The Illustrated Discography of Surf Music 1961-65 is an excellent source to find the what, who, and where of surf music produced in these influential times. While the book doesn't go into any great detail of the history of each song, there is a good and basic history of Surf Music and gives useful information about certain artists. This book contains a database-like listing of albums and is a useful guide to collecting albums. This book is worth looking high and low for.

It is amazing, that this is the only book on one of the biggest bands in the world, and by its sole existence, it should have 10 stars! It is a good book, especially because it contains lots of really, really good pictures, most of them from from the 1992/3 X-tour. The text-parts tend to be not-so-interesting, beacause they mostly are concerned with general observations on the bands achievements, and not so much with the actual events. There are, however, lots of interesting quotes from interviews with the band members. One positive thing is that all the stupid, slimy stuff about Michael Hutchences personal life has been left out. The book is 100 percent about the band. On the down-side, I think the book is a bit too sterile. The band members appear like such a bunch of nice guys, and I am sure they are, but come on, after touring and touring and touring, you have got to be pissed about something! To me, INXS was the best band ever - both musically and in the signals they sent to their audience - so I may not be the best person to review this book. But I think it is definately worth reading, and I can only recommend it.

If you already have his autiobiography (Take Me Home) and any other greatest hits songbook, save your money (although it does have one of my photos, uncredited, of course) :)

This book contains numerous good photos of the Lennon family from the late 1970's. Primary locations featured are Hong Kong, Japan and New York City. John, Yoko and Sean are photographed in numerous nature scenes in Japan. John and Sean are pictured swimming together. Zoo visits, picnics and bicycle riding are also featured. In NYC John and Julian are shown sledding together in Central Park. Also, there are pictures from a birthday party in NYC for John and Sean. Overall, this book provides various intimate shots of the Lennon family at leisure.

I've always been interested in the Beatles early days so this book was a must. Fellow (Quarrymen)bandmate Len Gerry does a good job documenting the first gigs, run-ins with Teddy Boy gangs, and the significance of Penny Lane. I could have done with less of Garry's personal biography, but I mourned along with him as he told of the loss of his friend John Lennon.

I like Yoko's early albums.I think she was a great artist at one time. But if what May Pang says in this book is factual, then Yoko Ono truly was a sick woman. Totally controlling, and totally after John Lennons money. After reading this book, I just wished John had stayed with May Pang. Who knows, things might have turned out a whole lot differently if he had.
Fascinating read for a Lennon fan.

For anyone planning to hike the River to River Trail across the Shawnee Hills of Southern Illinois, this guide is a MUST. It contains a narative discription as well as topographic maps. I was able to obtain my copy by calling the River to River Trail Society at 618-252-6789, they are the not for profit group that tends to the trail. I later joined the society which also has a web page at ... All and all you can't hike the trail without the guide. Most folks think that Illinois is flat. It's not! And the River to River Trail proves it. The best times to hike in Southern Illinois are from September to mid -December and February to the end of May.

Rocker! is a very interesting about the people who were the rockers. This is not a motorcycle book, per se, but a book about motorcyclists of the '60s who lived in a world devoted to motorcycles, a book about kids who wanted to have a good time without going over the edge in rebelliousness, but liked the power of the machine and image of "Bad Boy." I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the life style of the Ton-up boys.

In the 1980s, the late Alex Harvey was feted as the "godfather of punk" for his attitude & stage persona, belying his glam-rock status of the '70s, a status which, in turn, belied his '60s R&B legend status, predated by his skiffle & Dixieland status... The story of Scots rocker Alex Harvey, the self-proclaimed "Last of the Teenage Idols", is a story long overdue. Munro's bio focuses remarks from Harvey's family and contemporaries alongside vintage interviews with the Faith Healer himself to paint a picture of a journeyman artist, more workingman than Rock Star.

Harvey's rise, fall, and rebirth as Sensational parallels the history of rock itself. As arguably the first Scottish artist to record a rock album (1964's "Alex Harvey & His Soul Band"), Harvey's career swung as wildly as his choice of cover tunes. After fronting the group that inspired Glasgow schoolgirl Lulu to record her first hit, "Shout", Harvey went on to focus on folk, then spent time as a cabaret singer before landing in the pit band of the London production of "Hair". After making several avant garde attempts at psychedelia (including stints with the jazz-tinged Rock Workshop and his own band, Giant Moth), Harvey found his place fronting the former prog band Tear Gas as his own Sensational Alex Harvey Band. As in his previous musical incarnations, Harvey's main strength as a performer lay in making other artists' songs undoubtedly his own, whether the Tom Jones chestbeater "Delilah", R&B stalwarts Lieber & Stoller's "Framed" or those of more obscure composers like Belgian Jaques Brel ("Next").

The main criticism I've heard about the book is that any die-hard Harvey fan will have heard all these stories before. That doesn't really detract from the value of the book -- any die-hard Harvey fan will have to have it, if only for the rare photos inside. Maybe once the paperback version is released Alex Harvey will finally, 20+ years after his untimely death, get the recognition he deserves as a world-wide Sensation.

There are things about how this book was written, the way the info was obtained and the author's bizarre quest to "get inside" Lennon's head that are off-putting and tend to make me take this book with a heaping handful of sodium chloride. The author claims he has distilled the essence of the man's last year by allegedly analyzing Lennon's pilfered diaries, starving himself down to John Lennon's weight and chasing after former servants of the Lennons. I would say this book does give us a picture of a person who lived a very strange life but whether that person is or is not Lennon, really, who can say? It is an interesting picture. Certainly a disticnt perspective that diverges wildly from the domesticated, retiree superstar Lennon like to style himself as. So it's an interesting read but the author is trying painfully hard to show us how well he knew a man he never actually met. It smacks of wishful thinking. There's something about it that feels forced and kind of...fictional.

Even a dedicated Lennonphile who find new material in this well-written and poignantly sad examination of John's last year. The closer Rosen edges towards the assassination, the sadder and more wistful the reader feels. It's puzzling and amazing that an icon like Lennon was not very happy towards the end of his too-short life. The book brings out the numerous infidelities that marred the Lennon-Ono partnership, supposedly one of the greatest love stories of the era. Yoko comes off fairly well here, which is surprising considering the usually brutal treatment she receives at the hands of biographers.

Her manipulative nature is exemplified in Lennon's decision to include Yoko's pathetic musical material on his last album, "Double Fantasy," which was utterly compromised by having Yoko wail on every other track. Her control over Lennon's decision-making processes is detailed here and is sobering. It's frustrating that John relied upon Yoko so heavily in making professonal decisions when his musical career had benn nearly without parallel.

Ultimately this is an interesting and well-written book with few errors of fact and some new information (rare for any Beatles-related book). One of the most depressing nights of my life was when I heard John was killed, and this book brings back the anguish quite well. Twenty years later, all Lennon fans will eternally ask themselves how much more great music John had within him. Tragically, we will never know because of Mark David Chapman.

Numerous books and countless articles have been written about the Beatles and every single member of the group. Was there still a possibility left to discover new aspects of John Lennon's life? Didn't we know it all about the man that brought us songs like "Good Day Sunshine", "Imagine" and "Yellow Submarine"? The answer has to be no. Robert Rosen's new book "Nowhere Man. The final Days of John Lennon" portrays the former leader of the famous music quartet from a very different, unexplored viewpoint. Rosen focuses on Lennon's inner life, his private self that existed far away from the public eye. He portrays a man that was pushed back and forth between the disciplined life of a yogi and the more ordinary, worldly pleasures of an aging human being and celebrity who had lost touch with the world and himself. Like other depressed people Lennon's daily schedule was dominated by minor tasks and challenges that had become the center of his existence. His universe evolved around juice fasts, dream journals, his appearance and horoscopes. Long gone were the heights of creativity, no reading and no meditation could bring them back and smoking grass didn't help either. The John Lennon of the late seventies and early eighties observed New York from the windows of the Dakota: down there in Central Park the real life was happening, up in the rooms of the Dakota superstition and paranoia had taken over. We learn a lot from this book about how the Lennons lived, how they hired and fired their service people, how they raised there son, which books John read etc. But mostly we learn from these pages the story of a desperate man who thought he had nowhere to go anymore and who because his life was tragically taken from him never got a second chance to find out differently.