Paul Trynka

THE STRANGER He came to observe life on Earth - that's what happens when a peace-loving alien takes the friendly invitations we send into space seriously. But the US Air Force shot down the starman's ship, and now he has to cone the body of a human being to stay alive. Armed with a smattering of earthly lore (how to say hello in 300 languages, the Stones "Satisfaction") collected from Voyager II, as well as his own mind-boggling extraterrestrial powers, he will set out with a beautiful young earth woman (who goes from kidnappee to conspirator) on what will become the greatest adventure of their lives - a dangerous flight across America into the unexplored territory of interplanetary love.

Tracing Bowie's life from the English suburbs to London to New York to Los Angeles, Berlin, and beyond, Jones describes a man profoundly shaped by his relationship with his schizophrenic half-brother Terry; an intuitive artist who could absorb influences through intense relationships and yet drop people cold when they were no longer of use; and a social creature equally comfortable partying with John Lennon and dining with Frank Sinatra. By turns insightful and deliciously gossipy, it will transform our understanding of both artist and art.

For the first time, the complete story of the enigmatic founder of the Rolling Stones and the early years of the band. Brian Jones was the golden boy of the Rolling Stones, the visionary who gave the band its name and its sound. Yet he was a haunted man, and much of his brief time with the band, before his death in 1969 at the infamous age of twenty-seven, was volatile and tragic. Some of the details of how Jones was dethroned are well known, but the full story of his downfall is still largely untold. Brian Jones is a forensic, thrilling account of Jones' life, which for the first time details his pioneering achievements and messy unraveling. With more than 120 new interviews, Trynka offers countless new revelations and sets straight the tall tales that have long marred Jones' legacy. His story is a gripping battle between creativity and ambition, between self-sabotage and betrayal. It's all here: the girlfriends, the drugs, and some of the greatest music of all time. Victors get to write history, but it's rarely fully true. The complete, magnificent story of the Rolling Stones can never be told until we disentangle all the threads and put Brian Jones back in the foreground.

"The story of Blues music is the story of musicians meeting in bars, playing for a meal, taking trains to strange places with a guitar and the clothes they stand up in, and working in automobile factories or paint shops to make a living. Some even made it big, to the bright lights, recording studios, and television screens around the world."--BOOK JACKET. "This is that story, told in a unique collection of first-hand interviews with John Lee Hooker, BB King, Buddy Guy and many more legendary names. Along with the pictures of world-famous photographer Val Wilmer, taken over the last thirty years in the American rural south and urban Blues centres like Chicago, New Orleans and Memphis, these are the people and places that made the Blues."--BOOK JACKET.

Even before the Beatles hit the big time, a myth was created. This version of the Beatles legend smoothed the rough edges and filled in the fault lines, and for more than forty years this manicured version of the Beatles story has sustained as truth - until now. The product of almost a decade of research, hundreds of unprecedented interviews, and the discovery of scores of never-before-revealed documents, Bob Spitz's The Beatles is the biography fans have been waiting for -- a vast, complete account as brilliant and joyous and revelatory as a Beatles record itself. Spitz begins in Liverpool, a hard city knocked on its heels. In the housing projects and school playgrounds, four boys would discover themselves -- and via late-night radio broadcasts, a new form of music called rock 'n roll. Never before has a biography of musicians been so immersive and textured. Spitz takes us down Penny Lane and to Strawberry Field (John later added the s), to Hamburg, Germany, where -- amid the squalor and the violence and the pep pills -- the Beatles truly became the Beatles. We are there in the McCartney living room when Paul and John learn to write songs together; in the heat of Liverpool's Cavern Club, where jazz has been the norm before the Beatles show up; backstage the night Ringo takes over on drums; in seedy German strip clubs where George lies about his age so the band can perform; on the lonely tours through frigid Scottish towns before the breakthrough; at Abbey Road Studios, where a young producer named George Martin takes them under his wing; at the Ed Sullivan Show as America discovers the joy and the madness; and onward and upward: up the charts, from Shea to San Francisco, through the London night, on to India, through marmalade skies, across the universe...all the way to a rooftop concert and one last moment of laughter and music. It is all here, raw and right: the highs and the lows, the love and the rivalry, the awe and the jealousy, the drugs, the tears, the thrill, the magic never again to be repeated. Open this book and begin to read -- Bob Spitz's masterpiece is, at long last, the biography the Beatles deserve.