23 Best Rock, Music Books

The Metal God, himself, Rob Halford–lead vocalist of Judas Priest and author of the critically acclaimed and reader-beloved autobiography, Confess–delivers yet again, now with the bible of hard rock and heavy metal, all in his enlightening, hilarious, and one-of-a-kind voice.

Rob Halford has long been known for his legendary voice. As the front man of Judas Priest, his vocals have been tremendous, and tremendously influential. In 2020, he brought his voice to the page with a glorious autobiography. Fans and readers loved Halford’s frank and open narrative, as well as his terrific insight and sense of humor. In an ideal follow-up, Halford runs his lively eye over all facets of the hard rock history and the heavy metal world. Biblical is an encyclopedia and manifesto in which Halford shares his opinions, memories, and anecdotes regarding every element of the rock and roll work and lifestyle from tours to tattoos, riffs to riders, and drugs to devil horns. In Halford’s relaxed and honest tone, the book mixes serious and in-depth pieces with whimsical reflections on lessons learned during his fifty years of a life in music. Biblical is a handed-down-from-on-high holy tome that transports fans behind the scenes and back into their record collections, to the almighty ways of rock.

The ultimate front-row seat to Hootie & the Blowfish and Jim “Soni” Sonefeld’s breathtaking path from addiction to recovery.

For a time, there was no bigger band in the world than Hootie & the Blowfish–rock & roll’s unexpected foil to the grunge music that dominated the early ’90s airwaves. Jim Sonefeld, drummer and one of the group’s principal songwriters,
reveals their humble beginnings, meteoric rise, Grammy Award-winning musicianship, sudden fall, and ultimate rebirth–and opens his heart to readers about addiction, recovery, and faith.

Hootie’s debut album Cracked Rear View was one of the bestselling in the history of rock music. It saturated radio airwaves, television, and culture, and placed the quartet at the center of the American music conversation–for better and for
worse. Though Jim enjoyed the perks that came with fame–the parties, the relationships, the money, the drugs and alcohol–eventually it all became a camouflage that hid a deeper spiritual malady. As his life careened toward
disaster, he sought relief in twelve-step recovery, eventually devoting himself to a loving but by no means uncomplicated home life.

Swimming with the Blowfish is an unpretentious, emotional story of one man’s spiritual path to a more fruitful life. Jim’s journey is staggering and redeeming, and ultimately as comforting as your favorite flannel shirt.

A riveting look at the transformative year in the lives and careers of the legendary group whose groundbreaking legacy would forever change music and popular culture.

They started off as hysteria-inducing pop stars playing to audiences of screaming teenage fans and ended up as musical sages considered responsible for ushering in a new era.

The year that changed everything for the Beatles was 1966–the year of their last concert and of Revolver, their first album created to be listened to rather than performed. This was the year the Beatles risked their popularity by retiring from live performances, recording songs that explored alternative states of consciousness, experimenting with avant-garde ideas, and speaking their minds on issues of politics, war, and religion. It was the year their records were burned in America after John’s explosive claim that the group was “more popular than Jesus,” the year they were hounded out of the Philippines for “snubbing” its First Lady, the year John met Yoko Ono, and the year Paul conceived the idea for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Music journalist and Beatles expert Steve Turner investigates in detail the enormous changes that took place in the Beatles’ lives and work during 1966. He looks at the historical events that had an impact on the group, the music they made that in turn profoundly affected the culture around them, and the vision that allowed four young men from Liverpool to transform popular music and serve as pioneers for artists from Coldplay to David Bowie, Jay-Z to U2.

By talking to those close to the group and by drawing on his past interviews with key figures such as George Martin, Timothy Leary, and Ravi Shankar–and the Beatles themselves–Turner gives us the compelling, definitive account of the twelve months that contained everything the Beatles had been and anticipated everything they would still become.

The definitive biography of Chuck Berry, legendary performer and inventor of rock and roll

Best known as the groundbreaking artist behind classics like “Johnny B. Goode,” “Maybellene,” “You Never Can Tell” and “Roll Over Beethoven,” Chuck Berry was a man of wild contradictions, whose motives and motivations were often shrouded in mystery. After all, how did a teenage delinquent come to write so many songs that transformed American culture? And, once he achieved fame and recognition, why did he put his career in danger with a lifetime’s worth of reckless personal behavior? Throughout his life, Berry refused to shed light on either the mastery or the missteps, leaving the complexity that encapsulated his life and underscored his music largely unexplored–until now.

In Chuck Berry, biographer RJ Smith crafts a comprehensive portrait of one of the great American entertainers, guitarists, and lyricists of the 20th century, bringing Chuck Berry to life in vivid detail. Based on interviews, archival research, legal documents, and a deep understanding of Berry’s St. Louis (his birthplace, and the place where he died in March 2017), Smith sheds new light on a man few have ever really understood. By placing his life within the context of the American culture he made and eventually withdrew from, we understand how Berry became such a groundbreaking figure in music, erasing racial boundaries, crafting subtle political commentary, and paying a great price for his success. While celebrating his accomplishments, the book also does not shy away from troubling aspects of his public and private life, asking profound questions about how and why we separate the art from the artist.

Berry declined to call himself an artist, shrugging that he was good at what he did. But the man’s achievement was the rarest kind, the kind that had social and political resonance, the kind that made America want to get up and dance. At long last, Chuck Berry brings the man and the music together.

Get a completely new look at guitar legend Eddie Van Halen with this groundbreaking oral history, composed of more than fifty hours of interviews with Eddie himself as well as his family, friends, and colleagues.

In Solid State, Kenneth Womack offers the most definitive account of the conception, recording, mixing, and reception of Abbey Road.

In February 1969, the Beatles began working on what became their final album together. Abbey Road introduced a number of new techniques and technologies to the Beatles’ sound and included “Come Together,” “Something,” and “Here Comes the Sun,” which all emerged as classics.

Womack’s colorful retelling of how this landmark album was written and recorded is a treat for fans of the Beatles. Solid State takes listeners back to 1969 and into EMI’s Abbey Road Studios, which boasted an advanced solid state transistor mixing desk. Womack focuses on the dynamics between John, Paul, George, and Ringo and producer George Martin and his team of engineers, who for the most part set aside the tensions and conflicts that had arisen on previous albums to create a work with an innovative (and among some fans and critics, controversial) studio-bound sound that prominently included the new Moog synthesizer, among other novelties.

As Womack shows, Abbey Road was the culmination of the instrumental skills, recording equipment, and artistic vision that the band and George Martin had developed since their early days in the same studio seven years before. A testament to the group’s creativity and their producer’s ingenuity, Solid State is required reading for all fans of the Beatles and the rock ‘n’ roll.

In this breathtaking cultural history filled with exclusive, never-before-revealed details, celebrated rock journalist Joel Selvin tells the definitive story of the Rolling Stones’ infamous Altamont concert in San Francisco, the disastrous historic event that marked the end of the idealistic 1960s.

In the annals of rock history, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival on December 6, 1969, has long been seen as the distorted twin of Woodstock–the day that shattered the Sixties’ promise of peace and love when a concertgoer was killed by a member of the Hells Angels, the notorious biker club acting as security. While most people know of the events from the film Gimme Shelter, the whole story has remained buried in varied accounts, rumor, and myth–until now.

Altamont explores rock’s darkest day, a fiasco that began well before the climactic death of Meredith Hunter and continued beyond that infamous December night. Joel Selvin probes every aspect of the show–from the Stones’ hastily planned tour preceding the concert to the bad acid that swept through the audience to other deaths that also occurred that evening–to capture the full scope of the tragedy and its aftermath. He also provides an in-depth look at the Grateful Dead’s role in the events leading to Altamont, examining the band’s behind-the-scenes presence in both arranging the show and hiring the Hells Angels as security.

The product of twenty years of exhaustive research and dozens of interviews with many key players, including medical staff, Hells Angels members, the stage crew, and the musicians who were there, Altamont is the ultimate account of the final event in rock’s formative and most turbulent decade.

Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley is the first biography to go past that myth and present an Elvis beyond the legend. Based on hundreds of interviews and nearly a decade of research, it traces the evolution not just of the man but of the music and of the culture he left utterly transformed, creating a completely fresh portrait of Elvis and his world.

This volume tracks the first twenty-four years of Elvis’ life, covering his childhood, the stunning first recordings at Sun Records (“That’s All Right,” “Mystery Train”), and the early RCA hits (“Heartbreak Hotel,” “Hound Dog,” “Don’t Be Cruel”). These were the years of his improbable self-invention and unprecedented triumphs, when it seemed that everything that Elvis tried succeeded wildly. There was scarcely a cloud in sight through this period until, in 1958, he was drafted into the army and his mother died shortly thereafter. The book closes on that somber and poignant note.

Last Train to Memphis takes us deep inside Elvis’ life, exploring his lifelong passion for music of every sort (from blues and gospel to Bing Crosby and Mario Lanza), his compelling affection for his family, and his intimate relationships with girlfriends, mentors, band members, professional associates, and friends. It shows us the loneliness, the trustfulness, the voracious appetite for experience, and above all the unshakable, almost mystical faith that Elvis had in himself and his music. Drawing frequently on Elvis’ own words and on the recollections of those closest to him, the book offers an emotional, complex portrait of young Elvis Presley with a depth and dimension that for the first time allow his extraordinary accomplishments to ring true.

Peter Guralnick has given us a previously unseen world, a rich panoply of people and events that illuminate an achievement, a place, and a time as never revealed before.

This is the first biography of Ralph Peer, the adventurous–even revolutionary–A&R man and music publisher who saw the universal power locked in regional roots music and tapped it, changing the breadth and flavor of popular music around the world. It is the story of the life and fifty-year career, from the age of cylinder recordings to the stereo era, of the man who pioneered the recording, marketing, and publishing of blues, jazz, country, gospel, and Latin music.

The book tracks Peer’s role in such breakthrough events as the recording of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” (the record that sparked the blues craze), the first country recording sessions with Fiddlin’ John Carson, his discovery of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family at the famed Bristol sessions, the popularizing of Latin American music during World War II, and the postwar transformation of music on the airwaves that set the stage for the dominance of R&B, country, and rock ‘n’ roll.

But this is also the story of a man from humble Midwestern beginnings who went on to build the world’s largest independent music publishing firm, fostering the global reach of music that had previously been specialized, localized, and marginalized. Ralph Peer redefined the ways promising songs and performers were identified, encouraged, and promoted; rethought how far regional music might travel; and changed our very notions of what pop music can be.

This is the classic biography of reggae legend Bob Marley, updated and revised for the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death.

Bob Marley left an indelible mark on modern music, both as a reggae pioneer and as an enduring cultural icon. Catch a Fire, now a classic rock biography, delves into the life of this man, the leader of a musical and spiritual revolution that continues today. The book chronicles Marley’s life and career, as well as the milieu that shaped his spiritual and political beliefs.

Under the supervision of the author’s widow and with the collaboration of a Marley expert, this fourth edition contains a wealth of new material, including many revisions made by the author before his untimely death. This new edition, factually updated throughout, chronicles Marley’s legacy in recent years, as well as the ongoing controversy over the possibility that Marley’s remains might be exhumed from Nine Mile, Jamaica, and reburied in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where hundreds of Rastafarians live.

Fascinating inside information about the intrigues of the reggae music business, the dramatic rise of Marley’s musical offspring, the complex legal struggles surrounding the Marley estate, and a sweeping social history of modern Jamaica, as well as the Rastafarian religion, also make up this expanded edition.

Dire Straits filled giant stadiums around the world and sold hundreds of millions of records. Their classic songs–‘Sultans of Swing’, ‘Romeo & Juliet’, ‘Money for Nothing’, ‘Brothers in Arms’–formed the soundtrack of a generation and live on
today: still racking up sales, still being played on the radio on every continent. Starting with his own unlikely beginnings in Middle England, John Illsley recounts the band’s rise from humble origins in London’s spit-and-sawdust pubs to the
best-known venues in the world, the working men’s clubs to Madison Square Garden, sharing gigs with wild punk bands to the Live Aid stage at Wembley until, ultimately, the shattering demands of touring on a global scale and living life in
the spotlight took their inevitable toll.

John’s story is also a tribute to his great friend Mark Knopfler, the band’s lead singer, songwriter and gifted guitarist. They were the only band members to stay the fifteen-year distance. Told with searching honesty, soulful reflection and wry
humour, this is the first and only account of that incredible story.

The authorized biography of the most notorious rock manager of all time, Peter Grant, best known for his work with Led Zeppelin

Peter Grant is the most famous music manager of all time. Often acknowledged as the “fifth member of Led Zeppelin,” Grant’s story has appeared in fragments across countless Zeppelin biographies, but none has explored who this brilliant and intuitive manager yet flawed and sometimes dangerous man truly was. No one has successfully captured the scope of his personality or his long-lasting impact on the music business. Acclaimed author and journalist Mark Blake seeks to rectify that.

Bring It On Home is the first book to tell the complete uncensored story of this industry giant. With support from Grant’s family interviews with Led Zeppelin’s surviving band members, and access to Grant’s extensive archive and scores of unpublished material, including his never-before-published final interview, Blake sheds new light on the history of Led Zeppelin and on the wider story of rock music in the 1960s and ’70s.

Full of new insights into Grant’s early life as an actor, wrestler, and road manager for rock ‘n’ roll pioneers Chuck Berry and Little Richard; the formation of Led Zeppelin; his seclusion following the demise of the band; and his recovery from substance abuse, Bring It On Home reveals a man who, after the extraordinary highs and lows of a career in rock ‘n’ roll, found peace and happiness in a more ordinary life. It is a celebration, a cautionary tale, and a compelling human drama.

For more than a quarter century, biographer Philip Norman’s internationally bestselling Shout! has been unchallenged as the definitive biography of the Beatles. Now, at last, Norman turns his formidable talent to the Beatle for whom being a Beatle was never enough. Drawing on previously untapped sources, and with unprecedented access to all the major characters, Norman presents the comprehensive and most revealing portrait of John Lennon ever published.

This masterly biography takes a fresh and penetrating look at every aspect of Lennon’s much-chronicled life, including the songs that have turned him, posthumously, into a near-secular saint. In three years of research, Norman has turned up an extraordinary amount of new information about even the best-known episodes of Lennon folklore–his upbringing by his strict Aunt Mimi; his allegedly wasted school and student days; the evolution of his peerless creative partnership with Paul McCartney; his Beatle-busting love affair with a Japanese performance artist; his forays into painting and literature; his experiments with Transcendental Meditation, primal scream therapy, and drugs. The book’s numerous key informants and interviewees include Sir Paul McCartney, Sir George Martin, Sean Lennon–whose moving reminiscence reveals his father as never seen before–and Yoko Ono, who speaks with sometimes shocking candor about the inner workings of her marriage to John.

“[A] haunting, mammoth, terrific piece of work.” –New York Times

Honest and unflinching, as John himself would wish, Norman gives us the whole man in all his endless contradictions–tough and cynical, hilariously funny but also naive, vulnerable and insecure–and reveals how the mother who gave him away as a toddler haunted his mind and his music for the rest of his days.

On their fiftieth anniversary comes a groundbreaking rock-and-roll memoir by one of the founding members of the Grateful Dead.

The Grateful Dead are perhaps the most legendary American rock band of all time. For thirty years, beginning in the hippie scene of San Francisco in 1965, they were a musical institution, the original jam band that broke new ground in so many ways. From the music to their live-concert sound systems and fan recordings, they were forward-thinking champions of artistic control and outlaw artists who marched to the beat of their own drums.

Bill Kreutzmann, one of their founding members and drummer for every one of their over 2,300-dd concerts, has written an unflinching and wild account of playing in the greatest improvisational band of all time. Everything a rock music fan would expect is here, but what sets this apart is Bill’s incredible life of adventure, which was at the heart of the Grateful Dead experience. This was a band that knew no limits, and Bill lived life to the fullest, pushing the boundaries of drugs, drums, and high times, through devastating tragedy and remarkable triumph.

But at this book’s beating heart is the music–theirs and others. Some of the greatest musicians and concerts were a part of the Grateful Dead’s career, from sharing the stage with Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, and the Who, to playing in the Acid Tests, the Monterey Pop Festival, Woodstock, and Altamont. Bill’s life is a chronicle of American music and pop-culture history, and his epic personal journey is one of sonic discovery and thrilling experiences.

A singer-songwriter’s heartfelt memoir about growing up in a bohemian musical family and her experiences with love, loss, motherhood, divorce, the music industry, and more.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Love Is a Mix Tape, a thoughtful and loving meditation on the life of the late David Bowie that explores his creative legacy and the enduring and mutual connection he enjoyed with his fans

Innovative. Pioneering. Brave. Until his death in January 2016, David Bowie created art that not only pushed boundaries, but helped fans understand themselves and view the world from fantastic new perspectives.

When the shocking news of his death on January 10, 2016 broke, the outpouring of grief and adulation was immediate and ongoing. Fans around the world and across generations paid homage to this brilliant, innovate, ever evolving artist who both shaped and embodied our times.

In this concise and penetrating book, featuring color photographs, highly regarded Rolling Stone critic, bestselling author, and lifelong Bowie fan Rob Sheffield shares his own feelings about the passing of this icon and explains why Bowie’s death has elicited such an unprecedented emotional outpouring from so many lives.

It was the age when heavy-footed, humorless dinosaurs roamed the hard-rock landscape. But that all changed when into these dazed and confused mid-’70s strut-ted four flamboyant bands that reveled in revved-up anthems and flaunted a novel theatricality. In They Just Seem a Little Weird, veteran entertainment journalist Doug Brod offers an eye- and ear-opening look at a crucial moment in music history, when rock became fun again and a gig became a show. This is the story of friends and frenemies who rose, fell, and soared once more, often sharing stages, studios, producers, engineers, managers, agents, roadies, and fans-and who are still collaborating more than forty years on.

In the tradition of David Browne’s Fire and Rain and Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us, They Just Seem a Little Weird seamlessly interweaves the narratives of KISS, Cheap Trick, and Aerosmith with that of Starz, a criminally neglected band whose fate may have been sealed by a shocking act of violence. This is also the story of how these distinctly American groups-three of them now enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-laid the foundation for two seemingly opposed rock genres: the hair metal of Poison, Skid Row, and Motley Crue and the grunge of Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and the Melvins. Deeply researched, and featuring more than 130 new interviews, this book is nothing less than a secret history of classic rock.

Laurel Canyon was the neighborhood perched above the clubs and record companies of Sunset Strip where Joni Mitchell, Jim Morrison, Graham Nash, Cass Elliot, Carole King, Don Henley, and Peter Tork, just to name a few, lived and collaborated to make an indelible mark on our music and our culture. Starting with The Byrds in 1965, these musicians began combining the effusive harmonies of folk music with the sounds of the British rock invasion. From their song craft was born the singer-songwriter movement and a new style of American pop that thrives on.

This is not only a history of an important period in rock music but also the story of what happened to the peace and love philosophy of the sixties, as hard drugs and easy sex began to take their toll and the gruesome Wonderland murders signaled the end of the era.

Listen to Lysa William’s interview of the author, Michael Walker!

Learn more about Laurel Canyon at www.laurelcanyonthebook.com

A revelatory, redemptive, and “wild…juicy” (Rolling Stone) memoir from the lead guitarist of the legendary hard rock band Def Leppard–the first ever written by one of its members–chronicling the band’s extraordinary rise to superstardom and how they maintained it for three decades.

Meet Phil Collen. You may know him as the lead guitarist in Def Leppard, whose signature song “Pour Some Sugar on Me” is still as widely enjoyed as when it debuted in 1988. Maybe you’ve heard of him as the rock star that gave up alcohol and meat more than twenty-five years ago. Most likely you’ve seen him shirtless–in photos or in real life–flaunting his impeccably toned body to appreciative female fans.

But it wasn’t always like this. Collen worked his way up from nothing, teaching himself guitar from scratch and slogging it out in London-based pub bands for years; that is, until Def Leppard formed and transformed from unknowns to icons, from playing openers in near-empty arenas to headlining in those same stadiums and selling them out every night. But as Collen discovered, true overnight success is a myth. Like the other band members, he had to struggle and fight his way to the top; in the end, he says, “our work ethic saved us.” Just as it still does.

Adrenalized is an amazing underdog tale featuring a bunch of ordinary working-class lads who rose to mega-stardom, overcoming incredible obstacles–such as drummer Rick Allen losing an arm in a car crash and the tragic death of guitarist Steve Clark, Phil’s musical soul mate. Featuring personal, never-before-seen photos of Collen and his band mates on stage and off, Adrenalized is a fascinating account of the failures, triumphs, challenges, and rock-solid dedication it takes to make dreams come true.

The first full-length narrative biography of Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham, considered by many to be one of the greatest drummers in rock history, and a genuine wild man of epic (and sadly fatal) proportions.

Beast: John Bonham and the Rise of Led Zeppelin is the first-ever biography of the iconic John Bonham, considered by many to be one of the greatest (if not THE greatest) rock drummer of all time. Bonham first learned to play the drums at the age of five, and despite never taking formal lessons, began drumming for local bands immediately upon graduating from secondary school. By the late 1960s, Bonham was looking for a more solid gig in order to provide his growing family with a more regular income. Meanwhile, following the dissolution of the popular blues rock band The Yardbirds, lead guitarist Jimmy Page sought the company of new bandmates to help him record an album and tour Scandinavia as the New Yardbirds. A few months later, Bonham was recruited to join the band who would eventually become known as Led Zeppelin-and before the year was out, Bonham and his three bandmates would become the richest rock band in the world.

In their first year, Led Zeppelin released two albums and completed four US and four UK concert tours. As their popularity exploded, they moved from ballrooms and smaller clubs to larger auditoriums, and eventually started selling out full arenas. Throughout the 1970s, Led Zeppelin reached new heights of commercial and critical success, making them one of the most influential groups of the era, both in musical style and in their approach towards the workings of the entertainment industry. They added extravagant lasers, light shows, and mirror balls to their performances; wore flamboyant and often glittering outfits; traveled in a private jet airliner and rented out entire sections of hotels; and soon become the subject of frequently repeated stories of debauchery and destruction while on tour. In 1977, the group performed what would be their final live appearance in the US, following months of rising fervor and rioting from their fandom. And in September of 1980, Bonham-plagued by alcoholism, anxiety, and the after-effects of years of excess-was found dead by his bandmates.

To this day, Bonham is posthumously described as one of the most important, well-known, and influential drummers in rock, topping best of lists describing him as an inimitable, all-time great. As Adam Budofsky, managing editor of Modern Drummer, explained, “If the king of rock ‘n’ roll was Elvis Presley, then the king of rock drumming was certainly John Bonham.”