| Shop Search |
|
|||
|
|||
|
* * * * * Devils & Blue Dresses, a review Mitch Ryder’s autobiography goes well beyond typical eyewitness accounts of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll road stories. His account of rock stardom is one of the most lucid, original, darkly emotional and surreal in rock and roll. In 34 concise chapters, Ryder has penned a passionate and often experimental exposè, told in a distinctly introspective voice, a ‘long nights journey’ through the twisted alleyways of the music business and how his natural talent and notoriety was used and abused by himself and those around him. Readers take caution, this is not a light bedtime story. Devils & Blue Dresses is an emotionally searing autobiography where Ryder opens his heart and confronts his past with deadly aim. It’s a well-written memoir on music-politics, the weight of fame and identity, and its attendant web of prizes and perils. The book highlights many tragic-comic episodes both high and low; starting with impoverished scenes of childhood, a dysfunctional home-life and Ryder’s early manipulation and naivety inside the commercial hit-making machine. A string of exceptional high moments sparkle throughout the book; witnessing Bob Dylan’s recording of Highway 61, jamming with Jimi Hendrix (who asked Ryder to be his singer), partying with The Beatles at a countryside LSD retreat after their celebratory release of Sargent Peppers and Hollywood screen tests with Sam Peckinpah and others.
Ryder’s first top-ten hit was the Crewe produced wonder “Jenny Take a Ride” –a rocket of a single that skillfully combined Little Richard’s “C.C. Rider” with “Jenny Jenny” –a classic showcase for Ryder’s high-energy solid gold vocal style. That talent/producer relationship was dramatically revealed by Ryder who said, “Mr. Crewe held all the cards… all of the music appeared on his record labels, or was licensed out, and he held management, recording and publishing contracts… As long as the hit records kept coming, I was safe from the ill will of an industry that, by nature, was insensitive and exploitative and whose executives were, for the most part, angry and bitter at having to suffer the childish abuse of so many of their client victims.” Ryder himself a ‘client victim’ lost most of his royalties and was bound to medieval contracts that froze his assets. Finally he was forced to beg for a $15,000 down payment on his Southfield, Michigan home –and that became one of the last royalty payments Ryder ever received. His love for music and contempt for the industry is burned deep onto every page.
The book is filled with first hand documents; recording contracts, publicity shots, family photographs and deeply personal poetic side-bar sections titled, “a window to my soul” – italicized journal entries that convey Ryder’s inner thoughts on Southern Antisemitism, Holocaust museums, the feminist movement, “the dysfunctional existence we call American culture”, and his evaluation of poverty, freedom and democracy. Near the book’s end is a twelve page break-up letter and biting personal assessment from his wife Megan, followed by a glossary (Appendix A) that posts an A-Z listing of the artists Ryder met and his recollections of them, some include; Chubby Checker: I wish I knew how to turn a penny into a dollar like he does. Dave Clark Five: The Riveras and I took care of them before we ever had a hit. Janis Joplin: we talked about how tired we both were… we looked like two penniless vagrants … it was a surreal scene. Little Richard: It was his voice that taught me about energy. Jackie Wilson: …there was Jackie nude on a bed with a nude woman and we conversed for maybe fifteen minutes. Appendix B is Ryder’s outspoken geographic impressions from Canada to Switzerland. Appendix C is a complete discography of singles and albums and Appendix D, “An Essay from Mitch” is a last poetic stream-of-consciousness rage, a Heart of Darkness decent into an empty and bleak apocalypse. A sense of betrayal, anger and vitriol is aimed both at himself, the marketplace and his critics he calls “a pack of vengeful hyenas” – yet through all the pain and rejection there remains the rock steady soul of a Detroit survivor, unafraid to face himself and his demons head-on. All the loose threads and surreal juxtapositions give the book a down-home slightly dizzy feel where Ryder may in fact be forging new directions in prose. Sincere and courageous to the nth degree and constructed seemingly without editorial direction, his book is one of the most self-analytic, raw and beautiful memoirs in the history of rock and roll. It’s purity comes from the fact he did this completely himself and its uncertain how his fans will receive this type of a creative autobiography, but one thing undeniable is that Ryder has laid out the naked truth for all to see and he remains a verifiable Detroit and national treasure. * * * * * Ryder’s book will also accompany a new album, The Promise, his first release in over three decades. Produced by another Detroit legend Don Was, the disc’s dozen tracks feature eleven originals plus a live cover for the Motown classic “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted.” Copies of the new CD will be made available during the signing from our next door neighbors at Street Corner Music. We appreciate your support of this event, for more information please call: (248)-968-1190 |
|||
|
|||
|
Tags: book signing, Detroit music, Devils and Blue Dresses, Mitch Ryder, Rock and Roll, The Detroit Wheels Posted in: Author signings, Book Reviews, Book Signings, Detroit & Michigan, Music, New Arrivals | 1 Comment » |
|
|||
|
|||
|
To help put some fun into holiday gifting, we’ve selected a group of entertaining small curiosities, guaranteed to make your gifted one smile and maybe laugh out loud. life’s little accessories (click on picture for details):
also back in stock: Pirate Bandages & Jesus Bandages make your own music boxEdward Gorey’s black doll
new plush toysMexican ornaments |
|||
|
|||
| Posted in: Dios de Los Muertos, New Arrivals, cool gifts, pop culture | No Comments » |
|
|||
|
|||
|
“My mother told me, if you call yourself ‘Little’ Stevie Wonder you’d better be as good as Little Willie John.” – Stevie Wonder “Little Willie John was a soul singer before anyone thought to call it that.” – James Brown On Tues., July 12th at 7pm, Book Beat will host an event with author and Detroit News columnist Susan Whitall along with Kevin and Keith John (children of Little Willie John) in memory and celebration of one of Detroit’s greatest unsung musical heroes, Little Willie John, creator of such timeless classics as “Fever,” “Need Your Love So Bad,” and “Grits ain’t Groceries.” One of the first singers to successfully meld gospel with rhythm and blues into what eventually became known as soul music, Willie was primed to become a breakout pop star when a tragic incident led to his imprisonment and suspicious death at the age of 30. “Fever: Little Willie John’s Fast Life, Mysterious Death and the Birth of Soul” is the first authorized biography to consider the life of the influential singer and the circumstances surrounding his untimely death. Author Susan Whitall will be joined by John’s two sons, Keith and Kevin John, for a rare presentation in memory of this brilliant, and electrifying singer. Link to Detroit News article about Willie’s life and career here Excerpt from “Fever” describing Willie on stage here Our next door neighbor Street Corner Music will be stocking some of Little Willie John’s music. Please don’t miss this exciting presentation!
|
|||
|
|||
| Posted in: African-American History, Author signings, Detroit & Michigan, Music, New Arrivals | 1 Comment » |
|
|||
|
|||
|
Destroy All Monsters Magazine Detroit area book launch Facsimile Edition Released by Primary Information
A Detroit launch for the Destroy All Monsters Magazine (book) is scheduled for Saturday June 11th 8-10 PM at Public Pool, 3309 Caniff in Hamtramck. A talk between local art critic Vincent Carducci and DAM member Cary Loren will begin at 8:30 PM, a Q & A will follow. Primary Information: http://primaryinformation.org/index.php?/upcoming/destroy-all-monsters/ New York book launch at MoMA/PS1: http://www.artbook.com/blog-at-first-sight-d-a-m.html
Destroy All Monsters was an Detroit-area band and collective that was formed in 1973. Its initial members were Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, Niagara and Jim Shaw. Destroy All Monsters were art students and musicians who used performance art tactics to create noise music that evolved out of influences like Sun Ra, Nico, horror movie soundtracks and local bands like MC5 and The Stooges. The band later took on new members and briefly reunited in the 90s. Destroy All Monsters Magazine was edited by Cary Loren and contained artwork, photographs, and flyers from Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, Niagara and Jim Shaw. Printed using any papers and techniques available to the band, the issues combine the cut and paste tactics of punk zines with a psychedelic affinity for color. Destroy All Monsters Magazine functions as a kind of manifesto, providing insight into the band through densely layered pages with movie imagery, kitsch, cartoons, delicate drawings, and counter-culture collages. While Destroy All Monsters has been the subject of recent exhibitions and partial reprints, this is the first time that all issues have been reprinted. Destroy All Monsters Magazine is available directly through Primary Information’s website www.primaryinformation.org and is distributed through Distributed Art Publishers worldwide. For further information or to order Destroy All Monsters Magazine, please contact Primary Information at info@primaryinformation.org Primary Information is a 501(c)3 organization. The organization receives generous support through grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Stichting Egress Foundation, the Buddy Taub Foundation, and individuals worldwide. |
|||
|
|||
| Posted in: Art, Author signings, Author/artist interviews and lectures, Music, New Arrivals, Psychedelia, pop culture | No Comments » |
|
|||
|
|||
|
The Book Beat reading group meets the last Wednesday of every month. At our next meeting we will be discussing the contemporary cult and mystical classic There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales (Paperback) Our next meeting is Wednesday, April 28th at 7:00 PM at the Goldfish Teahouse, 117 W. Fourth Street in Royal Oak. Meetings are free and open to the public. Please call 248-968-1190 for more information. Book club books are discounted 15% at Book Beat. Petrushevskaya’s own brand of fairy tale straddles the line between reality and utopia, intermingling the dismal oppressiveness of life in a Moscow apartment with the joy that can be found in a children’s home. “I think of myself as a documentary writer,” she has said, “collecting documents about people’s lives and reworking them.” — The Nation review“Write down strange things you hear people say, stories people tell you, strange thoughts that you have.” -Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
If these stories are gray, blocky walls, the images, poetry and metaphor within them are beautiful, fluid cement that binds them. Shadows of ghosts hover around murderers. Characters break from tension and the ground shifts from the land of the living to the land of the dead, or from home to America. People trade money to bring their loved ones back to life. In some of the stories, the bribes work. When people write about Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, they remark on the hope that clusters around the bleak stories. I am not so certain I read hope in these pages but there is redemption within them, something that keeps the fantastical and mystical events that do not often end happily from seeming ripe with despair. For me, maybe it is just the act of storytelling that is redemptive. Someone lived to tell the tale. –online review from “The Millions”
|
|||
|
|||
| Posted in: Book Reviews, Film & Video, New Arrivals, Reading Group | No Comments » |
“What is shocking and memorable about the stories is not the sudden, supernatural junctures but the utterly bleak and believable details of the character’s lives. In the seventies and eighties, Petrushevskaya, then primarily known as a dramatist, was reputed for her bracing realism. Her recent fairy tales follow the trajectory of this work. While fantastical, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby reverberates with the grim realities of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.” – 
Sighting Ludmilla, the author speaks (briefly)
|
|||
|
|||
“Information is content. Content is fiction.”– Lee Lozano, July 1971
She is a walking secret history of the sometimes tragic late American avant-garde. “I paint stoned.”— Lee Lozano, 29 March 1969The fact that she is also quite mad prevents her from seeking help through any existing social-service resources. PARTY PIECE (or PARANOIA PIECE): describe your current work to a famous but failing artist from the early 60’s. Wait to see whether he boosts any of your ideas. – Lee Lozano , Notebook March 15, 1969“I have started to document everything because I cannot give up my love of ideas”-Lee Lozano
Her father and mother died, having neglected to leave a will, in 1987 and 1990 respectively, and another six years passed before their estate was exhausted—whereupon the aging orphan faced certain eviction and possible full-time life on the streets. –excerpts from the Lee Lozano blog site MYTHING IN ACTION “Confinement is the near root of all my rage.” — Lee Lozano in her notebook on December 20, 1969Lee Lozano was among the most celebrated conceptual artists of the 1960s. So why is she buried in an unmarked grave in Grand Prairie?During the 1960s, she showed in the most prestigious of New York’s galleries and museums, until one day she decided she wanted nothing more to do with the commodification of her work. Her writings became her work; soon enough, her life became her art, around the time she decided to stop talking to women and opted to leave behind the world that once embraced her. Even now, nearly an entire decade of her life remains unaccounted for. — LEE LOZONO THE DROPOUT PIECE article by Robert Wolonsky: Dallas Observer News “black and white is more perfect, more beautiful, more abstract, less associational, less tiring and less pretty than color” –Lee Lozano Notebook, Aug, 1, 1968
Between the time I saw Lozano’s paintings in a barn in Pennsylvania, in 2001, and their appearance in Basel, their prices had rocketed from the low tens of thousands to nearly a million dollars…. Lozano’s rediscovery by the art world, as much as her withdrawal from it, belongs to a larger market dynamic. In the recent past, museums, galleries, critics, and auction houses have been reviving older and dead artists in earnest. Categories include the “artist’s artist” (as opposed to the collector’s artist, I suppose) who has been seen as minor but begins to look major (Mary Heilmann); the artist who enjoyed initial success but floundered when money got tight or when fashions changed (Alan Shields); the artist whose production was inconsistent or ephemeral (Tony Conrad). Not by coincidence, these rediscovered artists represent good value: Now construed as the product of integrity rather than of failure, their obscurity serves as a substitute for the obsolete category of the avant-garde; they even rival emerging artists as a source of speculative reward. As Nickas pointed out in a recent conversation, unlike the freshly minted art school graduate, the rediscovered artist comes complete with oeuvre and provenance. — Katy Siegel, Free Library LEE LOZANO “I WILL NOT CALL MYSELF AN ART WORKER BUT RATHER AN ART DREAMER AND I WILL PARTICIPATE ONLY IN A TOTAL REVOLUTION SIMULTANEOUSLY PERSONAL AND PUBLIC” – Lee Lozano Notebook, April 10, 1968 “People (in some ways) are more important than art.” –Lee Lozano September, 1969Available now: THE NOTEBOOKS OF LEE LOZANO published by Primary Information Transiting Pop art, Feminist Expressionism, Conceptualism and Minimalism, Lee Lozano (1930–1999) sits alongside Eva Hesse and Hannah Wilke as a radical and influential model for younger generations of female artists. Lozano’s notebooks, which she approached as drawings, and which were later dismantled and sold as individual pages, became a part of her artmaking at the height of her fame in the late 1960s. Reproduced here for the first time, as an affordably-priced facsimile reprint, the three notebooks collected here, which were kept between 1967–1970, contain sketches for her Wave paintings, writings about the trajectory of her artistic process and the language pieces that she became famous for prior to her withdrawal from the art world. They thus constitute the fullest and richest document on an artist whose relevance and profile have recently seen a steady ascent. |
|||
|
|||
| Posted in: Art, Book Reviews, New Arrivals, Poetry | No Comments » |
Lozano…has spent much of the past 14 years wandering Dallas’ darker byways and skidzones, and is not an unfamiliar figure along the lower extremities of Greenville Avenue.
…the more that I learn, the more it appears that she is the missing link…to the wider societal mysteries and maladies that beguile most of us every day: madness, homelessness, what America does to its artists and what America’s artists do to themselves.| Catalogs Sitemap | Shipping Policy | Privacy & Security | Shop Statement | Contact |