Jan Berry, one half of the mid-sixties pop duo “Jan and Dean” (Torrence) possessed a very precious and rich talent for arranging pop tunes and producing records, a fact that too often has been overlooked, as the band was known for its surf sound and maybe songs about teenage activities in the first place. Their […]
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Tag: 1960s United States
Bill Clifton: America’s Bluegrass Ambassador to the World by Bill C. Malone (2016)
The careers of most classical bluegrass musicians in the US more or less resemble each other, except for a few details. The typical biography finds them raised essentially in poverty, born into a family of four or five children, equipped only with the most basic schooling and after some amateur nights in between shifts in […]
Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture by David Kaiser and W. Patrick Mc...
Even if today many fans (and critics) of the 1960s/1970s and the “counterculture” hold the believe that this generation, and those involved in social change were mostly anti-scientific and anti-technology, this view of the era is largely wrong. We know for a fact that back then many alternative ways of coping with life, philosophy, the idea […]
Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties by Bill Warren (2016)
The 1950s were a unique time when many aggressors, real and imaginative, seemingly threatened not only the people and the political system of the United States, but Earth itself. One product of these anxieties were science fiction movies that more often than not gave (not so pretty) faces and (not so nice) names to the […]
Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America by Jesse Jarnow (2016)
Psychedelic drugs, most prominently LSD, can be credited for having changed Americans and American culture forever. Hardly anything else in the last 60 years has had such a strong influence on American culture as a whole, meaning it had the power to influence the arts (in particular, music), politics, spirituality, technology and naturally a high […]
Anxiety Muted. American Film Music … by Stanley C. Pelkey and Anthony Bushard (eds.) (2015)
In this volume the thirteen contributors research how in audiovisual media of the 1950s and 1960s (TV and cinema), the modern anxieties about conformity, urbanization, gender and family were represented audibly, that is, in sound of any kind or the lack thereof. This could be the soundtrack, music used in the media, but also all […]
Bending Steel. Modernity and the American Superhero by Aldo J. Regalado (2015)
By examining interviews, trade magazines and even testimonies, letters, memoirs and other personal data author Regalado seeks direct impact of the superheroes on the real lives of actual people. Or rather, he aims to find out just how “the big forces of American modernity shaped the lives of Americans on an individual level and how […]
Lee, Myself & I: Inside The Very Special World Of Lee Hazlewood by Wyndham Wallace (2015)
In case you are looking for a straightforward biography of a pop music giant, you may not immediately like Lee, Myself and I. One reason may be the large room the „Myself“ and the „I“ take up on those pages; and they refer to biographer Wallace, not to Lee Hazlewood. However, if one considers the […]