He roomed with David Lynch. He married Faye Dunaway. He hung with Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan and Van Morrison. He gigged with everyone from The Velvet Underground to The Rolling Stones to Howlin’ Wolf. He wrote chart-topping hits. He sang on one of the best live albums of all time. He is undeniably one of the greatest frontmen in rock ’n’ roll. He is Peter Wolf — and the fact that he and The J. Geils Band still aren’t in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame is a goddamn travesty, if you ask me. But even though Wolf — who just turned 79 on Friday — hasn’t got his due, this unsung hero of rock will have his say when his long-overdue memoir drops in a few days. Put me down for a copy. And it’s just one of a few intriguing titles on the way. See for yourself:
Waiting On The Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses
By Peter Wolf
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Former J. Geils lead singer and songwriter Peter Wolf shares a treasure trove of vignettes, musings and recollections of his fascinating life during his six decades long career in the new book Waiting On The Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters and Goddesses. Wolf grew up in a tiny three-room apartment in the Bronx, raised by his Bohemian intellectual mother and his father, a former Vaudeville singer, who influenced both his love of music and painting. Through his wanderlust he came to rub shoulders in his Zelig-like life with some of the most iconic artists and musicians of his generation — including a very young Bob Dylan as he arrived on the folk scene. Each chapter reads as its own short story such as when Wolf reflects on his art studies in Boston — where he shared an apartment with David Lynch — and recalls stories of first love, his untraditional literary education, and his soulful early musical influences such as Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. Wolf fronted The J. Geils Band and their fame grew with Centerfold, Freeze Frame and Love Stinks; meanwhile, many other greats left their impressions on him, including Tennessee Williams, Alfred Hitchcock, Sly Stone and John Lennon. He also sheds light on his marriage to Faye Dunaway during the height of her Hollywood career. Told with gentle humor and often heart-rending poignancy, Waiting On The Moon offers revealing snapshots of artists, writers, actors, and musicians as they work — the creative forces that drive them to achievement; the demons they battle; and the patterns of their human relationships. They are meant to inspire not only empathy but also admiration. Like Christopher Isherwood in Goodbye to Berlin, Wolf remains a camera with its shutter open.”
One Foot on the Platform: A Rock ‘N’ Roll Journey
By Peter Goddard & J.A. Wainwright
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “In the summer of 2020, acclaimed music critic and journalist Peter Goddard began work on a new book that would take readers on a journey back through his 50-plus years spent writing professionally about rock music and the musical styles circling it — everything from blues and jazz to country and classical. His plan was to revisit his old haunts and their habitués, scenes and figures he first wrote about starting in the mid-1960s when he became Canada’s first on-staff popular music critic, to show how ongoing revisions continually reframe first impressions. Tragically, Goddard died in 2022 before work on the manuscript was complete. But many of the core essays — on Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, The Who, k.d. lang, David Bowie, Liza Minnelli, The Band, Neil Diamond and others — are here. Accompanying these new essays is a collection of some of the best writing of Goddard’s career — ranging from interviews with B.B. King, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen and Janis Joplin to reviews of classic albums by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Neil Young, to close readings of Leonard Cohen, Anne Murray, Led Zeppelin and Gordon Lightfoot. Taken as a whole, One Foot On The Platform represents more than fifty years of thought and writing by one of Canada’s foremost cultural critics.”
Sex & Drugs & Rock ‘N’ Roll: The Life Of Ian Dury Remastered
By Richard Balls
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Ian Dury always met life head on, both in his relationships and in his music. As rocker, lyricist, artist and actor he was unsentimental and uncompromising. As a man he was harder to fathom — until now. This acclaimed biography shines a light on it all, chronicling his darker moments as well as his triumphs. Author Richard Balls talked to more than 50 of Dury’s friends, as well as to Dury himself shortly before his death. This remastered edition includes the continuing success of The Blockheads and tells the inside story of the biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, a foreword by Martin Freeman and an afterword from Andy Serkis. There are vivid insights into harsh post-war schools for disabled children, the ’50s art school scene and the ramshackle pub-rock circuit, plus a mixed bag of celebrities from Peter Blake to Omar Sharif.”
London Calling New York New York: Two Songs, Two Cities
By Peter Silverton
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “How’s this for a surprising musical coincidence? Frank Sinatra cut his version of New York, New York within weeks of The Clash recording London Calling. That nearly simultaneous expression of optimistic striving and dystopic despair is the jumping-off point for London Calling New York New York, a tale of two cities and the songs that came to exemplify them. Peter Silverton, the veteran English journalist who died in 2023 not long after completing the manuscript, did numerous interviews and in-depth research to dig deep into the history and impact of the two songs on their respective cities. Combining musical scholarship, cultural analysis and personal memoir, London Calling New York New York is rich with wit, fascinating digressions and scholarly insight. Salting the story with tales from his own colorful life, Silverton ranges back and forth across the Atlantic and over centuries, taking in the almost biological connection between the cities, the songs and their creators. From the Great Fire of London to a White Castle in the Bronx, from the Thames to the Hudson, Joe Strummer to George Gershwin, Noel Coward to Jay-Z, Silverton marshals a wealth of connections and coincidences to illuminate the creative process and its enduring cultural impact. “This is a story about two songs and the cities they came to represent, those songs’ writers, the two cities’ many other emblematic songs (and their writers) and the two metropolitan cultures: Their differences and their similarities,” Silverton wrote. “It’s also a personal story: mine. It reaches back to my decades-long light friendship with Joe Strummer, my presence at several significant early performances of London Calling and at Joe’s West London cremation in December 2002.”
Lonnie Holley
By Harmony Holiday & John Beardsley
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Lonnie Holley’s widely admired practice spans painting, drawing, assemblage sculpture, and performance that combines experimental music and poetry. After decades of making art, he is now getting the recognition he richly deserves. The artist’s first sculptures were carved tombstones for his nieces who perished in a house fire in 1979. Over the following years, he devoted himself to making sculptures that populated his property near Birmingham, a large all-encompassing outdoor installation that was eventually destroyed in 1997. The artist’s work continued unabated as he began to gain recognition and exhibit his work in the South and throughout the U.S. In his first major monograph, every facet of his practice is explored. Harmony Holiday considers Holley’s art and music as interconnected components of the artist’s overall creative vision. John Beardsley focuses on the artist’s Birmingham roots connecting the cultural firmament of that city with other major creative communities in Alabama, most notably Boykin, more popularly known as Gee’s Bend, home of the famous quilters.”
David Bowie’s London
By Paul Gorman
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “David Bowie, though well-traveled, was fundamentally a London boy. The capital shaped his cosmopolitan worldview and influenced all aspects of his persona and artistry. From his distinctive voice with its Brixton-by-Bromley inflections to his ever-evolving personal style and musical prowess, London’s impact on Bowie was profound. Born in post-war Brixton, Bowie’s formative years spanned the urban inner city and suburban Bromley. He used central London as a canvas for his life and creativity, his journey through the city mirroring his artistic evolution. From seductive Soho, where he honed his craft as an uber-Mod and recorded groundbreaking early ’70s albums, to upscale areas like Marylebone, South Kensington, and Chelsea, where he resided with various managers and collaborators, London was integral to Bowie’s development. In Beckenham, Bowie explored counterculture through his community-based ‘arts lab’. Covent Garden played a significant role, hosting his performances with the experimental trio Feathers. This area later became home to early ’80s nightclubs Blitz and Hell, epicentres of the New Romantic movement that Bowie influenced. Despite leaving the U.K. in 1974, never to return as a permanent resident, London continued to shape Bowie’s artistry. His ability to reinvent himself mirrored the city’s capacity for constant renewal. From mod to glam to New Romantic and beyond, Bowie’s transformations reflected London’s ever-changing cultural landscape. This guide charts 61 locations associated with Bowie, from childhood to global superstar.”
Rihanna Is Life: A Superfan’s Guide to All Things We Love about Rihanna
By Kathleen Perricone
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Celebrate your enlistment in Rihanna’s Navy with this gorgeously illustrated, all-encompassing fan book on everything there is to know and love about the modern icon that is Rihanna. From her first muscial trio with classmates in Barbados, to signing with Def Jam and moving to the United States, to becoming one of the most prominent recording artists of the 21st century, and then breaking the internet with her acting and industry-shattering makeup brand, Rihanna has rocked the music scene and captured the hearts of fans across the globe. Gathering her incredible life story, music, and fan culture all in one place, Rihanna Is Life captures her epic achievements, risqué lyrics, and her entrepreunerial spirit.”
Schoenberg: Why He Matters
By Harvey Sachs
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “In his time, the Austrian American composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was an international icon. His 12-tone system was considered the future of music itself. Today, however, leading orchestras rarely play his works, and his name is met with apathy, if not antipathy. With this interpretative account, the acclaimed biographer of Toscanini finally restores Schoenberg to his rightful place in the canon, revealing him as one of the 20th century’s most influential composers and teachers. Harvey Sachs shows how Schoenberg, a thorny character who composed thorny works, raged against the “Procrustean bed” of tradition. Defying his critics — among them the Nazis, who described his music as “degenerate” — he constantly battled the anti-Semitism that eventually precipitated his flight from Europe to Los Angeles. Yet Schoenberg, synthesizing Wagnerian excess with Brahmsian restraint, created a shock wave that never quite subsided, and, as Sachs powerfully argues, his compositions must be confronted by anyone interested in the past, present, or future of Western music.”
Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse
By Andrew S. Berish
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “A rock guitarist plays four notes in front of 1,000 people, while a jazz guitarist plays 1,000 notes in front of four people. You might laugh or groan at this jazz joke, but what is it about jazz that makes people want to disparage it in the first place? Andrew S. Berish’s Hating Jazz listens to the voices who have denounced, disparaged, and mocked the music. By focusing on the rejection of the music, Berish says, we see more holistically jazz’s complicated place in American cultural life. Jazz is a display of Black creativity and genius, an art form that is deeply embedded in African American life. Though the explicit racial tenor of jazz jokes has become muted over time, making fun of jazz, either in a lighthearted or aggressive way, is also an engagement with the place of Blackness in America. An individual’s taste in music may seem personal, but Berish’s analysis of jazz hatred demonstrates that musical preferences and trends are a social phenomenon. Criticism of jazz has become inextricable from the ways we understand race in America, past and present. In addition to this form of criticism, Berish also considers jazz hate as a form of taste discrimination and as a conflict over genre boundaries within different jazz cultures. Both enlightening and original, Hating Jazz shows that our response to music can be a social act, unique to our historical moment and cultural context — we react to music in certain ways because of who we are, where we are, and when we are.”
Songs In The Key Of MP3: The New Icons of the Internet Age
By Liam Inscoe-Jones
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “It’s 2013. You’re a teenager squinting at your laptop in the dead of night, flicking between iTunes, YouTube and PirateBay. Endless reams of artists unspool at the click of a button. New forms of musical discovery open up before your very eyes. This evolving digital landscape exists beyond the radio, HMV and even the most extensive record collection. You’ve entered a whole new world and, suddenly, just about everything feels possible. In Songs in the Key of MP3: The New Icons of the Internet Age, Liam Inscoe-Jones explores five artists who broke the old rules of sound, style and the music industry at large: Devonté Hynes (of Blood Orange), FKA Twigs, Oneohtrix Point Never, Earl Sweatshirt and Sophie. Each began their careers as obscure outsiders but, over time, they helped to reshape pop culture in their image. Through these five figures and an eclectic supporting cast of dozens more like Caroline Polachek, Daniel Lopatin and Nicolás Jaar, Inscoe-Jones paints a picture of the sonic landscape of the last 10 years, exploring the influence of their music on pop culture, the internet and ourselves. An unorthodox mix of criticism, biography and history, Songs In The Key Of MP3 is a book of endless curiosity and wonder; a salutary attempt to define pop culture in a fast and ephemeral age.”
Our Subversive Voice: The History and Politics of English Protest Songs, 1600-2020
By John Street & Oskar Cox Jensen
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Whether accompanying a march, a sit-in, or a confrontation with police, songs and protest are inextricably linked. As a tool for activism, the protest song spells out the issues at the heart of each cause. Over a surprisingly long history, it has been used to spread ideas, inspire political imagination, and motivate political action. The protest song is — and has always been — a form of political oratory as vital to political representation as it is to performance. Investigating five centuries of English history, Our Subversive Voice establishes that the protest song is not merely the preserve of singer-songwriters; it is a mode of political communication that has been used to confront many systems of oppression across its many genres, from street ballads to art song, grime to hymns, and music hall to punk. Our Subversive Voice traces the history of the protest song, examines its rhetorical forms, and explores the conditions of its genesis. It recounts how these songs have addressed discrimination and inequality, exploitation and the environment, and immigration and identity, and how institutions and organizations have sought both to facilitate and to suppress them. Drawing on a large and diverse corpus of songwriters, this book argues that song does more than accompany protest: it choreographs and communicates it. The protest song, Our Subversive Voice shows, is an enduring, affecting, and effective means of expression and an essential element in understanding the drive to create political change, in the past and for the future.”
Fabric: The Fully Illustrated History Of The Famous London Club
By Joe Muggs
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “When a small group of enthusiasts rebelled against the increasing commercialisation of the rave scene, converting a derelict meat store in London into a venue seemed the only option to stay authentic. The meat store became and remains a cathedral for undiluted dance music with a global following. This book celebrates Fabric’s phenomenal impact on club culture over the past quarter of a century. Using oral history, photography, archival ephemera and club night artwork, Fabric tells the story of the misfits and visionaries who made it happen, the curators and resident DJs who kept the pure beats pulsing, and the devotees who filled the floor week after week, year after year — through highs, lows and a campaign against enforced closure.”
