From the acclaimed biographer of Keith Moon comes a vibrant picture of mid-20th-century New York and the ways in which its indigenous art, theater, literature, and political movements converge to create an original American sound.

A penetrating and entertaining exploration of New York’s music scene from Cubop through folk, punk, and hip-hop. From Tony Fletcher, the acclaimed biographer of Keith Moon, comes an incisive history of New York’s seminal music scenes and their vast contributions to our culture. Fletcher paints a vibrant picture of mid-twentieth-century New York and the ways in which its indigenous art, theater, literature, and political movements converged to create such unique music. With great attention to the colorful characters behind the sounds, from trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie to Tito Puente, Bob Dylan, and the Ramones, he takes us through bebop, the Latin music scene, the folk revival, glitter music, disco, punk, and hip-hop as they emerged from the neighborhood streets of Harlem, the East and West Village, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens. All the while, Fletcher goes well beyond the history of the music to explain just what it was about these distinctive New York sounds that took the entire nation by storm.

The first joint biography of one of rock n roll's greatest song writing teams, Hitmakers Inc. explores the private lives and public triumphs of lyricist Doc Pomus and composer Mort Shuman. Between 1958 and 1965, usually working out of Manhattan s famous Brill Building, they wrote some 500 teen anthems and timeless ballads for Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, The Drifters, Bobby Darin, Del Shannon and Andy Williams among others. Polio-stricken ex-blues shouter Pomus always attracted the press coverage, but after the duo split junior partner Shuman proved the more colourful of the two, acting in films, writing musicals, joining the post-Beatles British beat boom and eventually becoming a chart-topping singer-composer in his own right in of all places France. The story of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, writing together and individually, reveals a personal dynamic that was both warm and difficult but which at its height produced songs like Teenager In Love, Save The Last Dance For Me, Surrender, Little Sister, (Maries The Name) His Latest Flame, This Magic Moment and Lonely Avenue.

At the beginning of 1965, the U.S. seemed on the cusp of a golden age. Although Americans had been shocked by the assassination in 1963 of President Kennedy, they exuded a sense of consensus and optimism that showed no signs of abating. Indeed, political liberalism and interracial civil rights activism made it appear as if 1965 would find America more progressive and unified than it had ever been before. In January 1965, President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed that the country had "no irreconcilable conflicts." Johnson, who was an extraordinarily skillful manager of Congress, succeeded in securing an avalanche of Great Society legislation in 1965, including Medicare, immigration reform, and a powerful Voting Rights Act. But as esteemed historian James T. Patterson reveals in The Eve of Destruction, that sense of harmony dissipated over the course of the year. As Patterson shows, 1965 marked the birth of the tumultuous era we now know as "The Sixties," when American society and culture underwent a major transformation. Turmoil erupted in the American South early in the year, when police attacked civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama. Many black leaders, outraged, began to lose faith in nonviolent and interracial strategies of protest. Meanwhile, the U.S. rushed into a deadly war in Vietnam, inciting rebelliousness at home. On August 11th, five days after Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, racial violence exploded in the Watts area of Los Angeles. The six days of looting and arson that followed shocked many Americans and cooled their enthusiasm for the president's remaining initiatives. As the national mood darkened, the country became deeply divided. By the end of 1965, a conservative resurgence was beginning to redefine the political scene even as developments in popular music were enlivening the Left. In The Eve of Destruction, Patterson traces the events of this transformative year, showing how they dramatically reshaped the nation and reset the course of American life.

Packed with information, savvy insights, and surprising facts, this guide to Dylan’s years in New York City examines the role that the city played in the creation of his music, the evolution of his creative process, and the continual reinvention of his public persona. In the landscape of Manhattan, Dylan created words and sounds that redefined the possibilities of popular music throughout the world. Chronicling where he lived, worked, and played, this book offers an evocative portrait of the city, especially its folk scene during the 1960s. With street maps featuring more than 50 sites—from fleabag hotels and avant-garde clubs to tiny coffeehouses and vast concert halls—readers can navigate Bob Dylan’s New York and experience the sites and sounds that influenced the singer, such as Café Wha?; the Chelsea Hotel; Columbia’s Studio A, where he recorded songs such as “Desolation Row” and “Positively 4th Street;” the Decker Building, where he hung out with Andy Warhol and Nico; the Delmonico Hotel, where he introduced the Beatles to marijuana; and the Bitter End, where he spent much of the summer of 1975 playing pool and guitar.

Two kids in their early twenties walk down the Bowery on a spring afternoon, just as the proprietor of a club hangs an awning with the new name for his venue. The place will be called CBGB & OMFUG which, he tells them, stands for “Country Bluegrass and Blues & Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers.” That's exactly the sort of stuff they play, they lie, somehow managing to get a gig out of him. After the first show their band, Television, lands a regular string of Sundays. By the end of the year a scene has developed that includes Tom Verlaine's new love interest, a poet-turned rock chanteuse named Patti Smith. American punk rock is born. Bryan Waterman peels back the layers of this origin myth and, assembling a rich historical archive, situates Marquee Moon in a broader cultural history of SoHo and the East Village. As Waterman traces the downtown scene's influences, public image, and reputation via a range of print, film, and audio recordings we come to recognize the real historical surprises that the documentary evidence still has to yield and come to a new appreciation of this quintessential album of the New York City night.

San Francisco and the Long 60s tells the fascinating story of the legacy of popular music in San Francisco between the years 1965-69. It is also a chronicle of the impact this brief cultural flowering has continued to have in the city – and more widely in American culture – right up to the present day. The aim of San Francisco and the Long 60s is to question the standard historical narrative of the time, situating the local popular music of the 1960s in the city's contemporary artistic and literary cultures: at once visionary and hallucinatory, experimental and traditional, singular and universal. These qualities defined the aesthetic experience of the local culture in the 1960s, and continue to inform the cultural and social life of the Bay Area even fifty years later. The brief period 1965-69 marks the emergence of the psychedelic counterculture in the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood, the development of a local musical 'sound' into a mainstream international 'style', the mythologizing of the Haight-Ashbury as the destination for 'seekers' in the Summer of Love, and the ultimate dispersal of the original hippie community to outlying counties in the greater Bay Area and beyond. San Francisco and the Long 60s charts this period with the references to received historical accounts of the time, the musical, visual and literary communications from the counterculture, and retrospective glances from members of the 1960s Haight community via extensive first-hand interviews. For more information, read Sarah Hill's blog posts here: http://blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/musicresearch/2014/05/15/san-francisco-and-the-long-60s http://blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/musicresearch/2014/08/22/city-scale/ http://blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/musicresearch/2015/07/21/fare-thee-well/