18 and Life on Skid Row

Author: Sebastian Bach
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062265415
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 459

Book Description
The legendary rock singer and Skid Row frontman holds nothing back in this “ribald and freewheeling memoir . . . a delightfully trashy and salacious read” (AV Club). FROM SKID ROW TO BROADWAY, FROM THE GUTTERS OF NEW JERSEY TO SAVILE ROW, HEREIN LIES THE TALE OF THE FIRST THIRTY YEARS OF BACH ’N’ ROLL, MOTHERTRUCKERS!!!!!! Sebastian Bach is the epitome of a rock ’n’ roll front man. Loud, boisterous, sometimes self-destructive, and constantly creative, he was the electrifying, iconic lead singer of Skid Row—the band whose platinum-selling songs “18 and Life,” “Youth Gone Wild,” and “I Remember You,” took the world by storm, and were MTV mainstays. But Bach is no ordinary rock star. In his funny, exhilarating, and brutally honest memoir, Bach tells his story of Skid Row: the parties, drugs, and international tours with Mötley Crüe, Aerosmith, Metallica, Slayer, and Guns N’ Roses, as well as the one-of-a-kind voice that carried him through Skid Row’s heyday and their eventual breakup. With his typical bravado, Sebastian reflects on the cost of fame, the price of creativity, and what it means to go from rock hopeful to rock star. From his birth in the Bahamas to his teenage years in Canada to the music that rocks his life today, 18 and Life on Skid Row is the ultimate story of Sebastian Bach and his devotion to the music he loves.

The King of Skid Row

Author: James Eli Shiffer
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452950199
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
City blue laws drove the liquor trade and its customers—hard-drinking lumberjacks, pensioners, farmhands, and railroad workers—into the oldest quarter of Minneapolis. In the fifty-cent-a-night flophouses of the city’s Gateway District, they slept in cubicles with ceilings of chicken wire. In rescue missions, preachers and nuns tried to save their souls. Sociology researchers posing as vagrants studied them. And in their midst John Bacich, aka Johnny Rex, who owned a bar, a liquor store, and a cage hotel, documented the gritty neighborhood’s last days through photographs and film of his clientele. The King of Skid Row follows Johnny Rex into this vanished world that once thrived in the heart of Minneapolis. Drawing on hours of interviews conducted in the three years before Bacich’s death in 2012, James Eli Shiffer brings to life the eccentric characters and strange events of an American skid row. Supplemented with archival and newspaper research and his own photographs, Bacich’s stories re-create the violent, alcohol-soaked history of a city best known for its clean, progressive self-image. His life captures the seamy, richly colorful side of the city swept away by a massive urban renewal project in the early 1960s and gives us, in a glimpse of those bygone days, one of Minneapolis’s most intriguing figures—spinning some of its most enduring and enthralling tales.

Down, Out &Under Arrest

Author: Forrest Stuart
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022637095X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Book Description
“A well-supported critique of therapeutic policing and, by extension, of similar paternalistic efforts to help the poor by hassling them into good behavior.” —Los Angeles Times In his first year working in Los Angeles’s Skid Row, Forrest Stuart was stopped on the street by police fourteen times. Usually for doing little more than standing there. Juliette, a woman he met during that time, has been stopped by police well over one hundred times, arrested upward of sixty times, and has given up more than a year of her life serving week-long jail sentences. Her most common crime? Simply sitting on the sidewalk—an arrestable offense in LA. Why? What purpose did those arrests serve, for society or for Juliette? How did we reach a point where we’ve cut support for our poorest citizens, yet are spending ever more on policing and prisons? That’s the complicated, maddening story that Stuart tells in Down, Out & Under Arrest, a close-up look at the hows and whys of policing poverty in the contemporary United States. What emerges from Stuart’s years of fieldwork—not only with Skid Row residents, but with the police charged with managing them—is a tragedy built on mistakes and misplaced priorities more than on heroes and villains. At a time when distrust between police and the residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods has never been higher, Stuart’s book helps us see where we’ve gone wrong, and what steps we could take to begin to change the lives of our poorest citizens—and ultimately our society itself—for the better.

Sex, Drugs, Ratt & Roll

Author: Stephen Pearcy
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 145169458X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
Welcome to heavy metal rock 'n' roll, circa 1980, when all you needed was the right look, burning ambition, and a chance. Stephen Pearcy and supergroup Ratt hit the bull's-eye. Cranking out metal just as metal got hot, Ratt was the perfect band at the perfect time, and their hit single "Round and Round" became a top-selling anthem. As Ratt scrambled up a wall of fame and wealth, so they experienced the gut-wrenching free fall, after too many hours in buses, planes, and limos; too many women; too many drugs; and all the personality clashes and ego trips that marked the beginning of the end. Pearcy offers a stunningly honest self-portrait of a man running on the fumes of ambition and loneliness as the party crashed. His rock 'n' roll confessional, by turns incredible, hilarious, and lyrical, is a story of survival--and a search for the things that matter most.--From publisher description.

Rory Gallagher

Author: Marcus Connaughton
Publisher: Gill & Macmillan Ltd
ISBN: 1848899807
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Book Description
Rory Gallagher is a hero and icon of rock music. He inspired guitar players from The Edge to Johnny Marr, Slash to Gary Moore, Johnny Fean to Philip Donnelly, Declan Sinnott to Brian May. He toured incessantly and sold over 30 million albums worldwide. Acknowledged as one of the world's leading guitarists, he collaborated with his boyhood hero Muddy Waters, and played with Jerry Lee Lewis, Albert King and Lonnie Donegan. In this compelling biography, contemporaries, fellow musicians, film maker Tony Palmer and Taste drummer John Wilson tell stories about Rory from his meteoric rise in the late 1960s with Taste to his remarkable solo career. This is a compelling testament to the musical life of a shy and retiring working-class hero, distinguished by his checked shirts and his astounding dexterity on acoustic and electric guitar – the guitarist and blues man who blazed a trail for others to follow.

Nothin' But a Good Time

Author: Justin Quirk
Publisher: Unbound Publishing
ISBN: 1789651360
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
From 1983 until 1991, Glam Metal was the sound of American culture. Big hair, massive amplifiers, drugs, alcohol, piles of money and life-threatening pyrotechnics. This was the world stalked by Bon Jovi, Kiss, W.A.S.P., Skid Row, Dokken, Motley Crue, Cinderella, Ratt and many more. Armed with hairspray, spandex and strangely shaped guitars, they marked the last great era of supersize bands. Where did Glam Metal come from? How did it spread? What killed it off? And why does nobody admit to having been a Glam Metaller anymore?

FREE MAN WALKING

Author: Andy Nieman
Publisher: FriesenPress
ISBN: 1460235479
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
The horror of loneliness. Over 10 years in prison. Hooked on heroin, cocaine and drugs for 23 years. A chronic alcoholic for 27. Homeless. Eating out of garbage bins. Born into a violent alcoholic home. Molested by a pedophile in a residential school for three years. Surviving on skid row for 10 years. Living with the constant threat of suicide. Now this same person has a University Degree, is a United Pentecostal Church Pastor, an Officer of the Legislative Assembly, a poet, husband and stepdad. This true story will give you a unique front-row look into a world few know about or experience. Once you read this book your heart will be overflowing with hope. You will be left with no other alternative because this story will touch you so deeply it will remain in your heart the rest of your life. If you know a chronic alcoholic or drug addict whose life appears to be totally hopeless, or have a family member living with one, this book is a book for you and for them. I could not stop drinking! I could not stop sticking that needle in my arm! No matter what I tried I always failed…until I learned the TRUTH!

Dirty Rocker Boys

Author: Bobbie Brown
Publisher: Gallery Books
ISBN: 9781476734729
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
An uncensored Hollywood tell-all filled with explicit tales of love, sex, and revenge from the video vixen made famous by Warrant’s rock anthem “Cherry Pie.” Who could forget the sexy “Cherry Pie” girl from hair metal band Warrant’s infamous music video? Bobbie Brown became a bona fide vixen for her playful role as the object of lead singer Jani Lane’s desires. But the wide-eyed Louisiana beauty queen’s own dreams of making it big in Los Angeles were about to be derailed by her rock-and-roll lifestyle. After her tumultuous marriage to Jani imploded, and her engagement to fast-living Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee ended in a drug haze—followed by his marriage later to Pamela Anderson—Bobbie decided it was time Hollywood’s hottest bachelors got a taste of their own medicine. Step one: get high. Step two: get even. In a captivating, completely uncensored confessional, Bobbie explicitly recounts a life among some of the most famous men in Hollywood: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kevin Costner, Mark McGrath, Dave Navarro, Sebastian Bach, Ashley Hamilton, Rob Pilatus of Milli Vanilli, Matthew and Gunnar Nelson, Orgy’s Jay Gordon, and many more. No man was off limits as the fun-loving bombshell spiraled into excess, anger, and addiction. Bobbie survived the party—barely—and her riveting, cautionary comeback tale is filled with the wildest stories of sex, drugs, and rock and roll ever told.

Making Your Own Luck

Author: Fred Glass
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025305947X
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
One man's odyssey from skid row to rebuilding a major collegiate sports program. In Making Your Own Luck, former Indiana University athletic director Fred Glass recounts how even a self-described "knucklehead" learned to be prepared to recognize and seize opportunities and thus make his own luck through life. Growing up in a skid row bar, having an alcoholic father, struggling with anxiety and self-doubt, and making his share of stupid mistakes, Glass had much to contend with in early life. However, supported by socially enlightened parents, a Jesuit education, and his soulmate, Barbara, his odyssey has led him to serve a mayor, a governor, a senator, and even a president. With great humor and insightful reflection, Glass details how he helped keep the Colts in Indianapolis—he spearheaded a massive convention center expansion and the building of Lucas Oil Stadium and even helped to attract the Super Bowl to his hometown. Any of these accomplishments individually would be more than enough to call Glass's career a resounding success, but they were only the beginning. In the latest stage of his journey, Glass led the rebuilding of the athletic program of his beloved alma mater, Indiana University. Featuring a foreword from IU alumnus and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban, Making Your Own Luck is a must-read not only for Indiana sports fans, but for anyone that recognizes the importance of preparation, opportunity and action in creating your own success.

Lightfoot

Author: Nicholas Jennings
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 014319920X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER A 2023 ROLLING STONE RECOMMENDED BOOK Shortlisted for the 2017 Legislative Assembly of Ontario Speaker's Book Award Nominated for the 2018 Heritage Toronto Award - Historical Writing: Book “The preeminent account of the late singer's life.” —Rolling Stone The definitive, full-access story of the life and songs of Canada's legendary troubadour Gordon Lightfoot’s name is synonymous with timeless songs about trains and shipwrecks, rivers and highways, lovers and loneliness. His music defined the folk-pop sound of the 1960s and ‘70s, topped charts and sold millions. He is unquestionably Canada’s greatest songwriter, and an international star who has performed on the world’s biggest stages. While Lightfoot’s songs are well known, the man behind them is elusive. He’s never allowed his life to be chronicled in a book—until now. Biographer Nick Jennings has had unprecedented access to the notoriously reticent musician. Lightfoot takes us deep inside the artist’s world, from his idyllic childhood in Orillia, the wild sixties, and his canoe trips into Canada’s North to his heady times atop the music world. Jennings explores the toll that success took on his personal life—including his troubled relationships, his battle with alcohol and his near-death experiences—and the extraordinary drive and tenacity that pulled him through it all. Rich in voices from fellow musicians, close friends, Lightfoot’s family and the singer’s own reminiscences, the biography tells the stories behind some of his best-known love songs, including “Beautiful” and “Song for a Winter’s Night,” as well as the infidelity and divorce that resulted in classics like “Sundown” and “If You Could Read My Mind.” Kris Kristofferson has called Lightfoot’s songs “some of the most beautiful and lasting music of our time.” Lightfoot is an unforgettable portrait of a treasured singer-songwriter, an artist whose work has been covered by everyone from Joni Mitchell, Barbra Streisand and Nico to Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley and Gord Downie. Revealing and insightful, Lightfoot is both an inspiring story of redemption and an exhilarating read.