Suicide: Dream Baby Dream, A New York City Story
Suicide: Dream Baby Dream, A New York City Story

Author: Kris Needs

Publisher: Omnibus Press

Published: 2015-10-12

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 1783235357

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“We were living through the realities of war and bringing the war onto the stage... Everybody hated us, man” Alan Vega Born out of the city's vibrant artistic underground as a counter-cultural performance art statement, opposing the war by mirroring its turmoil, Suicide became the most terrifyingly iconoclastic band in history, and also one of the most influential. By the time the punk scene they're usually associated with came out of CBGBs in the mid-seventies, Suicide had already been causing havoc in New York’s clubs for several years. Working closely with the author, Rev and Vega explain the influences and events which led to the birth of Suicide and their early struggles. They invoke another world and era, peppered with smoky jazz clubs, Iggy Pop in his new-born Stooge persona and even suffer an attack from beat guru Allen Ginsberg. Along with interviewing major figures in the Suicide story, the author reaches back into 40 years chronicling and interviewing major players in New York’s musical history, including Blondie, Jayne County, James Chance and the New York Dolls. While the city changes around them, it all adds up to the definitive account of the lives and times of this unique duo.

Infinite Dreams
Infinite Dreams

Author: Liz Lamere

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2024-06-18

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 1493072498

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Best known for co-founding the early punk duo Suicide, Alan Vega lived a complex and labyrinthine life, driven by a desire to express himself uncompromisingly through art. From his first sketch in art class at Brooklyn College to the 2021 release of the album Mutator five years after his death, Vega continues to shock and inspire. This first-ever biography of Vega tells the story of the man’s life and art, beginning with his early attempts to live a “normal” life and his epiphanic encounter with Iggy Pop in 1969. Although becoming a performer on stage had been at the bottom of Vega’s list of lifetime ambitions, Iggy changed his mind: he needed music to truly express his vision. Infinite Dreams goes on to describe Vega’s many experiments across a variety of media, including the partnership with Marty Rev that became Suicide, which challenged audiences to look deep inside themselves and to not settle for distractions. A raw but engaging exploration of a man whose artwork, music, and philosophy inspired thousands, written by award-winning author Laura Davis-Chanin together with Liz Lamere, Alan Vega’s wife and long-term creative collaborator.

1973: Rock at the Crossroads
1973: Rock at the Crossroads

Author: Andrew Grant Jackson

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2019-12-03

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1250299993

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A fascinating account of the music and epic social change of 1973, a defining year for David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd, Elton John, the Rolling Stones, Eagles, Elvis Presley, and the former members of The Beatles. 1973 was the year rock hit its peak while splintering—just like the rest of the world. Ziggy Stardust travelled to America in David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane. The Dark Side of the Moon began its epic run on the Billboard charts, inspired by the madness of Pink Floyd's founder, while all four former Beatles scored top ten albums, two hitting #1. FM battled AM, and Motown battled Philly on the charts, as the era of protest soul gave way to disco, while DJ Kool Herc gave birth to hip hop in the Bronx. The glam rock of the New York Dolls and Alice Cooper split into glam metal and punk. Hippies and rednecks made peace in Austin thanks to Willie Nelson, while outlaw country, country rock, and Southern rock each pointed toward modern country. The Allman Brothers, Grateful Dead, and the Band played the largest rock concert to date at Watkins Glen. Led Zep’s Houses of the Holy reflected the rise of funk and reggae. The singer songwriter movement led by Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell flourished at the Troubadour and Max’s Kansas City, where Bruce Springsteen and Bob Marley shared bill. Elvis Presley’s Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite was NBC’s top-rated special of the year, while Elton John’s albums dominated the number one spot for two and a half months. Just as U.S. involvement in Vietnam drew to a close, Roe v. Wade ignited a new phase in the culture war. While the oil crisis imploded the American dream of endless prosperity, and Watergate’s walls closed in on Nixon, the music of 1973 both reflected a shattered world and brought us together.

Suicide's Suicide
Suicide's Suicide

Author: Andi Coulter

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2020-09-03

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 1501355678

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New York City in the 1970s was an urban nightmare: destitute, dirty, and dangerous. As the country collectively turned its back on the Big Apple, two musical vigilantes rose out of the miasma. Armed only with amplified AC current, Suicide's Alan Vega and Marty Rev set out to save America's soul. Their weaponized noise terrorized unsuspecting audiences. Suicide could start a riot on a lack of guitar alone. Those who braved their live shows often fled in fear--or formed bands (sometimes both). This book attempts to give the reader a front-row seat to a Suicide show. Suicide is one of the most original, most misunderstood, and most influential bands of the last century. While Suicide has always had a dedicated cult following, the band is still relatively unknown outside their musical coterie. Arguing against the idea of the band's niche musical history, this book looks at parallels between Marvel Comics' antiheroes in the 1970s and Suicide's groundbreaking first album. Andi Coulter tells the origin story of two musical Ghost Riders learning to harness their sonic superpower, using noise like a clarion call for a better future.

Miles Davis
Miles Davis

Author: Clarence Bernard Henry

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-08-15

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 1317228391

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This research and information guide provides a wide range of scholarship on the life, career, and musical legacy of Miles Davis, and is compiled for an interdisciplinary audience of scholars in jazz and popular music, musicology, and cultural studies. It serves as an excellent tool for librarians, researchers, and scholars sorting through the massive amount of material in the field.

Roots Punk
Roots Punk

Author: David A. Ensminger

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2023-11-15

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 1496848438

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Punk rock evokes dissent and disruption, abrasive and anarchic musicality, and a host of countercultural aesthetics. Featuring original interviews and over one hundred images, Roots Punk: A Visual and Oral History by longtime music journalist and author David A. Ensminger focuses on how punk merged with roots music to create a rich style that incorporated honky-tonk, rockabilly, doo-wop, reggae, ska, jazz, folk, blues, and labor ballads. This engagement transformed the notion of punk to include a wide array of vintage source material that seems more aligned with bolo ties and Stetsons than Doc Martens and safety pins. Ensminger explores the music’s aesthetics, traits, and themes. He contextualizes, clarifies, maps, and probes roots punk’s hybrid nature as well as its diverse, queer-inclusive, and multicultural strains. By painting a broad, nuanced, and well-documented picture of the genre from its earliest incarnation, he forms a kind of people’s history of the movement. Roots Punk features original interviews with members of Minutemen, MDC, the Dicks, the Plimsouls, Tex and the Horseheads, Dils/Rank and File, X, the Flesh Eaters, Beatnigs, Alejandro Escovedo, Robert “El Vez” Lopez, Blasters, and more. Whether covering sarcastic novelty forms or sincere embraces, Ensminger reveals and revels in a punk tradition lined with blues records, acoustic ballads, country, and hillbilly romp. In a time of growing conformity, replication, and commercialization, roots punk (sometimes dubbed cow-punk) offers a tantalizing revitalization and reimagination of the American songbook.

This Must Be the Place
This Must Be the Place

Author: Jesse Rifkin

Publisher: Harlequin

Published: 2023-07-11

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 0369732995

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*A Kirkus Best Book of July* *An InsideHook Book You Should Be Reading This July* A fascinating history that examines how real estate, gentrification, community and the highs and lows of New York City itself shaped the city’s music scenes from folk to house music. Take a walk through almost any neighborhood in Manhattan and you’ll likely pass some of the most significant clubs in American music history. But you won’t know it—almost all of these venues have been demolished or repurposed, leaving no record of what they were, how they shaped music scenes or their impact on the neighborhoods around them. Traditional music history tells us that famous scenes are created by brilliant, singular artists. But dig deeper and you’ll find that they’re actually created by cheap rent, empty space and other unglamorous factors that allow artistic communities to flourish. The 1960s folk scene would have never existed without access to Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park. If the city hadn’t gone bankrupt in 1975, there would have been no punk rock. Brooklyn indie rock of the 2000s was only able to come together because of the borough’s many empty warehouse spaces. But these scenes are more than just moments of artistic genius—they’re also part of the urban gentrification cycle, one that often displaces other communities and, eventually, the musicians themselves. Drawing from over a hundred exclusive interviews with a wide range of musicians, deejays and scenesters (including members of Peter, Paul and Mary; White Zombie; Moldy Peaches; Sonic Youth; Treacherous Three; Cro-Mags; Sun Ra Arkestra; and Suicide), writer, historian and tour guide Jesse Rifkin painstakingly reconstructs the physical history of numerous classic New York music scenes. This Must Be the Place examines how these scenes came together and fell apart—and shows how these communal artistic experiences are not just for rarefied geniuses but available to us all.

Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–1983
Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–1983

Author: Tim Lawrence

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2016-09-15

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0822373920

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As the 1970s gave way to the 80s, New York's party scene entered a ferociously inventive period characterized by its creativity, intensity, and hybridity. Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor chronicles this tumultuous time, charting the sonic and social eruptions that took place in the city’s subterranean party venues as well as the way they cultivated breakthrough movements in art, performance, video, and film. Interviewing DJs, party hosts, producers, musicians, artists, and dancers, Tim Lawrence illustrates how the relatively discrete post-disco, post-punk, and hip hop scenes became marked by their level of plurality, interaction, and convergence. He also explains how the shifting urban landscape of New York supported the cultural renaissance before gentrification, Reaganomics, corporate intrusion, and the spread of AIDS brought this gritty and protean time and place in American culture to a troubled denouement.

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire
Love Goes to Buildings on Fire

Author: Will Hermes

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2012-09-04

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0374533547

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This title provides a group portrait of some of the greatest musicians of the 20th century, including Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Grandmaster Flash and Bob Dylan.

Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth
Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth

Author: Cathi Unsworth

Publisher: Nine Eight Books

Published: 2023-05-11

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 1788706250

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A Times Book of the Year A Mojo Book of the Year A Louder Than War Book of the Year A Waterstones Book of the Year A Resident Book of the Year 'A beautifully written, meticulously researched account. 4/5.' - CLASSIC POP 1979. Months of industrial action throughout the winter have left the dead unburied and mountains of rubbish piling up in the streets. Punk has reached its bleak climax with the fatal heroin overdose of Sid Vicious while awaiting trial for the murder of his girlfriend. Unlikely alliances of outsiders prepare to seize power, set the political agenda and write the soundtrack for the years to come. Their figureheads are two very different kinds of dominatrices... As Margaret Thatcher enters 10 Downing Street, a handful of bands born of punk - Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division and the Cure - find a way to distil the dissonance and darkness of the shifting decade into a new form of music. Pushing at the taboos the Sex Pistols had unlocked and dancing with the fetishistic, all will become global stars of goth. By the time Thatcher is cast out of office in 1990, the arrival of goth will have imprinted on the cultural landscape as much as the Iron Lady herself. Forty years on, author Cathi Unsworth provides the first comprehensive overview of the music, context and lasting legacy of goth. This is the story of how goth was shaped by the politics of the era - from the miners' strikes and privatisation to the Troubles and AIDS - as well as how its rock 'n' roll outlaw imagery and music cross-pollinated throughout Britain and internationally, speaking to a generation of alienated youths. A fascinating social history, Season of the Witch tells the tale of an enduring counter-culture, one that steadfastly refuses to give up the ghost.