion in Hollywood and how, along the way, some of its executives helped smuggle Huey Newton out of the country; how director Hal Ashby was busted for drugs and thrown in jail in Toronto; why Martin Scorsese attended the Academy Awards with an FBI escort when Taxi Driver was nominated; how George Lucas, gripped by anxiety, compulsively cut off his own hair while writing Star Wars, how a modest house on Nicholas Beach occupied by actresses Margot Kidder and Jennifer Salt became the unofficial headquarters for the New Hollywood; how Billy Friedkin tried to humiliate Paramount boss Barry Diller; and how screenwriter/director Paul Schrader played Russian roulette in his hot tub. It was a time when an "anything goes" experimentation prevailed both on the screen and off. After the success of Easy Rider, young film-school graduates suddenly found themselves in demand, and directors such as Francis Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, George Lucas, and Martin Scorsese became powerful figures. Even the new generation of film stars -- Nicholson, De Niro, Hoffman, Pacino, and Dunaway -- seemed a breed apart from the traditional Hollywood actors. Ironically, the renaissance would come to an end with Jaws and Star Wars, hugely successful films that would create a blockbuster mentality and crush innovation. Based on hundreds of interviews with the directors themselves, producers, stars, agents, writers, studio executives, spouses, and ex-spouses, this is the full, candid story of Hollywood's last golden age. Never before have so many celebrities talked so frankly about one another and about the drugs, sex, and money that made so many of them crash and burn. By turns hilarious and shocking, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is the ultimate behind-the-scenes account of Hollywood at work and play.

In 1969 a man walked upon the moon, the Woodstock music festival was held in upstate New York, Richard Nixon was sworn in as the president of the United States, the Beatles made their last public appearance, as did, after a fashion, Judy Garland, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Boris Karloff, Joseph P. Kennedy, and Jack Kerouac, all of whom passed away that year. Something else passed away that year as well. In early July, just days before the moon landing, a low-budget exploitation movie, EasyRider, was released. It’s astonishing and wholly unexpected success almost single-handedly destroyed the Hollywood studio system which had been controlling the entertainment industry for half a century. Its success would ultimately change the way movies would be made, and who made them, as well as how those movies looked and sounded, and which audiences those movies would be made for. Additionally, the film’s innovative techniques; including extensive location shooting, unexplained editing juxtapositions, improvised dialogue, and innovative use of popular music, would change the vocabulary and language of cinema forever. Easy Rider: 50 Years of Looking for America will tell the story of Easy Rider on the fiftieth anniversary of its explosive release. Through published interviews, previously undiscovered archival materials, and new reflections by the participants, the whole story of Hollywood’s first true counterculture movie will be revealed for the first time ever.

The 1960s on Film tells the narrative of the 1960s through the lens of the movie camera, analyzing 10 films that focus on the people, events, and issues of the decade. Films create both an impression of and — at times for younger audiences — a primary definition of events, people, and issues of an era. The 1960s on Film examines the 1960s as the decade was presented in ten films that focused on that decade. Discussion will focus on both what the films have to say about the era and how close they come to accurately depicting it. For example, films such as Mississippi Burning and Selma tell the story of racial conflict and hope for reconciliation in the 1960s. Other films such as The Right Stuff and Hidden Figures show the deep fascination America had at that time with the burgeoning space program and NASA, while Easy Rider analyzes the role of rock music and drugs among young people of the decade. The Deer Hunter studies the controversies surrounding the war in Vietnam. The Graduate, Mad Men, JFK, and Thirteen Days also receive significant treatment in this exciting volume.

A raucous cultural history of rock’s relationship with the moving image. When rock ’n’ roll burst into life in the 1950s, the shockwaves echoed around the world, amplified by images of untamed youth projected on cinema screens. But for the performers themselves, corporate showbusiness remained very much in control, contriving a series of cash-in movies to exploit the new musical fad. In this riveting cultural history, John Scanlan explores rock’s relationship with the moving image over seven decades in cinema, television, music videos, advertising, and YouTube. Along the way, he shows how rock was exploited, how it inspired film pioneers, and, not least, the film transformations it caused over more than half a century. From Elvis Presley to David Bowie, and from Scorpio Rising to the films of Scorsese and DIY documentarists like Don Letts, this is a unique retelling of the story of rock—from birth to old age—through its onscreen life.

This cultural history reveals the unique qualities of road stories and follows the evolution from the Beats' postwar literary adventures to today's postmodern reality television shows. Tracing the road story as it moves to both LeRoi Jones's critique of the Beats' romanticization of blacks as well as to the mainstream in the 1960s with CBS's Route 66, Mills also documents the rebel subcultures of novelist Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, who used film and LSD as inspiration on a cross-country bus trip, and she examines the sexualization of male mobility and biker mythology in the films Scorpio Rising, The Wild Angels, and Easy Rider. Mills addresses how the filmmakers of the 1970s - Coppola, Scorsese, and Bogdanovich - flourished in New Hollywood with road films that reflected mainstream audiences and how feminists Joan Didion and Betty Friedan subsequently critiqued them. A new generation of women and minority storytellers gain clout and bring genre remapping to the national consciousness, Mills explains, as the road story evolves from such novels as Song of Solomon to films like Thelma and Louise and television's Road Rules 2.

Counterculture, while commonly used to describe youth-oriented movements during the 1960s, refers to any attempt to challenge or change conventional values and practices or the dominant lifestyles of the day. This fascinating three-volume set explores these movements in America from colonial times to the present in colorful detail. "American Countercultures" is the first reference work to examine the impact of countercultural movements on American social history. It highlights the writings, recordings, and visual works produced by these movements to educate, inspire, and incite action in all eras of the nation's history. A-Z entries provide a wealth of information on personalities, places, events, concepts, beliefs, groups, and practices. The set includes numerous illustrations, a topic finder, primary source documents, a bibliography and a filmography, and an index.

The Rock Music Imagination is an exploration of rock artists in their social and artistic contexts, particularly between 1964 and 1980, and of rock music in relation to literature, that is, creative expression, fantastic imagination, and contemporary fiction about rock. Robert McParland analyzes how rock music touches our imaginative lives by looking at themes that appear in classic rock music: freedom and liberation, utopia and dystopia, community, rebellion, the outsider, the quest for transcendence, monstrosity, erotic and spiritual love, imaginative vision, and mystery. The Rock Music Imagination explores blues imagination, countercultural dreams of utopia, rock’s critiques of society and images of dystopia, rock’s inheritance from romanticism, science fiction and mythic imagination in progressive rock, and rock’s global reach and potential to provide hope and humanitarian assistance.