5 Music Biographies Every Rock Fan Should Read

Malcolm Young: The Man Who Made AC/DC
By: Jeff Apter
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Malcolm Young was a legend: the founder and the driving force of AC/DC, a man with what many have called ‘the greatest right hand in rock and roll’. That right hand provided the instantly recognisable riffs and muscle behind such timeless songs as ‘Highway to Hell’, ‘Back in Black’, ‘A Long Way to the Top’ and many others. Malcolm was instrumental in ensuring that AC/DC survived shifting musical trends and numerous in-house dramas to stand tall as the biggest rock band on the planet. Yet he was the most unpretentious man to ever strap on a Gretsch guitar. 

One of eight children, Young was always destined for a life in rock and roll: his elder brother George was a key member of The Easybeats and was also a vital early mentor of AC/DC. And Malcolm stood alongside his younger brother Angus in AC/DC for the best part of 40 years. 

Malcolm lived hard and fast, enduring incredible hardship when the band started out in the mid-1970s, surviving the terrible loss of Bon Scott in 1980, and suffering numerous personal demons, including alcoholism. Yet without Malcolm Young, there would have been no AC/DC. As the band’s former bassist, Mark Evans, wrote of Malcolm: ‘He was the driven one, the planner, the schemer, the behind the scenes guy, ruthless and astute

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“Life” by Keith Richards
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Once-in-a-generation memoir of a rock legend…

With the Rolling Stones, Keith Richards created the riffs, the lyrics and the songs that roused the world, and over four decades he lived the original rock and roll life: taking the chances he wanted, speaking his mind, and making it all work in a way that no one before him had ever done. Now, at last, the man himself tells us the story of life in the crossfire hurricane. And what a life.

Listening obsessively to Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters records as a child in post-war Kent. Learning guitar and forming a band with Mick Jagger and Brian Jones. The Rolling Stones’ first fame and success as a bad-boy band.

Creating immortal riffs such as the ones in ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ and ‘Street Fighting Man’ and ‘Honky Tonk Women’. Falling in love with Anita Pallenberg and the death of Brian Jones.

Tax exile in France, wildfire tours of the US, ‘Exile on Main Street’ and ‘Some Girls’. Ever increasing fame, isolation and addiction. Falling in love with Patti Hansen.

Estrangement from Mick Jagger and subsequent reconciliation. Solo albums and performances with his band the Xpensive Winos. Marriage, family and the road that goes on for ever.

In a voice that is uniquely and intimately his own, with the disarming honesty that has always been his trademark, Keith Richards brings us the essential life story of our times. 

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Room Full of Mirrors : A Biography of Jimi Hendrix
By: Charles R Cross
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Jimi Hendrix died in 1970, but his music and spirit are still very much alive for his fans everywhere. Charles R. Cross vividly recounts the life of Hendrix, from his difficult childhood and adolescence in Seattle through his incredible rise to celebrity in London’s swinging sixties. It is the story of an outrageous life–with legendary tales of sex, drugs, and excess–while it also reveals a man who struggled to accept his role as idol and who privately craved the kind of normal family life he never had. Using never-before-seen documents and private letters, and based on hundreds of interviews with those who knew Hendrix–many of whom had never before agreed to be interviewed–Room Full of Mirrors unlocks the vast mystery of one of music’s most enduring legends.

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The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band
by Nikki Sixx, Vince Neil, Mick Mars, and Tommy Lee.
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Mötley Crüe – The most influential, enduring, and iconic metal band of the 1980’s reveals everything a tell-all of epic proportions.

The Dirt—the outrageous, legendary, no-holds-barred autobiography of Mötley Crüe. Fans have gotten glimpses into the band’s crazy world of backstage scandals, celebrity love affairs, rollercoaster drug addictions, and immortal music in Mötley Crüe books like Tommyland and The Heroin Diaries, but now the full spectrum of sin and success by Tommy Lee, Nikki Sixx, Vince Neil, and Mick Mars is an open book in The Dirt.
Their hobbies have included collecting automatic weapons, cultivating long arrest records, pushing the envelope of conceivable drug abuse, and dreaming up backstage antics that would make Ozzy Osbourne blanch with modesty.

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Scar Tissue
By: Anthony Kiedis
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In Scar Tissue Anthony Kiedis, charismatic and highly articulate frontman of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, recounts his remarkable life story, and the history of the band itself.

Raised in the Midwest, he moved to LA aged eleven to live with his father Blackie, purveyor of pills, pot, and cocaine to the Hollywood elite. After a brief child-acting career, Kiedis dropped out of U.C.L.A. and plunged headfirst into the demimonde of the L.A. underground music scene. He formed the band with three schoolfriends – and found his life’s purpose.

Crisscrossing the country, the Chili Peppers were musical innovators and influenced a whole generation of musicians. But there’s a price to pay for both success and excess and in Scar Tissue, Kiedis writes candidly of the overdose death of his soul mate and band mate, Hillel Slovak, and his own ongoing struggle with an addiction to drugs.

Scar Tissue far transcends the typical rock biography, because Anthony Kiedis is anything but a typical rock star. It is instead a compelling story of dedication and debauchery, of intrigue and integrity, of recklessness and redemption.

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