KALAKALaklat

26/10/2015

THE CLASH WAS - AND REMAINS - ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT groups of the late 1970’s and early '80’s. Indebted to rockabilly, reggae, Memphis soul, cowboy justice, and ‘60s protest, the overtly political band railed against war, racism and a dead-end economy, and in the process imparted a conscience to punk, Joe Strummer was the Clash’s front man and the political heart of the group, a rock ’n roll hero seen by many as the personification of outlaw integrity and street cool. He synthesised gritty toughness and poetic sensitivity in a manner that still resonates with listeners years after his death in 2002. Music journalist Chris Salewicz was a friend of Strummer’s for close to three decades and has covered the Clash’s career and the entire punk movement from its inception. With exclusive access to Strummer’s friends, relatives and fellow musicians, Salewics penetrates the soul of an icon. In the process, he argues for Strummer’s place in a long line of protest singers that includes Woody Guthrie, John Lennon and Bob Marley, and examines by turns Strummer’s and punk’s ongoing cultural influence.

02/09/2015

This story is mine. I'm the guy that gave it all to beat the odds, left everything he had on the stage each night, didn't screw around on his woman, took care of his kids, and was sober enough to remember it all and write about it...myself.

The one thing that has surprised and confused me, though, is my unlikely transformation into a "beloved public figure." How did the unpopular kid, who grew up to be the angry young man, who became the "80's poster boy for the evils of rock 'n' rill, arrested for profanity and assault, and boycotted by parents and religious groups, became the likeable mensch he is today?

02/09/2015

Rolling Stone Magazine's review of the Jane's Addiction's seminal debut album, "Nothing's Shocking," hailed both the band and their ground breaking musical epic as "the greatest hope of Los Angeles club scene has long been every bit as successful and commercially productive as its more heralded punk and post punk scene.. Jane's Addiction, young and restless, makes music that scrapes against the smooth surfaces of commercial pop. Creating their own soundscape that awoke America's youth to the dawn of a new time in music and culture where frontman Perry Farrell was the first prophet in a generation, his band created a Mecca for musical meditation and discovery; his words a sanctuary for solitude and solace from the desolation of life as a teenager. What voices like John Lennon and Bob Dylan had done for their generation in the early 1960's, Farrell with Jane Addiction would realize largely alone for their era in the later 1980's and early 1990's. Kurt Cobain's popular emergence was massively catalyst for the commercial crossover of alternative rock into the sub genre of Grunge, but he was still as much as descendant of the musical ground that Farrell had laid as Jim Morrison was of Dylan and Lennon.

Jane Addiction's instantly legendary catalog of albums would spawn a generational movement that would change the face of rock and roll forever, giving way to the mainstream advent of alternative rock in the 1990's. Following up 1988's "Nothing's Shocking" with the album that revolutionized the aforementioned genre, "Ritual Lo Habitual," which Billboard Magazine hailed as "one of rock's all time sprawling masterpieces...and one of alt rocks finest moments," cemented the band's status as the genre's most iconic rock and roll band. Now, for the first time in the pages of "Jane's Addiction: in the Studio," fans are taken behind the scenes and quite literally in the studio for a V.I.P access inside the writing and recording of such legendary classics as "Jane says," "Coming Down the Mountain," "Three days," "Been Caught Stealing," "Stop" and host of others. Chronicled via first hand interviews with lead producer Dave Jerden, engineer Ronnie S. Champagne, legendary Pink Floyd producer Bob Ezrin, as well as early players in discovering the band, including former Triple X Records A&R head Charlie Brown, and members of Perry Farrell's first L.A Band PSI COM (where the sonic foundations of Jane's experimental sound were first discovered/fine tuned), this is by far the most definitive study of Jane's Addiction's legendary musical legacy. With the recent addition of legendary Guns N' Roses/ Velvet Revolver bassist Duff McKagen to the band's fold, and a new studio album due in 2011, "Jane's Addiction: in the Studio" is more relevant than ever for fans- past, present and beyond!

24/08/2015

"A remarkable achievement, and like Henry Miller's best personal writings, it is a story that opens up the times that it portrays and then reveals the possibilities of the human spirit." -Rolling Stone

24/08/2015

"I change during the course of the day. I wake and I'm one person, and when i go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else."

Direct from the mouth of America's most celebrated street poet comes a rare and diverse collection of intimate interviews. Dylan on Dylan features 31 of the most significant and revealing conversations with the singer, stretching over forty years from 1962 to 2004.

24/08/2015

The Funk Era and Beyond is the first scholarly collection to discuss funk music in America and delve into the intricate and complex nature of the word and its accompanying genre. While pleasure and performance are often presumed to be mutually exclusive of intellectuality, funk offers immense possibilities for a new critical rubric. As these writings demonstrate, funk is reflected in myriad forms and context and has been the catalyst for stylistic innovation. Contributors employ a multitude of methodologies to examine this unique musical field's relationship to African American culture and to music, literature and visual art as a whole.

02/06/2015

B.B KING HAS THE BLUES RUNNING THROUGH HIS BLOOD.

Growing up in the rural poverty of the Mississippi Delta, King first experienced the blues at nine years old, when his mother passed away. The man of the house before the end of his first decade, he used this strife as a source of inspiration and launched one of the most celebrated musical careers in American history.

King has led a remarkable life, and this riveting autobiography dramatizes his whirlwind adventures from the Memphis of the forties to the Moscow of the nineties with unflinching condor and sincerity. But most of all, B.B's story is the story of the blues- the evolution from country acoustic to urban electric, the birth and explosion of rock 'n' roll - and B.B's own long, but ultimately triumphant, struggle for crossover success, during which he remained unwaveringly true to the music of his heart.

08/04/2014

The Jazz Handbook is a practical guide to the landscape of Jazz. Using as its starting points 200 major musicians- from the Original Dixieland Jass Band to Pat Metheny and Wynton Marsalis- the Handbook suggests new directions to take and connections to make. For each entry, the Handbook indicates a web of possible routes to pursue and provides facts, critique and comment along the way, plus information on recordings, record labels, festivals, books and film appearances.

24/04/2012

24/04/2012

14/03/2012

In nineteenth-century Vienna, a drama of love, fate, and will is played out amid the intellectual ferment that defined the era. Josef Breuer, one of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, is at the height of his career. Friedrich Nietzsche, Europe's greatest philosopher, is on the brink of suicidal despair, unable to find a cure for the headaches and other ailments that plague him.

When he agrees to treat Nietzsche with his experimental talking cure, Breuer never expects that he too will find solace in their sessions. Only through facing his own inner demons can the gifted healer begin to help his patient. In When Nietzsche Wept, Irvin Yalom blends fact and fiction, atmosphere and suspense, to unfold an unforgettable story about the redemptive power of friendship.

27/02/2012

Alternative music's most obsessed-about icon gets the business from an appropriately obsessed fan. Barely two pages into this "psychobio" of the former lead signer of The Smiths, the author opines, "Arguably, poor Oscar [Wilde] was merely an early, failed, and somewhat overweight prototype for Morrissey," and not many more before he declares, " 'The Smiths' is the greatest of the Smiths' albums, making it, of course, the Greatest Album of All Time." There's a wink and a nudge here, of course: Simpson, known in his native Britain as a wickedly funny, out-there gay satirist, is well aware of just how unhinged—or, yes, "alarming"—he is going to sound to those not initiated into the cult of Morrissey, and he plays off that to an extent. But he still truly thinks that Morrissey is just about the best thing to have hit modern music since . . . well, anyone. To many, The Smiths was just a band of mopey Brits with a classically handsome, s*xually ambiguous singer crooning about heartache over jangling guitars. But to a vociferous minority, Morrissey became an icon, an "anti-pop idol" in Simpson's words; to this day, his solo concerts are mobbed by screaming fans. The author is not so concerned with rehashing the ups and downs of a landmark alternative band as he is with dissecting Morrissey himself: what makes the bookish, vegetarian, celibate Irish-Catholic from Manchester tick, and what draws his fans to him. No matter how hard he digs into the perverse appeal of a highly s*xualized star who renounces s*x itself, Simpson doesn't quite get an answer, but along the way he is able to fire off plenty of tart darts at the pop-historical landscape, continually topping one ludicrously overreaching announcement ("Morrissey was the real mad lad holding the world hostage at the point of a pop single") with another. Relentlessly enjoyable, and enhanced by the author's absolute refusal to keep even a shred of his dignity intact.