Books — All Formats  

A really unique look at The Velvet Underground – a book that traces their late 60s experience and existence at a day-by-day level – offering up crucial dates in their career with very vivid happenings, and lots of photos and images too! The book is way way more than a diary – as Richie Unterberger digs deep – and shows a side of the group that never comes through on record – their lives in New York, and their experience reaching out to a wider audience in other scenes and cities in the US – not just concerts, but other appearances too. The book offers a cool "prequel" to the group – with details from 1958 to 1964 of individual members' careers and lives – then moves into detailed analysis of the years 1965 to 1970 – before stepping back and offering some slight "post-lude" moments, as well as a bit on their reunion in the early 90s. A whopping 360 pages, very heavy – with loads of photos!

The Beach Boys – day by day, year by year, presented in a very compelling diary format that really gets past some of the overblown mythos about the group! Author Badman goes for a "just the facts" sort of approach – and lists key days in the group's career from the 60s onward – with most of the details given to important stretches before 1970, but some key information from later decades too. Each entry is dated, with specific information on what the Beach Boys were involved in on that day – recording, rehearsing, touring, etc – with a surprising amount of vintage photos and other bits to support the text. Perhaps most compelling is the book's frequent use of Musicians Union sheets for recording sessions – listing session players and their details (including, oddly, social security numbers!) – which really helps illuminate the way that the records were being made. 399 pages, softcover, with black and white images.

A cool little book that's partly an introduction to jazz – but more like a cool collection of sidebars from longer articles – offering up interesting slices that really help you understand the music! The book is roughly chronological, but served up with lots of images and smaller text pieces – sometimes a focus on a specific artist, sometimes a smaller genre – often with additional notes off to the side that help illuminate things! The volume is unusual, but surprisingly helpful too – and even offers up some recommendations for CD listening as well. 276 pages, with color and black and white images.

A great look at one of the more modern sides of our fair city – a beautiful book that focuses on the Lake Shore Drive apartments of architect Mies Van Der Rohe! Mies had a huge influence on the city's look in the postwar years – and some of his most striking creations are a set of apartment buildings at the cusp of Lake Shore as it hugs the shore of Lake Michigan – beautifully modern buildings that still have a tremendous sense of form, style, and purpose all these many years later – captured here in an array of well-done black and white photographs that showcase the buildings inside and out. The book offers shots both inside and out, as well as architectural plans and other images too – and also features notes in German and English. 90 pages, hardcover, and done with a sharp sense of style!

Somebody's finally gone out and written a book about one subject we can really get behind – the Record Store – and not only that, they've done a beautiful job with the entire package too! The book takes a look at the importance of the record store – not just historically, but culturally as well – with an especially important focus on the need for stores in the digital age, as a way of keeping both the music, and interest in the music, alive and well for generations to come! As you might guess from the subtitle, authors Calamar and Gallo have a bit of an agenda in their portrait – but they really pave the way with some great recollections of record stores past, incredible bits not just from folks who owned and worked in stores, but also from famous shoppers, artists, and collectors too. And even cooler, the book is filled with lots of great photographs – wonderful images of old stores in color and black and white, plus lots of great sidebar bits that help draw a focus on key issues in record retail. If you, like us, get a bit of a rush every time you walk into a record store, then you'll be sure to get an equal rush from this book – a wonderful tome that's one we can send home to our parents, and finally show them we've got a career worth a bit of respect! 238 pages, hardcover, and really beautifully done.

Amazing images from the Santeria underground in contemporary Cuba – the rich spiritual culture that's persisted for decades – and, if anything, has gotten only stronger through a rich network of local practice and dedicated spirituality! The photographs here are all in brilliant black and white – shot both behind the scenes, and at public festivals – and accompanied by notes and writing in both English and Spanish. The oversized book is 158 pages, with very good paper stock – a heavy coffee-table tome on the topic!

A heavily detailed story of the great Nina Simone – her really unique place in music and American society – with a strong focus on the boundaries she broke and bridges she burned! Author Nadine Cohodas wrote a previous book on Dinah Washington, and does an even better job here with Simone – really laying out the complexity of the woman and her music, but in ways that never over-sensationalize any of the key historical details either. There's a pacing here that really shows Nina's strong commitment over the years – and the heavy notes in the back show that Cohodas really did her research. 448 pages, hardcover, with black and white images.

Amazing work from the great Roy Crane – one of the most important newspaper strip artists of the 20th Century! The book features the initial few years of Buz Sawyer – a new project that Crane did for William Randolph Hearst after leaving behind his very successful Wash Tubbs & Captain Easy strip – and the volume features beautiful black and white reproductions of over two years' worth of daily strips, plus cool color fold-out pages of Sunday pages as well! Crane's penmanship is amazing – tight, yet full of feeling and energy – and definitely at a level that wins him comparisons to Milt Caniff, Alex Raymond, and other contemporary greats. Over 206 pages, and very nicely done!

We love The Creation, but never knew their full story until now – a really compelling tale that not only gets at the greatness of their music in the 60s, but which also explains why they never reached the sort of fame they deserved! The story here is incredibly detailed – not just fan fluff pulled from vintage music mags, but well-researched information, fleshed out by surviving group members, producers, and key contemporaries and later influences too – plenty of details that will have you going back to your Creation records and hearing them all over again in a very different light! The book is almost 400 pages, with some black and white photos, and a helpful discography at the back.

A beautiful collection of early 30s newspaper strips penned by Floyd Gottfredson – early daily comics starring Mickey Mouse, but offering up a very different version of the character than on the screen! The format does a great job of tying Mickey to some of the other comic stars of the time – and as many of these strips are in a longer-form narrative mode, with as much adventure as humor, there's more parallels here to strips like The Gumps, Gasoline Alley, and Thimble Theater than you might expect. Gottfredson's line work is wonderful – clean and lean, with that edgey early version of Mickey that disappeared later on – presented here in sparkling black and white, in a hardcover volume that's almost 300 pages in length!

A beautiful collection of early 30s newspaper strips penned by Floyd Gottfredson – early daily comics starring Mickey Mouse, but offering up a very different version of the character than on the screen! The format does a great job of tying Mickey to some of the other comic stars of the time – and as many of these strips are in a longer-form narrative mode, with as much adventure as humor, there's more parallels here to strips like The Gumps, Gasoline Alley, and Thimble Theater than you might expect. Gottfredson's line work is wonderful – clean and lean, with that edgey early version of Mickey that disappeared later on – presented here in sparkling black and white, in a hardcover volume that's almost 300 pages in length! Also features bonus essays – and some color material too.

The amazing story of Ahmet Ertegun – the driving force behind Atlantic Records, and a crucial figure in popular music in the 20th Century! Ahmet's story is the stuff of legend – and this book delivers the whole thing in stunning detail – from Ertegun's early years as the child of the Turkish ambassador, to his adolescent love of jazz and blues, to his launching Atlantic with his brother – initially to dominate the field of rhythm and blues, then jazz and soul, then even mainstream rock and roll! The hefty book is over 400 pages in length, and features a handful of black and white images too.

The life story of Buddy Guy – one of the the key blues figures to come out of our Windy City home! David Ritz helps shape the story, but the book is definitely in Buddy's own words – which vividly paint a picture of both the Chicago scene, and the growing global world that began to appreciate the talents of Guy and his contemporaries – as well as a myriad of little trials and tribulations that show that the road to fame was never an easy one for Buddy – even after he thought that he'd made it! The book is a very lively read, but also has some heft too – and is 276 pages, hardcover, with some black and white images.

A cinematic effort from Gilbert Hernandez – a standalone graphic novel that expands on the story of one of the characters from his Palomar epic – but with a gritty sort of vibe that really matches the cover! The shift is a nice one – as Hernandez works in an even more visually-focused style here – without dialogue in a number of scenes, and often hitting the pacing of a b-movie thriller! 120 pages, black and white, and with a nice sort of oversized crime novel feel.

A cool sci-fi story from two of the three brothers who created Love & Rockets – a tight little tale about robot culture, with a vibe that's like some of the best work from the early years of the magazine! The drawings here are most strongly in the famous style of Gilbert Hernadez, but you can also feel the influence of Mario as well – and the high-quality printing has the black and white images really popping off the page, wrapped up in a nice color hardcover! 126 pages, with bonus notes as well.

A brilliant look at the early days of the comic book industry – a very well-written history that intermingles economic history and personal biography – in ways that really get at the complexity of the early days of comics! Gerard Jones covers a wide range of roots at the start of the book – then really zeroes in on a few key figures who help give structure to his portrait of the young comic book industry – the team of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who created Superman; and the businessmen Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz, who moved from sleazy pulp to mainstream fame with their work at DC Comics. Jones introduces a number of other figures along the way – and does a brilliant job of laying out the landscape of youth in the depression and World War years – and he really illuminates darker corners of this history, and gets way way past some of the over-told chestnuts of the early years, to link the growth of the industry to the rise of corporate-owned culture in the 60s and beyond. 384 pages, hardcover, with some black and white images.

A massive book on the music of Bob Marley and The Wailers – written in collaboration with Aston Barrett and other group members – and offering up a huge amount of detail that we haven't seen in other Marley biographies! The style is great – and offers up loads of personal recollections pulled from interviews, which are then woven together to tell this important story through details that go way beyond the historical information – a vivid portrait of the rise of Jamaican music on the global scene, and the all-too-short life of the great one. Filled with black and white photos, yet very densely written – almost 600 pages in length.

A thick, photo heavy book dedicated to the greats of Latin rock – from the creative firestorm that burst from the 60s San Franisco Haight scene, up to Santana's surprise commercial juggernaut Supernatural in the late 90s. The book goes far deeper Santana, though, with reminiscences from a number of pivotal figures, and reintroduction to greats such as Malo, Azteca and many more, plus the funkier side of things with Mandrill and others. Definitely not an academic tome, either, this is a visual feast for both fans and neophytes. Large, kind of coffee table style paperback, beautifully illustrated with tons of amazing photographs (black & white). Forward by Carlos Santana.

Over looked genius in American comics from the 40s to the 80s – a wonderful volume that features material we never would have seen otherwise! Some of the names here are legends, represented by obscure slices of their work – and others are talents that never got the respect they deserve – laid out lovingly by Dan Nadel, in a way that's similar to his previous collection, Art Out Of Time. Original comic pages are reproduced in full color, but with a nice yellowing effect to the pages – and black and white underground art comes through very vividly – in this huge volume that features work by Bill Everett, Matt Fox, Jesse Marsh, Mort Meskin, HG Peter, John Stanley, Pat Boyette, and others – plus great text and introductions from Nadel. 301 pages, hardcover, in color and black and white.

A beautifully-drawn sci-fi strip from the great Jerry Robinson – material that's even more vibrant than Jerry's famous 40s work on comic books – thanks in part to the lavish style of this volume! Jet Scott was a short-lived continuity strip – one that mixed rocket stories with earthbound action – but the quality is very top-shelf – with adult scripting from Sheldon Stark, and superb draftsmanship by Jerry Robinson – ink and pen that almost rivals Milton Caniff for its characterization and use of space. The book presents all Sunday strips in full color, and dailies in black and white, oversize too – and also features some additional text pieces to frame the material, and rare sketches as well. 253 pages, and an oversize hardcover.

A surprisingly beautiful book from Patti Smith – her memoirs of her years with Robert Mapplethorpe, told with an even more sensitive voice than we might have expected from her music! The book has earned Patti a whole new range of appreciation – and for good reason too – and in addition wonderfully personal and poignant passages, the story also really opens up the New York artist experience of the 60s and 70s – especially during the years of struggle that Smith and Mapplethorpe experienced together. 287 pages, softcover, with some black and white images, and a few poems as well.

Maybe the deepest book we've ever read on the life and music of James Brown – and certainly one to really get past the monolithic moments, and really serve up the full details of The Godfather at work! There's a surprising amount of research that went into the project – way more than some of those star bios on Brown that were issued years back – and RJ Smith definitely digs James from the same perspective that we do, and really gets at the important forces that helped shape the sound of his music, and its exposure to the world at large! 455 pages, with some black and white images, hardcover.

An amazing little book – quite possibly one of the first-ever graphic novels, and an amazing hybrid of pulp crime and postwar comics! This unique volume was originally designed as a comic-style paperback – no full text at all, just black and white images from the amazing Matt Baker – well-known for his lusty images of the late 40s and early 50s – and words by Arnold Drake, who later went onto fame in a range of superhero settings. There's a wonderful edge to the whole thing – very much like the best pre-code comics – and this replica volume brings the whole thing back to life on even better paper stock than the original. 136 pages, black and white, with an afterward by Drake.

A very personal tale of this wonderful group – one that's brought together out of recollections by each of the group members, as well as by key members of the Minneapolis scene as well! Jim Walsh isn't really the author so much as the moderator – he structures the book like one long group discussion – snipping comments from all these different figures, and lining them up together to form a very vivid narrative of the group – early days, their climb to fame, and missteps along the way – all told from a perspective that you'd never find in a conventional biography! Pretty neat stuff, and with notes on each of the discussants at the end. 304 pages, hardcover, with black and white photos.

A great overview of the sound of surf music on the west coast – a surprisingly detailed volume that really fills in a lot of gaps in our knowledge of the genre – which can often be a bit oblique, due to a lack of studio and session details on the original records! Kent Crowley traces the genre from the start – looking at pre-surf guitar styles, then focusing on the big waves of the scene as surf evolves strongly over the 60s – and even looks at some later manifestations of the style too. The book's got a nice batch of black and white photos in the middle, and is 256 pages, softcover.