The Beach Boys FAQ: All That's Left to Know About America's Band
By Jon Stebbins
Backbeat Books, 400 pp., $19.99.
Backbeat's FAQ series of books are the perfect addendum for those who are already fa...
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Way Down: Playing Bass with Elvis, Dylan, The Doors & More
By Jerry Scheff
Backbeat Books, 240 pp., $19.95
Bassist Jerry Scheff had a bird's-eye view of a lot of musical greats in the '60s through th...
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My Cross to Bear
By Gregg Allman with Alan Light
William Morrow, 400 pp., $27.99
If there were a classic-rocker version of the TV show Survivor, Gregg Allman would surely be one of the last contestan...
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When I Left Home: My Story
Buddy Guy with David Ritz
Da Capo Press, 320 pp, $26
Once the young kid in a stable of blues giants, Buddy Guy is now an elder statesman of the genre. And in this memoir, t...
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While many young'uns spent their years 'twixt 12 and 20 just listening to music and attending concerts, Joe Louis Walker was a bit more proactive. At age 16, he became the house guitarist for the lege...
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...and on piano... Nicky Hopkins: The Extraordinary Life of Rock's Greatest Session Man
By Julian Dawson
Though his name is known mostly to classic-rock liner note readers, even the casual fan has he...
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Grateful Dead concerts were always something of a time machine that took both casual fans and hardcore Deadheads back to another era. And for one night only, the machine goes back more than 20 years -...
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He was one of the most ubiquitous comedians on stage, screen and television during the 1990s, a newer version of Bill Cosby with a clean act... More >>
It seemed like someone's idea of a joke at Harlow's in Sacramento in late December 2011 when this announcement was made: fIREHOSE would be playing the club next April.
Whaaatr fIREHOSEr The hugely in...
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Bad Reputation: The Unauthorized Biography of Joan Jett
By Dave Thompson
Backbeat Books, 300 pp., $19.99.
From her days as a Runaway (the band, not the teen social problem), to massive MTV stardom, ...
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In a list of phrases that most music journalists would probably like to see banned, hearing that an artist's latest record "is their most personal yet" would rank near the top. But in the case of sing...
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Experience Hendrix Tour
Arena Theatre
March 22, 2012
It was a guitar-gasm of monstrous proportions at the Arena Theatre when string shredders, bass thumpers, keyboard squealers, and one very, very ha...
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As far as the estates of deceased classic-rock artists go, few can hold a lighter to the efforts of Jimi Hendrix's in terms of keeping the artist and their music alive.
In recent years, Experience He...
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A boon for classic-rock fans in recent years has been an increased activity in vault-mining, as record labels are discovering, polishing up, and releasing a lot of unearthed "new" material from favori...
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There's only one really bad thing about the anti-clotting pill Pradaxa. You can't fall or get cut while taking it because once you start bleeding, there's almost no way to stop it. There's no reversal agent, no antidote.
There's no gloves or batting helmets when Larry Joe Miggins and the rest of the Houston Babies regularly travel back in time to play the game by its 1860 rules.