Few styles of popular music have generated as much controversy as progressive rock, a musical genre best remembered today for its gargantuan stage shows, its fascination with epic subject matter drawn from science fiction, mythology, and fantasy literature, and above all for its attempts to combine classical music's sense of space and monumental scope with rock's raw power and energy. Its dazzling virtuosity and spectacular live concerts made it hugely popular with fans during the 1970s, w...

Created in the late 1960s, fashionable in the early 1970s and hated in the 1980s Progressive Rock has a colourful and eventful story. Many of the genres main protagonists, including Genesis, Yes, King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, remain as popular as ever, while lesser-known names like Camel, Caravan, Renaissance, Van der Graaf Generator and Gentle Giant retain cult status.Prog expert Stephen Lambe guides the reader through the early years as the music developed out of the B...

Hes not paying me anymore, so I can say what I like. Ritchie is the greatest guitarist in the world. - Bobby Rondinelli of Rainbow This is the independent and uncensored guide to the music of Rainbow. Written by Jeff Perkins, this amazing eBook is the ultimate commemoration of one of the greatest rock bands on the planet.Also featured are rare and previously unreleased interviews with Ritchie Blackmore and the late great Ronnie James Dio. The views of the two founders are complemented by n...

Anyone who grew up in Canada in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, knows how amazing Canada's music scene was in those magical decades. Etched in the musical memories of millions of music fans in Canada and around the globe are great tunes, television appearances and live shows featuring The Diamonds, Lighthouse, Steppenwolf, Mashmakhan, Patsy Gallant, Skylark, Bobby Curtola, Edward Bear, Susan Jacks, Terry Jacks, Denny Doherty, The Five Man Electrical Band, The Paupers, Moxy, The Raes, A Foot in C...

When Nirvana first exploded onto the music scene in 1991 with the anthemic 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', few people could've predicted their subsequent global impact. No one knew then that Nevermind would become one of the seminal albums of the decade, selling over 30 million copies worldwide and spearheading a whole new 'grunge' movement. In so doing, the band's lead singer Kurt Cobain was transformed into one of music's most enduring and iconic figures.As drummer for the British group Capta...

Highway 61 Revisited resonates because of its enduring emotional appeal. Few songwriters before Dylan or since have combined so effectively the intensely personal with the spectacularly universal. In "Like a Rolling Stone," his gleeful excoriation of Miss Lonely (Edie Sedgwick? Joan Baez? a composite "type"?) fuses with the evocation of a hip new zeitgeist to produce a veritable anthem. In "Ballad of a Thin Man," the younger generation's confusion is thrown back in the Establishme...

'They call me a madman but compared to Pete Way, I'm out of my league.' - Ozzy OsbourneThere are rock memoirs and then there is this one. A Fast Ride Out of Here tells a story that is so shocking, so outrageous, so packed with excess and leading to such uproar and tragic consequences as to be almost beyond compare. Put simply, in terms of jaw-dropping incident, self-destruction and all-round craziness, Pete Way's rock'n'roll life makes even Keith Richards's appear...

In Psychedelia and Other Colours, acclaimed author Rob Chapman explores in crystalline detail the history, precedents and cultural impact of LSD, from the earliest experiments in painting with light and immersive environments to the thriving avant-garde scene that existed in San Francisco even before the Grateful Dead and the Fillmore Auditorium. In the UK, he documents an entirely different history, and one that has never been told before. It has its roots in fairy tales and fair...

Christopher R. Weingarten provides a thrilling account of how the Bomb Squad produced such a singular-sounding record: engineering, sampling, scratching, constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing - even occasionally stompingon vinyl that sounded too clean. Using production techniques that have never been duplicated, the Bomb Squad plunderedand reconfigured their own compositions to make frenetic splatter collages; they played samples by hand together in aroom like a...

Marc Woodworth's book covers the album's long and unorthodox period of writing, recording, sequencing, and editing. It includes interviews with members of the band, manager Pete Jamison, web-master and GBV historian Rich Turiel and Robert Griffin of Scat Records. At least sixty-five songs were recorded and considered for the album and five distinct concepts were rejected before the band hit upon the records final form. One late version, very nearly released, contained only a few of Bee...

'You can only marvel at Robertson's brilliant audacity as he attacks the on-the-road-off-their-heads genre with giddy aplomb… He is either a genius or an utter madman' – NME'Robertson's raw portrayal of Liam Gallagher makes every indiscretion you've heard about seem perfectly feasible!' - TIME OUTOasis were a band like bands used to be. Hard-drinking and substance abusing. If they liked you, they loved you. If they didn't, you had to be prepared for confrontation.They ...

Smile is not merely a great unfinished album, but a living work of art that is all at once expansive, indeterminate, and resolutely pop.In the early 1960s, The Beach Boys rose from the suburbs of Hawthorne, California to become emissaries of a post-war American dream that fused middle-class aspiration and mobility with images of youth. Led by dream master Brian Wilson, their music gave voice to a Southern California mythos and compelled an audience across the nation and be...