Omnivoracious

Read Up on 2013 Hall of Fame Rock and Rollers

Tuesday night in Los Angeles, Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea announced the roster for the 2013 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, which will take place April 28.

This year's lineup is an eclectic mix spanning generations and genres, comprised of rap pioneers Public Enemy, stalwart arena rockers Rush, classic rock sister act Heart, prolific singer-songwriter Randy Newman, Queen of Disco Donna Summer, Mississippi blues guitarist Albert King, legendary producers Lou Adler and Quincy Jones.

How did they get here? An artist must have a recording career spanning at least 25 years in order to be eligible, and the committee considers more subjective criteria, as well, including the "influence and significance of the artists' contributions to the development and perpetuation of rock and roll."

Learn more about the 2013 inductees and their rich histories.

 

 

The Ultimate Rock 'n' Roll Eye Candy: The Guitar Collection

One of the things I always look forward to during the holidays here at Amazon are the mouth-wateringly beautiful collections, compendiums, boxed sets, and retrospectives we get our hands on. They're the kinds of books that create a visceral reaction in book fiends like me.

2011 has plenty of these luxurious books for every reader (it's hard to admit, but my drool-worthy favorite last year, The Oxford Companion to the Book, was replaced this year by the equally stunning--and, dare I say, more delicious--The Oxford Companion to Beer). To get a sense of the scope of these titles, check out our featured coffee table books, including everything from Harry Potter to high-end shoes.

One of the most unusual books this season is surely the mammoth, limited edition book, The Guitar Collection. At 512 pages and weighing in at 44.8 pounds, this is a monster book of guitars. There are three different editions--with only 1,500 numbered copies of each available--and each celebrating a different era and style of music:

• The Flat-top ’43 Edition contains a signed John Peden print of the Buddy Holly J-45, the 1943 Gibson covered with leather that Buddy Holly hand-tooled himself.
• The Solidbody '54 Edition contains a signed John Peden print of the Jeff Beck Esquire, 1954, the electric guitar Beck played with the Yardbirds.
• And the Double-Neck ’05 Edition contains signed John Peden print of the PRS Double-neck Dragon, 2005, a double-neck (12-string) electric guitar inlaid with a fighting dragon design.

It's a pricy gift, to be sure, but one that would surely make true guitarists and rock 'n' roll fans salivate. As Billy Gibbons says, "The Guitar Collection is, indeed, the single most sumptuous source of guitar glamour to have ever been conceived.  It's an overwhelming compendium, so dazzling in its scope that you might have to lie down after paging through it."

Check out a video of the book after the jump.

--Lynette

Comics on Wax: Tony Millionaire Covers The Donkeys

Even when I am shopping for music, it seems I cannot escape comics. Case in point: I’ve been meaning to get into the San Diego-based band The Donkeys after they randomly popped up on my recommendations and I sampled their first two albums. The wistful surfer songs sounded great, and I noticed that their new album, Born with Stripes (label: Dead Oceans), was available in vinyl (and it includes a code to download MP3s of the entire album). I immediately fell in love with the cover art. The title and band name are both hand-lettered, but what really drew me in were the five images on the cover: a striped, psychedelic frog, bees swarming from a hive, a lonely bloodhound on a beach, a pair of legs in blue stockings, and…the cosmos.

I flipped the record over, catching that several of the images directly referenced song titles (“Bloodhound,” “New Blue Stockings,” “Bullfrog Blues”), but what about the rest? Would the lyrics hold more answers? Were the lyrics even included? I had to find out.

As I sat on my living room floor and read the liner notes--the lyrics are included!--I noticed the art credit: “Cover Illustration by Tony Millionaire.” I’m mostly familiar with the cartoonist’s work on Maakies and his two stories in Marvel’s Strange Tales and the recent Strange Tales II (both of which received Omni spotlights), where his work is coarse and bawdy. Here, though, it’s quiet and dreamy, a fine complement to the album. I can’t stop looking at the hind leg on the centerpiece frog, which at its bend--and combined with the rounded stripes--is a mesmerizing juxtaposition with the blue stocking legs below it, one of which is also captured in a tucked position. I’m not sure what the silky black is that covers the rest of the lower torso (a dress?), but the flowers that jut from its inky waves resemble the dotted planets in the upper-left corner. The bloodhound and bees look as if they belong to the same coastal scene (dig the motion lines that follow the speeding station wagon).

Born with Stripes is fantastic, with laid-back crooning, layered guitars that never overwhelm, and a surprising psychedelic bent. It’s perfect for a weekend spent with the windows open. To close the loop on the cover: the bees are mentioned in “I Like the Way You Walk,” and there’s plenty of outer space in “Kaleidoscope.” Plus in the album opener, “Don’t Know Who We Are,” the comics connection continues: “I’m a cartoon/You’re a book….” Ha! What a gem.

For more on Tony Millionaire's comics, be sure to check out his author page.

--Alex

Books + Stop Motion Animation=Fun!

 

[via Paul Constant.] Enjoy!

--Lynette

Omni Daily News

Like a Rolling Stone: Tonight I will be spending the night with Keith Richards.  Well, in print anyway, as Life, Keith Richards' highly anticipated memoir goes on sale today.  If the cover alone doesn't make you want this book, then Michiko Kakutani's review certainly will...

Happy Birthday, Doonesbury:  Garry Trudeau's first Doonesbury comic strip was printed on October 26, 1970, and continues today--not bad for someone who says he'd "...given no consideration to a career in cartoons."  The usually publicity-shy cartoonist spoke with The Guardian about the past four decades, how his process of creating the Doonesbury strip has changed, and his new collection, 40: A Doonesbury Retrospective.

Model reading:  Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes of fashion shows? Models reading, apparently.  The Daily Beast polled models about what they read while they are getting all glammed up, and came up with a fun gallery pairing the model and their books.

Moving & Shaking: An appearance on Good Morning America bumped Kelly Valen's book, The Twisted Sisterhood, into the top of the Movers and Shakers list this morning.

--Seira

 

Omni Daily News

Highly Anticipated Music Bios, Part I: Life, Keith Richards's autobiography (out next week, but already topping our bestsellers list) has been getting plenty of press this week. From CBS News:

In the book, co-written with Richard's pal James Fox, the guitarist takes swipes at former Rolling Stone band mates Brian Jones and Mick Taylor and calls Beatle John Lennon a silly sod" and poet Allen Ginsberg "a gasbag."

And the latest speculation from the internet rumor mill is that Richards could be cut out of the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film due to the contents of the book. 

Highly Anticipated Music Bios, Part II: Rapper Jay-Z talks to the Wall Street Journal about his new book, Decoded, which "looks at his life and the evolution of hip-hop culture through the lens of his lyrics." Fans can get an early look at the book with Jay-Z's thoughts on "American Dreamin' '" (or check out our video with him.)

Miami Celebrates LeBron with... Poetry?: To honor LeBron James's move to Miami, The Miami Herald is sponsoring a poetry contest in his honor (aspiring poets may find inspiration in LeBron's Twitter feed). [via GalleyCat]

Moving and Shaking: With less than a month left until the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part I), Brian Sibley's Harry Potter's Film Wizardry makes an appearance on our Movers & Shakers list today.

--Lynette

Kurt B. Reighley's New Americana

When I picked up United States of Americana: Backyard Chickens, Burlesque Beauties & Handmade Bitters, the recent field guide to the American Roots movement by a former contributing editor for No Depression and current KEXP DJ Kurt B. Reighley, of course I expected to learn about music. Who are the forefathers (and mothers) of American Roots music? What are some of the essential gateway albums? That sort of thing. I wasn't even that surprised to find tips on "how to play a washboard."

What I didn't expect to learn is that there is a DJ in New York who only plays shows on hand-crank Victrolas and wax cylinders, or that there are now barbershops that specialize in straight-razor shaves. In this broad survey of DIY, durable living, Reighley offers up tips from hundreds of interviews and a fair amount of personal research on such varied life skills as beard growing, water-bath canning, making a corncob pipe, and choosing a pre-Prohibition-era cocktail. I am now frantically in search of items like selvage denim, hard tack and salt pork, and Wellingtons. ("I love my Wellingtons," says Reighley. "I'm like Paddington Bear.)

The author spoke to me recently about his experience of Americana over coffee and doughnuts:

Reighley: The response to this book has been really really positive because people are excited about the whole idea of control. There's that theme running underneath all these things: take control of your life. If you learn to preserve your own food you have more control over what you consume and what your kids consume. If you know how clothes are made, you know whether or not you're getting a good deal. You know where it was made, under what conditions. If you pull the camera back a little bit, the fundamental principles outlined in the book are going to appeal to just about anybody.

Amazon: What drew you to this initially? I assume it was music.

Reighley: It was, and it wasn't. What drew me to it was I had put together a proposal for another book inspired by the freak folk movement, not even necessarily American Roots music, but there's some overlap--Devendra Banhart, Antony and the Johnsons, CocoRosie. I put together a book proposal based on that and it was more light-hearted but it did talk a lot about crafts and visual arts and it was inspired sort of loosely by this discussion Antony and I had had several years ago. He had this concept "in the time of flourishing beauty" which inspired a show at On the Boards with Antony and Coco and William Basinski and Devendra Banhart.

I started to see kind of a throughline between the resurgence in interest in crafts and learning to play an instrument and then I started connecting things a bit more. It wasn't that I lost interest in the music component, but I was so familiar with that component already and I was having so much fun learning about the other things, and they just kept snowballing. People kept giving me information and ideas, they were so excited: well, have you thought about blank and blank and blank.

I come from a music background and sometimes DJs and record collectors can be very "information to the bosom," like very selfish, they don't want to share. There's that whole tradition amongst DJs of taking the labels off records and obscuring records so people won't know what you're playing. So I kind of expected to encounter a little more of that but in fact people were really excited to share information and it was so invigorating because that was what I wanted to believe was driving this, that people were excited about learning and wanted to pass that learning along and wanted people to take advantage of the resources we have, older people, the physical library, take advantage of these things, preserve them, celebrate them before they go away.