Chris Rock Books

The amg books are quite exceptional but this one is really something. There are a few omissions I noted (Rotary Connection and Fanny)yet the proof is in the pudding. Prove it to yourself by finding an artist with several works you have a view on and see what their writer says...often the observations are right on whether you fully agree or not. The reviews and bios are quite interesting, and it is a volume to get lost in...a real treasure. A few artists will get more attention than you might like, but it leaves all other volumes like it in the dust.

I've found the "All Music Guide" to be such a useful research tool, that I start lapsing into an "info-mercial-esque" tone when I begin extolling its virtues: "Hi. My name is Alan, and I'm a freelance music writer. When I'm assigned to write about a band that I know next-to-nothing about, I always turn to the 'All Music Guide'. This mammoth music encyclopedia is not only useful, but a ton o' fun! Let's say that I need a quick factoid about some rock group that I despise--like, I dunno, The Scorpions. I just pull out my 'AMG', turn to page 329, and voila; I quickly learn that Scorp's, co-founder Michael Schenker quit the band in 1973 to join fellow metal-meisters UFO. Wow...UFO! But they don't call it the 'All Music Guide' for nothin'; flip over to page 1351, and you'll find incisive reviews of almost every available record by legendary jazz saxophonist/heroin addict Art Pepper. If you only buy one music research book this year, make it 'All Music Guide'." In all seriousness, this thing has saved me hours of net-surfing, in addition to helping me avoid a few hundred research sojourns to Tower Records trying to find out what year Buddy Guy's first record was released.

There's a report here, in great detail, of how Jimi modified his guitars. I've read numerous sources of Jimi info and never seen that info before. Really explains a lot. Meanwhile, the rest of the book is filled with nothing but press reports about Jimi. Surprisingly, they make for a substantial collection of information and opinion. chrisbct@hotmail.com

i just got this book during the past week&read it right away.i dig these type of books.great commentary on the Genius&power of Jimi Hendrix.great insights&observations.

If the name Chris Michie rings your bell, you either lived in Madison in the late 1960s, or you've memorized the liner notes for albums by Van Morrison and the Pointer Sisters.

Now living and producing music in the San Francisco Bay area, Michie was a fixture on the Madison scene from 1965 to '69 as lead guitarist for the Grapes Of Wrath and the Mendelbaum Blues Band.

His memoirs of those years -and of the years since- are now available through his Web site at www.cmichie.com in the form of a publication called NAME DROPPINGS or IT'S ALL ABOUT ME, ISN'T IT?.

With e-mail contributions from former bandmates Willie Collins, Greg Loeb, and Keith Knudsen, Michie offers a unique perspective on those turbulent years.

There are anecdotes about playing the area's VFW halls, Langdon Street fraternities (where beer "Was served in tall cans that had the top cut out"), the Memorial Union's Great Hall, the Factory and the Dane County Fairgrounds, where the Grapes opened for the Beau Brummels.

The Grapes disintegrated in 1968 amid the frustrations of trying to be original at a time when their audience wanted covers of what was playing on the radio. "By the time the Grapes broke up, all my relationships were in a shambles." Michie writes.

He found salvation in the Mendelbaum Blues Band. "Within a few months we were the hottest group in the area, if not all of Wisconsin and the surrounding states." Michie writes. "Wisconsin was an 18-year-old drinking state, so all the college kids from Minnesota, Iowa, Upper Michigan and Illinois swarmed into Wisconsin nightly to hear music and get drunk. We worked every night of the week, sometimes doing two or three shows a day, and we made good money."

The band would arrive home at dawn after an out-of-town gig and "have breakfast at Vi's Grill, just around the corner from where we all shared a big house on West Main Street. Vi's generally catered to the early morning workers, truckers, and hotel help from across the street, but we were her favorites."

Their abode on West Main was home to as many as fourteen people at a time, not counting such overnight guests as Big Joe Williams, one of the Chicago blues acts for whom Mendelbaum opened under the auspices of the University Folk Arts Society.

"A stipulation of Joe's contract was a place to stay and a bottle of Jack Daniels," Michie writes. "Joe was accompanied by Otis Rush, who was in town for another show the following night, and after the show we all convened to the Mendelbaum house. We all sat in the living room until four in the morning, listening to Joe tell stories as Otis translated for us. The combination of the liquor and Joe's thick accent made it impossible for us to understand him. Eventually we rolled out the sofa bed for Joe, said goodnight and thank you to Otis, and headed off to bed. By then, Joe was already asleep in our living room."

Mendelbaum produced its own shows at the Broom Street Theater and the UW Music Hall, but after a series of outdoor gigs-cum-anti-war rallies turned increasingly violent and confrontational, Michie and company headed for northern California.

They quickly broke into the Bay area music scene, jamming with Buddy Miles, Carlos Santana, and members of the Velvet Underground, opening for Albert King and B.B. King before disbanding in 1971.

Michie has gone on to the kind of below-the-radar music career you don't often read about. He's opened for the Eagles and Procol Harum, played with Boz Scaggs and other Bay area heavies, toured the world, and recorded with Van Morrison and the Pointers. He now has his own production company and record label and says he's found a happy balance between recording his own albums and composing music for radio and TV.

The title is apt. Michie drops dozens of names, and has an anecdote to associate with each, including Mama Cass Eliot, Muhammad Ali (whom Michie met while in Zaire with the Pointers as part of the "Rumble In The Jungle"), and Stevie Wonder (whom Michie observed sucking on Anita Pointer's fingers during a studio session).

Memory is a filter, of course. Sometime Michie's recollections are screened through cheesecloth. Other times they're poured freely through a sieve. But NAME DROPPINGS is an entertaining read, and its chapters evoke a music scene nearly two generations gone.

If the name Chris Michie rings your bell, you either lived in Madison in the late 1960s, or you've memorized the liner notes for albums by Van Morrison and the Pointer Sisters.

Now living and producing music in the San Francisco Bay area, Michie was a fixture on the Madison scene from 1965 to '69 as lead guitarist for the Grapes Of Wrath and the Mendelbaum Blues Band.

His memoirs of those years -and of the years since- are now available through his Web site at www.cmichie.com in the form of a publication called NAME DROPPINGS or IT'S ALL ABOUT ME, ISN'T IT?.

With e-mail contributions from former bandmates Willie Collins, Greg Loeb, and Keith Knudsen, Michie offers a unique perspective on those turbulent years.

There are anecdotes about playing the area's VFW halls, Langdon Street fraternities (where beer "Was served in tall cans that had the top cut out"), the Memorial Union's Great Hall, the Factory and the Dane County Fairgrounds, where the Grapes opened for the Beau Brummels.

The Grapes disintegrated in 1968 amid the frustrations of trying to be original at a time when their audience wanted covers of what was playing on the radio. "By the time the Grapes broke up, all my relationships were in a shambles." Michie writes.

He found salvation in the Mendelbaum Blues Band. "Within a few months we were the hottest group in the area, if not all of Wisconsin and the surrounding states." Michie writes. "Wisconsin was an 18-year-old drinking state, so all the college kids from Minnesota, Iowa, Upper Michigan and Illinois swarmed into Wisconsin nightly to hear music and get drunk. We worked every night of the week, sometimes doing two or three shows a day, and we made good money."

The band would arrive home at dawn after an out-of-town gig and "have breakfast at Vi's Grill, just around the corner from where we all shared a big house on West Main Street. Vi's generally catered to the early morning workers, truckers, and hotel help from across the street, but we were her favorites."

Their abode on West Main was home to as many as fourteen people at a time, not counting such overnight guests as Big Joe Williams, one of the Chicago blues acts for whom Mendelbaum opened under the auspices of the University Folk Arts Society.

"A stipulation of Joe's contract was a place to stay and a bottle of Jack Daniels," Michie writes. "Joe was accompanied by Otis Rush, who was in town for another show the following night, and after the show we all convened to the Mendelbaum house. We all sat in the living room until four in the morning, listening to Joe tell stories as Otis translated for us. The combination of the liquor and Joe's thick accent made it impossible for us to understand him. Eventually we rolled out the sofa bed for Joe, said goodnight and thank you to Otis, and headed off to bed. By then, Joe was already asleep in our living room."

Mendelbaum produced its own shows at the Broom Street Theater and the UW Music Hall, but after a series of outdoor gigs-cum-anti-war rallies turned increasingly violent and confrontational, Michie and company headed for northern California.

They quickly broke into the Bay area music scene, jamming with Buddy Miles, Carlos Santana, and members of the Velvet Underground, opening for Albert King and B.B. King before disbanding in 1971.

Michie has gone on to the kind of below-the-radar music career you don't often read about. He's opened for the Eagles and Procol Harum, played with Boz Scaggs and other Bay area heavies, toured the world, and recorded with Van Morrison and the Pointers. He now has his own production company and record label and says he's found a happy balance between recording his own albums and composing music for radio and TV.

The title is apt. Michie drops dozens of names, and has an anecdote to associate with each, including Mama Cass Eliot, Muhammad Ali (whom Michie met while in Zaire with the Pointers as part of the "Rumble In The Jungle"), and Stevie Wonder (whom Michie observed sucking on Anita Pointer's fingers during a studio session).

Memory is a filter, of course. Sometime Michie's recollections are screened through cheesecloth. Other times they're poured freely through a sieve. But NAME DROPPINGS is an entertaining read, and its chapters evoke a music scene nearly two generations gone.

AN AWESOME BOOK WHICH WILL NOT ONLY SHOW YOU BUT MAKE YOU AN AWESOME GUITARIST AND SHOW YOU THE WAYS OF ROCK GUITAR!!!THIS BOOK RULES!CHRIS SHAHIN IS AN AWESOME PLAYER AND KNOWS HIS STUFF. THANX CHRIS FOR THE BOOK!

Chris Shahins "Rock Out" instructional guitar book is completely awesome!!!! I live in the San Jose area where Chris teaches guitar. I purchased his book "Rock Out" and immediately improved drastically. Because of this great instructional book, I found out where he taught guitar and have been taking guitar lessons with him for a year now!!!! This is a must-have instructional book for all wanna-be-Stevie Ray Vaughan's!!!!!!!

thank you Chris!

If you're looking at this book, you probably already know that Hoek & Bray is the Bible for rock slope engineering... no argument. Wyllie & Mah are simply carrying the torch for the aging masters. Same amazing book. Buy it. As for Amazon, however, I can't say quite as much. I recently purchased 3 books: Terzaghi's Soil Mechanics in hard cover, Wyllie & Mah's (Hoek & Bray's) Rock Slope Engineering in hard cover, and Hudson & Harrison's Engineering Rock Mechanics in paperback (wish I'd gotten hard cover). All 3 are landmark books. All 3 also arrived Saran-wrapped to a flat piece of cardboard and placed in a box large enough to allow it to slide around inside. There was no packing material to prevent sliding. The Terzaghi book was not plastic wrapped (separately from the Saran wrap); the other 2 were. All 3 books appeared (and smelled) wonderfully new inside; but all 3 had covers which were marred to some degree. Yes, I'm picky, but I'm also paying around $200 for some of these books. I don't know whether the slightly bent corners, surface indentations and scratches were the result of Amazon or some previous handler or the publisher/binder, but I was a bit pieved. The books should be delivered to the consumer in perfect condition. I kept all 3, knowing that I would probably inflict more wear and tear on them than what they had when I received them (being an engineering geologist), but I was nonetheless annoyed. I now have a bit of distrust in Amazon. Thanks for taking the time to read my opinion. Enjoy your books!

I'm an engineer working in the field of dams and hydropower.
Many professionals in our field consider all the books written by prof. Hoek the reference books for rock mechanics.
This book is an very good update ( including many more case histories ) of a classical text.
I strongly suggest it at least for all the professionals.
If you're a student in rock mechanics you might also read Hoek's course notes ( that can be downloaded from prof. Hoek's site ).

You can throw away those rock and mineral guides you've been collecting through the years; this well-written and well-thought out guide makes them pale and obsolete. I bought this for myself, then needed another one for a young niece who was captivated by its straightforward style and unbelievable photos. It is clean and organized and easy to use as a reference. It would also make a great text for self-education as it places rocks and minerals in context, including photos and descriptions of famous cliffs, sills, and other geologic formations around the world.

It's such a shame this book went out of print because the photographs in it are stunning and exactly what you need for field recognition. The big size was probably it's undoing but at second hand prices it's a great buy despite it's age.

I bought this book on a whim; it showed up looking for gardening books. It is one of the cleverest, funniest books I have read in a long time. It is perfect satire of old rock and roll, beatles, rolling stones, but with an organic gardening message. "I want to dig by hand" and Here come the slugs" are among the full set of beatles tunes with complete lyrics and liner notes explaining the gardening lore. Well worth the price for a old hippie. I laughed, I cried, I felt better turning the compost.

This book was and is a big hit with my four-year-old. Clear, easy-to-understand text and big, bright illustrations make the book accessible to young readers. It is neatly formatted into two-page "chapters" focusing on specific topics, which makes it easy for him to "look up" whatever he's interested in that particular day. It also has useful tips for starting a rock collection, and (important for parents) convenient ways to store said collection. I recommend this book to any parent with a child interested in any aspect of geology.

I am truly surprised that nobody else has submitted a review of this book! It certainly deserves to be widely read as an original contribution to African-American studies, to food studies in general, to cultural studies, and most importantly, by anyone who wants to understand how sterotyping works as part of the process of oppression. I also learned a great deal about what 'signifying' means, and how it can be used as an analytical tool.

This is not a perfect book. Sometimes I found it moved to quickly from the general to the specific and vice versa. But Williams-Forson has taken a really tough topic - the way Chicken has been attached to African American women, and she treats it with sensitivity, creativity, wit and an eclectic set of tools from literature, social science and history. In the process she gets to the heart of how stereotypes cut in a lot of different directions; they reveal weaknesses and strengths, solidarities and divisions. She is not interested in passive victimology, nor does she ignore the violence and pain of slavery and prejudice.

The result is a book which really does teach you something new about the Black experience. It is the opening, I hope, of a new generation of black history which shakes off some of the old narratives which have served their purposes, and gets into really complex terrain. I look forward to more complex counterpoint with the work being done in the Caribbean and on the Black experience elsewhere in the Americas. I will certainly be using this book in the classroom, and I hope it gets the broader readership it deserves!

Chris Charlesworth completed this nicely done 94-paged biography on Steven Demetri Georgiou in May, 1984 with the assistance of Steve himself. After the Table of Contents is an Introduction followed by six chapters and discography of Cat Stevens's albums and singles.

Chris tells us that Steve was born to Ingrid Wickman of Sweden and Stavros Georgiou, a Greek Cypriot father who owned a Greek restaurant just north of Cambridge Circus in Central London that was geographically distant from the hub of London's Greek community. From an early age, Steve was writing privately - "funny little stories"(p9) and later songs. Steve attended Drury Lane Roman Catholic School for his primary education, then went on to Northampton Secondary Modern School where he ran afoul of a bully. Steven finished his secondary education at Hugh Middleton School in Islington. Apart from an artistic talent he seems to have inherited from his mother's side, Steve showed no aptitude for formal education. He did try a year at Hammersmith Art College, but spent most of his time practising his guitar on the fire escape and was asked to redo the year which Steve decided against.

He wrote a song "I Love My Dog", which nobody in the music racket liked apart from Mike Hurst who was really Michael Longhurst-Pickworth. Mike took a chance and gambled on the 18-year-old kid and his song. It was a hit on the pop charts and Cat Stevens was off and running with his second hit "Matthew and Son", which rose to Number 2 on the British Charts. Less than two years later he had his contract with Mike Hurst declared null and void (because he signed it as a minor), then he was stopped abruptly in his tracks by tuberculosis.

While Steve was recuperating at a nursing home, he wrote more songs that were more folk than pop with an undercurrent of religious/spiritual yearning. In 1969, he and Mike Hurst tried once more to click while producing a record titled "Where Are You". The small string section was a compromise between Hurst's desire for big instrumental arrangements and Steve's desire for vocal accompanied by guitar only. They could not click and parted ways.

1970 saw Cat Stevens rise like the mythical Phoenix, while adhering to his own winning folk-style. By 1978, he had made 10 albums with his last titled "Back to Earth". Steve had been a secret Muslim for two years after his brother David came him a copy of the Last Testament - The Recitation ("Al-Qur'aan" in Arabic). The following year, he publicly testified at London's Regents Park mosque that he was of submission to God ("mu-Islaam" or "muslim" in Arabic). He did not follow the example ("sunnah" in Arabic) of the last Prophet, peace be upon him, and keep his name. Instead, Steve chose the Arabic names of Yusuf Islam. Cat Stevens became history and Steve, now Yusuf, recorded no more music for mass consumption up to when this book was published.

An interesting look at a very popular entertainer's journey for spiritual truth, which can be also be read through his songwriting in the decade he produced songs. I higly recommend this volume as the definitive career biography of the singer Cat Stevens.