The Rolling Stone Illustrated History Of Rock & Roll

by Jim Miller (Editor)

A critical history, bringing together the work of the finest rock writers in the country; a pictorial record, combining scores of long-lost photos from the fifties with the best work of contemporary photographers; a reference book, offering superbly detailed discographies on every important performer and genre to have emerged in rock and roll, soul music and rhythm and blues over the last twenty years. This is a book of visual elegance and critical intelligence; a combination that in this field has really been attempted and will not soon, if ever, be surpassed.

Designed by Robert Kingsbury

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, History, Reference, Art

382 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

James Miller is an American writer and academic. He is known for writing about Michel Foucault, philosophy as a way of life, social movements, popular culture, intellectual history, eighteenth century to the present; radical social theory and history of political philosophy. --Wikipedia

See James Miller.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

So long, Chuck Berry 1926-2017 – what a life. When rock and roll bust down the doors in the mid 1950s the grown-ups huffed and puffed and feared not just for the lascivious tendencies of their young family members but for their aesthetic sensibilities too, as popular music nosedived from the sublime lyrics of the 30s and 40s, with lines like

Thanks for the memory
Of Schubert serenades, little things of jade
And traffic jams and anagrams and bills you never paid

To the voluntary brain death of this new stuff

I got a girl, named Sue,
She knows just what to do
I bop to the east, She bop to the west,
but she's the girl that I love the best
Tutti frutti, all rooty

But Chuck Berry brought hope to those who paid attention. He showed how it was possible to articulate the inarticulate and create street poetry out of the thinnest of air. His songs were never angry, he celebrated the common stuff of American life, he had wit and charm and a chiming guitar style too, and his diction was as beautiful as his quiff. I’m only sorry of two things, that his inspiration lasted a mere six years, and that his biggest hit (My Ding-a-Ling) was his stupidest song, which is like the Beatles only being known for Yellow Submarine. But such are the vicissitudes of popular music.

Here is my favourite Chuck Berry song, “You Never Can Tell”, a song about happiness studded with the kind of detail you usually only get from Richard Price police procedurals.


It was a teenage wedding, and the old folks wished them well
You could see that Pierre did truly love the mademoiselle
And now the young monsieur and madam have rung the chapel bell,
"C'est la vie", say the old folks, “it goes to show you never can tell"

They furnished off an apartment with a two room Roebuck sale
The coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale,
But when Pierre found work, the little money comin' worked out well
"C'est la vie", say the old folks, “it goes to show you never can tell"

They had a hi-fi phono, boy, did they let it blast
Seven hundred little records, all rock, rhythm and jazz
But when the sun went down the rapid tempo of the music fell
"C'est la vie", say the old folks, “it goes to show you never can tell"

They bought a souped-up jitney, 'twas a cherry red '53,
They drove it down New Orleans to celebrate their anniversary
It was there that Pierre was married to the lovely mademoiselle
"C'est la vie", say the old folks, “it goes to show you never can tell”

[Petergiaquinta]

Joan Jett loves rock and roll, and I do too, and I miss seeing The Rolling Stone on magazine racks and reading it every month. Heck, I miss magazine racks and magazines, too. There's still a great newsstand in Evanston. What a place.

I wrote a crappy review of this book for my Young Adult Lit class back in 1990. In it, I discussed the widely ranging reading levels of the different essays by the various writers and the challenge this posed to lower-level readers. In response, my professor wrote in the margin, "Remember that interest overrides text difficulty," to which now I would be forced to reply, "What interest?" because today's typical high school student has no interest in either reading a magazine or listening to rock and roll, two dusty old cultural relics from a time long gone and totally forgotten. Show a kid a magazine today and boy howdy will he be confused. And play him some of that rock and roll music, and he isn't going to want to dance with you at all. Neil Young may have said that rock and roll will never die, but he didn't say it would continue to be listened to by the youth of Amerikkka in perpetuity.

Here's an excerpt from that weak review I wrote. The rest was just rambling on about how the book might be used in the English classroom and what kinds of students might enjoy it. Ha!

+++++++++++++++

This illustrated history of rock and roll is a compilation of essays by various writers for Rolling Stone, tracing the development of rock and roll music and focusing on important artists. The book begins with an examination of the blues, jazz, country and western, and gospel music, the forerunners of rock. From there, it moves chronologically through the history of rock and roll, finishing with a sketch of Elvis Costello. Each essay is replete with black and white photography, and concludes with a discography of the time period or the particular musician focused on.

+++++++++++++++

Speaking of Elvis Costello, remember that moment on Saturday Night Live in 1977 when he said fuck you to his record label and Lorne Michaels on live television, stopping his performance of "Less than Zero" before ripping into "Radio Radio"? That was rock and roll. Compare that moment to the ridiculous lip-synching shit show by Megan Thee Stallion last week on SNL because that surely was not rock and roll. Watching Megan Thee Stallion, you just might have been reminded of that line from "Radio Radio" when Elvis Costello sneers that Megan's kind of music is just "Tryin' to anesthetize the way that you feel." You better do as you are told!

+++++++++++++++
Reviewed for Literature for Young Adults course, March 1990

[David Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll by Jim Miller (Random House 1972)(784).

This brings back great memories! In 1979 I was a senior at a small liberal arts college in the North Carolina mountains; each year between the fall and spring semesters we had a thirty-day stretch called “January Term” where students could select a single class of interest for the length of the term.

My senior year I chose a class called “The History of Rock and Roll.” The professor was an unreconstructed old hippie who had a collection of several thousand albums; he knew his way around rock and roll. The class met in the campus coffeehouse (yeah, I already told you that this was the 1970's) from 9:00 a.m. until noon; the format of the class was to listen to music that the professor selected. The coffeehouse was a huge wood-paneled room with a big circular fireplace that was always lit, and the ceiling of the room was ringed with Bose 901 speakers, which were widely regarded as the best and most powerful speakers of the day. A large portion of the class met each morning and came in reeking of marijuana; everyone would flop down into beanbag chairs (remember them?) near the crackling fireplace and rock out to the teacher's album selections of the day.

Fortunately, the class was taught on a pass/fail basis. It was a pleasant time.

What was the point of this long reminiscence? The assigned text for the class was – you guessed it – The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll!

My rating: 8/10, finished 1980.

PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP

[Tim Dickmeyer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would give this book 4 stars in dealing with the content preceding the first British Invasion. However, it enters a downswing thereafter and falls apart right around the Summer of Love. The first fatal flaw is that any content regarding material after Rolling Stone began publishing is merely reprints of old articles. Thus, instead of having a new essay drafted regarding Phil Spector, they reprint an article from 1970. Since it is a collection of essays, it suffers heavily from speculation and personal taste of the authors. Case in point when one states, "Cream was not Clapton's best work, in fact it is much weaker than the solo work he created in the 70's and 80's." Additionally, any editor who complies a "History of Rock and Roll" that does not contain sections on Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin while containing essays on Sam Cooke, Madonna and Michael Jackson needs to take a good look in the mirror.

Sadly, this is the best history that I've read. I really should write one myself.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVE this book. Covers all the greats. It's like my 3rd bible.

[Burt Campbell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good reference material; certainly NOT definitive, feel free to disagree with the opinions therein. A good way to find 'similar artists' to those you already enjoy.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Undergraduate degree reading

[Nathan Phillips · Rating 5 out of 5]

(This got too long to logically fit into one of the compilation posts.)

The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll: Second Edition (1980), edited by Jim Miller
Reread, but probably the first time I read every single word cover to cover, which I'd wanted to set aside time to do for almost twenty years. My mom found this book for me in a library sale in 2000; I was a synthpop fan and classic rock skeptic, apart from the Beach Boys and the Beatles, at the time. The only music this covered that resonated with me then was punk rock and its immediate descendants. But I did subscribe to Rolling Stone and liked the semi-scholarly way it was written, and the writing in this book proved even better, coming from a time when the magazine was still pretty much undisturbed by the commercial impulses that derailed it in the 1980s. Over time, the essays in this book resonated more and more with me. I was hooked in by the brilliant chapter on UK punk and how it seemed to bring the music to life; it's a little juvenile but I'd be lying if I said I didn't also enjoy Lester Bangs' takedown of the Doors. But the chapter I couldn't get out of my head was the one about the Beatles, casting their work under a critical and personal eye that was new to me despite an entire lifetime of reading about them already -- I guess Nicholas Schaffner's firsthand account of the British Invasion in his invaluable book The Beatles Forever bore some resemblance, but he was a kid at the time whereas Greil Marcus was a college student, and his chronicle of those first days of the Beatles' U.S. popularity are haunting in their sense of gravity, joy and -- if you've read Lewisohn and know the back story -- triumph. At first I bristled at Marcus' attitude toward the Beatles' later work, which he did not champion the way he did "There's a Place" and "Money"; this was a different kind of reverence than I'd ever seen leveled at the band in this very studious VH1 era. The more I read the essay, the more I understood the points he was making, and the more I found myself hearing an entirely different story told to me by music I thought I had memorized. To say that Marcus' Beatles piece changed the way I thought about writing would only be inaccurate insofar as it's a gross understatement. Not only in terms of music but in cinema and even other aspects of life, it taught me that there are an infinite number of narratives to spin from great art, and that -- as he would later say himself -- it's not about your taste, it's about where it takes you.

The Beatles chapter was also the key to "getting" the rest of this book (though conversely, I agreed with almost every word of Jim Miller's Beach Boys essay out of the gate). The pieces bounce off one another, as Marcus recently said in his "ask Greil" feature when I asked about the creative process behind this book and he very generously offered a more extensive answer than I expected. (You'll find that here, dated November 6th.) It was also remarkably perspicacious, a knowledgeable and passionate exploration of almost every facet of postwar popular music. The fact that it was often tough-minded and unsentimental only gave credence to the moments when it allowed genuine awe and excitement to come through. I was touched, almost as if I was myself being praised, when these "elder statesmen" rock critics were singing the praises of the New York bands like Talking Heads, who were my big obsession then, even though TH hadn't been a "new band" since before I was even born. So I guess more than anything, it made me notice the lines that ran through 1950s rock & roll -- which I wouldn't become a huge fan of myself until a few years later, and maybe this book is what allowed me to hear it -- all the way to the '70s soul, '80s pop and '90s alternative that was then my whole world. It taught me to believe in the great power of rock & roll as a communicative force, and it taught me not to bristle at critical opinions that were at odds with my own -- that their value would be gleaned from what they said about the material, not their yes-or-no judgments of it. I went too far in the wrong direction for a while, feeling myself a failure if my views on various music didn't match up with what the book -- or at least Marcus and Miller's essays -- told me. It was all part of growing up.

Reading the book now I was still just galvanized at a lot, even most, of it. At its best it remains thrilling. It's one of those things I wish there was some way for me to share, which is not easy as it's out of print and has only ever resurfaced in apparently inferior editions. Many of these short form pieces are superior to long-form books on the same subject matter. You can argue with some of the choices, like Jackie Wilson getting a chapter when Marvin Gaye doesn't; and I really don't know that the decision to focus so much on Graham Parker and Steely Dan has aged all that well, and while I love the Byrds and like Elvis Costello the same is probably true for them, and it's interesting how terminology has shifted, with things like metal and soul viewed mostly as dying genres as of the publication date, and an outright wrong prediction that rock festivals were over... but there are just as many stunningly prophetic passages, like when Ed Ward gives a rundown in the reggae chapter of how soundsystem rapping was in the process of giving way to hip hop, only there wasn't a name for it yet. As I noted in my question to Marcus, I'm fascinated by wondering how the book would look now if the same format were extended. What artists would get full chapters? Which ones would be excised? (Not many, they did a good job knowing what would matter down the line; the only artist missing from this edition who was in the first was the Allman Brothers Band, replaced here with a general piece on Southern Rock.) What movements would be explored? As fragmented as we are now, I think the book's thesis that everything since "Maybelle" and "Don't Be Cruel" is of a piece in some way still stands.

Brief thoughts on the individual pieces in the book:

Robert Palmer: Rock Begins - Fascinating. Beautifully illustrated. Successfully conveys how difficult it is to find a proper "beginning" for rock & roll while also delving into how many individual elements coalesced into it.

Barry Hansen: Rhythm and Gospel - One of the book's transitional chapters, helpfully indexing ancestral music I find more interesting than pleasurable with a few exceptions. (Note that there are no chapters on country, pop or blues, all of which Palmer touches on.) Wild fact I just learned: Hansen is Dr. Demento!

Peter Guralnick: Elvis Presley - Guralnick of course would later write the definitive biography of Elvis, which I'm preparing to dive into soon. This essay is highly personal and staggeringly good, and introduced me to the conceit (shared by John Lennon) that Elvis' best work by far was at Sun. I wasn't into Elvis at all when I first read this but it prompted me to hear that stuff eventually and boy, did I ever hear it when I was ready. I've also never forgotten Guralnick's fiery memory of the night the '68 comeback special aired.

Langdon Winner: The Sound of New Orleans - Another long, helpful exploratory index of sorts, but because this one is tied to the history of a city, it's particularly engrossing. The geographic centering of various rock & roll ideas and movements in this book also had a big effect on my way of thinking about the music, though coming up in the "Seattle era" and being very familiar with the Liverpool scene's legacy steered me there also.

Peter Guralnick: Fats Domino - The first of the book's pieces that, while not exactly dismissive, shows that this book is not at all a traditional hagiography of the form; of course the Elvis piece is plenty skeptical too, but this one is more questioning of the relevant artist's place in the music history except as a source of populist fun.

Langdon Winner: Little Richard - Strange to realize I didn't really know the Story until I read this in my junior year; of course I only became an acolyte of Richard and his peers a few years after that but his influence was inescapable in the music I did listen to. It can't give you the full scope of it but the words and pictures say a lot. Winner does skirt Richard's sexuality a bit, but I'm not sure how completely open a secret it was by this point.

Robert Christgau: Chuck Berry - Beautiful piece about the greatest rock & roller from one of his biggest fans. And makes a hell of a case for his long-term importance.

Peter Guralnick: Rockabilly - The essay's great but the biggest of the photos, of Gene Vincent with his ruined guitar "raising the flag at Iwo Jima" (says the caption) is the essence of rock & roll to me.

Jim Miller: Jerry Lee Lewis - As with the Little Richard piece, a story so harrowing and weird it would be hard to tell it badly; Miller does it proud, though.

Kit Rachlis: The Everly Brothers - The most low-key of the first wave of rock & roll artists merits a lower-key chapter, inevitably, though there's some real insight here about the duo's later years, and some unfortunately influential slagging off of their Warner Bros. work, which -- while inconsistent -- boasts richer pleasures than most people will ever know, though since Spotify can't even figure out which of their recordings were the actual hits I'm not sure it matters anymore. A pity, as they were truly magic at their best.

Jonathan Cott: Buddy Holly - Cott's thoughts on individual songs and their complex sexual undercurrent are so compelling I started to find Holly's life and death almost an intrusion.

Barry Hansen: Doo-Wop - Amazing that doo wop, one of the most inherently populist forms of American music, had by 1979 already been taken over by obsessive and seemingly wealthy collectors. I suppose that as the classic doo wop sound becomes more of a niche, its scattered champions will grow ever more selective and cultivated a group, which is a shame. I miss Rhino.

John Morthland: The Rise of Top 40 AM
Greg Shaw: The Teen Idols
John Morthland: The Payola Scandal - Three engrossing pieces of history about the years when rock & roll seemed to be losing dominance, caused by the almost suspiciously rapid downfalls of the above guiding lights. The teen idol chapter is especially interesting in its descriptions of how capitalist cronies learned to turn the burgeoning youth culture against itself, something that I'd argue still plays into the marketing and popularity of major label pop music to this day.

Greg Shaw: The Instrumental Groups - Near and dear to my heart, the subject here rendered as an inevitable outgrowth of middle American response to rock & roll, and a nice companion to the later garage band chapter.

Peter Guralnick: Ray Charles - Guralnick's interpretation of Charles' white audience as tending to romanticize the darker side of his life is real food for thought to apply to almost any troubled black rock, soul or hip hop performer.

Joe McEwen: Sam Cooke - A bit difficult to be satisfied with this after reading Guralnick's full-fledged biography, but a fine summary.

Joe McEwen: Jackie Wilson - I love the Wilson greatest hits CD I have, but yes, it appears Jim Miller's love of this artist clouded his judgment a bit, as it's hard to justify multiple pages dedicated to him in this context, especially in the absence of, say, a Wilson Pickett chapter. Still, a great tragedy well-told.

Greg Shaw: Brill Building Pop - Again, I'm slightly stymied because I recently fell hard for a full book on this very topic by one of this book's other authors, Ken Emerson; nevertheless, any version of this narrative is going to have you tapping your feet and humming, and the discography divided by songwriting team is very helpful.

Ken Emerson: Roy Orbison - The first chapter that feels incomplete, only because of Orbison's major comeback in the '80s and untimely death just thereafter. That story about the "Running Scared" session, though...

Ed Ward: Italo-American Rock - One of my least favorite chapters in the book. I don't care that much about the subject (I like Dion and the Rascals but wouldn't really think to place them in the same category) and I find Ward's rambunctious conversational, overly macho style here grating. Weird because I like some of his other work here a lot.

Robert Palmer: James Brown - Only too appropriate that the author of the chapter on the music's most primal forms would come back for Brown. I do think Christgau could've done more with this.

Joe McEwen: The Sound of Chicago - Doesn't feel entirely necessary, but a handy primer, especially on the likes of Jerry Butler and Curtis Mayfield.

Nik Cohn: Phil Spector - Oof. A small masterpiece. An extremely unnerving chronicle of mental illness couched in Cohn's story about going to Spector's creepy mansion to interview him for a potential biography. This of course predates the murder charge, the downfall, prison, etc., but manages not to feel dated, as if his fate is inherent to the story already. The photos are truly eerie.

Greil Marcus: The Girl Groups - Two pages on some of the greatest pop music ever recorded. Vital, smart, correct, moving, and the reason I discovered Darlene Love's "A Fine, Fine Boy," one of the best records in all of rock & roll.

Jim Miller: The Beach Boys - I talked about this in my own Beach Boys overview a couple of years ago but basically, Miller takes them seriously and "gets it." The idiosyncracies, the themes, the problems, it's all here; nothing that's happened to the band since has invalidated any of it.

Lester Bangs: The British Invasion - Bangs' enthusiasm and disdain are both infectious, and all of his pieces in this book find both in equal measure; he declares most Brit Invasion rock to be crap and proceeds to regale us with how much he loves it. May belong in a Bangs anthology more than in this book but fun all the same.

Greil Marcus: The Beatles - Described above. Obviously one of the best critical pieces about rock & roll in existence, one that puts every puffed-up book and nostalgia exercise about this band to shame. Marcus wants to carefully make the case that the Beatles, in essence, are rock & roll because they birthed their sound parallel to it, and to also champion them as the greatest and most fascinating rock artist of them all without copping to received wisdom or fawning. He succeeds.

Robert Christgau: The Rolling Stones - Oddly disappointing; Christgau can sometimes get really wound up in boring term-defining and obsessive analysis of class and politics in his longer essays and this Stones piece, even though it comes from somebody who loves them dearly, never sees the forest for the trees, never describes the music or the essence the way Marcus does in the Beatles piece. It's too focused on Mick Jagger's preppy background and a lot of sociopolitical melodrama that simply isn't as interesting as the music it's supposed to be about.

Ed Ward: The Sound of Texas - Slightly redundant because a lot of the bands covered here come up in other chapters, but a pleasant read.

Peter Guralnick: Soul - Guralnick later wrote a whole book about this too. This chapter is kind of useless now for reasons that aren't his fault; "soul" as it was then defined was mostly gone, whereas now we think of it as a permanent fixture of rock & roll, though the term is commonly used interchangeably with R&B.

Jon Landau: Otis Redding - A big relief that Redding is afforded decent space; I wasn't sure his legacy was as assured in the '70s as it is now. Landau can't quite define Redding's appeal because how do you really cover something so self-evident?

Robert Palmer: The Sound of Memphis - The Stax story, more or less, with a little of Sun Records' legacy thrown in. Palmer is the right person to tie these threads together.

Janet Maslin: Bob Dylan - Surprisingly unimpressed with the idea of Dylan having a permanent place in history and pop culture, which wouldn't fly now and I'm a little shocked it did then, but the writing is of course immaculate.

Bud Scoppa: The Byrds - A band I absolutely love, true originals. But also a cult band, despite their hits; and a band whose story doesn't feel like it needs this much explication in a linear history of rock & roll, particularly knowing how often their style and even genre went through upheaval, and particularly when they'd fit snugly in the very next chapter.

Paul Nelson: Folk Rock - Donovan and Sonny & Cher in the same chapter as Buffalo Springfield shows the limits of this kind of genre-boxing.

Joe McEwen & Jim Miller: Motown - An exhilarating, masterful exploration of the gigantic influence Motown had on pop culture in the '60s. It makes you truly long for that time, and to have the records ready to go. Also quite extensive, giving a full story of the Motown sound and the music Berry Gordy shepherded from multiple angles despite limited space.

Russell Gersten: Aretha Franklin - Fails to get the drama that Franklin's narrative warrants, but does correctly imply that rock & roll had no better vocalist.

Peter Guralnick: B.B. King - I'm not a huge King fan -- after his very early sides, I'm sorry to say he starts to bore me -- so I can't be sure how this reads or captures his place in the story, but it certainly sounds fair to me.

Ed Ward: The Blues Revival - Another chapter where I'm pretty much at sea. Aside from the Yardbirds, who I'd argue were a lot more than a blues revival outfit, I don't care for any of these artists. ZZ Top isn't bad when you're drunk.

Lester Banks: Protopunk- The Garage Bands - Ah, now here's the good stuff. Predating Nuggets even, this is Bangs writing what he knows, and lord does he deliver. Prompted me to seek out "Moulty" by the Barbarians, and thank goodness I did that.

Charles Perry: The Sound of San Francisco
Charles Perry: The Jefferson Airplane - Back in the day when I would regularly consult this book after I g

[Murf Reeves · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock And Roll has been sitting on my shelf for almost thirty years, so reading it was a kind of therapy. The book is a series of essays that build a timeline for the evolution of rock n roll. The copy I have ends with Elvis Costello and I am not sure it there are updated versions. I enjoyed the journey, especially when I discovered (The Rascals later albums) or re-visited artists (The Everly Brothers, Van Morrison). What interested me the most was the tone of the essays. In the beginning the essays were about discovery. All these different ideas coagulating together and exciting the people. As rock n roll develops and becomes more and more a product, the tone of the essays starts to change. Not all of them, but more of the essays start to focus on the flaws of artists, movements or sounds. As the money became more of a factor the emotions in some the essays reflected the influence of money.
The book has some great photos and is a great reminder of the power of music and how it can unite people in all kinds of ways.

[HARRY Cullen · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like music and certain 'rock' bands this book has great insight and comments about various genres

[1joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Death, rape, sex, drugs, murder, and alchol are these things suitable for childern? I dont think it is wheather its in a book or on tv. Books that contain these things i dont think should be taught in school. Childeren should not be exposed to things like this. There is no schoolastic vaule to teaching these things in a class. A child should be revealed to these things in a healthy enviroment.


First off books that have graphic content shouldnt be taught in school. At a young age it is not a smart move to expose a child to such things like this. If the child finds it intresting they might want to go out and do some of the things that are mention in the book. Clockwork orange is a very gruesome book that involves a lot of violence and one graphic scene and where a mans wife gets raped in front of him. Now what kid needs to imagine this happening and worst off why even bring it up in ear shot of a child.

On top of that books with this have no schoolist value at all. In school kids are taught things that are suppose to help them in their every day life and help them achieve a carrer. Now in what way can teaching them about homocide and drugs help them achieve this. If anything such thoughts could plauge their mind and do quite the opposite of the reason things are taught in school for.

Lastly kids should be taught this in a good enviroment. Im not saying that a class room is not a good enviroment Im just saying there are better places for this to be taught. When topics such like this are being brought up most parents would feel more comfortable talking directly to their kids rather then someone else telling them about it. While also in a classroom there are many immature kids that wont take it serious and might defeat the whole purpose of the talk.

In conclusion books that contain explict content should be banned in school. There is nothing good a child could take away from a book that involves these things. A better enviroment which most likely envolves the childs parents is where things like this should be discusses. Books that pollute a young mind shouldnt most definatly not be taught in a place where we are trying to advance them not break them down. Im not saying that novels that include these things are not a good piece of literture I just think they have no place in school

[Catherine Woodman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have spent the last six months reading this book out loud to my youngest son as he takes a class in Rock and Roll in American Culture. It has been overall fun to read about rock and roll as a phenomenon and to learn that there are trends in music that are directly tied to social and economic trends. This book, however, is less academic and more fan based. There are multiple authors for different artists and eras in music, which leads to a highly variable book in terms of quality. One thing that is consistent across the book was excellent photographs of artists and bands. The performance side of the business was well represented and the changes that have become so prevalent in music were not going on in 1992 when the book was published. I think this would appeal to the fan, but not someone who wanted to learn more about rock and roll overall. It is a collection of chapters rather than a book tied together with an overarching story.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would have rated it 5 stars when I read it back in junior high school around 1976 or so. Since then, it's a little easier to see its canonization of all things boomer and what the cultural critic folks call Rockist ideology. It's still a good one though. Probably affected as much as just about any book I've read in my life.

To this day, when I'm evaluating the historical importance of a contemporary artist, I ask myself how long an essay they would have warranted in this book (quarter-page, half-page, full-page, multi-page, etc.).

It's rare that I decide somebody would deserve more than a half-page.

[Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll is a substantial, deep, broad, and engaging exploration of the history of rock up to 1992. If you’re not into music or rock, this isn’t going to change your mind, but it’s a solid introduction to the genre.

[Marlén Carrillo Hernández-Ferman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imperdible, para los rockeros de "ayer, hoy y siempre".

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Skipping gym class in high school to hang out in the library (where else?) and read this stuff...

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots of information in here. Great stories and analysis of several different groups and time periods.

[Joel · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the book is a collection of essays, my enjoyment was varied but mostly positive.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not gonna lie, I trust I read this, I remember finding it in my grandparents' basement, first edition, but I totally forgot what was in it except that Lester Bangs wrote a few chapters.