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Books, authors, spoken word and poetry which may appeal to the curious spirit of Elsewhere.
JOHNNY CASH AT FOLSOM PRISON;THE MAKING OF A MASTERPIECE by MICHEAL STREISSGUTH
A hip comedy club, New York, late 1980s. The stand-up delivers a one-liner which has the smart set baying: "Does anyone know why Johnny Cash still wears black?" At the time Cash's career was in one of its periodic lows. In the 90s it would be turned around with the spare and elemental albums under the genre-defining banner American Recordings, and by the time of his death... more >>
Added: 30 Aug 10 
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CAN'T BE SATISFIED, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MUDDY WATERS by ROBERT GORDON
When McKinley Morganfield’s grandmother named him Muddy after the nearby Mississippi and he later took the surname Waters, there seemed something oddly symbolic in it. Here was man who wasn’t born in the year he said he was, claimed a town he wasn’t born in as his birthplace and carried a name he wasn’t born with. These are muddy waters indeed. Yet in that there... more >>
Added: 30 Aug 10 2 Comments
VINYL HAYRIDE; COUNTRY MUSIC ALBUM COVERS 1947-89 by PAUL KINGSBURY
The purest strain of American country music -- not the pop-schlock of Shania Twain or the credible singer-songwriters out of Texas -- bewilders most people. It can be cornball, sentimental, blindly patriotic, hypocritically conservative, and often just plain strange. It is also, to cite Nick Tosche's excellent studies of it, "the biggest music in America" and "the twisted roots... more >>
Added: 23 Aug 10
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND: AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE by JIM DeROGATE: When the whip comes down
In 1976 the musician/producer and music theorist Brian Eno said to Punk magazine of New York’s the Velvet Underground: “I knew that they were going to be one of the most interesting groups and that there would be a time when it wouldn’t be the Beatles up there and then all these other groups down there. “It would be a question of attempting to assess the relative... more >>
Added: 22 Aug 10
DOWN AT THE END OF LONELY STREET by PETER BROWN and PAT BROESKE: The rise and fall of the King
With the second volume of Peter Guralnick’s definitive two-part biography of Elvis, Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley there would seem little reason to be interested in this more modest paperback subtitled with blunt literalism The Life and Death of Elvis Presley. However, Brown and Broeske have done their homework and cite numerous personal interviews with major... more >>
Added: 16 Aug 10
MIND OVER MATTER: THE IMAGES OF PINK FLOYD by STORM THORGERSON AND PETER CURZON: Memorable lapses of reason
For many Pink Floyd fans the name of photographer/designer Storm Thorgerson conjures up an image of some Scandinavian psychedelic traveller, hair blowing in the breeze as he traverses landscapes of the subconscious and alights on startlingly personal visions which then become public proprerty. Thorgerson is the man with a mainline to the images which have long been associated with this... more >>
Added: 9 Aug 10
SLEEPING WITH GHOSTS by DON MCcCULLIN: War -- and something approaching peace
In one of those excellent but buried television programmes, various photographers who were in the Vietnam killing zones told of the stories behind some of those images imprinted on the collective memory of a generation. That shot of the young girl running down the road, her back on fire from napalm? It was initially rejected because it showed frontal nudity. The policeman... more >>
Added: 6 Aug 10
20TH CENTURY DREAMS by NIK COHN AND GUY PEELAERT: A life less ordinary
Max Vail was an extraordinary character. Part-Zelig and part-Chauncey Gardiner, he was seen in the company of the great and famous throughout last century. He counted among his friends Andy Warhol, John Lennon, Rudolph Nureyev, Truman Capote and all the important Kennedys. His funeral in 2000 - he died at age 100, his life spanning the century that he somehow defined -- was attended by... more >>
Added: 2 Aug 10
BIGGLES SHOT DOWN: But not by the Boche this time
The thrilling air adventure of Biggles in World War One flew pretty close to reality. Take the case of the Belgian aerial observer whose balloon shared the skies with glue-and-matchstick flying machines flown by heroic young adventurers. His balloon caught fire and he slid back to earth 3000 feet down the steel mooring cable -- and lived. William Earle Johns, creator of the legendary... more >>
Added: 23 Jul 10
CLEOPATRA; HISTORIES, DREAMS AND DISTORTIONS by LUCY HALLETT-HUGHES
It seems curious that Madonna, who has had the unerring instinct to reinvent herself in the image and iconography of others (yesterday Marlene, today Marilyn) has never – at least not yet – alighted on Cleopatra for inspiration and a new dress code. Here, at least in myth, is a wannabe seductress and style-setter for the modern era. The life of a steamy... more >>
Added: 19 Jul 10
AN EXPANDING SUBTERRA by WAYNE BARRAR: Going underground
The first time I went to Las Vegas it tricked me, and I enjoyed it. In some kitsch casino my partner and I descended a floor or two underground to a street made up to look like a New York City block. We went into an Italian restaurant which had a nice patio facing the street and I turned to her and said, "You want to sit inside or outside?" "Outside"? Underground?... more >>
Added: 8 Jul 10
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI INTERVIEWED (2000): The angry old man
Lawrence Ferlinghetti sounds in feisty spirit. Indeed, my call to his famous City Lights bookshop in San Francisco finds the 81-year-old deeply irritated, if not to say downright angry.It's all because of the recently released album of him reading selections from his poem, A Coney Island of the Mind, his 42-year-old poetic meditation which has been translated into nine languages.No, he wasn't... more >>
Added: 7 Jul 10
THE GREAT WALL by JULIA LOVELL: Built it and they'll believe it
When Richard Nixon stood on a segment of China’s famous wall in 1972 he announced, “This is a great wall and it had to be built by great people” the anti-Communist American president was playing the diplomacy game on his break-through mission. But he was wrong on a number of counts. He had fallen for the widespread notion of a “great wall” when there are many... more >>
Added: 5 Jul 10
VENICE: PURE CITY by PETER ACKROYD (2010)
If you had been in Venice last year and gone to see the elegant Bridge of Sighs you would have had an unpleasant surprise. This passage between the Doge’s palace and the prison -- those taken to the clanger would, at the very least, sigh -- was itself a prisoner of the 21st century. It was surrounded by huge covers over the surrounding buildings which were undergoing renovation, and... more >>
Added: 5 Jul 10
MAGICAL MYSTERY TOURS by TONY BRAMWELL:Not only a northern song
Tony Bramwell -- who sounds like great man to have a martini with -- has had an extrordinary life, and not just because he was a childhood friend of the Beatles, became their manager Brian Epstein's off-sider, and -- as their road manager and CEO of Apple Records and Films -- was one of a small inner sanctum around the band until they went their separate ways. His extraordinary life... more >>
Added: 28 Jun 10
SCENES FROM A REVOLUTION by MARK HARRIS: He not busy being born is busy dying.
That film is a collaborative art is accepted, but it can also be a war of attrition where inflated egos collide at the interface of culture and commerce. And in Hollywood where the stakes -- money, careers, egos -- are bigger, and can disproportionately rise or fall dramatically with any project, then the stories from behind the scenes can be outrageous. Peter Biskin's Easy... more >>
Added: 28 Jun 10
HOWLING AT THE MOON by WALTER YETNIKOFF AND DAVID RITZ
Yetnikoff, former head of CBS Records who helmed the company's sale to Sony, tells a racy, drug-fuelled story of 70s and 80s excess, fame and fantasy. He opens by describing sex with Jackie Onassis (it's a dream, but he is to meet her later that day to talk about him writing a book of his mad life) and then his day really begins. There are vodkas, snacks of cocaine and marijuana, a... more >>
Added: 21 Jun 10
MARILYN by ANDRE de DIENES: Little girl heading for the big time
For those who came of age after her death, Marilyn Monroe belongs to that generation of American males whose idea of cool was smoking a pipe and reading Playboy. That seems pretty tame to those who grew up with designer drugs and Hustler -- so Marilyn is merely a frozen image from a safer era of the sexual revolution. The mystique of Marilyn -- as with the genuinely famous, a... more >>
Added: 14 Jun 10
THE RESTLESS GENERATION by PETE FRAME: Britain before the Beatles
There is a widely held view, especially amongst those who came of age in the Sixties, that nothing much happened in British music before the Beatles. Yes, there was Cliff Richard and the Shadows, and a few names like Marty Wilde and Billy Fury, and of course the Lonnie Donegan skiffle phase which lead into Tommy Steele . . . but really that was about it. Rock writer Frame -- well known... more >>
Added: 8 Jun 10
THE FAT MEXICAN by ALEX CAINE: Uneasy riders
When Hunter S Thompson spent a year in the mid Sixties riding with the Hells Angels to emerge with his book Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, he ushered in the era of "New Journalism" (in which the author is part of the story). For his heroism under violent circumstances, Thompson became the writer that many journalists wanted to be -- but... more >>
Added: 1 Jun 10
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