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6 books match the query 'Rock 'n' Roll'

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Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll in the Dutch Golden Age

Benjamin B. Roberts

Amsterdam University Press, 2018

Binge drinking and illicit sex were just as common in the Dutch Golden Age as they are today, if not more so. Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll in the Dutch Golden Age is a compelling narrative about the generation of young men that came of age in the Dutch Republic during the economic boom of the early seventeenth century. Contrary to their parents' wishes, the younger generation grew up in luxury and wore extravagant clothing, grew their hair long, and squandered their time drinking and smoking. They created a new youth culture with many excesses; one that we today associate with the counterculture generation of the 1960s.

With his engaging storytelling style and humorous anecdotes, Roberts convincingly reveals that deviant male youth behavior is common to all times, especially periods when youngsters have too much money and too much free time on their hands.

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Sex, Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll in Rembrandt’s Time

Benjamin B. Roberts

Amsterdam University Press, 2024

Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll in Rembrandt’s Time focuses on the generation of rich young men that grew up in the seventeenth century in the Dutch Republic. These men had more money to spend on clothes, music, and recreation than the generation before them. This fascinating account of male adolescence in the Dutch Republic reveals how young men including Rembrandt van Rijn disregarded conservative values and rebelled against the older generation, and consequently created a new youth culture that was similar to the one of the 1960s. They had long hair, wore colorful and extravagant clothing, and started taking drugs. Theirs was the first generation in European history to smoke tobacco. Moreover, they defied conventional norms and values with their promiscuity and by singing lewd songs in their free time.

With his engaging storytelling-style filled with humorous anecdotes, Roberts convincingly shows how deviant male youth behavior is a feature of all ages, especially in periods when youngsters have too much free time and money.

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Tell Tchaikovsky the News

Rock 'n' Roll, the Labor Question, and the Musicians' Union, 1942-1968

Michael James Roberts

Duke University Press, 2014

For two decades after rock music emerged in the 1940s, the American Federation of Musicians (AFM), the oldest and largest labor union representing professional musicians in the United States and Canada, refused to recognize rock 'n' roll as legitimate music or its performers as skilled musicians. The AFM never actively organized rock 'n' roll musicians, although recruiting them would have been in the union's economic interest. In Tell Tchaikovsky the News, Michael James Roberts argues that the reasons that the union failed to act in its own interest lay in its culture, in the opinions of its leadership and elite rank-and-file members. Explaining the bias of union members—most of whom were classical or jazz music performers—against rock music and musicians, Roberts addresses issues of race and class, questions of what qualified someone as a skilled or professional musician, and the threat that records, central to rock 'n' roll, posed to AFM members, who had long privileged live performances. Roberts contends that by rejecting rock 'n' rollers for two decades, the once formidable American Federation of Musicians lost their clout within the music industry.

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The Late Great Johnny Ace and the Transition from R&B to Rock 'n' Roll

James M. Salem

University of Illinois Press, 1999

Johnny Ace's crooning style and stirring ballads made him the first postwar African American artist to cross over to a white audience. After a string of R&B hits, Ace released the million-selling "Pledging My Love," a song headed to the top of the charts when the singer accidentally shot himself in his dressing room between sets at a show.

James M. Salem captures the enigmatic, captivating, and influential R&B legend. Venturing from raucous Beale Street to Houston's vibrant Fourth Ward, Salem places Johnny Ace within a multifaceted world of postwar rhythm and blues that included B. B. King, Johnny Otis, Big Mama Thornton, and Gatemouth Brown. Salem also examines how entrepreneur Don D. Robey and his wife Evelyn Johnson promoted Ace to the top of the charts. Yet fame, as always, had a price. Ace's tours on the Chitlin' Circuit meant endless one-night stands and a grueling schedule that kept him on the road 340 days per year.

Comprehensive and filled with anecdotes, The Late Great Johnny Ace and the Transition from R&B to Rock 'n' Roll tells the story of the star who fused black and white styles and changed American popular music forever.

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Thirty Rooms to Hide In

Insanity, Addiction, and Rock ‘n’ Roll in the Shadow of the Mayo Clinic

Luke Longstreet Sullivan

University of Minnesota Press, 2014

Author Luke Longstreet Sullivan has a simple way of describing his new memoir: “It’s like The Shining . . . only funnier.” Thirty Rooms to HideIn tells the astonishing story of Sullivan’s father and his descent from one of the world’s top orthopedic surgeons at the Mayo Clinic to a man who is increasingly abusive, alcoholic, and insane, ultimately dying alone on the floor of a Georgia motel room. For his wife and six sons, the years prior to his death were characterized by turmoil, anger, and family dysfunction; but somehow they were also a time of real happiness for Sullivan and his brothers, full of dark humor and much laughter.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, the six brothers had a wildly fun and thoroughly dysfunctional childhood living in a forbidding thirty-room mansion, known as the Millstone, on the outskirts of Rochester, Minnesota. The many rooms of the immense home, as well as their mother’s loving protection, allowed the Sullivan brothers to grow up as normal, mischievous boys. Against a backdrop of the times—the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, fallout shelters, JFK’s assassination, and the Beatles—the cracks in their home life and their father’s psyche continue to widen. When their mother decides to leave the Millstone and move the family across town, the Sullivan boys are able to find solace in each other and in rock ’n’ roll.

As Thirty Rooms to HideIn follows the story of the Sullivan family—at times grim, at others poignant—a wonderful, dark humor lifts the narrative. Tragic, funny, and powerfully evocative of the 1950s and 1960s, Thirty Rooms to Hide In is a tale of public success and private dysfunction, personal and familial resilience, and the strange power of humor to give refuge when it is needed most, even if it can’t always provide the answers.

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William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll

By Casey Rae

University of Texas Press, 2019

William S. Burroughs's fiction and essays are legendary, but his influence on music's counterculture has been less well documented—until now. Examining how one of America's most controversial literary figures altered the destinies of many notable and varied musicians, William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock 'n' Roll reveals the transformations in music history that can be traced to Burroughs.

A heroin addict and a gay man, Burroughs rose to notoriety outside the conventional literary world; his masterpiece, Naked Lunch, was banned on the grounds of obscenity, but its nonlinear structure was just as daring as its content. Casey Rae brings to life Burroughs's parallel rise to fame among daring musicians of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, when it became a rite of passage to hang out with the author or to experiment with his cut-up techniques for producing revolutionary lyrics (as the Beatles and Radiohead did). Whether they tell of him exploring the occult with David Bowie, providing Lou Reed with gritty depictions of street life, or counseling Patti Smith about coping with fame, the stories of Burroughs's backstage impact will transform the way you see America's cultural revolution—and the way you hear its music.

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