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All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes. It’s been almost 40 years since Prince released his hit album Purple Rain and its impact is still felt today as […]
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Taylor Swift’s 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, hasn’t just broken records, but left Easter eggs scattered throughout its raw lyrics. It’s one lyric in particular though that has left fans curious, with the “Fortnight” singer comparing herself to the godmother of punk, Patti Smith.
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The title track features the line, “You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith/This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots,” and for those new to the punk rock icon, you can learn more about the artist who earned a shoutout from the Grammy-winner through her book Just Kids, which is currently on sale for up to 40% off.
Smith’s book is a part of the growing list of bestselling female musician memoirs, even becoming a national book award winner in 2010. For a limited-time you can get the memoir for less than $15, and display the book at the top of your coffee table or bookshelf while discovering more about the woman who inspired the “Cruel Summer” singer’s lyrics.
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“Just Kids” by Patti Smith
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Read straight from the perspective of the “Gloria” singer in this official memoir, as she recounts her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Taking place in NYC throughout the ’70s, you’ll discover how a chance encounter led to a whirlwind romance filled with passion, art and desire to fulfill their dreams.
An illustrated edition of the book eventually came out, which features more photos from Smith’s with the photographer, which you can buy here.
In response to the “August” singer mentioning her name, Smith took to Instagram to share her gratitude where she posted a photo of herself reading the book Dylan Thomas: Portrait of the Artist As a Young Dog.
“This is saying I was moved to be mentioned in the company of the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. Thank you Taylor,” she captioned the post.
For more product recommendations, check out our roundups of the best Taylor Swift books, Taylor Swift recommended books and best Taylor Swift outfits.
Fifty years ago, Steven Gaines, a New York Sunday News rock ‘n’ roll newspaper columnist, lined up to ask the Beatles‘ John Lennon a question during a press event for the musical Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band On the Road. Gaines blurted out, “Hi, John, does seeing Sgt. Pepper’s being made into an off-Broadway show make you feel old?” Lennon responded acerbically: “I don’t need that to make me feel old, mate. Next!”
It was a humiliating moment for Gaines, and he wandered off. Peter Brown, the Beatles‘ former day-to-day manager and president of the Robert Stigwood Organization, which produced the show, noticed Gaines’ dejection, invited him to talk in a nearby lounge, and the pair became lifelong friends. Later, using Brown’s connections, the duo spent much of 1980 recording exclusive interviews with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and Beatles insiders such as Apple Corps’ Neil Aspinall and publisher Dick James. The transcripts became the basis for their 1983 best-seller The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of the Beatles.
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Reading like a “paperback pulp novel,” as Rolling Stone declared, the book contains revelatory allegations such as Lennon’s brief sexual relationship with the Beatles’ late manager, Brian Epstein, and Lennon and Ono’s journey through heroin addiction. When the book came out, McCartney burned it in his fireplace, and his late wife, Linda, photographed the destruction. Now that Brown and Gaines have released the full transcripts from those 1980 interviews in a new book, All You Need Is Love: The Beatles In Their Own Words, which is out now, Gaines tells Billboard by phone from his East Hampton, N.Y., home that the first book may have been “polarizing,” but it’s based on talks with reliable — and comfortable — sources such as a jovial, weed-smoking McCartney.
Billboard: Why put this book out now, 41 years after the publication of The Love You Make?
Steven Gaines: I had the tapes in a bank vault for 40 years while we tried to figure out what to do with them. I wanted there to be full access to the tapes for historians, for the public. Peter and I, getting up in years, decided we had to make a decision now. Publishers were interested. We didn’t do it for the money, because there’s not a huge amount of money involved.
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My favorite detail in the book is “Dalí’s coconut” — a $5,000 gift Lennon commissioned for Starr in which the surrealism master Salvador Dalí created what appeared to be half a coconut lined with a sponge and “a long, curly black hair that he’d plucked from his mustache, he claimed, although I had my suspicions,” as Brown writes in the book.
A young man working for the Beatles in New York, Arma Andon, came in from America, because Dalí wanted to be paid in cash, and you couldn’t bring cash, especially in American dollars, out of England. He went out with Peter Brown and Dalí and his wife Gala to dinner. When it was over, Salvador Dalí asked Arma Andon if he’d like to go with him to a whorehouse. We didn’t put that in the book because it had nothing to do with the Beatles.
The other weird thing was … the hair in the coconut. We don’t know if Dalí got that from his mustache or his pubic hair. John wanted so badly to give Ringo something special, because Ringo felt so maligned and [like] such an outsider and they didn’t appreciate his drumming. When Peter showed it to John, they wet the hair, and the hair curled up, or straightened out, or — I forget what it did. John loved it so much. I forget what they gave Ringo instead. Ringo never knew about the coconut.
I was surprised at the bluntness of your questions, especially to McCartney: “Rock ‘n’ roll bands had a reputation for being bad on the road, like tying groupies to bedposts and f—– them with a fish. But you guys were supposed to be celibate.”
It was one of the things I always wondered about. They were always painted as such angels. Then, of course, there was Hamburg [where the Beatles performed in Germany in the ’60s] and all the hookers. It really shocked me that Paul said there were lots of girls on the road. Why hadn’t any of them come forward?
Paul invited me and Peter to his house in Sussex for the weekend. Paul whispered to me, “Do you smoke grass?” I said, “Not since I’ve been here.” He said, “I’m not allowed to smoke in the house because of the kids and because I’ve been arrested. Let’s go out in my car and we’ll drive around and smoke a joint.” We got into his Mini, the fanciest Mini I’d ever seen. He put one joint on the dashboard of the car.
Then the second joint fell down around the windshield-wiper defroster slot. Paul said, “Oh, no, no, no, they’ll find it, they’ll pull me over for a ticket, and Linda, and they’ll find it! We’ve got to get it out of there.” So we pulled over to the side of the road. We opened up both the doors to the car. He got some screwdrivers out of the bonnet and we started unscrewing the dashboard. His neighbors were walking down the street: “Having car trouble, Mr. McCartney?” “Oh, no, that’s OK, that’s fine, thank you very much.” We never found the joint. We screwed everything back together.
That was my experience in the interview: He was really shockingly forthcoming.
For decades, Yoko Ono was said to have broken up the Beatles, but the studio footage in Peter Jackson’s documentary Get Back suggests it was really about business — particularly regarding Allen Klein, whom Lennon wanted to hire as manager, while McCartney and others disagreed. All You Need Is Love indicates all these reasons are true, and others as well.
The first thing was that Brian [Epstein] died. He was the glue that held the Beatles together. Then the guys were getting tired of each other. They couldn’t go out on the street, they were the most famous people on earth, everything they did, every gesture, everything they said, was blown up, and they could only see each other, and it created tremendous tension.
If the feelings behind them weren’t so bad, they maybe would have solved those financial problems. There is a moment in Get Back when John and Yoko go over to speak with Peter Brown. Peter says, “Allen Klein is here,” and John and Yoko say, “Oh, when can we see him?” Peter says, “He’s at the Dorchester [Hotel in London], you can see Allen Klein tomorrow.” What they do behind everyone’s back is call the Dorchester and see him that night. And he brainwashes them. He made everything worse. He picked at all the scabs. He made the Beatles fight with each other.
How did you and Peter come up with this arrangement to write together?
In 1980, I was broke and down and out and unhappy and miserable in New York. He was living in Laguna Beach in a penthouse on a cliff. He said, “You’ve got to get out of New York. Stay here for a while.” It was glorious, and I said, “What about that book now?” He said, “Let’s write a proposal.” Then it exploded. We got $250,000 for the hardcover rights, $750,000 for the paperback rights. It went on and on until we had almost $2 million in advances. The problem was, it was too honest, it was too direct and the Beatles fans weren’t ready for it. But everybody’s grown up now. They’re ready for All You Need Is Love.
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Lana Del Rey took over the first weekend of Coachella — even reuniting with Billie Eilish for an unforgettable duet of “Ocean Eyes” and “Video Games” — and she’s back for Weekend 2. The singer’s performance at one of the biggest festivals and tours of the year seems to have left fans clamoring for more from the artist — so much so, that her book of poems, Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass, has returned to the bestsellers charts, earning a No. 3 spot as of this writing on Amazon’s rock books chart (just behind the new Beatles book).
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Right now, you can score the “Summertime Sadness” singer’s poetry book on sale for up to 29% off for a limited time (dropping the price down to less than $20). You can currently find the book on Amazon, Walmart, Target and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardcover and audiobook versions. Fans who choose the audiobook edition will be treated to 14 selected poems read by Del Rey herself, with music created by Jack Antonoff.
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“Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass”
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Within Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass, you can expect more than 30 poems penned by the artist and printed on her classic typewritten manuscript pages. Alongside the text will also be original photography taken by the star. The book of poems were originally released in 2020 and was nominated as a Goodreads Choice nominee. Amazon reviewers have even given the book a 4.8 star rating (out of five) with more than 10,000 reviews.
“Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass is the title poem of the book and the first poem I wrote of many,” Rey says, in the official description for the poetry book. “Some of which came to me in their entirety, which I dictated and then typed out, and some that I worked laboriously picking apart each word to make the perfect poem. They are eclectic and honest and not trying to be anything other than what they are and for that reason I’m proud of them, especially because the spirit in which they were written was very authentic.”
Is Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass Age Appropriate?
A note: The poetry book deals with themes of love, fame, trust and the American dream, with areas of melancholy touched on as well. Target recommends the book for people ages 22 and older, but according to Goodreads readers, the book would be okay for readers as young as high school age.
For more product recommendations, check out our roundups of the best female musician memoirs, music books and musician cookbooks.
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes. Rush is trading their instruments for bookshelves with the release of a new comic book that aims to delve into the […]
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes. As Swifties wait for Taylor Swift’s upcoming 11th studio album, a new book has climbed to the top of the charts […]
Revolución to Roxy – the wildly entertaining new memoir from Roxy Music’s lead guitarist, Phil Manzanera – is out now U.S. — and as befits an art-rock pioneer of his caliber, it’s far from your typical rock n’ roll autobiography. From rubbing elbows with musical deities to surviving tumultuous moments in political history, the 73-year-old musician’s life recalls the groundbreaking guitar work he delivered as a member of Roxy: Loaded with left-field twists, out-of-the-blue delights and the occasional hint of danger.
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In this book (and while speaking to Billboard from his spacious, bright recording studio in England), Manzanera likens himself to Forrest Gump – and he’s not just referring to the pinch-me musical moments he’s been party to. Born to a Colombian mother and English father in London, Manzanera was just six years old when his family moved to Cuba for his father’s job; less than two years later, they were dodging bullets on New Year’s Eve 1958 as the Cuban Revolution reached their doorstep.
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Escaping Cuba brought him from New York to Hawaii to Venezuela and back to London, where he befriended David Gilmour during the Syd Barrett era of Pink Floyd. While his first band, Quiet Sun, failed to rise, he soon became part of the British rock vanguard as a member of Roxy Music, the stylish, influential and experimental band who clinched a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2019. Along the way, he’s had hairy run-ins with Columbian cartels, baffling moments with Bob Dylan and cashed in big time when Kanye West and Jay-Z sampled one of his guitar licks for the 2012 single “No Church in the Wild.” Oh, and later in life, he found out that his father was the product of a secret love affair his grandmother had with a touring Italian musician while estranged from her abusive husband (the two eventually reconciled, so he grew up knowing a non-biological grandfather).
“One of the things about writing the book is trying to make sense of what happened,” Manzanera says, sounding a bit incredulous about his own life even now. While thinking of the night his family hid in a bathroom while a gun battle raged outside during the Cuban Revolution, he says, “You do start to think, ‘Oh, did I have’ – they hadn’t invented post-traumatic stress. I’m trying to go back there and think, ‘Sh-t, I must be really scared and my mother’s screaming and all this.’ I seem to have just refocused – maybe it’s the music that took me away. Thank you, music.”
Music arrived in Manzanera’s life in a way that marks another curious coincidence. As a child in Havana before Castro’s takeover, his mother’s friend – an Italian woman named Franca – began playing guitar at their house, piquing his interest in playing the instrument. When I point out that it was an Italian woman who got him started on the guitar decades before he learned the truth about his biological grandfather being Italian, he rubs his forehead. “I’ve never made that connection until you mentioned it,” Manzanera says. “I’m going to have to try and process it.”
Learning Spanish songs in Havana as a kid certainly paid off for Manzanera. A 1972 audition in front of Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, Andy MacKay and Paul Thompson turned him into a full-time member of Roxy Music, where he’s remained a constant through the band’s on-and-off half-century.
The band’s first period resulted in five classic albums (Manzanera cites their second, For Your Pleasure, as his favorite), numerous top 10 U.K. hits and an eventual American breakthrough when “Love Is the Drug” hit the Billboard Hot 100 top 30. Roxy Music’s 1979 return, Manifesto, became their highest charting American LP (No. 23 on the Billboard 200), while their studio swan song, 1982’s Avalon – a lush, atmospheric piece of sophisticated pop – is frequently listed as one of the greatest albums of all time. Even so, Avalon isn’t exactly Manzanera’s favorite – he prefers the weirder side of Roxy, and was delighted when they performed an ode to a blow-up sex doll, “In Every Dream Home a Heartache,” at their Rock Hall induction.
While Eno, who left Roxy after its first two albums, wasn’t present for the induction, he and Manzanera have continued to keep in touch and work together over the years. The ambient godfather contributed vocals and instruments to Manzanera’s solo debut, 1975’s Diamond Head, a knockout album that found Manzanera imbuing his heady, playful art rock with his Latin roots for the first time on wax.
The following year, Manzanera brought together a group of profession and non-professional musicians for a project called 801, which produced the cult classic LP 801 Live. While Manzanera says that Eno “prided himself on being a non-musician” in the 801 equation, he admits that his bandmate is “fudging it a little bit” with that self-assessment. “Let’s face it: he writes songs, he sings songs, he does lovely melodies. Well, what else do you have to do to qualify as a musician?”
Manzanera’s memoir offers plenty of beautifully written insights about his music with Roxy, 801, Quiet Sun and more, but Manzanera really soars when sharing some of the madcap anecdotes that a globe-trotting life has afforded him. There’s his story of playing a charity gig in Colombia alongside lifelong pal David Gilmour and Roger Daltrey only to be accused of being entangled in a drug cartel’s alleged money-laundering (cousins in Colombia helped him navigate that one). Plus, there’s an amazing Bob Dylan story. When he met the notoriously inscrutable icon at a 1991 festival in Seville, Spain, Dylan asked him to identify a Tex-Mex song from 1947 that he wanted to play onstage with Manzanera – and then proceeded to play five wildly different songs in succession.
“Let me just start by saying I love Bob Dylan,” Manzanera says. “He can do anything he likes. But it was baffling and confused. And I’ve often thought about it. Did he think that I was Mexican?” Long after the gig, Manzanera asked Phil Ramone, the legendary producer of Blood on the Tracks, about Dylan’s modus operandi. “He said, ‘Well, you just patiently let him come and he does whatever he wants to do. And then he goes, and then you get whatever you can.’” As for his Dylan encounter, Manzanera concludes that he was “probably too British and too polite” to wrangle the iconoclast at that concert, but says the experience had one lasting benefit. “I wasn’t intimated working with anyone else ever again. I’ve been there, done that and bring it on.”
Two decades later, another confounding musical artist came into his orbit when Kanye West, via producer 88-Keys, decided he needed to sample a guitar lick from Manzanera’s “K-Scope,” the title track to his 1978 solo album. Manzanera gave it his blessing, and the song morphed into “No Church in the Wild,” a Hot 100 hit from the acclaimed Kanye West & Jay-Z collab album Watch the Throne.
“It was huge,” says Manzanera, who opines he probably made more money off that sample than he ever did as a member of Roxy Music. “It was the first proper album that Jay-Z and Kanye had done together; it was No. 1; it won a Grammy; it was used in The Great Gatsby trailer as well as the film; in the Denzel Washington film Safe House; and in a Super Bowl commercial. And if you get played in a trailer, it’s much more (money) than just being in the film.”
Manzanera sees song syncs as something “everybody is chasing” in the industry right now. “It’s just like, oh, so that’s where the money is,” he says. “Syncs, synchronization rights, are worth a fortune.”
Beyond his brush with a smashing sync success, it’s clear that Manzanera is keeping tabs on the ever-shifting music industry. “The whole paradigm has changed over the years. Forget about looking at streaming — we know all the problems with that. It’s a changing world and particularly difficult for young artists. That’s why (I support) what Taylor Swift and RAYE, who just won a load of Brit Awards, are doing: independent, keeping their rights, doing it for themselves. I’m right there.”
Just as the “No Church In the Wild” windfall fell into his lap, Forrest Gump-esque opportunities continue to come his way. Not long ago, he was asked to produce some big band-styled sessions for Rod Stewart and Jools Holland. The resulting album, Swing Fever, features seven songs he produced and recently topped the U.K. album chart. And Manzanera continues to make his own music; his memoir comes with a musical component (including a track dedicated to his mother), and when we speak, he’s about to start rehearsals for AM/PM concerts with Roxy bandmates MacKay and Thompson. “It’s going to be experimental — I hope in a good way,” he adds with a chuckle.
“You don’t expect to be able to do this 50 years after you start,” Manzanera muses. “But rock n’ roll has grown up, and there’s a lot of us still here. Music is what we do. We just want to be happy. And we want to be free.”
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Prime Video has dropped the trailer for its steamy new rom-com, The Idea of You, which is the latest piece of Harry Styles-inspired fan-fiction to be brought to life on screen. The movie premieres on May 2, but if you’re too excited to wait, you can read the book that influenced the film beforehand.
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The Idea of You novel by Robinne Lee follows Solène Marchand, a divorced 39-year-old who works at an art gallery. She reluctantly decides to bring her daughter Isabelle to meet her favorite boy band in an attempt to get closer to her, but while there ends up meeting and connecting with one of the world-famous August Moon bandmates: 20-year-old Hayes Campbell. What ensues is a passionate romance that travels across the world. But once their relationship becomes public, Solène must face the reality of how her relationship impacts those close around her.
What Is The Idea of You Based On?
The Idea of You came about by Lee’s desire to give older women a sense that their lives are more than just their obligations to others, according to a 2020 interview with Vogue. It was through her research that she discovered One Direction and after learning that Styles often dated older women, the idea came to fruition.
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“The Idea of You” by Robinne Lee
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The Idea of You was originally published in 2017, but gained high popularity including a Goodreads Choice nomination. More than 9,000 verified Amazon reviewers have rated the book five-stars, calling it a “sweet seductive read,” making it the perfect gift for Styles fans.
Harry Stans can also expand their merch collection with other books inspired by the “Adore You” singer including a popular fashion-focused book. And, as you dive into The Idea of You novel, make sure to light up a Watermelon Sugar candle for a cozier reading ambiance.
Where to Watch the Movie The Idea of You Online for Free
The Idea of You movie is a Prime Original movie that is set to premiere on Prime Video on May 2. Only Prime members will have access to the movie for free, which means you’ll need a subscription in order to stream The Idea of You online. Already have a Prime membership? Just log into your account on May 2 and go to Prime Video to watch the movie for free.
Don’t have a membership? Amazon offers a 30-day free trial to new members who sign up. After your free trial is over, you’ll be charged the regular subscription fee of $14.99/month or $139/year. Click here or the button below to start your free trial.
Along with The Idea of You, a Prime membership will give you access to the entire Prime Video library to watch TV shows and movies like Gen V, The Boys, The Wheel of Time, Expats, Citadel, The Summer I Turned Pretty, Daisy Jones & The Six, Upgraded, Good Omens and more.
To expand you content offerings, you can adde premium channels to your subscription like Max, Paramount+ and Starz through the Prime Video Channel Storefront.
Check below to watch the trailer for of The Idea of You.
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“All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words” by Peter Brown & Steven Gaines
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Within the pages of the new Beatles book you can expect to learn more previously unknown details about The Beatles’ history as well as why they broke up. Fans can expect to hear from each band member’s point of view as well as from their closest confidants such as Yoko Ono, their families, friends and business associates. As publisher St. Martin’s Press notes, “In addition to interviews with Paul, Yoko, Ringo and George, Brown and Gaines also include interviews from ex-wives Cynthia Lennon, Pattie Harrison Clapton, and Maureen Starkey, as well as the major social and business figures of the Beatles’ inner circle.” The press release adds that “Only a small portion of the contents of these transcribed interviews have ever been revealed.”
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Brooklyn is still taking it. One of the Lo-Lifes’ founding members has written a new book detailing his life story and how the crew changed fashion forever.
As reported by The Gothamist Rack-Lo is set to has penned his life story in Lo-Life: The Story Of Rack Lo. Born George Billups the New York native co-founded the infamous Lo-Lifes. As the story goes there were two boosting crews in Brooklyn, one from Crown Heights in St. John’s and the other from Brownsville in Marcus Garvey Village. Rack, which is slang for stealing, lived in both areas and seemingly united both factions into one. In 1988 the Lo-Lifes were born.
The collective would specialize in high risk shoplifting missions throughout the city that not only provided them an outlet to make money with reselling but kept them fresh from head to toe. While they didn’t discriminate what stores they pillaged, they quickly gained an affinity for Polo Ralph Lauren due to the brand’s signature color block designs, crests, symbols, and more. So much so the Lo-Lifes became synonymous with the apparel line and would be credited for bringing high fashion to the streets. Over 35 years later there are Lo-Lifes throughout the world that honor the original crew’s tradition of staying fresh but also love and loyalty.
But to hear Rack-Lo tell his life was a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs that included ducking warrants, arrests, rival gang confrontations, bullet wounds and even jail time. Lo-Life: The Story Of Rack Lo will be available April 23.
