San Antonio College Library

A biography of the blind musician discusses his career and how he uses his fame to raise money for charities and promotes benefits for human rights, disadvantaged youths, and world peace.

Drawing upon extensive new first hand interview material from Debbie Harry, Chris Stein and many other significant players in the band's long history and a huge archive of personal materials and unpublished interviews, Blondie: Parallel Lines is the definitive eye-witness account of the group's long and often tumultuous existence. Beginning with the band members' childhoods, backgrounds and influences, the book is also an evocative homage to the unique...

"Throughout his prolific career, John Mellencamp has performed more than twenty Top 40 hits, has been nominated for thirteen Grammy Awards, and has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Hits like Jack and Diane, Small Town, and Cherry Bomb are iconic American songs that have played an important role in defining midwestern music and developing the rock genre. Despite his critical and commercial success, however, the rough guy from a small...

M Train is a journey through eighteen "stations." It begins in the tiny Greenwich Village cafe where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. We then travel across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations: from Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico, to a meeting of an Arctic explorer's society in Berlin; from the ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York's...

A journalist who had unprecedented access to Guns n' Roses at their peak delivers a history of the band's charismatic, talented and idiosyncratic leader. Even in the world of rock, a figure like Axl Rose doesn't come along very often. Mercurial and brilliant, deluded and imperious, Rose defies easy description or analysis. Few people have studied Rose as closely as Mick Wall. Traveling with Guns n' Roses and writing about them in the late 1980s and...

In Patti Smith: America's Punk Rock Rhapsodist, musician and historian Eric Wendell delves into the volatile mix of religious upbringing and musical and literary influences that gave shape to Smith's lyrics, music, and artistic output. Wendell explores how Smith's androgynous stage presence pulled the various societal triggers, adding a new layer of meaning to popular music performance. Songwriter and singer, performance artist and poet, Smith created...

Peter Whitmer delves deep into Elvis's personality in a compelling psychological investigation, exposing the private pain and agony that kept him from becoming the man and performer he might have been. Beginning with the trauma of the loss of his twin brother, Jesse, at birth, psychologist Peter Whitmer shows how this unknown brother became a major presence that would haunt Elvis his entire life. The loss drove Elvis's mother, Gladys, to overprotect...

Counter In the past eight-years, the face of popular culture has changed radically and with it, the music that will define the decade. Gone are the pop saturated songs of the 70's and 80's. Today's sound is a fusion of grunge, hip-hop, metal, hardcore and funk. Disparate sounds that together create something thoroughly modern and unlike anything we've heard before. No band embodies this musical melting pot more than Korn. With their frantic, no-holds-barred...

Based on interviews with surviving band members, Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars shares how lead singer and front man Ronnie Van Zant guided the band's hugely successful five-year run and, in the process, created not only a new country rock idiom, but a new Confederacy in constant conflict with old Southern totems and prejudices. Placing the music and personae of Skynyrd into a broad cultural context, this book gives a new perspective to a history...

The book delves into the various incarnations of the band, and the personalities of all key members, past and present.