A close look at the lives of working musicians who aren’t the center of their stage. Secret (and not-so-secret) weapons, side-of-the-stagers, rhythm and horn sections, backup singers, accompanists—these and other “band people” are the anonymous but irreplaceable character actors of popular music. Through interviews and incisive cultural critique, writer and musician Franz Nicolay provides a portrait of the musical middle class. Artists talk frankly about their careers and attitudes toward their craft, work environment, and group dynamics, and shed light on how support musicians make sense of the weird combination of friend group, gang, small business consortium, long-term creative collaboration, and chosen family that constitutes a band. Is it more important to be a good hang or a virtuoso player? Do bands work best as democracies or autocracies? How do musicians with children balance their personal and professional lives? How much money is too little? And how does it feel to play on hundreds of records, with none released under your name? In exploring these and other questions, Band People gives voice to those who collaborate to create and dissects what it means to be a laborer in the culture industry.

Containing new material consisting of interviews and photos to bring every fan up to date on the band's recent happenings.

The definitive chronicle of underground music in the 1980s tells the stories of Black Flag, Sonic Youth, The Replacements, and other seminal bands whose DIY revolution changed American music forever. Our Band Could Be Your Life is the never-before-told story of the musical revolution that happened right under the nose of the Reagan Eighties -- when a small but sprawling network of bands, labels, fanzines, radio stations, and other subversives re-energized American rock with punk's do-it-yourself credo and created music that was deeply personal, often brilliant, always challenging, and immensely influential. This sweeping chronicle of music, politics, drugs, fear, loathing, and faith is an indie rock classic in its own right. The bands profiled include: Sonic Youth Black Flag The Replacements Minutemen Husker Du Minor Threat Mission of Burma Butthole Surfers Big Black Fugazi Mudhoney Beat Happening Dinosaur Jr.

An investigative account of the medical, sexual, and scientific questions surrounding the spread of AIDS across the country.

Someone Should Pay for Your Pain by Franz Nicolay is about a singer-songwriter named Rudy Pauver, his conflicted relationship with a successful former protege, and a young niece who wants to travel with him and whose surprise appearance forces a reckoning with himself and his past. This illuminating anti-hero story propels the characters through time, story, and philosophical discourse with sharp asides, short stories, dialogues, and monologues. A musician's book for the punk scene insider, with so many truths that "punks" (whatever) have had to reconcile or deny, that it's like holding up a mirror and seeing something beautiful and ugly. Engrossing and compelling, the novel wrestles with the "punk ethos" and features a punk/rock-inflected inside look at life on the road: magical, honest, and pure, but also destructive, dangerous, and out of control. The author, a writer and musician best known for playing the accordion and piano in The World/Inferno Friendship Society and keyboards in The Hold Steady, was once named #1 of the top ten accordionists in punk rock. He is also the author of the travel book The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar (a New York Times "Season's Best Travel Books" pick) and is a lecturer in writing about music at UC Berkeley.

Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You is a story of music, obsession, violence, and madness by Scotto Moore I was home alone on a Saturday night when I experienced the most beautiful piece of music I had ever heard in my life. Beautiful Remorse is the hot new band on the scene, releasing one track a day for ten days straight. Each track has a mysterious name and a strangely powerful effect on the band's fans. A curious music blogger decides to investigate the phenomenon up close by following Beautiful Remorse on tour across Texas and Kansas, realizing along the way that the band’s lead singer, is hiding an incredible, impossible secret. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Heavy metal has developed from a British fringe genre of rock music in the late 1960s to a global mass market consumer good in the early twenty-first century. Early proponents of the musical style, such as Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Judas Priest, Saxon, Uriah Heep and Iron Maiden, were mostly seeking to reach a young male audience. Songs were often filled with violent, sexist and nationalistic themes but were also speaking to the growing sense of deterioration in social and professional life. At the same time, however, heavy metal was seriously indebted to the legacies of blues and classical music as well as to larger literary and cultural themes. The genre also produced mythological concept albums and rewritings of classical poems. In other words, heavy metal tried from the beginning to locate itself in a liminal space between pedestrian mass culture and a rather elitist adherence to complexity and musical craftsmanship, speaking from a subaltern position against the hegemonic discourse. This collection of essays provides a comprehensive and multi-disciplinary look at British heavy metal from its beginning through The New Wave of British Heavy Metal up to the increasing internationalization and widespread acceptance in the late 1980s. The individual chapter authors approach British heavy metal from a textual perspective, providing critical analyses of the politics and ideology behind the lyrics, images and performances. Rather than focus on individual bands or songs, the essays collected here argue with the larger system of heavy metal music in mind, providing comprehensive analyses that relate directly to the larger context of British life and culture. The wide range of approaches should provide readers from various disciplines with new and original ideas about the study of this phenomenon of popular culture.

In 1996, Patterson Hood recruited friends and fellow musicians in Athens, Georgia, to form his dream band: a group with no set lineup that specialized in rowdy rock and roll. The Drive-By Truckers, as they named themselves, grew into one of the best and most consequential rock bands of the twenty-first century, a great live act whose songs deliver the truth and nuance rarely bestowed on Southerners, so often reduced to stereotypes. Where the Devil Don’t Stay tells the band’s unlikely story not chronologically but geographically. Seeing the Truckers’ albums as roadmaps through a landscape that is half-real, half-imagined, their fellow Southerner Stephen Deusner travels to the places the band’s members have lived in and written about. Tracking the band from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia, to the author’s hometown in McNairy County, Tennessee, Deusner explores the Truckers’ complex relationship to the South and the issues of class, race, history, and religion that run through their music. Drawing on new interviews with past and present band members, including Jason Isbell, Where the Devil Don’t Stay is more than the story of a great American band; it’s a reflection on the power of music and how it can frame and shape a larger culture.

This nostalgic, fully-illustrated history of boy bands -- written by culture critic and boy band stan Maria Sherman -- is a must-have for diehard fans of the genre and beyond. The music, the fans, the choreography, the clothes, the merch, the hair. Long after Beatlemania came and went, a new unstoppable boy band era emerged. Fueled by good looks and even greater hooks, the pop phenomenon that dominated the '80s, '90s, and 2000s has left a long-lasting mark on culture, and it's time we celebrate it. Written by super fan Maria Sherman for stans and curious parties alike, Larger Than Life is the definitive guide to boy bands, delivered with a mix of serious obsession and tongue-in-cheek humor. Larger Than Life begins with a brief history of male vocal groups, spotlighting The Beatles, the Jackson 5, and Menudo before diving into the building blocks of these beloved acts in "Boy Bands 101." She also focuses on artists like New Edition, New Kids on the Block, Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, One Direction, and BTS before ending with an interrogation into the future of boy bands. Included throughout are Tiger Beat-inspired illustrations, capsule histories of the swoon-iest groups, in-depth investigations into one-hit wonders, and sidebars dedicated to conspiracy theories, dating, in-fighting, haters, fan fiction, fashion (Justin and Britney in denim, of course), and so much more. Informative, affectionate, funny, and never, ever fan-shaming, Larger Than Life is the first and only text of its kind: the ultimate celebration of boy bands and proof that this once maligned music can never go unappreciated.