An expansive biography of David Bowie, one of the twentieth century’s greatest music and cultural icons.From noted author and rock ’n’ roll journalist Marc Spitz comes a major David Bowie biography to rival any other. Following Bowie’s life from his start as David Jones, an R & B—loving kid from Bromley, England, to his rise to rock ’n’ roll aristocracy as David Bowie, Bowie recounts his career but also reveals how much his music has influenced other musicians and forever changed t...

Taking us back to late ’70s and early ’80s Hollywood—pre-crack, pre-AIDS, pre-Reagan—We Got the Neutron Bomb re-creates word for word the rage, intensity, and anarchic glory of the Los Angeles punk scene, straight from the mouths of the scenesters, zinesters, groupies, filmmakers, and musicians who were there.“California was wide-open sex—no condoms, no birth control, no morality, no guilt.” —Kim Fowley“The Runaways were rebels, all of us were. And a lot of...

Fitzgerald was once a twee wallflower. He’s remade his image as a tough, junkie hipster and wants to take his Smiths obsessed, cardigan-wearing friends with him. Fearing resistance, he approaches a surly, Australian pimp, Blixa and hires her "finest bitch" Kylie, to "de-virginize them." He pays for Kylie’s services with bad dope. When a furious Blixa shows up for revenge, what is supposed to be the most special night of Rodney and Stew’s life could very well be their last on earth. Heroin,...

The pressures of life in a post 9/11 world are starting to effect suburban dad Mort Williams in a strange way. His wife has left him and the only two people he can relate to are his unscrupulous plastic surgeon and his "tween" next door neighbor. Eventually the fact that Mort is slowly turning into Michael Jackson becomes a problem that his two grown sons must deal with; even as one has become a survivalist and the other is trying to convince his French girlfriend to keep their baby. Bleak...

Walter Dabney thinks he’s being practical when he ingests a recreational erectile dysfunction drug called Themis. It will, he reasons, allow him to have a quickie with Annie, his mistress, before his wife returns with her family for a long planned celebratory supper. Only Walter is that guy you wonder about: the one who actually gets the four hour erection they warn you about in those commercials. He must now navigate the aforementioned dinner and the spontaneous arrival of all kinds of ra...

It was supposed to be a routine promotional appearance: an aspiring writer appears on a cable news or entertainment network to film a talking heads expert spot in order to promote one of his recently published articles. When face to face with the routine manipulations and blunt agendas that elicit the soundbytes we routinely see as part of our daily info-tainment, he is horrified and decides to rebel, only to realize that he is essentially violating the order of the entertainment universe ...

The Farewell Drugs (Reed, Chimpy, Johnny and Sloane) were the worst behaved band on the Lower East Side: heroin snorting, groupie abusing, shoplifting, drug dealing, sexist, racist misanthropes. But they had talent. When beleaguered record industry executive Hella Hecht endeavors to make them over, she finds wild success, marketing them as The Skatekeys, a boy band full of clean cut and polite young troubadours. The Drugs play along but slowly and surely, their old ways creep back in with ...

Winston Frame is the self described, urban "poet of death and despair." Young, dour, pale and handsome, he is, much like Ian Curtis of Joy Division, also haunted and suicidal. When the pressure of impending success, fatherhood and an affair get too much, he hangs himself. Only his journey is not quite over. Winston finds himself in Purgatory, which is a Weimar style cabaret full of animal acts, exhausted chanteuses and the borscht belt comic Bobby Lemondrops. His guide is "Mad Simon," who ...

The full story of the rise and spectacular comeback of the band hailed as the saviors of punk rock.It's hard to believe that in early 2004 Green Day was considered over—the band was still together, but they were dismissed as a strictly '90s phenomenon, incapable of re-creating the success of their groundbreaking album Dookie. Then American Idiot debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts, stayed on the charts for nearly 18 months, and went on to sell more than four mill...

A biography and cultural examination of the Rolling Stones' frontman Mick Jagger's spectacular life and the cultural revolution he led.As the Rolling Stones' legendary front man Mick Jagger remains an enigma. He hasn't given an in-depth interview for a decade and a half and never commented on his friend and partner, Keith Richard's often critical biography. Drawing on firsthand recollections from rockers, filmmakers, writers, radicals, and other artists who have be...

Four old college friends reunite in Manhattan and what starts as a stiff and awkward game of catch up devolves into a drug and rancor soaked mess when old rivalries and affections boil to the surface; abetted by drugs, professional jealousies, a new cultural divide and the arrival of their favorite college professor; a famous and deeply troubled novelist with a pretty, young girlfriend and a mysterious box in tow. Twenty years on, class is back in session and if they can get out of this co...

Bug Blowmonkey does so much cocaine that he has developed a friendship with one of his chemically induced hallucinations: the confused but still righteous ghost of Marvin Gaye. Estranged from the one woman he had feelings for, Bug begins to question his compulsion to get so numb and frigid. When he meets a new woman, he tries to strip away the icy, hipster facade and accept her for who she is: and not the idealized Vertigo-style duplicate of the pristine ghost he needs to break away from. ...