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First published in 1972, Ian Whitcomb's After the Ball is an
exuberant account of the origins and explosion of popular music,
informed by the author's store of experience in the field as a pop
sensation of The Sixties. 'Brash, learned, funny and
perspicacious.... The author of this free-wheeling, diverting
history was a student at Trinity College, Dublin, when he created a
rock hit 'You Turn Me On,' and experienced a brief, bewildering
season as a touring rock celebrity. This book... is his effort to
explain that experience to himself, and, well-educated man that he
is, he goes all the way back to the first pop bestseller (in sheet
music, of course), 'After The Ball,' and all the way forward to the
1960s.' New Yorker 'One of the best books on popular music to come
along in the last few years.... Whitcomb's own involvement with
music constantly surfaces to make the book both revealing and
highly enjoyable.' Seattle Times
Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Rudy Vallee these
cultural icons whose fame spanned all the important mass media,
also played a vital role in the origin and development of the
crooning tradition. Crooning represented one of the most important
musical styles of the twentieth century, intermingling with jazz
and fronting the big band craze of the thirties and forties.
Crooners spurred the rise of radio as home staple and the Golden
Age of film musicals. When commercial television became a viable
commodity, crooners anchored perhaps the first TV programming
innovation, the variety show. It took the cataclysmic aesthetic and
cultural changes ushered in by rock 'n' roll in the 1950s to
finally bring crooners down from their pedestal. The Rise of the
Crooners examines the historical trends and events that led to the
emergence of the crooning style. Ian Whitcomb, a successful popular
music vocalist himself for almost 40 years, provides a personal
perspective on this phenomenon. The lives and careers of six
pioneers of the style Bing Crosby, Russ Columbo, Gene Austin, Rudy
Vallee, Johnny Marvin, and Nick Lucas are covered at length. With
the exception of one entry devoted to Crosby possibly the greatest
entertainer of the past century these biographies (appended by
lengthy bibliographies and discographies) are more thorough and
up-to-date than any treatment in print about these seminal artists.
Ian Whitcomb, One Hit Wonder British Invader of the 1960s and teen
heart-throb, never went home. Instead he tried to settle down in
Los Angeles County where, over the years, he produced a
Grammy-winning CD, wrote songs for movies, auditioned for butler
roles in TV commercials, had and lost dogs, married successfully,
and continued to play his ukulele as the ship went down. Now the
entire soap opera (1996--2008), roped together in hard copy with
appropriate photos, can be relished as a roller coaster of
self-pity, vaunting and failed ambition, jealousy, bathos and
pathos, culminating in a Big Dream. In other words, this is a
comedy book. Mainline Show Biz may have passed Whitcomb by but here
in these precious pages he creates his own world of heroes and
villains with himself as King in order to get sweet revenge through
the twisted lingo of his India rubber sword.
(Limelight). In 1965, Ian Whitcomb's novelty rocker "You Turn Me
On" was number eight on the national charts, along with entries
from the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys. In 1966 he
was nowheresville a certified rock 'n' roll flash in the pan. It
is, then, with a survivor's humor that he tells both his and rock's
story from its beginnings in the late fifties to 1969, the year of
Woodstock and psychedelic dreams of universal peace and love. Here
is the saga of the British Invasion, the genesis of folk rock, the
blooming of Flower Power, the Summer of Love and the inner workings
of the pop music biz, brought to life by a true insider who is also
an uninhibitedly acute observer.
(Limelight). An irreverent and engaging chronicle of popular music
dating from the 1880s, when Tin Pan Alley was founded, to the
present by a British-born songwriter and onetime pop star. "Brash,
learned, funny, and perspicacious." The New Yorker
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