Snake Music: A Detroit Memoir

Snake Music: A Detroit Memoir PDF Author: J. Patrick Reilly
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1105925129
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
Snake Music is a coming-of-age story set in the 1940s and 1950s in an inner-city Catholic neighborhood of Detroit, Michigan. The author, J. Patrick Reilly, describes his struggles to cope with his mother's near-fatal descent into mental illness, his father's alcoholism and early death, his family's desperate financial straits, and a devastating accident that crippled him for several years. In the midst of these challenges, Snake Music shows the redeeming power of a loving mother, good humor, and a love for music. Reilly reveals an old and terrible family secret and its multigenerational consequences, while telling his own story through the eyes of the boy he was at each stage of his memoir. Snake Music makes the reader laugh out loud, and sometimes cry.

Snake Music: A Detroit Memoir

Snake Music: A Detroit Memoir PDF Author: J. Patrick Reilly
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1105925129
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 391

Get Book

Book Description
Snake Music is a coming-of-age story set in the 1940s and 1950s in an inner-city Catholic neighborhood of Detroit, Michigan. The author, J. Patrick Reilly, describes his struggles to cope with his mother's near-fatal descent into mental illness, his father's alcoholism and early death, his family's desperate financial straits, and a devastating accident that crippled him for several years. In the midst of these challenges, Snake Music shows the redeeming power of a loving mother, good humor, and a love for music. Reilly reveals an old and terrible family secret and its multigenerational consequences, while telling his own story through the eyes of the boy he was at each stage of his memoir. Snake Music makes the reader laugh out loud, and sometimes cry.

Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs! My Adventures in the Alice Cooper Band

Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs! My Adventures in the Alice Cooper Band PDF Author: Dennis Dunaway
Publisher: Omnibus Press
ISBN: 1783236205
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
When Alice Cooper became the stuff of legend in the early '70s, their shows were monuments of fun and invention. Riding on a string of hits like "I'm 18" and "School's Out," they became America's highest-grossing act, producing four platinum albums and hitting number one on the U.S. and U.K. charts with Billion Dollar Babies in 1973. As teenagers in Phoenix, Dennis Dunaway and lead singer Vince Furnier, who would later change his name to Alice Cooper, formed a hard-knuckles band that played prisons, cowboy bars and teen clubs. Their journey took them from Hollywood to the ferocious Detroit music scene. From struggling for recognition to topping the charts, the Alice Cooper group was entertaining, outrageous, and one-of-a-kind. Dennis Dunaway, the bassist and co-songwriter for the band, tells a story just as over-the-top crazy as their (in)famous shows. Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs! is the riveting account of the band's creation in the '60s, strange glory in the '70s, and the legendary characters they met along the way.

Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem

Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem PDF Author: Daniel R. Day
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0525510532
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Dapper Dan is a legend, an icon, a beacon of inspiration to many in the Black community. His story isn’t just about fashion. It’s about tenacity, curiosity, artistry, hustle, love, and a singular determination to live our dreams out loud.”—Ava DuVernay, director of Selma, 13th, and A Wrinkle in Time NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VANITY FAIR • DAPPER DAN NAMED ONE OF TIME’S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE IN THE WORLD With his now-legendary store on 125th Street in Harlem, Dapper Dan pioneered high-end streetwear in the 1980s, remixing classic luxury-brand logos into his own innovative, glamorous designs. But before he reinvented haute couture, he was a hungry boy with holes in his shoes, a teen who daringly gambled drug dealers out of their money, and a young man in a prison cell who found nourishment in books. In this remarkable memoir, he tells his full story for the first time. Decade after decade, Dapper Dan discovered creative ways to flourish in a country designed to privilege certain Americans over others. He witnessed, profited from, and despised the rise of two drug epidemics. He invented stunningly bold credit card frauds that took him around the world. He paid neighborhood kids to jog with him in an effort to keep them out of the drug game. And when he turned his attention to fashion, he did so with the energy and curiosity with which he approaches all things: learning how to treat fur himself when no one would sell finished fur coats to a Black man; finding the best dressed hustler in the neighborhood and converting him into a customer; staying open twenty-four hours a day for nine years straight to meet demand; and, finally, emerging as a world-famous designer whose looks went on to define an era, dressing cultural icons including Eric B. and Rakim, Salt-N-Pepa, Big Daddy Kane, Mike Tyson, Alpo Martinez, LL Cool J, Jam Master Jay, Diddy, Naomi Campbell, and Jay-Z. By turns playful, poignant, thrilling, and inspiring, Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem is a high-stakes coming-of-age story spanning more than seventy years and set against the backdrop of an America where, as in the life of its narrator, the only constant is change. Praise for Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem “Dapper Dan is a true one of a kind, self-made, self-liberated, and the sharpest man you will ever see. He is couture himself.”—Marcus Samuelsson, New York Times bestselling author of Yes, Chef “What James Baldwin is to American literature, Dapper Dan is to American fashion. He is the ultimate success saga, an iconic fashion hero to multiple generations, fusing street with high sartorial elegance. He is pure American style.”—André Leon Talley, Vogue contributing editor and author

Nick Cave's Bar

Nick Cave's Bar PDF Author: Aug Stone
Publisher: Aug Stone
ISBN: 9781087929071
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
A mission to find a mythological watering hole... In June 1999, Aug Stone and his best friend flew to Germany to find the bar they had heard Nick Cave owned in Berlin. They assumed they would get off the plane, ask 'which way to Nick Cave's bar?', and then spend the rest of their time living it up amidst the wild world of its confines. Instead what followed were nine days of confusion, thwarted plans, and perpetual drunken misery. To this day, they're not sure Nick Cave ever owned a bar in Berlin. Aug Stone is a writer, comedian, & musician. Stone is the author of the comedy novel Off-License To Kill, and his journalism has appeared in The Quietus, The Comics Journal, Under The Radar, and many other sites and magazines. He performs comedy as Young Southpaw, bringing his surreal stories to the world via The Young Southpaw Part Of An Hour podcast and 'blends the arts with the absurd' on his interview show Etcetera ETC With Young Southpaw.

Motor City Music

Motor City Music PDF Author: Mark Slobin
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190882085
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
This is the first-ever historical study across all musical genres in any American metropolis. Detroit in the 1940s-60s was not just "the capital of the twentieth century" for industry and the war effort, but also for the quantity and extremely high quality of its musicians, from jazz to classical to ethnic. The author, a Detroiter from 1943, begins with a reflection of his early life with his family and others, then weaves through the music traffic of all the sectors of a dynamic and volatile city. Looking first at the crucial rule of the public schools in fostering talent, Motor City Music surveys the neighborhoods of older European immigrants and of the later huge waves of black and white southerners who migrated to Detroit to serve the auto and defense industries. Jazz stars, polka band leaders, Jewish violinists, and figures like Lily Tomlin emerge in the spotlight. Shaping institutions, from the Ford Motor Company and the United Auto Workers through radio stations and Motown, all deployed music to bring together a city rent by relentless segregation, policing, and spasms of violence. The voices of Detroit's poets, writers, and artists round out the chorus.

Songs Only You Know

Songs Only You Know PDF Author: Sean Madigan Hoen
Publisher: Soho Press
ISBN: 1616953373
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
A Rolling Stone Best Book: This memoir of a troubled young man’s escape into the Detroit punk scene is “a Kerouac-like saga fueled with energy and ecstasy” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). Described by Darin Strauss as “Nick Flynn meets Karl Ove Knausgard” and “a book of relentless compassion,” Songs Only You Know is an intense, sprawling memoir, equal parts family tragedy and punk rock road trip. It begins in late 1990s Detroit and spans a decade during which a family fights to hold itself together in the face of insurmountable odds. Sean’s father endangers his career at Ford Motor as he cycles from rehab to binge. His heartsick sister spirals into depression, and his mother relies on her Catholic faith and good works to spare what can be spared. Meanwhile, Sean seeks salvation in a community of eccentrics and outsiders. But the closer Sean comes to realizing his musical dream, the further he drifts from his family and himself.

A History of California Literature

A History of California Literature PDF Author: Blake Allmendinger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316299074
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
Blake Allmendinger's A History of California Literature surveys the paradoxical image of the Golden State as a site of dreams and disenchantment, formidable beginnings and ruinous ends. This history encompasses the prismatic nature of California by exploring a variety of historical periods, literary genres, and cultural movements affecting the state's development, from the colonial era to the twenty-first century. Written by a host of leading historians and literary critics, this book offers readers insight into the tensions and contradictions that have shaped the literary landscape of California and also American literature generally.

African American Jazz and Rap

African American Jazz and Rap PDF Author: James L. Conyers, Jr.
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786462388
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Music is an expressive voice of a culture, often more so than literature. While jazz and rap are musical genres popular among people of numerous racial and social backgrounds, they are truly important historically for their representation of and impact upon African American culture and traditions. Essays offer interdisciplinary study of jazz and rap as they relate to black culture in America. The essays are grouped under sections. One examines an Afrocentric approach to understanding jazz and rap; another, the history, culture, performers, instruments, and political role of jazz and rap. There are sections on the expressions of jazz in dance and literature; rap music as art, social commentary, and commodity; and the future. Each essay offers insight and thoughtful discourse on these popular musical styles and their roles within the black community and in American culture as a whole. References are included for each essay.

Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences

Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 934

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Book Description


Guitars, Bars, and Motown Superstars

Guitars, Bars, and Motown Superstars PDF Author: Dennis Coffey
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472113996
Category : Guitarists
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Under Berry Gordy, Motown was a place where studio musicians usually stood in the shadows, unlike the solo stars whose names appeared on the albums. Gordy held a tight rein on his musicians, forbidding them from playing for other record companies and denying them credit on his records. In Guitars, Bars, and Motown Superstars, author and guitarist Dennis Coffey tells how he slipped Gordy's draconian rules and went on to success as both a Motown musician and a million-selling solo artist. He offers a fascinating backstage look at the Detroit, L.A., and New York music scenes in the '60s and '70s, with side trips to the smoky clubs and funky studios where the Motown Sound was born. Coffey is credited with creating a lot of that sound, including the famous guitar intro to the Temptations' classic "Cloud Nine." He played on hundreds of Motown albums, and introduced such innovations as the wah-wah pedal into the Motown recording studio. Guitars, Bars, and Motown Superstars is an entertaining and amusing memoir of one of the most dynamic and influential periods in contemporary pop culture, and a unique insight into the ups and downs of the studio guitar-for-hire. It's also a look at the dizzying rags-to-riches-and-back-again career of a rock musician who went from million-seller with a house in the Hollywood Hills, and ultimately back to his roots in the Detroit area. A must for fans of Motown, rock, and you-are-there popculture history. Book jacket.