The author of What Was the First Rock 'n' Roll Record? chronicles the spectacular chart-topping success of Bill Haley's hit record "Rock Around the Clock," focusing particular attention on the cultural setting that surrounded the birth of rock music in 1955. Original.

In Rockin' the Free World, international relations expert Sean Kay takes readers inside “Bob Dylan’s America” and shows how this vision linked the rock and roll revolution to American values of freedom, equality, human rights, and peace while tracing how those values have spread globally. Rockin' the Free World then shows how artists have engaged in advancing change via opportunity and education; domestic and international issue advocacy; and within the recording and broader communications industry. The book is built around primary interviews with prominent American and international performing artists ranging from Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees and Grammy winners to regional and local musicians. The interviews include leading industry people, management, journalists, heads of non-profits, and activists. The book concludes with a look at how musical artists have defined the American experience and what that has meant for the world.

It began with an outrageous press trip to New York to launch unknown rock band Brinsley Schwarz, which went disastrously wrong, and it went on to launch the careers of Ian Dury, Elvis Costello and Joe Strummer. The pub rock scene of the early 1970s was one of the most eventful and important in British music history.

The dawn of folk rock comes to life in Jerry Burgan’s unforgettable memoir of the pre-psychedelic 1960s and the summer that changed everything. As a naïve folksinger from Pomona, California, Burgan was thrust to the forefront of the counterculture and its aftermath. The Byrds, the Rolling Stones, the Mamas and Papas, Barry McGuire, Bo Diddley and many others make appearances in this 50th Anniversary reminiscence by the surviving cofounder of WE FIVE, the San Francisco electro-folk ensemble whose million-seller, "You Were On My Mind,” entered the world two months before Bob Dylan plugged in an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival. Vying with the Byrds to record the first folk-rock hit, Burgan and his lifelong friend Mike Stewart embarked on a road they thought well paved by the latter's older brother, Kingston Trio member John Stewart. Little did they realize that they would join the largest-ever American generation in an ecstatic, sometimes tortured, journey of invention and disillusion. Wounds to Bind bears witness to a lost and hopeful convergence in American history—that missing link between the folk and rock eras—when Bob Dylan and Sammy Davis Jr. were played on the same radio station in the same hour. A survivor of the human realignments, tragedies and triumphs that followed, Burgan tracks down the demons that drove the genius of We Five cofounder Mike Stewart and sheds light on the 40-year enigma of what became of the band’s reclusive lead singer, Beverly Bivens, a forerunner of Grace Slick, Linda Ronstadt, and Stevie Nicks.

From its roots in the black and white "under classes" through its clash with the broader culture to its multifaceted incarnation today, rock and roll has fostered and reflected a genuine cultural revolution that has gone on to influence the world. This critical work investigates rock music from a philosophical perspective, an approach rarely seen in the literature. Topics include a definition of rock music and a suggested typology; an examination of rock on radio and in television and film; and a depiction of what is to come. Of particular interest is how rock's shifting mores have mirrored the complex changes experienced by American society as it has undergone almost continuous turbulence. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

A portrait of folk rock cites its role as a vehicle for musical and social change, chronicling its evolution in the 1960s while profiling its major contributors and milestones, such as Bob Dylan, the Byrds, Simon and Garfunkel, the Newport Folk Festival, and Woodstock. Original.

In March 1977, John "Johnny Rotten" Lydon of the punk band the Sex Pistols looked over the Berlin wall onto the grey, militarized landscape of East Berlin, which reminded him of home in London. Lydon went up to the wall and extended his middle finger. He didn't know it at the time, but the Sex Pistols' reputation had preceded his gesture, as young people in the "Second World" busily appropriated news reports on degenerate Western culture as punk instruction manuals. Soon after, burgeoning Polish punk impresario Henryk Gajewski brought the London punk band the Raincoats to perform at his art gallery and student club-the epicenter for Warsaw's nascent punk scene. When the Raincoats returned to England, they found London erupting at the Rock Against Racism concert, which brought together 100,000 "First World" UK punks and "Third World" Caribbean immigrants who contributed their cultures of reggae and Rastafarianism. Punk had formed networks reaching across all three of the Cold War's "worlds". The first global narrative of punk, Punk Crisis examines how transnational punk movements challenged the global order of the Cold War, blurring the boundaries between East and West, North and South, communism and capitalism through performances of creative dissent. As author Raymond A. Patton argues, punk eroded the boundaries and political categories that defined the Cold War Era, replacing them with a new framework based on identity as conservative or progressive. Through this paradigm shift, punk unwittingly ushered in a new era of global neoliberalism.