Updated and revised for Aerosmith's 50th anniversary as a band in 2020, this first complete illustrated history of one of the world's most successful and popular bands includes hundreds of stunning performance and backstage photographs, as well as rare memorabilia, including gig posters, backstage passes, ticket stubs, and more.
This ultimate illustrated history of Aerosmith—one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll bands of all time and the best-selling American hard rock band of all time—is now revised and updated to celebrate the group’s 50th anniversary as well as their multi-year farewell concert tour. This massive, visually exhilarating celebration in hardcover provides a front-row seat to the Boston Bad Boys’ entire career: scrapping their way cross-country in the 1970s, scrapping their way back to the top of the heap in the late 1980s, and scrapping with each other the entire way. Updated with 16 additional pages of text and photographs, this complete history of one of the world's most successful and popular bands features: A lively and honest band history by music journalist Richard Bienstock Sidebar album reviews from a host of well-known music journalists, including Greg Kot, Jaan Uhelszki, Chuck Eddy, Bill Holdship, Martin Popoff, Daniel Bukszpan, and more Nearly 400 photos of the band, on and off the stage, and images of rare memorabilia, including gig posters, backstage passes, ticket stubs, 7-inch picture sleeves, and more Advice from Steven Tyler and Joe Perry to young bands A survey and discussion of the guitars employed by Joe Perry and Brad Whitford over their 50 years in—and out—of Aerosmith An Aerosmith discography encompassing all official audio and video releases Aerosmith: The Ultimate Illustrated 50 Year History of the Boston Bad Boys is an awesome, must-have add to the library of every Aerosmith fan.
One of Guitar World magazine's Top 15 rock books of 2011. Aerosmith is one of the greatest rock 'n' roll bands of all-time. After their 1970s success was derailed by band strife and Dionysian excess, Boston's Bad Boys received a career jump-start in 1986 via their collaboration with hip-hop legends Run-DMC and producer Rick Rubin. This first complete illustrated history of one of the world's most successful and popular bands features a band history by music journalist Richard Bienstock and sidebar album reviews from a host of well-known music journalists, including Greg Kot, Jaan Uhelszki, Chuck Eddy, Bill Holdship, Martin Popoff, Daniel Bukszpan, and more. Illustrated throughout with hundreds of stunning performance and backstage photographs, as well as rare memorabilia, including gig posters, backstage passes, 7-inch picture sleeves, ticket stubs, and more.
Hang on, it's a hell of a ride! From the band that lived by the motto "Anything worth doing was worth overdoing" -- Steven Tyler, Joe Perry, Tom Hamilton, Brad Whitford, and Joey Kramer -- comes a quarter century of rock godhood: the life, the music, the truth, the hell, the lost years, and the raunchy, unsafe sex. And, of course, the drugs. But after crashing in a suffocating cloud of cocaine, crystal meth, and heroin, Aerosmith rose up from the ashes to become clean and sober -- and reclaim their rightful title as World Champion Rockers. Learn how they did it in a book that is pure Aerosmith unbound: where they came from, what they are now, and what they will always be -- a great American band.
"Aerosmith on Tour" focuses on the touring history of Aerosmith, based on local reviews of the shows and the contemporaneous critical perception of the band. This first volume of "Aerosmith on Tour" covers the band's early grind, as they sought to establish themselves on the rock 'n' roll landscape, through the successes and internal turmoil, ending with the successful 1984 reunion. Also covered are the offshoot bands, the Joe Perry Project and Whitford/St. Holmes, and classic era discographies. This is an unofficial & unsanctioned work fifteen years in the making! It's packed full of hundreds of tour ads, concert ticket stubs, set lists, and reviews. Spin your favorite Aerosmith LP, sit back, and take a trip back in time reliving memories you may have forgotten...
“Steven Tyler is one of the giants of American music, who’s been influential for a whole generation of Rock ’n’ Roll fans around the world. Long May He Rock!” —Sir Paul McCartney Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? is the rock memoir to end all rock memoirs—the straight-up, no-holds-barred life of Grammy Award-winning, Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame inductee, and all around superstar legend Steven Tyler, lead singer of Aerosmith (and celebrity judge on American Idol). This is it—“the unbridled truth, the in-your-face, up-close and prodigious tale of Steven Tyler straight from the horse’s lips”—as Tyler tells all, from the early years through the glory days, “All the unexpurgated, brain-jangling tales of debauchery, sex & drugs. and transcendence you will ever want to hear.”
In this riveting inside account of his life in rock-and-roll band Aerosmith, Joe Perry opens up for the first time to tell the story of his wild, unbridled life as the band's lead guitarist. He delves deep into his volatile, profound, and enduring relationship with singer Steve Tyler, and reveals the real people behind the larger-than-life rock-gods on stage. It's an intimate account of nearly five decades of mega highs and heartbreaking lows. The story of Aerosmith is not your average rock-and-roll tale. It's an epic saga, at once a study in brotherhood and solitude that plays out on the killing fields of rock and roll. With record-making hits and colossal album sales that compete with legends such as U2 and Frank Sinatra, Aerosmith has earned their place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But with a sweeping comeback in the late 80s, one can see there is a bigger story here: to come back that high, you have to have plummeted pretty low. Aerosmith's game with fame is one of success, failure, rebirth, re-destruction, even the post-destructive rebirth, but here they are today, in their 60s and still on top. ROCKS is ultimately a story of endurance, and it starts almost half a century ago with young Perry, the misanthrope whose loving parents practically begged him to assimilate, but who quits school because he doesn't want to cut his hair. He meets Tyler in a restaurant in Boston, sways him from pop music to the darker side, rock-and-roll, and it doesn't take long for the "Toxic Twins" to skyrocket into a world of fame, drugs, and utter excess. Perry takes fora personal look into the two stars behind Aerosmith, the people who enabled them, the ones who controlled them, and the ones who changed them.
Aerosmith is a band that made its name by relentless, grind-it-out, city-by-city touring. Since its inception in 1970 and for the following decade, nary a year went by without the band being on the road. Yet, for a band that built its reputation by incessant touring, the fans have been left with just a few bones of that live experience so critical in establishing Aerosmith. There is comparatively little officially etched into history via vinyl or compact disc from the band on stage in those formative years and halcyon days. But all was not lost. Several radio broadcasts along with dozens upon dozens of audience recordings weave a more complete narrative of the band's touring history. The recordings fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, and piece by piece create a picture of a tour history, bringing context. More than 200 concerts and setlists are examined here, illustrating how the band's non-stop touring and hard-edged brand of rock and roll propelled Aerosmith to the top of the world's music scene. Vintage ads, clippings and news articles are also presented, giving a flavor of Aerosmith's life on the road.
Only a handful of transit workers, daring explorers and graffiti writers have experienced the full scope of the New York subway system. Beneath The Streets reveals this world for the first time with fantastic photographs captured from throughout the tunnels and byways of the subway. Although it provides service to over 5 million riders every day, the subway is for most a sealed system. Very few of its patrons are aware of the extent of this vast underground infrastructure. The authors of this important historical work first discovered this hidden world in the process of photographing graffiti found below ground in the subway system. Now their riveting documentary work opens up this subterranean maze, including 600 miles of active track as well as abandoned sections and disused stations, for all to experience.
The acclaimed, bestselling rock-and-roll biographer delivers the first complete, unexpurgated history of the world’s greatest band. The saga of the Rolling Stones is the central epic in rock mythology. From their debut as the intermission band at London’s Marquee Club in 1962 through their latest record—setting Bridges to Babylon world tour, the Rolling Stones have defined a musical genre and experienced godlike adulation, quarrels, addiction, legal traumas, and descents into madness and death_while steadfastly refusing to fade away. Now Stephen Davis, the New York Times bestselling author of Hammer of the Gods and Walk This Way, who has followed the Stones for three decades, presents their whole story, replete with vivid details of the Stones’ musical successes_and personal excesses. Born into the wartime England of air-raid sirens, bombing raids, and strict rationing, the Rolling Stones came of age in the 1950s, as American blues and pop arrived in Europe. Among London’s most ardent blues fans in the early 1960s was a short blond teenage guitar player named Brian Jones, who hooked up with a lorry driver’s only son, Charlie Watts, a jazz drummer. At the same time, popular and studious Michael Philip Jagger–who, as a boy, bawled out a phonetic version of “La Bamba” with an eye-popping intensity that scared his parents–began sharing blues records with a primary school classmate, Keith “Ricky” Richards, a shy underachiever, whose idol was Chuck Berry. In 1962 the four young men, joined by Bill Perks (later Wyman) on bass, formed a band rhythm and blues band, which Brian Jones named the “the Rollin’ Stones” in honor of the Muddy Waters blues classic. Using the biography of the Rolling Stones as a narrative spine, Old God Almost Dead builds a new, multilayered version of the Stones’ story, locating the band beyond the musical world they dominated and showing how they influenced, and were influenced by, the other artistic movements of their era: the blues revival, Swinging London, the Beats, Bob Dylan’s Stones-inspired shift from protest to pop, Pop Art and Andy Warhol’s New York, the “Underground” politics of the 1960s, Moroccan energy and European orientalism, Jamaican reggae, the Glam and Punk subcultures, and the technologic advances of the video and digital revolution. At the same time, Old Gods Almost Dead documents the intense backstage lives of the Stones: the feuds, the drugs, the marriages, and the affairs that inspired and informed their songs; and the business of making records and putting on shows. The first new biography of the Rolling Stones since the early 1980s, Old Gods Almost Dead is the most comprehensive book to date, and one of the few to cover all the band’s members. Illustrated throughout with photos of pivotal moments, it is a celebration of the Rolling Stones as an often courageous, often foolish gang of artists who not only showed us new worlds, but new ways of living in them. It is a saga as raunchily, vibrantly entertaining as the Stones themselves.
