Rock Revolution

Ally Nightingale has secrets. Secrets she doesn't even share with the Rock Chicks. But two men know what she's up to. One has her back. The other has her heart, but he doesn't know it. As Ally rewinds the last year of her life, she knows two things. One, she’s never going to get what every Rock Chick should have - her own Hot Bunch guy. And two, she’s a Nightingale through and through. She just isn’t sure what to do about that. But as her secrets are revealed, the men in her life react.

No period in the history of rock music offered such an abrupt shift in prevailing tastes as the 1990s. While just a short while before, radio and MTV were clamoring for hair metal bands, suddenly alt-rockers such as Jane’s Addiction, Nine Inch Nails, Faith No More, Primus, Smashing Pumpkins, and of course, Nirvana, brought a sea change not just in what the most popular bands sounded like, but also in fashion, politics, and seemingly all aspects of pop culture.

Izzy Stradlin has long been rock’s great enigma. As the rhythm guitarist and songwriter who co-founded Guns N’ Roses, he helped craft Appetite for Destruction, the best-selling debut in American history, and co-wrote classics such as “Mr. Brownstone,” “Patience,” and “You Could Be Mine.” Yet at the height of global fame he walked away, rejecting stadium excess to carve a quieter, fiercely independent path. This definitive biography traces his journey from the flatlands of Lafayette, Indiana to the neon grind of Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip, from the combustible early days of ...

Pete Townshend is one of rock’s most restless innovators—guitarist, songwriter, art-school provocateur, and architect of the rock opera. Pete Townshend traces his extraordinary journey from postwar rubble in Chiswick to the orchestral reinterpretations and digital archives of the 21st century. Written in the voice of a seasoned music historian, this definitive biography situates Townshend not only within The Who’s combustible chemistry but inside the wider cultural and technological shifts that shaped his art. From skiffle beginnings and London’s Mod explosion to the explosive ...

Across five turbulent decades, Steve Earle has stood as one of America’s most uncompromising musical voices—a songwriter forged in the oil towns of Texas, tempered by the rebellion of Nashville’s outlaw scene, and redeemed through the hard grace of survival. Steve Earle: Outlaw Country Rock Poet traces his entire journey, from his teenage years chasing Townes Van Zandt through Houston coffeehouses to his transformation into the gravel-voiced elder statesman of Americana. This definitive biography follows Earle’s life in full: the early struggles to break into Nashville’s ...

Tom Morello has never treated the guitar as mere entertainment. From suburban Libertyville to Harvard lecture halls, from strip-mall rehearsal spaces to the front lines of world protests, his career charts a unique intersection of music and militancy. Tom Morello: Riffs, and Guerrilla Strategy is the definitive portrait of the Rage Against the Machine guitarist who weaponized sound against the machinery of power. This book traces his journey across three decades of cultural upheaval. Readers follow Morello’s disciplined Libertyville upbringing, his political grounding at Harvard, and his ...

This Thomas Paine Classic Collection contains three of Thomas Paine's most notable books: Common Sense, The Age of Reason, and The Rights of Man. Born during the Age of Enlightenment and one of America’s Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine wrote incredible works that continue to resonate with people in the modern world. Inside this collection, you’ll find some of Thomas Paine’s most famous and influential works, from his arguments against the Church to the nature of government and revolution.

Harry Nilsson defied every rule of pop stardom. He never toured, rarely appeared on stage, and yet his voice became one of the most recognizable sounds of the 20th century. Everybody’s Talkin’: The Life and Music of Harry Nilsson traces the improbable journey of a self-taught songwriter from Brooklyn who transformed the recording studio into his personal stage—and reshaped the emotional vocabulary of modern pop. From early days working in Los Angeles banks while recording homemade demos at night, Nilsson’s path was built on persistence, curiosity, and audacity. His friendship with ...

Grace Slick was never meant to blend quietly into the background. Born Grace Barnett Wing in 1939, she emerged from suburban order to become the uncompromising voice of a generation. As lead singer of Jefferson Airplane, she delivered the searing anthems “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit,” songs that captured the dissonance and possibility of the 1960s with unprecedented clarity. Grace Slick: Psychedelic Queen traces her journey from Highland Park childhood to Palo Alto adolescence, New York art student, reluctant advertising model, and finally, countercultural icon on the stages...

Few drummers have stood at the crossroads of popular music history quite like Bev Bevan. From his formative years in Birmingham’s industrial neighborhoods to the heights of global stadium tours, Bevan’s career traces the hidden architecture of rock’s most ambitious experiments. Mr. Blue Sky’s Pulse is the first full-length, documentary-grade biography of the man who anchored Electric Light Orchestra, The Move, and even Black Sabbath, written with archival depth and narrative momentum. This book follows Bevan’s story in strict chronology, situating every breakthrough and setback in...

In MC5: An Oral Biography of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band​, music journalists Brad Tolinski and Jaan Uhelszki invite listeners to reconsider this legendary band in a new light. Centered around a series of interviews with MC5 and their inner circle—many of whom are no longer with us—that Tolinski and Uhelszki inherited from Creem Magazine founding staffer and Mojo's US editor Bed Edmonds prior to his death, this book presents a genuinely candid, funny, and moving portrait of rock’s most uncompromising and articulate band.

It began with a handful of East Berlin teens who heard the Sex Pistols on a British military radio broadcast to troops in West Berlin, and it ended with the collapse of the East German dictatorship. Punk rock was a life-changing discovery. The buzz-saw guitars, the messed-up clothing and hair, the rejection of society and the DIY approach to building a new one: In their gray surroundings, where everyone's future was preordained by some communist apparatchik, punk represented a revolutionary philosophy - quite literally, as it turned out.

Punk Music History: The Origins, Heyday, and Lasting Impact of a Revolutionary Genre is the ultimate exploration of one of the most influential movements in modern music. From the raw energy of The Ramones and Sex Pistols to the political fire of The Clash and Dead Kennedys, punk has never been just about sound — it has been about rebellion, community, and authenticity. This comprehensive book takes you on a journey through punk’s origins, explosive rise, cultural transformation, and continuing legacy in the 21st century. Inside, you’ll discover: The roots of punk in garage rock and ...

Jon Fine spent nearly 30 years performing and recording with bands that played various forms of aggressive and challenging underground rock music. And, as he writes in this memoir, at no point were any of those bands "ever threatened, even distantly, by actual fame". Yet when members of his first band, Bitch Magnet, reunited after 21 years to tour Europe, Asia, and America, diehard longtime fans traveled from far and wide to attend those shows.

In the early 1990s, Olympia, Washington was a small city that sparked a global movement. Riot grrrl transformed punk into feminist revolt, and out of that crucible emerged Sleater-Kinney. This definitive biography tells the full story of one of the most important bands in modern rock, from their early experiments in Olympia basements to their transformation into icons of feminist resolve and uncompromising artistry. Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein began as parallel voices in riot grrrl’s noisy uprising, fronting Heavens to Betsy and Excuse 17. Their convergence in 1994, both personal ...

Tom Scholz is one of rock’s most paradoxical figures: an MIT-trained engineer who turned his Watertown basement into the launchpad for Boston, the best-selling debut album in rock history. This sweeping biography follows Scholz’s life chronologically, from his Toledo childhood of piano lessons and model airplanes to his years at MIT, where engineering discipline fused with a growing fascination for guitar tone. At Polaroid, he learned the problem-solving methods of laboratory work by day, while by night he soldered circuits, layered guitars, and built a sound that would change FM radio ...

Mick Jones was more than just the guitarist of The Clash—he was the band’s architect of melody, the restless experimenter who expanded punk into a global language. Mick Jones – Engineer of Noise is the definitive biography of a musician whose vision shaped generations, from the underground clubs of 1970s London to the hybrid sounds of Big Audio Dynamite and the digital frontiers of Carbon/Silicon. This book traces Jones’s story with cinematic detail: his Brixton childhood in postwar estates, his teenage obsessions with glam rock, and the chaotic experiments of London SS that set the...

Unhappy college sophomore Chandler Weitz has to change his life. To have any chance at happiness he needs two things, and he has to have them right away. He needs a girlfriend and a summer job. He more or less blunders into romance when a free-thinking redhead decides to take him home with her after a party. He has no idea what he’s getting into when she introduces him to her wildly unconventional friends, but he blithely joins in with them just for the chance to be with her. He even blunders into his summer job. Chandler and some friends sing in an amateur doo-wop group that a talented ...

The Beatles left an indelible mark not only on music, but on the culture in which they created it. In a time of great and sudden change, they led a generation into new territory, redefining the social landscape as a place where men and women could try on new roles. They led this change through their music, their public personae, and - under scrutiny - their example. The Beatles Guide to Love & Sex examines all three - the songs, the parts they played in public, and the way they led their lives, for better or worse. John, Paul, George and Ringo began their journey as typical working-class ...

France & Spain, 1795: The adventure continues in the saga of a sea bound healer caught between a British naval blockade and the bloody battles of the counter-Revolution in France. But there's something odd happening to her now, and it started with a rap upon her head, compliments of a French prison. Her cousin is dead, but she's remembering things from a past she had forgotten long ago, a trauma when she was only six years old. Hopefully, fulfilling her promise made there won't be the end of her. Waters, Winds & Rocks: "Ships are but boards, sailors but men; there be land-rats and water-...