Chris Rock Books

This book was a great help at finding the well-known arches at Arches National Park, and it was also extremely helpful in identifying them later in the pictures I took. The only thing I wish was that the book was in color. Oh what a wonderful book it would be then! Even in black and white, however, it's certainly worth the money.

It's essentially conversations with climbers Sharma, Davis, and Gill. Not much in the way of climbing information, but interesting historical stuff and some good stories.

Sharma dumps what feels like 10 minutes of incoherent babbling at the end of his session, but gives the best climbing advice of the lot.

Davis tells good stories about Patagonian alpinism and of course, Dean.

Gill talks about historical bouldering, inventing US bouldering and why he probably wouldn't be bouldering if he were a teen today.

Overall okay as an on-the-way-to-work listen.

But where the heck is number 2? I went to the URL listed at the end of the CD, and it apparently expired.

Eric, where is number 2? (or anything after that for that matter?) Can you just pod-cast it and not worry about money?

Anyway, it's a solid 4 in my book.

This is the second book in a two volume set. They are the written companion guide to the PBS series 'Rockschool'circa early 80's.(I wish I would have seen it.) The book covers the main topics of elctronics, keyboards and vocals. By a series of interviews and by using popular rock music as examples, they cover many basic styles & techniques used in rock music. The novice musician can find answers to many questions without going to the music store and "looking stupid". I found this book in a used book store. I would recomend this book to any musician or hardcore fan.

I can't put this book down! Yes, I'm a Yes fan, but I've read other bios of bands that I love that didn't grab me the way that this one does. Chris Welch was there through most of it, and through his writing and band interviews you feel that you're getting a first-hand re-telling of every event. Terrific insight album by album. It reads like a great Stephen King novel - gripping. (Look for the updated re-release in September!)

this is a great story about yes. its full of alot of details and it can be intersting at one pont and then funny at another. the problem i have with this book is that chris welch, the author, didnt write this book so good. its hard to understand it because there are barely any commas so you have to keep reading lines twice in this book a lot. I do suggest this book though for the story although it mighht be hard to understand at some times.

As a major Yes fan for over 25 years, I've often thought I knew everything there was to know about the band. Well, Chris Welch taught me a few things. His linear approach and comfortable style of writing made the book very hard to put down. I was enthralled by his descriptions of recording sessions; tours; member resignations; firings; and even how much they got paid for each gig in the early days. He delves into each member's personality and you get a feeling for how the members made the band more than a product of the sum of their individual efforts. If there's even just a single biographical book you buy this year, make it this one.

My favorite progressive rock band from the 1970s as money grubbing spoiled rock stars? Yes? No! The author certainly loves the band but reveals them as quite human after all, blowing the lid off the Yes mystique of cosmic peace and mind altering exploration, as they scramble to keep pace with changing public musical tastes and advancing middle age. Even after reading "Close To The Edge, The Story of Yes", the band members remain as strangers coming across as mere participants in the great machine called Yes, and as less than mature men who blame all their troubles on everyone but themselves. The author's narrative rolls along serving Yes information, however tedious to the unadorned, in an enjoyable way until the end when he suddenly dropa out of sight allowing the concluding chapter to serve as a promotion for the band's new album. One wonders if the band's participation for the book was dependent on that promotion.

a very well written book about yes' history by Chris Welch..if you wanna know about the history of this great band as well as little details that even some of the biggest yes fans may not know get this book you wont be dissapointed.

I don't wish to spout rhetoric about me being a huge fan of the band or something equally similar but I bought this on the proviso it would be an entertaining read despite knowing just about everything published on the band already.

I was three pages in before I bailed. Poorly written and Crocker's use of switching word spellings to coincide with Metallica songs was nauseating to say the least. The layout is especially hideous (who thought two black vertical borders was a good idea?). The following day I returned it.

If you want a good book about Metallica look no further than Joel McIver's 'Justice For All: The Truth About Metallica'. Funnily enough one of the metontour videos showed a confused Lars signing a copy for a fan.

I would have given it a 1/2 star if amazon.com would let me.

If you remove all of the insipid cliches from this book you would be left with about 2 pages of text. Yes, this book "crashed into" cliche stupidity.

This book is a detailed story of the members of Metallica. It starts out when they were no more that a garage band & takes you through thier first to their & more. Along the way telling stories of the new & old such as the real stories of the death of Cliff Burton.

This book will be received differently depending on what you are looking for. If you are a hardcore Metallica fan who has followed them in magazines from near the beginning, this book will not uncover new information for you. Chris Crocker gives thanks to "that guy at Revolver Records who unsealed all those magazines for me" in his Acknowledgments section(ix). Throughout the book he cites numerous magazines and newspapers, by bringing up the name of the publication such as "Faces",(21) not going to the effort of giving a true academic citation someone can look up to verify. It is not true that this book is just the project of summarizing magazine and newspaper articles about Metallica throughout the years. He has interviewed people such as Brian Slagel, who started Metal Blade Records which produced the Metal Massacre compilation where Metallica's first poorly recorded "Hit the Lights" first appeared(25-26), Jon and Marsha Zazula who used to promote Metallica, also inteviewed was Michael Alago who signed Metallica to Elektra. The only people interviewed are people next to the band, not any former bandmates like Mustaine or other band members themselves. The only way to really determine these people next to the band were interviewed is by seeing their words in quotes and their names mentioned without a magazine name being brought up, along with their being thanked in the Acknowledgments section. The book's speculation on whether the song "Fade to Black" was written about suicide or the band's experience in having their equipment stolen could have been superceded by a more definitive answer if Crocker actually interviewed the band.(63) A further downfall to this work is the annoying habit of inventing phrases such as: Metallicans(45), Kiss-er to refer to Gene Simmons(13), Metallisound(29), Metallicatz(174), and Metallitunes(73). Despite the book's downfalls, there are redeeming qualities; the descriptions of how songs sound and the look of their music videos, something not rendered well with words, were above par. Only in 1999 did I start to become a Metallica fan. The copyright of this book is from 1993, which leaves off later developments, something I can overlook to a great extent because while I do not hate Load or Reload, I definitely do not respect those albums as much as earlier ones and St. Anger, I just hate it. Where else would someone who has not been following Metallica for long have learned that Metallica did one of their earliest gigs at the Showplace in Dover, New Jersey, a small town that is my home, if not from a book, even one not based on interviews of the primary interlocutors playing in the band?(52) *[Note]*: Numbers and Roman numerals in parenthesis refer to pages in the book I cited.

Where to begin? This book is so poorly researched that it's embarrassing. There's basically a factual error every other page that I can spot without having to look it up, that it makes me question just how much else the author got wrong.

One excellent (and totally inexplicable) example of his sloppiness is in his descriptions of the No Life to Leather versions of Jump in the Fire and The Four Horsemen (which wasn't called that on the demo in the first place) using the lyrics from the Kill'em All album! Even when the book was written, it wasn't hard to track down copies of the songs from NLTL and if you're going to write a book about something the band has released, at least make an effort to listen to the material available - especially something as pivotal as this was for the band.

This error is further compounded in a later chapter when he mentions Dave Mustaine forming Megadeth and releasing a version of The Mechanix on their first album Killing is My Business, a song he claims Metallica only played briefly. Funny, The Mechanix was the early version of The Four Horsemen on NLTL. Metallica has played this song many times. Judging from the author's description of The Mechanix in the book (describing it as having a classical piano and bass intro), he confused it with Last Rites/Loved to Death. How anyone could get this confused and have it published absolutely baffles me. The writer is a moron. And there's a lot more where this came from.

The quotes are probably the only reliable items in the whole book, but it seems that they mostly come from a couple of articles published previously in magazines (a lot from the Guitar Player Apr 89 issue in the first half of the book). It's probably not the author's fault that he couldn't interview the band directly, but in tandem with the poor fact checking, this comes across as pretty weak.

If you want to read up on Metallica's early years, KJ Doughton's Metallica Unbound is superior in every way to this piece of crap. Nicer book, better pictures and at least he knew the band personally.

The only positive note I can leave with is that at least Crocker didn't fall for the bogus tale that Metallica got their name by combining their two favourite things - metal and vodka. I can't believe that anyone seriously believed that one, even though it was printed in a few magazines in the early '90s.

Punk: The Definitive Record Of A Revolution ****

It was a nice idea but it didn't deliver like I hoped. Using the Punk movement as a coffee table book is not only shocking but goes against everything the movement stood for. But with all that aside it was sort of cool. The kind of coffee table book I would love to have, right next to my Hippie, and Miles Smiles coffee table books.

Why not five stars? Well this is basically Legs McNeils Please Kill Me but bigger and with a different cover. The quotes are the same as the in Please Kill Me. It really just is the same thing but with more pictures. Though I must say the are some of the coolest pictures of the period I have ever seen, some of which I had never seen before, and I have quite a few books on the subject. In fact it is the pictures that make the book.

Also this really offers nothing new (other than some of the pictures) on the matter. There is no new information which is sort of a drag to read. Other than that it is informative if you are new to the subject and haven't read Please Kill Me. It is worth the price for the pictures though.

The dust jacket of this book would have you believing it's a retrospective of all the great bands of the punk rebellion, but so many greats are overlooked or just not mentioned, even if one were content to look at the UK only, PLUS the massive pics make it look more like an ode to the Pistols PR machine than anything else. Great as a coffee table book, but low on substance and accuracy. Don't leave it out when your mom comes to visit, however, as the big black and white dildo photo might just send her over the edge...precisely the kind of sensationalist schlock that made punk so misunderstood in the first place. Are we certain Malcom McLaren didn't write this trite? Really, you could spend your money on a lot better, and you'd probably have a better chance at staying awake, too!

There were some good things here. Great pictures and some interesting historical information I wasn't previously aware of. However, the amount of attention given to the Ramones/Sex Pistols is way over the top. I was expecting a comprehensive review of the life and times of Punk in the mid-late 70's. In the end what I got was a biography of 2 bands and Malcom McLaren with fairly brief (comparitavely) impersonal descriptions of other icons of the time. Additionally the collaborators of this book leave the reader the impression that there were only 2 places in the world (New York and London) that were producing anything worth writing about.

Worth the buy? Yes I would purchase it again. Disappointing? Again Yes. It could have been so much more.

If youre looking for punk history, well, you know punk was born in different parts of the world at the same time, so its not very accurate,in how it really emerged. Anyhow, you get lots of history telling from the most important punk era 1976 - 1979, and some background in the bands that influenced punk bands (1960's The velvet underground - the stooges and MC5 )such as the Ramones, Sex Pistols and more. A great collection of interviews actually, and the pictures, oh the pictures are great!. This book its huge! its so big you wont be able to hold it in your hands and try to read it. The photos are worth the price alone, i recommend this one.

Mostly photos and quotations, many of the quotations apparently from interviews the authors conducted with insiders. Seems okay being such a large book given that the alternative would have been several volumes and with smaller photos.

A Sex-Pistols-centric, British view of Punk, but with a good opening on Warhol, the Velvet Undergound, the New York Dolls, Ramones and other U.S. influences. By stopping with 1979, however, such American bands as the Plasmatics, the Circle Jerks and Black Flag aren't covered.

Finding out what happened to Sid Vicious's remains may be the best value from this book for me.

What ever happened to rock n' roll, punk or otherwise? One of the best things about this book is that it can bring you to that time. It's sad that Coldplay passes as good music nowadays. However remarkable the fashion and the events, 70's Punk was basically lots of great music. Who knew what a vacuum would follow it?

This is a superb book with some great images of some of the best sleeves ever produced. It has a lot of background on the artwork and history behind the sleeves. Ignore the critics who seem to be expecting some kinda thesis on the subject or think this book is exploitation or sexist (!?), its a great book and you won't regret buying it (or even cutting out some of the pages and framing them!). Enjoy. Peace.

So people are complaing that there should be a better or more comprehensive book on this subject....??
I am sure there will be, but in the meantime I think that Chris Morrow has given true reggae freaks a nice insight.
Many fantastic album covers...so unique to the mighty sounds of reggae music.
If you think there should be something better out there then get writing.
This is a rare book.

"Stir It Up: Reggae Album Cover Art" is a fascinating collection of images. The art is accompanied by text written by Chris Morrow; Neville Garrick wrote the foreword.

The vibrant, full color illustrations reproduce reggae album cover art of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. The cover art ranges from straightforward photographs of the Jamaican landscape and people to ambitious graphic designs. Many iconic images are featured: Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie (many times), the lion, the Star of David, marijuana plants, Che Guevera, and--of course--lots of dreadlocks. There are occasionally touches of satire and humor, such as a 1982 Prince Jammy cover spoofing the "Space Invaders" video game.

Artists whose covers are featured include Peter Tosh, Judy Mowatt, Black Uhuru, and the legendary Bob Marley and the Wailers. In his foreword, Neville Garrick pays tribute to Marley, noting that he "is now regarded as the voice of the oppressed, regardless of their race, religion, or language."

I myself know fairly little about Reggae music, but I was captivated by the striking images contained in this book. "Stir It Up" is a noteworthy achievement.

I can only concur with the previous reviewer. A cultural history of reggae album covers would be a wonderful idea, but this one is not it unfortunately. The text is patronising and only serves to further exoticise Jamaican artists, the choice of sleeves displays a fondness for lions but very little knowledge of the subject. Nothing on Studio One silk screen covers, no mention of Orville 'Bagga' Case, no discussion of the 'Zippo' lighter sleeve to Catch A Fire... I could go on and on, as Buju Banton would say.

Here's a rich topic to investigate! But the treatment here is sketchy and only skims on the surface. A sociologist or cultural anthropologist who knows the terrain should have a good go at the whole idea.

Item not available in timely manner at all. The book is good and in good condition.

Part of a series, this book seeks to say something about every song released by The Who in as concise a manner as possible, so as to keep the book's length commensurate with the format of the series, I suppose. Charlesworth is quite good at sifting through the complexities of the Who's CD catalogue, which keeps getting upgraded and altered, with overlapping bonus tracks appearing here and there (and sometimes in different mixes), but his judgments about the music itself are both mercurial and banal. BOringly, he affirms all the tracks everyone already affirms, then fails to give the wealth of non-album material that has appeared on CD over the last decade even a cursory listen. "Glittering Girl," "Melancholia," "Water," "I Don't Even Know Myself," and so on are cursorily addressed with a minor shrug of indifference. "Cut My Hair" is astoundingly judged "one of the less memorable songs" on Quadrophenia. And absolutely everything after The Who By Numbers gets coolly dismissed. Someone needs to do for The Who's catalogue what Ian McDonald did for The Beatles' in _Revolution in the Head_.

Great book for the uninitiated who are listening to the Who album by album for the first time. Skip this one if you're already in the know.

A small book which examines every song recorded by the Who, one of the most majestic rock bands of all time. Mr Charlesworth is the leading expert on the Who and this book pays great attention to detail.

Omnibus Press's CD size 'complete guides' are very popular and this book is a belated but welcome addition to the series. Penned by Chris Welch, an ex Melody Maker journalist this compact book includes a brief history and examines each song on each album including Message in a Box, and Sting's solo releases. There are also plenty of photographs including several in colour. The narrative for each track is, understandably, coloured by the author's view and it's obvious that he doesn't rate Stewart and Andy's songwriting talents too highly, but this aside the book is inexpensive and generally very good (and it fits perfectly next to your Police and Sting CD's!) and is excellent value for money.

To cut to the chase, this book has some interesting pictures and covers every song by the Police and into Sting's solo career up to _Ten Summoner's Tales_. Some photos are in color, but most are in b/w. Each section describes another album, when the album was released, what songs you'll find on it and what kind of reviews it received. The main thing I disliked about this book was the frequent commentary of the author regarding the meaning of songs. Sometimes we agreed, sometimes we didn't, but I would have been happier with more Sting quotes, more facts and less editorializing by the author. All things considered though, the affordable price makes this title worth buying.

Sorry to have to give this a bad review. This sounded like such a great book, and I really liked the title. But yikes, how to figure out what the author is actually trying to say? I find myself reading the paragraphs over and over again and still not knowing quite what happened. Oh well, I'm glad some readers were able to figure it all out, I'll keep trying. At least the author picked a great topic!

This is one of those books that people seem to either like or dislike...I have been a huge Springsteen fan since 1974, and I enjoyed every page. This books does a great job of taking you closer to Springsteen than any other book out there. Is Springsteen an narcissist? Probably...A few years ago I wrote down 10 things I wanted to do before I died and one of those ten things was to meet Bruce Springsteen...After reading Point Blank...I don't want to meet him anymore...But I will always carry his music in my soul for the rest of my life.

I've been an avid and captive listener of Bruce Springsteen's music for about three decades. That said, I'm not above reading a juicy/tell-all tome such as this one that Sandford strived to create.

The problem is, he just doesn't do it well (mercy, he makes Angela Bowie's teall-all book, BACKSTAGE PASSES; LIFE ON THE WILD SIDE WITH DAVID BOWIE, seem like a masterpiece by comaprison).

Being pretty well-grounded and centered as an adult in my forties, I'm a bit beyond the need to have heroes (though I'll be the first to admit that Springsteen was something of a hero to me back when I was in my teens, back in the days when I still was dumb and innocent enough to have heroes in the form of rock stars). So, this book could have revealed that Springsteen spent a chunk of his life slumming around the most seedy places in Time Square...and it really wouldn't diminish the admiration that I have for the fine canon of songs & performances that he's given the world).

So, no, there was no offense taken...nor were my sensibilities shattered... by some of the rumors and theories that Sandford tries to put forth in his book.

The problem with Sandford's book is that its poorly written. I mean, the writing is downright bad. So bad that I'm surprised an editor didn't demand a complete overhaul of this book before allowing it to go to print. This book is laden with vague/obtuse sentences, along with some of the most awkward paragraph constructions that I've ever tried to wade my way through.

To make matters even worse, Sandford clearly has an agenda...and damned if he'll let facts get in the way of his agenda. There's certainly no crime when one tries to take a few feet off of a pedestal. And, really, I'm glad he did this while Springsteen was still alive, rather than after (what I hope will be a far off) death. There's nothing more demonic than the likes of Albert Goldman who've written scathing biographies of folk such as Lenny Bruce, Elvis and John Lennon after they're dead and gone.....and have no way of defending some of his more vile and vitriolic claims on their lives.

In the case of Sandford's book, he does such a poor job of masking his agenda that it's unlikely that a cat such as Springsteen gave a rat's behind about what is contained in these pages. Or, equally as plausible, Springsten...like many others whom I've known who've read this book...may have tossed it aside after a few pages of discovering that Sandford gropes with forming a coherent thought or even a decent sentence structure.

I am always wary of biographers who approach a subject with an agenda. As mentioned, their agenda often tends to ride roughshod over actual facts. That in itself would cause me to encourage folks to steer clear of this book. There are better and more objective biogrpahies about Bruce Springsteen readily available.

But, for those of us who dig a little dirt, Sandford's factual errors....and just plain bad-writing...make this book a trial and a chore to plow through. If one is going to dish out some dirt...and there will ALWAYS be a market for that....then I don't think it's asking too much for an author to get his facts straight and to write it in a style that doesn't read like a shoddy translation into the English language.

In a nutshell, this book is poorly researched and poorly written. Really, if one is looking for dirt on Springsteen, then hunt down the article that appeared in ESQUIRE magazine some years back. At least that piece is well-written.

This book is nothing less than a hack-job.

The most widely accepted version of Bruce Springsteen has it that abstract objects are distinguished by their causal inefficacy, is he? Concrete objects (whether mental or physical) have causal powers; numbers and functions and the rest make nothing happen. There is no such thing as Bruce not being Bruce. Or maybe causal commerce with the game of chess. And even if impure songs do in some sense exist in space, it is easy enough to believe that they make no distinctive causal contribution to what transpires, the only bruce matters theory of music. Peter and Paul may have effects individually; and they may have effects together which neither has on his own. But these joint effects are naturally construed as effects of two concrete objects acting jointly, or perhaps as effects of their mereological aggregate (itself a paradigm concretum), rather than as effects of some set-theoretic construction. (Suppose Bruce's band tip a balance. If we entertain the possibility that this event is caused by a gig, we shall have to ask which set caused it: the set containing just Peter and Paul? Some more elaborate construction based on them? Or perhaps the set containing the molecules that compose Peter and Paul? This proliferation of possible answers suggests that it was a mistake to credit causal powers to sets in the first place.)

This biography attempts to document Springsteen's meteoric rise to fame, placing emphasis on his music, concerts, politics and personal life. The author's assessment of Springsteen's albums mirrors my own, but he downplays or fails to recognise the extent to which Springsteen so radically changed the nature of rock performance. The intensity, pure exhilaration and uplifting nature of Springsteen's concerts are only hinted at. Sandford's account of Springsteen's political development is expressed in a rather patronising manner, and at times irritatingly mixed in with the author's own seemingly reactionary views. The story of Springsteen's personal life, in particular that concerning his parents and various relationships and friendships, despite much analysis and many words, offers little that Springsteen hasn't expressed more eloquently himself in interviews, especially in recent years.

This is a flawed biography, but worst of all Sandford simply can not write. His style is long-winded, repetitive and turgid, and his syntax awful. The book rambles on for over 400 pages in a pseudo-academic manner. The first few chapters, in particular, are poorly structured and at times sentences are incomprehensible and meaningless. Here are just a few examples (I gave up marking the margins after the first three chapters): "No longer would the Boss be the hard-eyed capo who flouted his moll". "Whatever his shin-guard flaws, they were more than matched by his academic scrapes". "Their few talks, hissed through carious teeth, soon left the foreshore of debate for the choppy seas of 'screw you'". "More than once he communicated in a semi-colon". Who does Sandford think he's writing for, never mind impress, with this gibberish? One of Springsteen's great talents is his ability to communicate. It's a pity that Sandford didn't try and follow his example.