During a time when toughskin blue jeans, button-down shirts, and flat-top haircuts were all the rage, Gene Odom and Ronnie Van Zant became best friends. Growing up on the same block, Ronnie and Gene fished, played football, anddreamed together. Years later, one of the boys would become famous-and the other would stand by his side through thick and thin. This is the story of two young men from the same neighborhood, school, and world who together, discovered the meaning of true friendship.

As Ronnie's dreams of becoming a professional musician finally became a reality, Lynyrd Skynyrdbegan selling out arenas and became famous for not only their music, but also their substance abuse. After Ronnie offered Gene a job as a security officer for the band, he embarked on an unforgettable journey into a world like no other. But everything would change in October 1977 when the plane carrying the band plummeted from the sky.

"Lynyrd Skynyrd, Ronnie Van Zant, and Me ... Gene Odom" provides a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse of what it was like to be friends with one of the biggest rock stars of the 1970s and how a friendship between two childhood buddies stood the test of time.

The great Arab singer, Asmahan was the toast of Cairo song and cinema in the 1930s, as World War II approached. A Druze princess actually named Amal al-Atrash, she came from an important clan in the mountains of Syria, but broke free from her traditional family background, left her husband, and became a public performer, a role frowned upon for women of the time. She was also rumored to be an agent for the allied forces during WWII. Through the story of Asmahan and her musical career, the reader glimpses not only aspects of the cultural and political history of Egypt and Syria between the two world wars, but also the change in attitude in the Arab world toward women as public performers on stage.

Music scholarship has been rethinking its understanding of Franz Schubert and his work. How might our modern aesthetic values and historical knowledge of Schubert's life affect how we interpret his music? Schubert's Instrumental Music and Poetics of Interpretation demonstrates how updated analysis of Schubert and his instrumental works reveals expressive meaning. In six chapters, each devoted to one or two of Schubert's pieces, René Rusch explores alternate forms of unity and coherence, offers critical assessments of biographical and intertextual influence, investigates narrative, and addresses the gendering of the composer and his music. Rusch's comparative analyses and interpretations address four significant areas of scholarly focus in Schubert studies, including his use of chromaticism, his unique forms, the impact of events in his own life, and the influence of Beethoven. Drawing from a range of philosophical, hermeneutic, historical, biographical, theoretical, and analytical sources, Schubert's Instrumental Music and Poetics of Interpretation offers readers a unique and innovative foray into the poetics of contemporary analysis of Schubert's instrumental music and develops new ways to engage with his repertoire.

'Before the sixties, you were a child and then you were a man. You went to school and then you went to work. That changed. Our generation changed it.' Roger Daltrey is the voice of a generation, and this is his story. This is the story of his tempestuous school days and his expulsion, age 15, thanks to his authoritarian headmaster, Mr Kibblewhite. That could have been where the story ended, as the life of a factory worker beckoned, but then came rock and roll. Making his first guitar from factory off-cuts, Roger formed a band that would become The Who, one of the biggest bands on the planet. This is the story of My Generation, Tommy and Quadrophenia, of smashed guitars, exploding drums, cars in swimming pools, fights, arrests and redecorated hotel rooms, but also how all those post-war kids redefined the rules of youth. This is not just a hilarious and frank account of more than 50 wild years on the road, it is the definitive story of The Who and of the sweeping revolution that was British rock 'n' roll.

Bob Dylan has constantly reinvented the persona known as "Bob Dylan," renewing the performance possibilities inherent in his songs, from acoustic folk, to electric rock and a late, hybrid style which even hints at so-called world music and Latin American tones. Then in 2016, his achievements outside of performance - as a songwriter - were acknowledged when he was awarded the Nobel Literature Prize. Dylan has never ceased to broaden the range of his creative identity, taking in painting, film, acting and prose writing, as well as advertising and even own-brand commercial production. The book highlights how Dylan has brought his persona(e) to different art forms and cultural arenas, and how they in turn have also created these personae. This volume consists of multidisciplinary essays written by cultural historians, musicologists, literary academics and film experts, including contributions by critics Christopher Ricks and Nina Goss. Together, the essays reveal Dylan's continuing artistic development and self-fashioning, as well as the making of a certain legitimized Dylan through critical and public recognition in the new millennium.

By examining theoretical debates about the nature of nineteenth-century German opera and analyzing the genre's development and its international dissemination, this book shows German opera's entanglement with national identity formation. The thorough study of German opera debates in the first half of the nineteenth century highlights the esthetic and ideological significance of this relatively neglected repertoire, and helps to contextualize Richard Wagner's attempts to define German opera and to gain a reputation as the German opera composer par excellence. By interpreting Wagner's esthetic endeavors as a continuation of previous campaigns for the emancipation of German opera, this book adds an original and significant perspective to discussions about Wagner's relation to German nationalism.

Released in 2008, J-pop trio Perfume's GAME shot to the top of Japanese music charts and turned the Hiroshima trio into a household name across the country. It was also a high point for techno-pop, the genre's biggest album since the heyday of Yellow Magic Orchestra. This collection of maximalist but emotional electronic pop stands as one of the style's finest moments, with its influence still echoing from artists both in Japan and from beyond. This book examines Perfume's underdog story as a group long struggling for success, the making of GAME, and the history of techno-pop that shaped it. 33 1/3 Global, a series related to but independent from 33 1/3, takes the format of the original series of short, music-basedbooks and brings the focus to music throughout the world. With initial volumes focusing on Japanese and Brazilian music, the series will also include volumes on the popular music of Australia/Oceania, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and more.

In The Eyeline of Furtherance, charts John Howard's rise from 70's pop idol to a career in A & R and marketing. The '90s opened up new vistas, ever bigger and better opportunities, working with Elkie Brooks, Madness, Barry Manilow and rock 'n' roll heroes Lonnie Donegan and The Crickets. As John puts it, "I was propelled onwards and upwards, not this time by my own ambition, but by the plans of others who had clearly decided that I was going places in a direction I would never have imagined twenty years earlier." John Howard's first book, Incidents Crowded With Life, followed the ambitions of a young gay singer-songwriter in London in the '70s which were realised after being signed by CBS Records and recording his debut LP at Abbey Road studios. En route, he wrote the theme song for a Peter Fonda movie and was heralded as The Next Big Thing. And all the while navigating a series of disastrous personal events, not least when he broke his back in 1976.