Rock N Roll Woman

This “crisp, absorbing” fully illustrated tribute to fifty iconic female musicians and bands is “a must for rock and roll and women's studies enthusiasts.” (Library Journal) Award-winning radio personality Meredith Ochs takes an insightful look at fifty rock icons who indelibly shook up the music scene, whether solo or in a band. Profiling women from the 1950s to today, and from multiple genres, Ochs tells the dramatic stories behind their journeys to success, their music, and their enduring impact. More than 100 photographs make this a rich volume, and the idols include Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, Grace Slick, Janis Joplin, Stevie Nicks, Heart, Chrissie Hynde, Patti Smith, Joan Jett and the Runaways, the Go-Go’s, Karen O, Sleater-Kinney, Grace Potter, and more.

ROCK 'N' ROLL BROKE INTO MY LIFE when a teenage girl older than I blasted Bo Diddley on her record player. She was a dishwasher with curly hair. I heard the music come out of her bedroom window and could not get it out of my head. Later, at school at lunch hour in the gym when guys danced with girls, I heard Carl Perkins and I haven't been the same person since. I had grown up on folk music and on rhythm and blues-I played Leadbelly records everyday for a year-and rock 'n' roll sounded in my ears as though it had come out of black bars, the black ghetto, and the juke joints of the South. Soon after the British Invasion of the 1960s, when rock 'n' roll bands such as the Beatles and the Stones, came to the States, I went to England and lived with an American who played the guitar and sang the blues in British pubs. When I came back home and started teaching literature, I attended rock concerts on campus with tens of thousands of students and heard The Beach Boys, the Jefferson Airplane, and other bands. Mostly, I listened to rock 'n' roll with others, rarely by myself, and often in the company of women, many of whom show up in these poems and to whom I mean to remember and to pay homage. Moreover, I wrote these poems explicitly for the purpose of performing them in public and so I have paid particular attention to the sounds of the words on the page. Hopefully you'll hear music in the background even when you read this work quietly at home. About thirty women show up in Rock 'n' Roll Women plus one man. I didn't want to leave men out completely; some might say that the one man I have included isn't a very good example of American manhood. To that I would say, I am not trying to provide good examples of anything. Rather, I aim to capture a specific person, place, and time from the 1950s to the present day when I'm still likely to listen to rock 'n' roll on CD or on radio stations such as KWMR that broadcasts from Point Reyes Station in Marin and that must know that I'm listening and that there are others out here beside me who want to hear rock 'n' roll, too.

This collection of interviews with notable women performers from the rock world focuses on both new performers with a more radical approach and the more established, but still progressive, artists working today. Rock journalist Liz Evans talks to them about their experience of sexism in the music industry, the riot girl phenomenon, whether they see the recent proliferation of women's bands as a trend that's here to stay, their perception of rock music as a barometer of popular culture, and so on.

This collection of interviews with notable women performers from the rock world focuses on both new performers with a more radical approach and the more established, but still progressive, artists working today. Rock journalist Liz Evans talks to them about their experience of sexism in the music industry, the riot girl phenomenon, whether they see the recent proliferation of women's bands as a trend that's here to stay, their perception of rock music as a barometer of popular culture, and so on.

African American women have played a pivotal part in rock and roll—from laying its foundations and singing chart-topping hits to influencing some of the genre's most iconic acts. Despite this, black women's importance to the music's history has been diminished by narratives of rock as a mostly white male enterprise. In Black Diamond Queens, Maureen Mahon draws on recordings, press coverage, archival materials, and interviews to document the history of African American women in rock and roll between the 1950s and the 1980s. Mahon details the musical contributions and cultural impact of Big Mama Thornton, LaVern Baker, Betty Davis, Tina Turner, Merry Clayton, Labelle, the Shirelles, and others, demonstrating how dominant views of gender, race, sexuality, and genre affected their careers. By uncovering this hidden history of black women in rock and roll, Mahon reveals a powerful sonic legacy that continues to reverberate into the twenty-first century.

From a legendary music journalist with four decades of unprecedented access, an insider's behind-the-scenes look at the major personalities of rock and roll. Lisa Robinson has interviewed the biggest names in music--including Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, John Lennon, Patti Smith, U2, Eminem, Lady Gaga, Jay Z and Kanye West. She visited the teenage Michael Jackson many times at his Encino home. She spent hours talking to John Lennon at his Dakota apartment--and in recording studios just weeks before his murder. She introduced David Bowie to Lou Reed at a private dinner in a Manhattan restaurant, helped the Clash and Elvis Costello get their record deals, was with the Rolling Stones on their jet during a frightening storm, and was mid-flight with Led Zeppelin when their tour manager pulled out a gun. A pioneering female journalist in an exclusive boys' club, Lisa Robinson is a preeminent authority on the personalities and influences that have shaped the music world; she has been recognized as rock jounralism's ultimate insider. A keenly observed and lovingly recounted look back on years spent with countless musicians backstage, after hours and on the road, There Goes Gravity documents a lifetime of riveting stories, told together here for the first time.

Stevie Nicks is a legend of rock, but her energy and magnetism sparked new interest in this icon. At 68, she's one of the most glamorous creatures rock has known, and the rare woman who's a real rock ‘n' roller. Gold Dust Woman gives "the gold standard of rock biographers" (The Boston Globe) his ideal topic: Nicks' work and life are equally sexy and interesting, and Davis delves deeply into each, unearthing fresh details from new, intimate interviews and interpreting them to present a rich new portrait of the star. Just as Nicks (and Lindsay Buckingham) gave Fleetwood Mac the "shot of adrenaline" they needed to become real rock stars—according to Christine McVie—Gold Dust Woman is vibrant with stories and with a life lived large and hard: —How Nicks and Buckingham were asked to join Fleetwood Mac and how they turned the band into stars —The affairs that informed Nicks' greatest songs —Her relationships with the Eagles' Don Henley and Joe Walsh, and with Fleetwood himself —Why Nicks married her best friend's widower —Her dependency on cocaine, drinking and pot, but how it was a decade-long addiction to Klonopin that almost killed her — Nicks’ successful solo career that has her still performing in venues like Madison Square Garden —The cult of Nicks and its extension to chart-toppers like Taylor Swift and the Dixie Chicks

'Entertaining, affectionate and righteous' Guardian 'Says so much about being a woman' Cosey Fanni Tutti In 1983, backstage at the Lyceum in London, Tracey Thorn and Lindy Morrison first met. Tracey’s music career was just beginning, while Lindy, drummer for The Go-Betweens, was ten years her senior. They became confidantes, comrades and best friends, a relationship cemented by gossip and feminism, books and gigs and rock ’n’ roll love affairs. Thorn takes stock of thirty-seven years of friendship, teasing out the details of connection and affection between two women who seem to be either complete opposites or mirror images of each other. She asks what people see, who does the looking, and ultimately who writes women out of – and back into – history.