Barry Miles knew Frank Zappa intimately and was present at the recording of some of his most important albums. This sparkling biography brings the Zappa the musician and composer, Zappa the controversialist and Zappa the family man (despite his love of groupies, he was married for more than 30 years) together for the first time.Barry Miles' biography follows Zappa from his sickly Italian-American childhood in the 1940s (when his father, Frank senior, worked for the US military and w...

The Early Years is the authentic and compelling story of Pink Floyd, the group that gave alternative London its first real soundtrack and launched on the rock world a radical combination of music, light shows and pyrotechnic stage effects.Author Barry Miles saw the band play when they were still called The Pink Floyd Sound and he wrote the first ever article about them for a New York underground newspaper in 1966. He knew band members socially, witnessed the rapid ...

Au début des années 1960, Barry Miles était un étudiant en art ; à la fin il dirigeait le label Zapple des Beatles, vivant dans le légendaire Chelsea Hotel de New York. Voici le récit de ce qui s’est passé entre les deux.Durant cette décennie, Barry Miles organise avec Ginsberg et Burroughs la lecture qui marque l’avènement de la Beat Generation à Londres, cofonde la galerie Indica, véritable centre de commande de la contreculture et y lance le premier magazine underground d’Europe,...

London has long been a magnet for aspiring artists and writers, musicians and fashion designers seeking inspiration and success. In London Calling, Barry Miles explores the counter-culture - creative, avant garde, permissive, anarchic - that sprang up in this great city in the decades following the Second World War. Here are the heady post-war days when suddenly everything seemed possible, the jazz bars and clubs of the fifties, the teddy boys and the Angry Young Men, Francis Baco...

The Beat Hotel has been closed for nearly forty years. But for a brief period—from just after the publication of Howl in 1957 until the building was sold in 1963—it was home to Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin, Peter Orlovsky, Harold Norse, and a host of other luminaries of the Beat Generation. Now, Barry Miles—acclaimed author of many books on the Beats and a personal acquaintance of many of them—vividly excavates this remarkable period and restores i...

Authoritative biography of cult writer and author of NAKED LUNCH, William Burroughs (1914-1997).It has been 50 years since Norman Mailer asserted, 'I think that William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.' This assessment holds true today. No-one since then has taken such risks in their writing, developed such individual radical political ideas, or spanned such a wide range of media - Burroughs has writte...

Greenwich Village, 6 marzo 1970. Tre esplosioni in rapida sequenza sventrano l'elegante palazzo al numero 18 dell'Undicesima Strada Ovest; dalle fiamme escono, confuse ma illese, due ragazze seminude. Domato l'incendio, le forze dell'ordine trovano in cantina più di sessanta candelotti di dinamite, una bomba anticarro e tutto l'occorrente che sarebbe servito al gruppo terroristico Weather Underground per produrre altri ordigni. È l'atto di nascita degli anni Settanta e Barry Miles è a New ...

The Beats. a title that Jack Kerouac coined to define the exhausted exaltation of a generation, produced a body of works infected with a new energy. Their spontaneous, often-unedited style epitomised their own era and their famed close-knit literary community continues to inspire writers today.Barry Miles, friend and biographerof Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, was there , part of the Beat Vibe. here he gathers together some of the most influential as well as the...

William Burroughs ha cinque anni quando, seduto con il fratello nella casa di famiglia, in un quartiere altoborghese di St. Louis, scoppia improvvisamente a piangere: «Era come la sensazione disperata e assoluta di essere vulnerabile». William ne è ancora ignaro, ma lo Spirito del Male è già penetrato in lui, entità ostile che lo perseguiterà per tutta la vita. Che studi medicina a Vienna o antropologia ad Harvard, che faccia il disinfestatore a Chicago o si rifugi tra le braccia dell'amic...

Fifty years ago, Norman Mailer asserted, "William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." Few since have taken such literary risks, developed such individual political or spiritual ideas, or spanned such a wide range of media. Burroughs wrote novels, memoirs, technical manuals, and poetry. He painted, made collages, took thousands of photographs, produced hundreds of hours of experimental recordings, acted in movies, and recorded mo...

Les années 1970 ont été l’âge des extrêmes, entre sexe, drogue et bien-sûr, rock'n'roll. Barry Miles raconte ici ses rencontres, à New York et à Londres, avec les légendes des années 1970 et montre à quel point des artistes comme Patti Smith, ou The Ramones, mais aussi des écrivains comme William Burroughs ou Allen Ginsberg, ont influencé l’émergence d’une contre-culture.Figure incontournable de la contre-culture, Barry Miles est l’auteur de plusieurs ouvrages sur la musique, la lit...

With greatly expanded text, this is the most revealing and frank personal 30-year chronicle of the group ever written. Insider Barry Miles covers the Beatles story from childhood to the break-up of the group.