Books by "Rick E. Presley"
6 books found
American Popular Music and Its Business in the Digital Age
by Rick Sanjek
2024 · Oxford University Press
As the long awaited sequel to American Popular Music and Its Business: the First 400 Years, this book offers a detailed and objective history of the evolution and effect of digital technology from 1985 through 2020 on all segments of the popular music business from CDs and stadium tours to TikTok and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, with particular emphasis on the relationship between the creators, the consumers, and the business professionals who form the three major axes of the industry. Author Rick Sanjek, a 50-year industry veteran, combines the knowledge acquired during his decades of experience with scholarly research to create a compelling narrative of the events, economics, and innerworkings of the modern music business.
If you didn’t experience rock and roll in Minnesota in the 1960s, this book will make you wish you had. This behind-the-scenes, up-close-and-personal account relates how a handful of Minnesota rock bands erupted out of a small Midwest market and made it big. It was a brief, heady moment for the musicians who found themselves on a national stage, enjoying a level of success most bands only dream of. In Everybody’s Heard about the Bird, Rick Shefchik writes of that time in vivid detail. Interviews with many of the key musicians, combined with extensive research and a phenomenal cache of rare photographs, reveal how this monumental era of Minnesota rock music evolved. The chronicle begins with musicians from the 1950s and early 1960s, including Augie Garcia, Bobby Vee, the Fendermen, and Mike Waggoner and the Bops. Shefchik looks at how a local recording studio and record label, along with Minnesota radio stations, helped make their achievements possible and prepared the way for later bands to break out nationally. Shefchik delves deeply into the Trashmen’s emblematic rise to fame. A Minneapolis band that recorded a fluke novelty hit called “Surfin’ Bird” at Kay Bank Studios, the Trashmen signed with Soma Records, topped the local charts in late 1963, and were poised to top the national charts in early 1964. Hundreds of Minnesota bands took inspiration from the Trashmen’s success, as teen dances with live bands flourished in clubs, ballrooms, gyms, and halls across the Upper Midwest. Here are the stories of bands like the Gestures, the Castaways, and the Underbeats, and the triumphs—and tragedies—of the most prominent Minnesota-spawned bands of the late 1960s, including Gypsy, Crow, and the Litter. For the baby boomers who remember it and everyone else who has felt its influence, the 1960s rock-and-roll scene in Minnesota was an extraordinary period both in musical history and popular culture, and now it’s captured fully in print for the first time. Everybody’s Heard about the Bird celebrates how these bands found their singular sound and played for their elated audiences from the golden era to today.
Categorizing hundreds of popular biographies according to their primary appeal—character, story, setting, language, and mood—and organizing them into thematic lists, this guide will help readers' advisors more effectively recommend titles. Read On...Biography: Reading Lists for Every Taste is that essential go-to readers' advisory guide, filling a gap in the growing readers' advisory literature with information about 450 biography titles, most published within the last decade, but also including some classic titles as well. The book focuses on life stories written in the third person, with subjects ranging from individuals who lived in ancient times to the present-day, hailed from myriad nations, and gained fame in diverse fields. The contents are organized in order to facilitate identification of read-alikes and easy selection of titles according to appeal features such as character, story, language, setting, and mood. Written specifically with librarians and their patrons in mind, this readers' advisory title will be invaluable in public, high school, and college libraries.
A social historian examines the use of technology in modern U.S. history and offers a different way to group American generations. The G.I. Generation. Silents. Baby Boomers. Gen Xers. Millenials. Generation Z. Every generation has its label and box. But the real question is: Why? Enter GenTech. It’s a whole new way to look at American generations. Instead of the conventional fixed and linear dates for generational cohorts, Dr. Rick Chromey proposes a fresh understanding that’s fluid and more of a loop, rooted to the technology each generation experiences in their “coming of age” years. Since 1900, there has been more technological change than in all of previous combined history. The airplane. The automobile. Radio. Television. Nuclear energy. Rockets. Internet. Cellphones. Robots. Furthermore, there’s a massive cultural shifting unlike anything witnessed since the Dark Ages gave way to the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, Scientific, and Industrial Ages. Consequently, postmodern generations (born since 1960) have grown up in a new, cyber, wireless, and visual high-tech culture that’s forever changed how we do business, learn, socialize, broadcast, entertain, and worship. It’s technology that shapes us, gives every generation its personality, and seeds who we’ll become tomorrow. GenTech opens a whole new perspective on how to view the world and understand why every generation matters. Praise for GenTech “Whether you’re a technology nerd or wizard, this intriguing book will help you connect the digital dots. You’ll see how technology is profoundly shaping our culture—and you, like it or not. Plus, you’ll discover how technology affects each generation differently, for better or worse.”—Thom Schultz, co-author of Don’t Just Teach…Reach!
On the history of the American musical in cinema
* Stories from the lean early days of American popular music * Ten visionaries who altered the course of popular music * Close-up portraits of risk-taking label owners who often gambled their careers and livelihoods to release music they believed in