Books by Anthony DeCurtis
Lou Reed: A Life
The essential biography of one of music's most influential icons: Lou Reed.
As lead singer and songwriter for the Velvet Underground and a renowned solo artist, Lou Reed invented alternative rock. His music, at once a source of transcendent beauty and coruscating noise, violated all definitions of genre while speaking to millions of fans and inspiring generations of musicians.
But while his iconic status may be fixed, the man himself was anything but. Lou Reed's life was a transformer's odyssey. Eternally restless and endlessly hungry for new experiences, Reed reinvented his persona, his sound, even his sexuality time and again. A man of contradictions and extremes, he was fiercely independent yet afraid of being alone, artistically fearless yet deeply paranoid, eager for commercial success yet disdainful of his own triumphs. Channeling his jagged energy and literary sensibility into classic songs - like "Walk on the Wild Side" and "Sweet Jane" - and radically experimental albums alike, Reed remained desperately true to his artistic vision, wherever it led him.
Now, just a few years after Reed's death, Rolling Stone writer Anthony DeCurtis, who knew Reed and interviewed him extensively, tells the provocative story of his complex and chameleonic life. With unparalleled access to dozens of Reed's friends, family, and collaborators, DeCurtis tracks Reed's five-decade career through the accounts of those who knew him and through Reed's most revealing testimony, his music. We travel deep into his defiantly subterranean world, enter the studio as the Velvet Underground record their groundbreaking work, and revel in Reed's relationships with such legendary figures as Andy Warhol, David Bowie, and Laurie Anderson. Gritty, intimate, and unflinching, Lou Reed is an illuminating tribute to one of the most incendiary artists of our time.
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No copies available.
Lou Reed: A Life
The essential biography of one of music's most influential icons: Lou Reed.
As lead singer and songwriter for the Velvet Underground and a renowned solo artist, Lou Reed invented alternative rock. His music, at once a source of transcendent beauty and coruscating noise, violated all definitions of genre while speaking to millions of fans and inspiring generations of musicians.
But while his iconic status may be fixed, the man himself was anything but. Lou Reed's life was a transformer's odyssey. Eternally restless and endlessly hungry for new experiences, Reed reinvented his persona, his sound, even his sexuality time and again. A man of contradictions and extremes, he was fiercely independent yet afraid of being alone, artistically fearless yet deeply paranoid, eager for commercial success yet disdainful of his own triumphs. Channeling his jagged energy and literary sensibility into classic songs - like "Walk on the Wild Side" and "Sweet Jane" - and radically experimental albums alike, Reed remained desperately true to his artistic vision, wherever it led him.
Now, just a few years after Reed's death, Rolling Stone writer Anthony DeCurtis, who knew Reed and interviewed him extensively, tells the provocative story of his complex and chameleonic life. With unparalleled access to dozens of Reed's friends, family, and collaborators, DeCurtis tracks Reed's five-decade career through the accounts of those who knew him and through Reed's most revealing testimony, his music. We travel deep into his defiantly subterranean world, enter the studio as the Velvet Underground record their groundbreaking work, and revel in Reed's relationships with such legendary figures as Andy Warhol, David Bowie, and Laurie Anderson. Gritty, intimate, and unflinching, Lou Reed is an illuminating tribute to one of the most incendiary artists of our time.
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The Rolling Stones: Unzipped
by Anthony DeCurtis, The Rolling Stones
An intimate and comprehensive volume tracing the incredible musical career and creative life of the Rolling Stones.
“As well as going back through our history we wanted everyone to experience and feel exactly what it’s like to be in the Rolling Stones.”
For almost 60 years the Rolling Stones have helped shape popular culture around the world. Unzipped traces their impact and influence on rock music, art, design, fashion, photography, and filmmaking. Packed with evocative archive photos, artworks, outtakes, and memorabilia, this stunning book immerses readers in the world of the Stones.
Peppered throughout with insightful new commentary by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, and Ronnie Wood, this volume also features a compelling introduction by Anthony De Curtis, as well as essays by Buddy Guy, Don Was, Anna Sui, John Varvatos, Martin Scorsese, Shephard Fairey, Patrick Woodroffe, and Willie Williams. In addition to stills from films, videos, and documentary footage, vivid photographic sections showcase the Stones’ musical instruments, their stage clothing, album cover designs, notebooks with lyrics, and tape boxes from the original recording sessions.
Bold, glamorous, and captivating, Unzipped is the perfect showcase for “the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world.” 370 color illustrations
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$50.00
In Other Words: Artists Talk About Life and Work (Book)
In Other Words collects the most intimate and revealing interviews by Anthony DeCurtis, who, in the course of a distinguished 25-year career, has earned a reputation for approaching his craft with depth, seriousness and sensitivity. His many subjects - music legends, movie directors, artistic provocateurs, up-and-coming talents, visionary songwriters - all speak with rare candor about the meanings within and the motivations behind their best work. Many of these interviews - which originally appeared in Rolling Stone, The New York Times and other publications - have been significantly expanded. DeCurtis has also written new introductions that tell the story behind these stories, transforming this collection into an episodic memoir of a life on the front lines of cultural journalism. These gripping conversations will make readers feel that they are sitting, as DeCurtis did, at a dinner table or in a quiet room alone, learning everything they want to know about some of the most revered artists of our time.
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The Best in Rock Fiction
by Anthony DeCurtis, June Sawyers
Rock has dominated radio, TV, movies, and even the Internet in our media-savvy lives, but its impact on the literary world has often been overlooked. This collection features today's finest writers, including Sherman Alexie, Madison Smartt Bell, T.C. Boyle, Don DeLillo, Roddy Doyle, Nick Hornby, Rick Moody, Tom Perrotta, Salman Rushdie, and Scott Spencer, as well as such up-and-coming writers as Tom Piazza and even musicians such as Steve Earle who have turned their talent for lyric writing to spinning a well-told yarn. In these short stories and excerpts from novels, the reader will recognize such familiar rock icons as Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen. Sherman Alexie's “Reservation Blues” follows the rowdy adventures of an all–Native American rock band from the reservation to New York City. In “Ground Beneath Her Feet ” Salman Rushdie offers a riff on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth in a rock-and-roll setting. Scott Spencer's “Rich Man's Table” focuses on the illegitimate offspring of a Dylan-like singer and a former Greenwich Village hippie. At times raucous, at times poignant, the stories in this collection celebrate in their own way the timeless spirit that is the heart of rock and roll.
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Rocking My Life Away: Writing about Music and Other Matters
Rocking My Life Away represents nearly twenty years of writing by one of the premier critics of popular music in America today. In these pieces from Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and other publications, Anthony DeCurtis reveals his ongoing engagement with rock & roll as artistic forum, source of personal inspiration, and compelling site of cultural struggle. Including significant new work—liner notes commissioned for the Phil Spector box set and a spirited discussion with Peter Buck of R.E.M. about rock criticism, for example—DeCurtis also ventures with insight and power beyond the world of rock & roll. A joint profile of the political writers Neil Sheehan and Taylor Branch and provocative looks at the work of novelists Don DeLillo and T. Coraghessan Boyle round out this eclectic collection.
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