From the author of Live from Medicine Park, a powerful coming-of-age novel. Set against the closing years of the Cold War, Constance Squires's debut novel introduces the family of Army Major Collins, as told through the eyes of Lucinda Collins-the vibrant, headstrong eldest daughter. Living on a military base, Lucinda feels displaced and isolated. Over time she finds her own tribe through rock and roll, and meets fellow Army brats, GIs, a ghost, and Syd, who knows how it goes. But after her father's final shocking betrayal, the only world she's ever believed in falls in like the Berlin Wall, leaving Lucinda to chart a new path. In spare, heart-wrenchingly beautiful prose, Squires offers us a rare glimpse into the experiences and sacrifices of an American military family. Along the Watchtower is a powerful story that reveals what it really means to fight for the things we believe in and to defend the ones we love.

1974. Nick and Rosemary Storey are seconded to the EU as national experts in an anti-fraud unit. At an EEC-Soviet conference, a Latvian Customs official seeks EEC help to tackle heroin smuggling from Soviet Central Asia through Riga. After an unsuccessful search in Tilbury, Nick and Rosemary, while visiting Rotterdam Customs, encourage them to search another Soviet ship. After a package of heroin is dropped covertly off the side, surveillance picks up a Turkish immigrant, who leads the authorities to a complicated network of Soviet organisations involved in unofficial heroin smuggling. As this is unwound, Nick and Rosemary have to make a perilous visit to Riga to extricate the ringleader. "Along the Watchtower" is the fourth published book in a series of detective stories set in Customs & Excise by Richard Hernaman Allen, a former Commissioner.

Covering—the musical practice of one artist recording or performing another composer's song—has always been an attribute of popular music. In 2009, the internet database Second Hand Songs estimated that there are 40,000 songs with at least one cover version. Some of the more common variations of this "appropriationist" method of musical quotation include traditional forms such as patriotic anthems, religious hymns such as Amazing Grace, Muzak's instrumental interpretations, Christmas classics, and children's songs. Novelty and comedy collections from parodists such as Weird Al Yankovic also align in the cover category, as does the "larcenous art" of sampling, and technological variations in dance remixes and mash-ups. Film and television soundtracks and advertisers increasingly rely on versions of familiar pop tunes to assist in marketing their narratives and products. The cover phenomenon in popular culture may be viewed as a postmodern manifestation in music as artists revisit, reinterpret and re-examine a significant cross section of musical styles, periods, genres, individual records, and other artists and their catalogues of works.The cover complex, with its multiple variations, issues, contexts, and re-contextualizations comprises an important and rich popular culture text. These re-recordings represent artifacts which embody artistic, social, cultural, historical, commercial, biographical, and novel meanings. Through homage, allusion, apprenticeship, and parody, among other modes, these diverse musical quotations express, preserve, and distribute popular culture, popular music and their intersecting historical narratives. Play it Again represents the first collection of critical perspectives on the many facets of cover songs in popular music.

For fifty years, Bob Dylan’s music has been a source of wonder to his fans and endless fodder for analysis by music critics. In Counting Down Bob Dylan, rock journalist Jim Beviglia dares to rank these songs in descending order from Dylan’s 100th best to his #1 song.

American Lit Remixed identifies a new sound in literature emerging after the digital revolution. It reads works by Jennifer Egan, Sherman Alexie, and others through the lenses of remix theory -- the term Eduardo Navas coined to describe the remix as a form of artistic and cultural discourse -- and the music industry’s preoccupations with nostalgia and authenticity, arguing that digital-age fiction, poetry, and drama remix the music and technology of the past to offer new modes of connecting to self, others, and place. Musical features such as references to popular songs, structural similarities to music recordings, and thematic treatment of the riffing and borrowing endemic within popular music lend a retro sound, feel, and structure to contemporary American texts, even when they refer to life in the digital era. Through engaging with the musical past, literature resists nostalgia and remixes the twenty-first century’s dystopian, disconnected ethos to find possibility and hope for the future. Critics often focus on technology’s negative impact on the music industry, but American Lit Remixed emphasizes music as a source of creative potential in twenty-first-century literature, including new ways of storytelling and relating.

In his 1967 megahit "San Francisco," Scott McKenzie sang of "people in motion" coming from all across the country to San Francisco, the white-hot center of rock music and anti-war protests. At the same time, another large group of young Americans was also in motion, less eagerly, heading for the jungles of Vietnam. Now, in The Republic of Rock, Michael Kramer draws on new archival sources and interviews to explore sixties music and politics through the lens of these two generation-changing places--San Francisco and Vietnam. From the Acid Tests of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters to hippie disc jockeys on strike, the military's use of rock music to "boost morale" in Vietnam, and the forgotten tale of a South Vietnamese rock band, The Republic of Rock shows how the musical connections between the City of the Summer of Love and war-torn Southeast Asia were crucial to the making of the sixties counterculture. The book also illustrates how and why the legacy of rock music in the sixties continues to matter to the meaning of citizenship in a global society today. Going beyond clichéd narratives about sixties music, Kramer argues that rock became a way for participants in the counterculture to think about what it meant to be an American citizen, a world citizen, a citizen-consumer, or a citizen-soldier. The music became a resource for grappling with the nature of democracy in larger systems of American power both domestically and globally. For anyone interested in the 1960s, popular music, and American culture and counterculture, The Republic of Rock offers new insight into the many ways rock music has shaped our ideas of individual freedom and collective belonging.

Jimi Hendrix, one of the great instrumentalists in rock history, pioneered amplified sound that extended the scope of the guitar into the urban landscape. In this book, Marie-Paule Macdonald situates Hendrix’s trajectory through the places he made music, translating an innovative sense of space into his songs. Macdonald follows Hendrix from the Pacific Northwest to the California coast to New York City, from his musical beginnings as a youth in Seattle to his launch, touring career, and up until his last weeks in London. She charts the surroundings of a genuine inner-city dweller, a nighthawk and wanderer who roamed the streets and alleys of everyday neighborhoods and haunted seedy basement bars and intimate clubs—as performer or audience member. She explores how the rumble, uproar, babble, and discord of urban life inspired Hendrix to incorporate noise into his powerful repertoire. Tracking the variety of places where Hendrix played—from open-air stages to dilapidated ballrooms—she shows how space eventually became a process, as Hendrix would eventually commission an architect and sound engineer to build an urban recording studio that would capture the reverberation, bounce, sustain, and echo that he heard and played. Crackling with the electrifying sound of explosive creativity, Jimi Hendrix explores place and space to offer fascinating new insight into Hendrix’s resounding talent.

This book begins with a simple question: Why haven't historians and musicologists been talking to one another? Historians frequently look to all aspects of human activity, including music, in order to better understand the past. Musicologists inquire into the social, cultural, and historical contexts of musical works and musical practices to develop theories about the meanings of compositions and the significance of musical creation. Both disciplines examine how people represent their experiences. This collection of original essays, the first of its kind, argues that the conversation between scholars in the two fields can become richer and more mutually informing. The volume features an eloquent personal essay by historian Lawrence W. Levine, whose work has inspired a whole generation of scholars working on African American music in American history. The first six essays address widely different aspects of musical culture and history ranging from women and popular song during the French Revolution to nineteenth-century music publishing in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Two additional essays by scholars outside of musicology and history represent a new kind of disciplinary bridging by using the methods of cultural studies to look at cross-dressing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century opera and blues responses to lynching in the New South. The last four essays offer models for collaborative, multidisciplinary research with a special emphasis on popular music. Jeffrey H. Jackson, Memphis, Tennessee, is assistant professor of history at Rhodes College. He is the author of Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris. Stanley C. Pelkey, Portage, Michigan, is assistant professor of music at Western Michigan University. He is a member of the College Music Society, and his work has appeared in music-related periodicals.

The Complete Idiot's Guide songbooks are designed to get novice guitarists playing immediately, and playing the songs that inspired them to pick up a guitar in the first place. Each song in The Complete Idiot's Guide books is preceded by a lesson that focuses on the most important technical and musical features. Fingerings, patterns, and techniques are discussed and broken down to help make learning smooth and simple. Most guitar songs are relatively easy to play, and the arrangements in these books are simplified just enough to show those core, natural guitar parts without being overcomplicated, just the way a friend might show someone how to play a song one-on-one. Learning is made even simpler with each song written in standard music notation plus TAB and guitar chord diagrams. Learning hit rock songs was never so easy! Pick up The Complete Idiot's Guide to Rock Guitar Songs and learn all 30 tunes from acclaimed artists like Cream, AC/DC, Guns N' Roses, Jimi Hendrix, Green Day, and many more.