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The Untold Story of Led Zeppelin: The Band That Sold 300 Million Records Without Releasing Singles
They were the biggest band of the seventies, and they did it by breaking nearly every rule of the music business. They refused to release singles in Britain. They refused to appear on television. They gave their fourth album no title, no band name, and no information whatsoever, and watched it sell 37 million copies.…
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The Untold Story of the Rolling Stones: Sleep-Written Riffs, a Riot at Altamont, and Sixty Years of Survival
No band was supposed to last this long. The Rolling Stones were supposed to burn bright for a few years, the way pop bands did in the early sixties, and then fade into the variety-show circuit. Instead, they became something no one had ever seen before: a rock band that simply refused to stop. Six…
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The Untold Story of Supertramp: The Dutch Millionaire, the Breakfast-Table Manhattan, and the Handshake That Broke
They were the unlikeliest hitmakers of the seventies: a band with two singers, two songwriters, and two completely different personalities, making progressive rock you could hum. Supertramp sold more than sixty million albums on the strength of a Wurlitzer electric piano, a saxophone, and songs about school, sanity, and the American dream. But behind the…
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The Untold Story of George Harrison: The Hit He Copied Without Knowing, the House He Mortgaged for a Laugh, and the Night His Wife Saved His Life
They called him the quiet Beatle, and for years that was a convenient way to overlook him. But George Harrison lived one of the most dramatic lives in rock history: the first Beatle to walk out, the author of a prayer that became a plagiarism landmark, the man who invented the modern benefit concert, a…
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The Untold Story of Jim Croce: The Letter That Arrived Too Late, the Dear John Letters, and Thirty Years That Counted
He had eighteen months of fame. That is all the world gave Jim Croce — a year and a half between obscurity and a pecan tree in Louisiana — and in that sliver of time he wrote some of the most beloved songs of the seventies. He was thirty years old when he died, one…
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The Untold Story of Gordon Lightfoot: The Jealous Night That Became “Sundown,” the Shipwreck He Sang Into Legend, and Six Weeks in a Coma
He was Canada’s bard, the plainspoken troubadour Bob Dylan once called a mentor, the man who turned a Great Lakes shipwreck into one of the most haunting hit singles ever released. But Gordon Lightfoot’s life was anything but the gentle folk idyll his songs suggested. Behind the twelve-string guitar lay a volatile love affair with…
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The Untold Story of Dan Fogelberg: The Christmas Eve Encounter, the Bandleader Father, and the Song That Wrote Itself in a Hammock
He was the soft-rock poet of the seventies and eighties, the voice behind “Longer,” “Leader of the Band,” and “Same Old Lang Syne.” But Dan Fogelberg was never quite the gentle, simple troubadour his ballads suggested. He was a restless multi-instrumentalist who could play nearly everything on his records, a pilot, a painter, a man…
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The Untold Story of Kansas: The 15-Minute Song That Took a Lifetime to Write
They were a progressive rock band from a state with, in their own words, “absolutely no musical tradition” — six guys from Topeka who played biker bars and rodeos and somehow became one of the biggest American rock bands of the seventies. Their most famous song began as a finger exercise their guitarist didn’t even…
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The Untold Story of Styx: How a Robot Destroyed Rock’s Biggest Theatrical Band
They were the first band in history to score four consecutive multi-platinum albums. They sold out arenas across America with a sound that stitched prog-rock ambition to power-ballad heart. And then their leader had an idea: a rock opera about a future where music is illegal, starring a robot, a fascist evangelist, and a hero…
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The Untold Story of REO Speedwagon: Fistfights, Firings, and the Ballad Nobody Wanted
They named themselves after a fire truck. Their first singer quit by climbing out of a moving car and vanishing into the night. Their second singer was fired mid-album, rehired years later, and then mocked by his own bandmates for writing the power ballad that made them superstars. REO Speedwagon sold forty million records on…