John Einarson

Emerging from a period of protest and social unrest, 1968 was the year that ushered in gut-punching sounds that would define classic and hard rock—the formation of bands like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath rolled away the light sounds of psychedelic music and Flower Power. John Einarson provides the first detailed account of this crucial period.

In the 1980s, Manitoba country-rock group The C-Weed Band scored a half dozen Top Ten hits on the country music charts beginning with their #1 hit single "Evangeline". As an Indigenous band, they broke ground for other Indigenous artists on the Canadian music mainstream. Starting out in the tough Main Street Winnipeg bars, the band faced daunting odds including poverty, discrimination, and racism throughout their rise to success. The members of The C-Weed Band, whose nucleus was the three Ranville brothers - Errol, Wally and Don - from rural Eddystone MB prevailed, earning the admiration of a legion of dedicated fans and respect from fellow musicians not only across Canada but in the United States, Europe and China where the band toured to great acclaim. This is their story, told by the members of the band themselves as well as associates, contemporaries, and friends. It's been a long, strange trip but The C-Weed Band triumphed and are still performing to adoring crowds everywhere.

In the 1980s, Manitoba country-rock group The C-Weed Band scored a half dozen Top Ten hits on the country music charts beginning with their #1 hit single "Evangeline". As an Indigenous band, they broke ground for other Indigenous artists on the Canadian music mainstream. Starting out in the tough Main Street Winnipeg bars, the band faced daunting odds including poverty, discrimination, and racism throughout their rise to success. The members of The C-Weed Band, whose nucleus was the three Ranville brothers - Errol, Wally and Don - from rural Eddystone MB prevailed, earning the admiration of a legion of dedicated fans and respect from fellow musicians not only across Canada but in the United States, Europe and China where the band toured to great acclaim. This is their story, told by the members of the band themselves as well as associates, contemporaries, and friends. It's been a long, strange trip but The C-Weed Band triumphed and are still performing to adoring crowds everywhere.

Widely hailed as a genius, Arthur Lee was a character every bit as colorful and unique as his music. In 1966, he was Prince of the Sunset Strip, busy with his pioneering racially mixed band, Love, and accelerating the evolution of California folk-rock by infusing it with jazz and orchestral influences, a process that would climax in a timeless masterpiece, the Love album Forever Changes. Shaped by a Memphis childhood and a South Los Angeles youth, Lee always craved fame. He would achieve his ambition with a mixture of vaulting talent and colossal chutzpah. Drug use and a reticence to tour were his Achilles heels, and he succumbed to a dissolute lifestyle just as superstardom was beckoning. Despite endorsements from the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, Lee s subsequent career was erratic and haunted by the shadow of Forever Changes, reaching a nadir with his imprisonment in 1996 for a firearms offence. Redemption followed, culminating in an astonishing postmillennial comeback that found him playing Forever Changes to adoring, multi-generational fans around the world. This upswing was only interrupted by his untimely death from leukemia in 2006. Written with the full consent and cooperation of Arthur s widow, Diane Lee, Forever Changes is a meticulously researched biography that includes lengthy extracts from Arthur s vivid, comic, and poignant memoirs, published here for the first time. Author John Einarson has also amassed dozens of new interviews with the surviving members of Love and with many others who fell into the incomparable Lee s flamboyant orbit. This updated edition adds a new foreword by Love s co-founder and lead guitarist, Johnny Echols.

Based on more than one hundred first-person interviews, this thoughtful portrait of the Byrds creative genius Gene Clark reveals how he pioneered new sounds within rock music while serving as one of the main musical visionaries in the seminal 1960s group. Original.

For What It's Worth is a revealing insiders look at an influential and groundbreaking rock group whose remendous talents have gone on to achieve legendary status in the annals of rock music history. Besides chronicling Buffalo Springfield's roots and career, the book offers rare and personal glimpses into several seminal music scenes, notably the Greenwich Village folk movement, the embryonic San Francisco scene, and LA's Sunset Strip, along with a lesson in the pitfalls of the music industry. Written with founding member Richie Furay and including the insights, recollections, and reflections of band members, managers, close friends, associates, and contemporaries, the book paints a unique portrait of one of rock music's most beloved groups. Updated edition includes new epilogue.

As told by the musicians who made it happen, Desperados: The Roots of Country Rock revisits country rock's rise to the top of the charts. Music scholar John Einarson delves into the years from 1963, when Buck Owens and his Buckaroos brought an electric edge to their Texas honky-tonk tunes, to 1973, when The Eagles released their album "Desperado" on David Geffen's label. Einarson examines how folk, rockabilly, blues, Nashville country, Tejano, bluegrass, and other musical idioms influenced a generation of journeyman musicians. He traces the paths taken by the songsmiths, the bands in which they served their apprenticeships, and the songs they wrote together, as they steadily shaped the country rock sound. The protagonists of this story include talented but troubled Gram Parsons, a virtuoso determined to burn out before he faded away; the versatile and appealing Linda Ronstadt; Mike Nesmith, the Monkee from Texas who returned to his musical roots with a trilogy of country-rock albums; TV heartthrob turned country rocker Rick Nelson; folkie songbird Emmylou Harris before she made it in Nashville; and many others.

This is the first book written on the group whose members included Neil Young and Stephen Stills. Provides a fascinating insight into the American music scene of the sixties.