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CHRIS O’DELL WASN’T FAMOUS. SHE WASN’T EVEN ALMOST FAMOUS. BUT SHE WAS THERE.

* She was in the studio when the Beatles recorded The White Album, Abbey Road, and Let It Be, and she sang in the “Hey Jude” chorus.

* She lived with George Harrison and Pattie Boyd and unwittingly got involved in Pattie’s famous love story with Eric Clapton.

* She’s the subject of Leon Russell’s “Pisces Apple Lady.”

* She worked for the Rolling Stones on their infamous 1972 to

Phish rank among the greatest live bands in rock history, and a sizable subculture of Phishheads would argue there’s been none better. Formed in Burlington, Vermont, this determined foursome of high-IQ misfits developed their uniquely telepathic chemistry playing that college town’s club scene. Vermont’s best-kept secret rose to national prominence in the nineties, when they became the most obvious heirs to the Grateful Dead’s legacy as onstage improvisers and touring Pied Pipers. With a raft of self-imposed challenges, Phish mapped out much new territory, as well. W

Before his untimely death in 1982, Lester Bangs was inarguably the most influential critic of rock and roll. Writing in hyper-intelligent Benzedrine prose that calls to mind Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, he eschewed all conventional thinking as he discussed everything from Black Sabbath being the first truly Catholic band to Anne Murray’s smoldering sexuality. In Mainlines, Blood Feasts, Bad Taste fellow rock critic John Morthland has compiled a companion volume to Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, the first, now classic collection of Bangs’s work. He

Rock & roll has transformed American culture more profoundly than any other art form. During the 1960s, it defined a generation of young people as political and social idealists, helped end the Vietnam War, and ushered in the sexual revolution. In Dixie Lullaby, veteran music journalist Mark Kemp shows that rock also renewed the identity of a generation of white southerners who came of age in the decade after segregation -- the heyday of disco, Jimmy Carter, and Saturday Night Live.

Growing up in North Carolina in the 1970s, Kemp experienced pain, confusion, and shame as a

In Dixie Lullaby, a veteran music journalist ponders the transformative effects of rock and roll on the generation of white southerners who came of age in the 1970s--the heyday of disco, Jimmy Carter, and Saturday Night Live. Growing up in North Carolina, Mark Kemp burned with shame and anger at the attitudes of many white southerners--some in his own family--toward the recently won victories of the civil rights movement. "I loved the land that surrounded me but hated the history that haunted that land," he writes.

Then the down-home, bluesy rock of the Deep South began taking the

Drawing upon nearly fifteen years of exclusive interviews with the members of Phish, veteran music journalist Parke Puterbaugh examines the colorful chemistry that inspired the wildly popular rock group to push their four-man experiment to the limit. An intimate and fascinating portrait, Phish: The Biography is the definitive story of these Vermont jam-band legends.

"There are no definitive histories," writes Elijah Wald, in this provocative reassessment of American popular music, "because the past keeps looking different as the present changes." Earlier musical styles sound different to us today because we hear them through the musical filter of other styles that came after them, all the way through funk and hiphop.
As its blasphemous title suggests, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll rejects the conventional pieties of mainstream jazz and rock history. Rather than concentrating on those traditionally favored styles, the book traces the evoluti

Classic sociological analyses of 'deviance' and rebellion; studies of technology; subcultural and feminist readings, semiotic and musicological essays and close readings of stars, bands and the fans themselves by Adorno, Barthes and other well-known contributors

In 1968, the New Yorker hired Ellen Willis as its first popular music critic. Her column, Rock, Etc., ran for seven years and established Willis as a leader in cultural commentary and a pioneer in the nascent and otherwise male-dominated field of rock criticism. As a writer for a magazine with a circulation of nearly half a million, Willis was also the country’s most widely read rock critic. With a voice at once sharp, thoughtful, and ecstatic, she covered a wide range of artists—Bob Dylan, The Who, Van Morrison, Elvis Presley, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Creedence C