In the 1940s and ’50s Spade Cooley, the King of Western Swing, played to sellout crowds at the Santa Monica Ballroom. He charmed audiences with his fine fiddling, self-deprecating manner, and bounce-all-over-the-stage exuberance. Adapting his ballroom show for live television, The Spade Cooley Show, began broadcasting in 1948 and made Cooley the top local television entertainer for several years. He married one of his band singers, Ella Mae Evans. Their fifteen-year marriage was plagued with Cooley’s drunk and jealous rage and ended with Cooley beating his wife to death. The front-page trial ended with Cooley’s conviction.
A true story of a famed musician who rose to fame and fortune only to lose it all by his debauchery and brutality. The most brutal murder ever committed in Hollywood. Total depravity personified.
Celebrating the dark origins of our most American music, Country reveals a wild shadowland of history that encompasses blackface minstrels and yodeling cowboys; honky-tonk hell and rockabilly heaven; medieval myth and musical miscegenation; sex, drugs, murder; and rays of fierce illumination on Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others, famous and forgotten, whose demonology is America's own. Profusely and superbly illustrated, Country stands as one of the most brilliant explorations of American musical culture ever written.
Now in paperback, this first oral history of the most nihilistic of all pop movements brings the sound of the punk generation chillingly to life with 50 new pages of depraved testimony. "Please Kill Me" reads like a fast-paced novel, but the tragedies it contains are all too human and all too real. photos.
The cult-y pocket-size field guide to the strange and intriguing secrets of the Mojave—its myths and legends, outcasts and oddballs, flora, fauna, and UFOs—becomes the definitive, oracular book of the desert For the past five years, Desert Oracle has existed as a quasi-mythical, quarterly periodical available to the very determined only by subscription or at the odd desert-town gas station or the occasional hipster boutique, its canary-yellow-covered, forty-four-page issues handed from one curious desert zealot to the next, word spreading faster than the printers could keep up with. It became a radio show, a podcast, a live performance. Now, for the first time—and including both classic and new, never-before-seen revelations—Desert Oracle has been bound between two hard covers and is available to you. Straight out of Joshua Tree, California, Desert Oracle is “The Voice of the Desert”: a field guide to the strange tales, singing sand dunes, sagebrush trails, artists and aliens, authors and oddballs, ghost towns and modern legends, musicians and mystics, scorpions and saguaros, out there in the sand. Desert Oracle is your companion at a roadside diner, around a campfire, in your tent or cabin (or high-rise apartment or suburban living room) as the wind and the coyotes howl outside at night. From journal entries of long-deceased adventurers to stray railroad ad copy, and musings on everything from desert flora, rumored cryptid sightings, and other paranormal phenomena, Ken Layne's Desert Oracle collects the weird and the wonderful of the American Southwest into a single, essential volume.
Ever made it in the back of a cab? Or in an elevator? If not, you've missed out because a lot of people have, and these 44 stories prove it. Shocking, bold, fun-Public Love is impossible to put down. Each first-person confessional describes the how, when, and where of a public sex act. Complete with grainy colour photos of the lusty locales, these absolutely true tales offer a sophisticated twist on a timeless subject. Prepare to blush, chuckle, and wonder if you should be having more fun.
Rooted in the creative success of over 30 years of supermarket tabloid publishing, the Weekly World News has been the world's only reliable news source since 1979. The online hub www.weeklyworldnews.com is a leading entertainment news site.
"Proud to be an Okie is a fresh, well-researched, wonderfully insightful, and imaginative book. Throughout, La Chapelle's keen attention to shifting geographies and urban and suburban spaces is one of the work's real strengths. Another strength is the book's focus on dress, ethnicity, and the manufacturing of style. When all of these angles and insights are pulled together, La Chapelle delivers a fascinating rendering of Okie life and American culture."—Bryant Simon, author of Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America
SkateKey presents twenty-two childhood stories told by men and women connected by a metal gadget, the skatekey, a popular tool used to make a roller-skate fit onto a skater's shoe. This collection of memoirs emphasizes diversity multicultural and religious family backgrounds. Each roller-skating story takes place during a specific time period in American history: The Great Depression 1920s-1030s, World War II The 1940s, The 1950s, The Civil Rights Movement 1960s, and The 1970s. Some stories are funny while others present the hardships and struggles of children growing up during difficult times. SkateKey arouses nostalgia and includes authentic photos of the times and places represented in the stories.
Proud to Be an Okie brings to life the influential country music scene that flourished in and around Los Angeles from the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s to the early 1970s. The first work to fully illuminate the political and cultural aspects of this intriguing story, the book takes us from Woody Guthrie's radical hillbilly show on Depression-era radio to Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee" in the late 1960s. It explores how these migrant musicians and their audiences came to gain a sense of identity through music and mass media, to embrace the New Deal, and to celebrate African American and Mexican American musical influences before turning toward a more conservative outlook. What emerges is a clear picture of how important Southern California was to country music and how country music helped shape the politics and culture of Southern California and of the nation.
