Chicago Review Press imprint: 770 books

Bowie on Bowie presents some of the best interviews David Bowie has granted in his near five-decade career. Each featured interview traces a new step in his unique journey, successively freezing him in time in all of his various incarnations, from a young novelty hit-maker and Ziggy Stardust to plastic...

By far the most comprehensive book on Dylan’s words ever written, including a number of songs that no one has ever heard, this first volume will fundamentally change how these lyrics are interpreted and understood. Arranged in a surprising chronology of when they were actually written rather than...

In this sexually open and disarming account of her life and the era, Cherry Vanilla tells all about her personal successes and failures and in the process explores every aspect of the music industry during its most electrifying era—complete with detours through the sexual revolution, the women’s...

"Nobody knows Dolly like Dolly," declares Dolly Parton. Dolly's is a rags-to-riches tale like no other. A dirt-poor Smoky Mountain childhood paved the way for the buxom blonde butterfly's metamorphosis from singer-songwriter to international music superstar. The undisputed "Queen of...

The third of Judy Garland's five husbands, Sid Luft was the one man in her life who stuck around. He was chiefly responsible for the final act of Judy's meteoric comeback after she was unceremoniously booted off the MGM lot: he produced her iconic, Oscar-nominated vehicle A Star Is Born and expertly...

This is the book that restarted the James Dean cult by celebrating him as the cool, defiant visionary of pop culture who made adolescence seem heroic instead of awkward and who defined the style of rock ’n’ roll’s politics of delinquency. The only book to fully show how deliberately and carefully...

Evoking the turbulent past of the subject’s time and place, this odyssey to rural Georgia peels back the many layers of Blind Willie McTell’s compelling, occasionally shocking, but ultimately uplifting story. Portraying him as one of the most gifted artists of his generation, this account uncovers...

Examining the culture and politics of the Black Power era of the late 1960s, this book explores the relationship of soul music to the Black Power movement from the vantage point of the musicians and black revolutionaries themselves. The 1960s were a turbulent time for race relations in the United...

This vivid oral snapshot of an America that planted the blues is full of rhythmic grace. From the son of a sharecropper to an itinerant bluesman, Honeyboy’s stories of good friends Charlie Patton, Big Walter Horton, Little Walter Jacobs, and Robert Johnson are a godsend to blues fans. History buffs...

Author Denise Sullivan explores the bond between music and social change and traces the evolution of protest music over the past five decades. The marriage of music and social change didn't originate with the civil rights and black power movements of the 1950s and 1960s, but never before had the relationship...

Bossa nova is one of the most popular musical genres in the world. Songs such as “The Girl from Ipanema” (the fifth most frequently played song in the world), “The Waters of March,” and “Desafinado” are known around the world. Bossa Nova-a number-one bestseller when originally published in...

The early decades of American popular music-Stephen Foster, Scott Joplin, John Philip Sousa, Enrico Caruso-are, for most listeners, the dark ages. It wasn’t until the mid-1920s that the full spectrum of this music-black and white, urban and rural, sophisticated and crude-made it onto records for...

Ludwig van Beethoven, one of the most influential composers of all time, is brought vividly to life and made relevant to today’s young musicians in Beethoven for Kids. Children will learn about Beethoven’s troubled childhood and family life, early gift and passion for music, volatile personality,...

Based in part on the recent interviews with more than 125 people -among them Tommy Ramone, Chris Stein (Blondie), Lenny Kaye (Patti Smith Group), Hilly Kristal (CBGBs owner), and John Zorn-this book focuses on punk’s beginnings in New York City to show that punk was the most Jewish of rock movements,...