THE CONCRETE WAVE: The History of Skateboarding (1999), Paperback
200 pages Skate/Art/Documentary, Used
Forty years after its birth on the streets and in the empty swimming pools of California, skateboarding has become a legitimate sport. Legend Tony Hawk has graced a "Got Milk?" ad, and skate parks are popping up in landlocked middle America. Although Brooke, a "skategeezer" and member of Toronto's Metro Longboarders, wrote this for skateboarding's retired, active, and future practitioners, any sports fan will enjoy this colorful crash course. After a brief prehistory, readers ride four "waves", a nod to surfing from 1959 to the present. Within each, Brooke features skateboarding's inventors, investors, stars, companies, media, and technological advances in a magazine-like layout. Best of all are the smart-ass anecdotes (e.g., Bob Schmidt's "The Day They Invented Skateboarding") by skateboarders, which originally appeared on Brooke's Skategeezer home page. A four-part appendix lists skate pros, movies, competitions, and parks. A high-speed treat, even for the gravitationally challenged. Highly recommended, duuude........
THE POWER AGE (1982); Paperback
128 pages. Heavy Metal/RocknRoll/Photobook/Documentary, Used
Black/white photos portraying the personalities of Heavy Metal and Rock 'n Roll musicians and vividly captures the excitement of their concert performances. Rare 1982 Softcover photo record of the great hard rock/metal bands of the late '70s and early '80s.
THE ENGLAND'S DREAMING TAPES (2010); Paperback
Punk/Music/70's/UK Huge 752 pages, Used
"The England’s Dreaming Tapes is undoubtedly the best interview-based book on British punk published thus far."
Jon Savage's 1991 book, England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond, was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "the definitive history of the English punk movement." Widely imitated but never equaled, it remains that rare work of music history that appeals to music fans, critics, and scholars alike. In researching England's Dreaming, Savage conducted hundreds of hours of interviews of which only a fraction made it into the finished book. Now, in The England's Dreaming Tapes, Savage makes available for the first time the full, uncut, sensational story behind the cultural moment that was punk. Here is the story of a generation that changed the world in just a few months in 1976, as told by the scene's major figures: all four original Sex Pistols as well as Joe Strummer, Chrissie Hynde, Jordan, Siouxsie Sioux, Viv Albertine, Adam Ant, Lee Black Childers, Howard Devoto, Pete Shelley, Syl Sylvain, Debbie Wilson, Tony Wilson, Jah Wobble, and many others. Together, they offer a sweeping history of the late 1960s and the 1970s-not just the era's music, but also its radical politics, social issues, fashion, and culture. An invaluable source of information about a movement that has become obscured by myth, these vivid, unvarnished interviews were conducted when punk was only a decade old. In many cases, this was the first time that the subjects had talked about the period. The interviews describe the founding of the Sex Pistols; 430 King's Road, site of the legendary boutique Sex, which helped establish the punk aesthetic; punk rock New York; the cultural landscapes of London and its suburbs; the writers who covered punk; and the Manchester music scene centered around Factory Records. With The England's Dreaming Tapes, Savage gives us the first and final word on the music, fashion, and attitude that defined this influential and incendiary era.
INSTRUMENT (2011); Hardcover
Music/Art/Photography/Guitar Hardcover (160 pages), New
Instruments tell stories through their appearance as much as through their sound. Pat Graham's photographs capture the intimate relationship between musician and instrument told by the signs of wear of fingers on frets or keys, chips, scratches, and modifications by the artists who have played, beaten on, bled over, and made them their own. For more than ten years, Graham has been documenting these amazing instruments and collecting stories about them from musicians on the road, in clubs, and at home, including members of The Smiths, Sonic Youth, The Flaming Lips, R.E.M., New Order, Wire, Fugazi, Built to Spill, Band of Horses, Modest Mouse, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and many more. His gritty and beautiful images reveal the physical nature of music.
THE BALLROOM The Melbourne Punk and Post-Punk Scene (2011); Paperback
Australian/Little Band Scene/Post Punk/Documentary 244 pages, Used
The Ballroom is a brutally frank memoir of what has become known as one of the most pivotal, fascinating and influential periods of Australian musical and cultural history. The story is illustrated with original flyers and candid photos, some never before seen or published. The scene: St. Kilda, Melbourne in the late 70s. It was here amongst the prostitutes, drunks and junkies that a music venue was born, a venue that would soon become the pulse of punk and new wave music in Australia. Melbourne's most famous and infamous musicians, artists, filmmakers and fashion designers such as Nick Cave, Hunters and Collectors, Richard Lowenstein, Sam Sejavka, Howard Arkley and Alannah Hill gathered on a weekly basis during their formative years. Internationally acclaimed acts such as Iggy Pop, The Cure, INXS and Johnny Rotten also performed there.
A LITTLE HISTORY Nick Cave and Cohorts, 1981-2013; Hardcover
Music/Little Band Scene/Nick Cave/Post Punk - Hardcover, New
When Bleddyn Butcher first saw The Birthday Party play, back in 1981, he was astonished. And then enthralled. He set about trying to catch their lightning in his Nikon F2AS. That quixotic impulse became a lifelong quest. A little history got made on the way. Collected here for the first time are the fruits of his labour. A Little History is an extraordinary document, tracking Nick Cave's creative career from the apoplectic extravagance of The Birthday Party to the calmer disquiet of 2013's Push The Sky Away via snapshots, spotlit visions and sumptuous, theatrical portraits. It mixes the candid and uncanny, the spontaneous and the patiently staged, and includes eyeball encounters with Cave's baddest lieutenants, men for the most part who long since burned their own bridges down. Butcher's Nikonic eye defines moment after arresting moment in Cave's glorious, sprawling story: it's a splendid testament to two brilliant careers.
BOHEMIAN GROVER / CONSPIRITUS MUPPETUS Glenno Smith (2014); Paperback
Art/Design/Street Art, Used
Sydney artist Glenno Smith has drawn and written all about esoteric cults, conspiracies and weird history, shoved it all in the (72) pages of a book and is offering it up, like it's some sort of... thing!
MEXICAN GRAPHICS: Grafica Mexicana; Hardcover
256 pages Lucha Libre/Dia Del Los Muertos/Art Hardcover, New
Lucha Libre, Santa Muerte and Dia del Los Muertos – Mexican graphics are everywhere. The 256 pages of this brilliant hardback tome are jam-packed with amazing visual invention and inspiration from over 40 superb artists, including Dr. Lakra, Dr. Alderete, Sergio Mora, Palehorse and Pooch. This is the essential follow-up to Kustom Graphics I and II and The Day of the Dead. Specially commissioned embossed cover by Dr. Alderete and Julio Carrasco.
LUCHA LOCO: The free wrestlers of Mexico (2012), Paperback
272 pages, Lucha Libre/Luchadores/Mexican Wrestling Book, New
Malcolm Venville’s rare deluxe Mexican wrestling volume, now available in an accessible, popular format. Lucha Libre, or "free wrestling," is a cultural phenomenon—renowned not only for the wrestler’s high-flying moves, but also for the mythology of their personas. These masked figures (a ritual dating back to Aztec culture) treat their masks—and the identities they embody—as sacred. El Santo, the first luchador pop star, rarely took off his mask even in retirement, and was eventually buried in it. It is such a significant part of the sport (and the performance) that the removal of an opponent’s mask in the ring is grounds for disqualification. Malcolm Venville fell in love with the sport after catching a show in Mexico and spent several weeks photographing and interviewing wrestlers outside the ring in a small portrait studio. Alongside each portrait is the wrestler’s fighting name and a signature quote from these interviews. Among the subjects are an accountant and a doctor by day—but Super Pinocchio and Astro Boy by night. They offer such gems as: "American wrestling is more about the lighting," "My character is the fastest in Mexico, but not when I’m making love," and "I combine wrestling with stripping but wrestling’s my passion." The result is an even more hilarious and colorful look at this already entertaining spectacle—part sport, part soap opera—as well as a window into the life of a luchador, a world normally shrouded in mystery.
ELECTRONIC SOUND George Harrison (1969); LP
Avantgarde/Electronic/Experimental/Noise/Beatles - Original 1969 press LP, Used (Small tear in cover)
Writing in 'Fusion' magazine, Lloyd Grossman pondered whether Harrison's "Electronic Sound" LP would have been released if not for the Beatles owning the Zapple label. He said that the record's shape and resistance to water made it useful as a "porthole cover" and concluded, in imitation of the noises heard on the LP: "If YOU fweemfweemfweemfweem apapapapapapap have an olD SunbeamToaster ugwachattttattachurgchurg churg and enjoyputting your dddddldddlddlllder ear up to it wwhoooooooggggg*-*- you may enjoy this album phwerpphwerp phwerp …"
GARBAGE GANG (Australian 1st release) 1985; Stickers
Assorted "Garbage Gang" stickers, Australia/New Zealand first edition from 1985 'Topps' (Rare)
$2.00 per sticker - contact store for details
BANANAFISH Number 16; Magazine + CD
Avant-garde/Noise/Experimental/Music/Zine Magazine, Used
Issue 16 of San Francisco’s cult influential and idiosyncratic noise zine 'Bananafish'. Over the years, Bananafish’s compelling taste in obscure music, art and performance, as well as the amusingly irreverent tone and content, elevated it from a well-produced amateur fanzine to a renowned scene figure in its own right. Some of its subjects, like Dylan Nyoukis of Prick Decay and Bruce Russell of the Dead C, became contributors, and others were avid readers. Wolf Eyes’ John Olson, who appeared in Issue #13 in 1999, wrote via email that he had followed it from beginning to end, and Australian drone guitarist Oren Ambarchi sought out every issue after he first found it in a Sydney record shop in the late 1980s. “It was a very important resource for me, being in Australia without much ‘literature’ on the noise underground – and it was hoot,” recalled Ambarchi, who was interviewed in Issue #16 in 2002. “It shaped what I did as a young musician, as I would search for releases of the artists that Bananafish covered,” he said, describing a search for Bananafish’s hardly-known subjects. “I would pore over it to find more clues about this mysterious underground music/culture.”