Press enter after choosing selection
Graphic for events post

Blog Post

Fleetwood Mac: the interviews

by eapearce

Fleetwood Mac fans will be delighted with the brand new book Fleetwood Mac on Fleetwood Mac: Interviews and Encounters. The book, edited by Sean Egan, compiles over 40 years of interviews with the band members and stories of their lives. Many of these interviews come from rock magazines of the band’s heyday, like Creem, NME and Mojo, but some have never been published before. Band members Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and Lindsay Buckingham have always been remarkably candid in the interviews that they give, about themselves and the band as a whole, so this compilation offers a truly in depth look into the lives of each one and the role they played in the creation of Fleetwood Mac’s music and persona. There are 40 total pieces in the book, arranged chronologically, and they span 1967 to 2014, although are certainly focused on the 1970s and 1980s. Egan opens each piece with a helpful paragraph setting the scene for the interview, but from then on the stories are completely unedited, even for corrections (although Egan points them out for readers). Fans of the band will love hearing the dramatic ups and downs of the quintet in their own words, and even casual listeners or fans of just Stevie Nicks will enjoy picking up this book and browsing through.

Not familiar with Fleetwood Mac? Get started with some of their music here!

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

The Wrecking Crew!

by manz

This gem of a documentary will thrill music lovers and rock and roll fans. It tells the story of the session musicians known as “the wrecking crew” who appeared on countless number one records in the 1960s and early 1970s. Name a hit song and chances are someone from this crew was playing on it. Everything from guitar to drums to piano sounded that much better with this mega talented group making it look and sound so easy, and so good.

This loose-knit group of hardworking LA session musicians worked with the likes of The Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra, Elivis, Ricky Nelson, Sonny & Cher, The Monkees, The Byrds, The Ronettes, The Mamas and the Papas, and many more. You may not find their names on the record sleeves, but the record wouldn’t exist or wouldn’t have hit number one without their magical skills. On many albums they were the uncredited ones playing the music, not the actual band.

The film was made by Tommy Tedesco's (member of the Wrecking Crew) son Denny Tedesco and interweaves archival footage of sessions and interviews with the musicians along with touching and insightful narration.

If you’re a fan of music or just good documentaries, check out The Wrecking Crew and smile at the sounds. And to read up on the history of the crew check out The Wrecking Crew: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll's Best-Kept Secret.

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

Born to Run: Bruce Springsteen's long-awaited autobiography

by eapearce

Bruce Springsteen fans rejoice! Born to Run, the musician’s long-awaited autobiography, hits shelves on September 27, and you can place your hold on it in the catalog now! Bruce started quietly working on Born to Run in 2008 (not to be confused with the 1975 album of the same name) and has been laboring carefully over it ever since. He announced recently that the book will be accompanied by the release of a companion album, Chapter and Verse, featuring songs from throughout his career, from all the way back to when he played with one of his very first bands, Steel Mill, to performances from his albums of the aughts along with some of his greatest hits from the 1970s and 1980s.

Bruce has never held a job besides being a musician; his storied career began back in the 1960s when he was in high school. His first band, The Castiles, played venues around his hometown of Freehold, New Jersey (“I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud,” he writes), along the Jersey Shore, and in small New York City bars. Bruce remained singularly focused on music from then onward, playing in various bands for years before eventually gathering the exact right combination of friends and musicians to become The E Street Band. Despite his talent, which was obvious to anyone who saw him perform, Bruce’s fame did not come easily. His first two albums, Greetings From Asbury Park and The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, were released to critical acclaim but minor commercial success, and his first successful album, Born to Run, was almost two years in the making (Bruce had so much material for it that he and the band recorded hundreds of songs and debated for months over which ones to cut and which ones to keep on the record). It was really in the 1980s that Bruce was catapulted into superstardom, when he launched the Born in the USA album, tour and era in 1984 and traveled the world blasting the biggest noise imaginable. Bruce is known today for his epic three and four hour performances, something that he’s been doing since he was a teenager. Once, after playing for three and a half hours, he turned to saxophonist Clarence Clemons and asked him of the audience, “Are they still standing?!” They were, and Bruce and the E Street Band played for another hour and a half.

Bruce is lauded for his poetic lyrics that describe the trials, tribulations, heartbreaks, victories and experiences of average Americans. He’s not without his own troubles; he had a difficult childhood marred by family mental illness and he’s struggled with his share of the inheritance of that. His life and career are marked with intensely difficult, solitary periods spent traveling alone or holed up with his guitar somewhere in New Jersey or California. Fans can hope to learn more about the intricate workings of such a simultaneously brilliant and troubled mind in Born to Run: “Writing about yourself is funny business,” he says at the beginning of the book. “But in a project like this, the writer has made one promise, to show the reader his mind. In these pages, I've tried to do this.”

He’s become more political over the years, using his music to make statements about the state of our nation and encourage people to do what they can to make a difference, while still focusing on the heartland America that he identifies with so intimately. “One of the questions I’m asked over and over again by fans on the street is ‘How do you do it?’” Bruce says in the foreward to Born to Run. “ In the following pages I will try to shed a little light on how and, more important, why. The rock’n’roll survival kit [is] DNA, natural ability, study of craft, development of and devotion to an aesthetic philosophy, naked desire for . . . fame? . . . love? . . . admiration? . . . attention? . . . women? . . . and oh, yeah . . . a buck. Then . . . if you want to take it all the way out to the end of the night, a furious fire in the hole that just . . . don’t . . . quit . . . burning.”

If you’re not yet a Bruce fan (how could you not be?!) or just want more Bruce in your life (how could you not?!), check out his great 2012 biography by Peter Carlin, Bruce, or listen to his albums on CD (try The River, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and of course, Born to Run) or on vinyl (the AADL has Greetings from Asbury Park, The Wild, The Innocent and The E Street Shuffle, and Born in the USA all on LP record).

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

Brilliant Band Biography: Trouble Boys: the true story of The Replacements

by eapearce

There’s no doubt in my mind that the Replacements are one of the most fascinating rock’n’roll bands of the 80s (maybe of the entire last century), first and foremost because—despite their talent—they never really got that famous. I myself am not a lifelong fan; but after being introduced to the ‘Mats earlier this summer, I haven’t stopped listening to them, and just had to read their recently published biography. Trouble Boys, by Bob Mehr, is an intricately researched book about the band that explores not only the roots of all the band members, but carries readers through their years together, breakup, and ultimate reunion in 2012.

The four original band members—guitarist and lead singer Paul Westerberg, guitarist Bob Stinson, bassist Tommy Stinson and drummer Chris Mars—are all Minnesota natives with troubled childhoods that haunted them throughout their careers. The band formed in Minneapolis in 1979 and began performing locally, gaining attention not only for their sound but because bassist Tommy was only 12 years old at the time. Alcoholism and mental health issues plagued the band, and Paul is quoted as once saying that “there isn’t a high school diploma or a drivers’ license among us,” but that didn’t stop them from rising up within the underground rock scene of the early 80s. One of the best things about the Replacements is the drastic dichotomy in the types of songs they wrote. Their second album, Hootenanny, opens with a song of the same name involving a seemingly drunken Westerberg yelling only “It’s a hootenanny” over and over, accompanied by vaguely coherent drums and guitar. On the same album though, is a deeply sensitive song called “Within Your Reach.” A fan favorite song is “Alex Chilton,” a tribute to the lead singer of Big Star, whom the Replacements were heavily influenced by and worked with at various points. The band inexplicably decided to name their first major-label album Tim, which was well-received but lead to a disastrous performance on Saturday Night Live, after which the Replacements were banned from ever playing the show again. Time marched on, Bob Stinson was fired dramatically, more albums were made (including the beautiful Pleased To Meet Me), the band broke up, and then the Replacements finally set out on a reunion tour in 2012 that concluded with their supposed “final show ever” in Portugal on 2015.

Trouble Boys tells this wild story and more of it in much greater, more vivid detail and draws on hundreds of interviews from the band members themselves, and others who knew them and worked with them over the past decades. Reading it, it’s hard not to have a soft spot for these, indeed, troubled boys from the Midwest who just wanted to play music and drink beer, but perhaps did both of those things a little too well.

Want to hear some of the Replacements’ music before reading? Try Let It Be, Tim or Pleased To Meet Me.

Graphic for events post

Public Event

Stix and Tones - Musical Elements for Young Children

Sunday February 19, 2017: 2:00pm to 2:45pm
Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room
Preschool - Grade 3

Graphic for events post

Public Event

An Evening with Premo & Gustavsson

Tuesday October 25, 2016: 7:00pm to 8:00pm
Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

Modern Lovers: not your typical summer read

by eapearce

Emma Straub gifted readers with the perfect summer novel two years ago, with The Vacationers, a beach read that was made so much more by the insight and wit with which Straub captured her characters. This summer, she’s done it again with Modern Lovers, a less beachy (it takes place in Brooklyn rather than the Mallorca setting of The Vacationers) but equally riveting story.

Former college bandmates Elizabeth, Andrew and Zoe have remained friends and neighbors since graduating thirty years ago. They’ve all clung on to their youth, some more successfully than others, but as their own children grow up and begin the fledging steps of adulthood themselves, the three friends must cope with the abrupt realization that they are no longer the young, sexy musicians they once were. It seems at first glance that Elizabeth, Andrew and Zoe have all come to an easy form of success in their adulthood; they have good jobs, families, partners, homes and each other. But it is the summer when their own children reach maturity that this all begins to unravel, and long kept secrets, truths, and loves come to the light. Re-enter the legacy of a fourth band member who actually went on to become famous without the trio but died a tragic death before reaching thirty, and it’s a complicated summer indeed.

“Straub packs wisdom and insight and humor together in a satisfying book about neighbors and nosiness, ambition and pleasure, the excitement of youth, the shock of middle age, and the fact that our passions never go away, they just evolve and grow along with us,” concludes the book jacket. The New York Times Book Review cautions readers from dismissing the book as light vacation reading, despite its sunny cover: “It’s just too deftly and thoughtfully written to be relegated merely to the beach.”

Graphic for events post

Blog Post

Jazz Record Collectors Journal

by iralax

Followers of early 20th century American jazz in Ann Arbor have been very fortunate since the 2009 closing of the Firefly Club to hear live music from that era at Kerrytown Concert House and Zal Gaz Grotto on Stadium, which convenes every Sunday (Phil Ogilvie’s Rhythm Kings), Monday (Paul Keller Orchestra) and Tuesday (Paul Klinger’s Easy St. Jazz Band). The Ann Arbor District Library now subscribes to The IAJRC Journal, the Quarterly magazine of the International Association of Jazz Record Collectors.

Its 100-page black & white format offers a lot of substance with very little gloss. The Spring 2016 issue with Benny Goodman and Loren Schoenberg on the cover, contains articles on recordings by Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Rudy Williams, The Deep River Boys. It also has regular features like CD, DVD & Book Reviews, Worldwide Jazz News, Big Band Quiz and lots of photos. So for those interested in the back-story with details of the heyday of early and modern jazz recordings, dig what IAJRC Journal has to offer. AADL also subscribes to Down Beat and several other music related magazines.

Graphic for events post

Public Event

Electronic Music Production with Mike Huckaby

Tuesday September 27, 2016: 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Downtown Library: Secret Lab
Grade 6 - Adult

Graphic for events post

Public Event

Electronic Music Production with Mike Huckaby

Tuesday September 13, 2016: 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Downtown Library: Secret Lab
Grade 6 - Adult