Michael Lydon

"How to Play Classic Jazz Guitar is an instruction book designed for the intermediate guitarist who wishes to explore the "classic" style of swing-era jazz popularized by Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, Herb Ellis, and other big band and small combo guitarists. It offers a clear, concise introduction to jazz guitar, beginning with simple chords and progressions, then going on step by step to more advanced chords and alternate harmonies. How to Play Classic Jazz Guitar opens the exciting world of jazz guitar to any musician with a basic knowledge of guitar technique and willingness to learn."--Jacket.

What makes a lyric memorable or a melody catchy?Should I start with the music first or the lyrics?Does the chorus come before the verse?Writing songs requires so many music and language skills that the beginner is often overwhelmed. Songwriting Success breaks down the craft of melody and lyric writing into easily digested lessons that anyone can follow, regardless of their musical knowledge. Michael Lydon shows the beginning songwriter how to integrate the craft's many skills into a seamless artistic and commercial whole. Songwriting Success includes a special CD taking the budding songwriter who can't read music (or prefers to learn by listening) step-by-step through the songwriting process, from initial idea through crafting melodic hooks and catchy choruses to creating a final 'demo' version for marketing the song. From putting pen to paper to getting your song heard, Songwriting Success offers a quick, fun, and useful introduction to the world of songwriting.

Ray Charles: Man and Music is a complete biography of this seminal singer/pianist who has been active on the American music scene since the mid-1950s. Originally published in 1995 by Penguin Books, and universally hailed as the definitive biography, this new edition will bring Charles's life up to date, covering the last 7 years of his life.Lydon begins with Charles's impoverished childhood in Greenville, Florida, where tragedy struck early when the young Charles went blind at age 6 and was orphaned at age 14. Driven by his enormous talent and determination, Charles landed work playing some of the toughest juke joints in the state, fought heroin addiction, and finally landed a recording contract with Atlantic Records. Unlike other R&B singers, Charles took control of his career with its earliest days, moving on from his gospel-soul stylings of the mid-'50s to break through musical barriers, recording two country albums in the late '50s (at a time when the black presence in country music was barely felt), pure jazz, and then the powerful pop hits of the '60s. A living legend, Charles continues to tour and record, and has become an icon in American popular music.

Erudite, inspirational, and concise, Michael Lydon offers a celebration of the craft of writing that will serve as a guidebook for aspiring writers and avid readers. A musician and former Newsweek reporter who was a founding editor of Rolling Stone, Lydon calls writing "a visible word music, more like singing than drawing," and indeed his own prose rings with a rhythm and lyricism that exemplifies his view. With enthusiasm and great warmth, he asks a question central to all writers and readers: "What makes writing good?" and for his answers he taps sources that range from the Bible to Raymond Chandler, Shakespeare to Nabokov, Dickens to the New York Times. What makes Lydon's study both remarkable and refreshing, however, is his conscious attempt to present an antidote to postmodern literary theory which tries to erase the presence of the author and negate the existence of an external reality. In contrast, Lydon describes in engaging, readable terms his own discovery that authors are very much alive and that reality is out there to be captured in their writing.

Illuminates the personalities, struggles, and careers of such outstanding rock musicians such as Chuck Berry, Janis Joplin, B.B. King, and Smokey Robinson.

Flashbacks: A Personal and Cultural History of an Era is Timothy Leary's autobiography, published in 1983. It was reprinted in 1990 and 1997. The new edition has a foreword by William S. Burroughs, and a new afterword by Leary. A double cassette album which contains Leary reading selections of Flashbacks was published under the same name in 1989 by Dove Books on Tape, Inc. Andrew Weil described the book as having, '...solid information about the psychedelic revolution of the Sixties' while Rick Strassman said he used the book, '...to avoid repeating Leary’s mistakes in his own research'. “I hid from the press," Strassman said, "kept religion and spirituality out of my writings while I was doing research, avoided studying undergraduates, studied no more than one student per department if I did use students as volunteers… and made certain my data were more important than anything else”. John Higgs suggests that Flashbacks contains, '...embellishments, point scoring and omissions'. He suggests however, that 'despite its flaws, there is still much about the book to praise'. Leary's biographer Robert Greenfield writes that much of what Leary "reported as fact in Flashbacks is pure fantasy".