Machers and Rockers: Chess Records and the Business of Rock & Roll (Enterprise)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.67 (732 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 039305280X |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 222 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-03-17 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Soon Bo Diddly and Chuck Berry added a dose of pulsating rhythm, and Chess Records captured that, too. Muddy Waters electrified the blues, and Leonard Chess recorded it. In a book as vibrantly and exuberantly written as the music and people it portrays, Rich Cohen tells the engrossing story of how Leonard Chess, with the other record men, made this new sound into a multi-billion-dollar business aggressively acquiring artists, hard-selling distributors, riding the crest of a wave that would crash over a whole generation. "Rich Cohen is a born storyteller, and this tale of how Muddy Waters and Leonard Chess helped invent Rock & Roll in Chicago in the 1950s is a tough, funny and smart read. On the south side of Chicago in the late 1940s, two immigrants, one a Jew born in Russia, the other a black blues singer from Mississippi met and changed the course of musical history. Full of absorbing lore and animated by a deep love for popular music, Machers and Rockers is a smash hit.. It's a big story, told in a big way." Jann Wenner A tour-de-force history of Jews, blues, and the birth of a new industry. Rock & roll had arrived, and an industry was born
Though written with the energy of his teenage bull sessions, Cohen's history avoids the rhetorical excess nearly endemic to rock and roll books, offering instead a punchy and driven but also sturdy and careful narrative. Cohen weaves the story of the mercurial, lovable but not always entirely ethical Chess with the stories of the artists he recorded and well-judged glimpses of social history. Sensing an audience where the big labels didn't, Chess carted unvarnished recordings of artists like Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry in the trunk of his Cadillac, getting them in stores and on the air by any means necessary. From Publishers Weekly In a postscript to his dynamic history of Chess Records, Cohe
How Leonard Chess built one of America's truly great indie labels Paul Tognetti These "record men" were a special breed. Men like Herman Lubsinky at Savoy in New Jersey, Sam Phillips at Sun in Memphis, Syd Nathan of King Records in Cincinnati and one Leonard Chess were the driving force in the evolution of the music we now call rock and roll. "Machers and Rockers: Chess Records and the Business of Rock. Some Historical Innacuracies, but an overall good read. Michael B. Wiseman If you're a blues fan, this is a great historical document. It has many interesting details about how the great Chess recording family started out and got along. The writer is a Jew and he explores the subject matter from the cultural viewpoint of the "machers", but believe me, there's much about rockers here, also.I've bee. "Decent Book That Is Mostly About The Life Of Leonard Chess" according to Daniel B. Pepper. This is a decent book that is mostly about the life of Leonard Chess, who was the genius behind Chess Records, which produced some of the greatest electric Blues and Rock 'N' Roll records of the 1950s and '60s. Unfortunately, the author constantly misquotes lyrics to songs by Muddy Waters, Chess Records' biggest star, somet