Mysteries In The Music

Mysteries in the Music: Case Closed examines some of the secrets, myths, legends, hoaxes, conspiracies, and the wildly inexplicable events that are such an intriguing part of rock and roll history. Travel back to the 1950s to uncover "Who Really Discovered Elvis Presley?" Revisit the 1960s when a folk troubadour tried forming a supergroup with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Transport back to Jamaica 1976 to discover whether the CIA tried to assassinate reggae superstar Bob Marley. Discover whether The Beach Boys actually stole a song from cult leader Charles Manson. Uncover the secrets behind Nirvana's Nevermind album. Best-selling author Jim Berkenstadt, the Rock And Roll Detective®, has spent decades researching the players behind these famous soundtracks and the mysteries hidden within the music itself. These questions have intrigued rock and roll fans for so long because no one has ever asked eyewitnesses the tough questions or dug through the primary sources and documentary evidence left behind... until now. Unsolved for decades, the stories of pop music lore have been unearthed-and the truth is finally revealed.

Mysteries in the Music: Case Closed examines some of the secrets, myths, legends, hoaxes, conspiracies, and the wildly inexplicable events that are such an intriguing part of rock and roll history. Travel back to the 1950s to uncover "Who Really Discovered Elvis Presley?" Revisit the 1960s when a folk troubadour tried forming a supergroup with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Transport back to Jamaica 1976 to discover whether the CIA tried to assassinate reggae superstar Bob Marley. Discover whether The Beach Boys actually stole a song from cult leader Charles Manson. Uncover the secrets behind Nirvana's Nevermind album. Best-selling author Jim Berkenstadt, the Rock And Roll Detective®, has spent decades researching the players behind these famous soundtracks and the mysteries hidden within the music itself. These questions have intrigued rock and roll fans for so long because no one has ever asked eyewitnesses the tough questions or dug through the primary sources and documentary evidence left behind... until now. Unsolved for decades, the stories of pop music lore have been unearthed-and the truth is finally revealed.

Julian Kestrel, gentleman sleuth and dandy, becomes fascinated with the unsolved case of the murder of a Milanese aristocrat and the disappearance of his protégé, a brilliant young English opera singer. What has become of the singer’s fiancée and the aristocrat’s notoriously surly manservant? Could the murder be tied to Italy’s tumultuous politics? Furthermore, the murdered marquis left a widow whose beauty makes Kestrel’s heart skip faster.

When a symphony musician is murdered, bashed with her own bassoon, flute player Emily Wilson becomes the prime suspect. To save herself and secure justice for her murdered friend, she must find the killer.

In this ground-breaking synthesis of art and science, Diana Deutsch, one of the world's leading experts on the psychology of music, shows how illusions of music and speech--many of which she herself discovered--have fundamentally altered thinking about the brain. These astonishing illusions show that people can differ strikingly in how they hear musical patterns--differences that reflect variations in brain organization as well as influences of language on music perception. Drawing on a wide variety of fields, including psychology, music theory, linguistics, and neuroscience, Deutsch examines questions such as: When an orchestra performs a symphony, what is the "real" music? Is it in the mind of the composer, or the conductor, or different members of the audience? Deutsch also explores extremes of musical ability, and other surprising responses to music and speech. Why is perfect pitch so rare? Why do some people hallucinate music or speech? Why do we hear phantom words and phrases? Why are we subject to stuck tunes, or "earworms"? Why do we hear a spoken phrase as sung just because it is presented repeatedly? In evaluating these questions, she also shows how music and speech are intertwined, and argues that they stem from an early form of communication that had elements of both. Many of the illusions described in the book are so striking and paradoxical that you need to hear them to believe them. The book enables you to listen to the sounds that are described while reading about them.

John Lennon said: "We're going to live, or we're going to die. If we're dead, we're going to have to deal with that. If we're alive, we're going to have to deal with being alive." Is there a curse on Rock 'n' Roll? Is talent so powerful that it destroys? The death of one of the purest musical talents in recent years, Amy Winehouse, has reopened this and many other questions. The "Club 27" really does exist, and it includes some of the best musicians of all time, very young adults who created works of art but who were themselves overwhelmed by art. This volume tells their story: from the first, Robert Johnson, who is said to have sold his soul to the devil for the gift of Blues, on to Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain, and passing through the runaway lives of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, the mysterious death of Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, and the fatality of "the day the music died" in 1959, when Buddy Holly's airplane crashed. There is suicide as the only way to affirm oneself; there is transgression taken to the extremes; there is mystery and senseless evil, manifesting in the pistol shot that killed John Lennon. There are stories that read like a detective thriller, like those of Bobby Fuller or Jim Morrison, and the touching human story of Freddie Mercury; there are Bob Marley, Keith Moon, and the absurd destiny that binds Tim and Jeff Buckley; but above all there is a lot of great Rock music. Because, as Neil Young sings in Hey Hey My My, "Rock 'n' roll is here to stay. It's better to burn out than to fade away" AUTHOR: Michele Primi is a journalist and television writer. He was born in Milan in 1973 and he currently lives in Barcelona, Spain. He writes for Virgin Radio and Virgin TV and he also writes about music and Rock 'n' Roll culture for the magazines Rolling Stone Italia, GQ and Riders. He is the author of the monograph 'Queen' and he has contributed to the book 'Legendary Rock Songs' published by White Star. ILLUSTRATIONS: 232 colour photographs

In 1950s Iowa, a murder-suicide forces a lawyer to put aside his rock-and-roll grief Sam McCain loves Buddy Holly because he’s the only rock-and-roll star who still seems like a dweeb, and Sam knows how that feels. With the unrequited love of his life at his side, Sam drives more than three hours through the snow to watch his idol play the Surf Ballroom. That night, Buddy Holly dies in the most famous plane crash in music history, but Sam has no time to grieve. Because there are too many lawyers in this small town, Sam makes a living as a PI, doing odd jobs for an eccentric judge—whose nephew, it seems, has a problem only a detective could solve. His trophy wife has been murdered, and as soon as Sam arrives, the nephew kills himself, too. The police see this as a clear-cut murder-suicide, but Sam wants to know more, diving into a mystery that will get dangerous faster than you can say “bye-bye, Miss American Pie.”