Book Review: Stalking the Red Headed Stranger

Katie March 7, 2012 0 Comments

I just have to start out by saying that I LOVED this book.  It was hard to put down once I started it, the story was so well written.

Stalking the Red Headed Stranger is subtitled “Or, How to Get Your Songs into the Hands of the Artists Who Really Matter Through Show Business Trickery, Underhanded Skullduggery, Shrewdness, and Chicanery as Well as Various Less Nefarious Methods of Song Plugging: A Practical Handbook and Historical Portrait”  Quite a subtitled there, right?

The book is written by Randy Poe.  The story starts with him talking about how Lieber (of Lieber and Stoller) asked him to pitch a Frank Sinatra song to Willie Nelson, assuming that Randy knew Willie.  (Randy has several photos with Willie and an autograph hanging in his office.)

Randy then goes back to talk about how he actually ended up in his career and how he knew he wanted to be in the music industry and he started at the bottom, temping for a music company and ended up the president of Lieber and Stoller.

Then it talks about how he “stalked the red headed stranger” and ended up flying from Los Angeles to Canada to try and pitch the Frank Sinatra song to Willie.  Along the way, he gives tips and advice to anyone who is interested in working in the music business.

In addition to the story – I really liked the pages of the book.  It was almost like a scrapbook with a bunch of photos to go along with his stories added in and album covers and the like.  I definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in working in the music industry or looking for an inside look at the industry!

I received a free e-copy of this book from Net Galley. I was not otherwise compensated. All opinions are my own.

About the Book

Stalking the Red Headed Stranger is a guide to the art and history of professional song plugging. But this isn’t your run-of-the-mill history book/instruction manual. It is an in-depth, up-close look into the real music business by industry insider and Grammy Award nominee Randy Poe, who has represented literally hundreds of the greatest songs in the history of popular music, including “Stand By Me,” “Happy Together,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Under the Boardwalk,” “Hound Dog,” “What a Wonderful World,” “Spanish Harlem,” “Chapel of Love,” “Summer in the City,” “Love Potion No. 9,” and “Kansas City.”

But wait! There’s so much more! Interwoven throughout this entertaining and enlightening book is the hysterical saga of the author as he chases American icon Willie Nelson across Canada-via plane, taxi, rental car, and even ferryboat-in an attempt to pitch a single song to the Red Headed Stranger. And what happens on Willie’s bus doesn’t stay on Willie’s bus.

Stalking the Red Headed Stranger, or How to Get Your Songs into the Hands of the Artists Who Really Matter Through Show Business Trickery, Underhanded Skullduggery, Shrewdness, and Chicanery, as Well as Various Less Nefarious Methods of Song Plugging: A Practical Handbook and Historical Portrait is the funniest, hippest, longest-titled how-to book you’ll read this year.

RANDY POE (Los Angeles, CA) is a recipient of the music industry’s Heroes & Legends Pioneer Award; is a Grammy-nominated record producer; and has produced, compiled, and/or written the liner notes for more than 100 albums. He is the former president of the California Copyright Conference and is on the advisory board of renowned folk music publication Sing Out! He is a recipient of the ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for his book Music Publishing: A Songwriter’s Guide. Poe’s other books are Squeeze My Lemon: A Collection of Classic Blues Lyrics, featuring a foreword by blues legend B.B. King, and Skydog: The Duane Allman Story. Since 1985, Randy Poe has been the president of Leiber and Stoller Music Publishing in Los Angeles. Prior to his position with Leiber and Stoller, Poe was executive director of the Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York.

Book Review: Don Kirshner: The Man with the Golden Ear

Katie March 6, 2012 0 Comments

Don Kirshner, The Man with the Golden Ear is a biography on Don Kirshner and “How He Changed The Face of Rock and Roll” by Rich Podolsky.

In the beginning of the book, Rich talks about how he had always been fascinated with Don Kirshner and how he thought about how he could go about writing such a book.  He had started with a list of people he’d try to contact, but wasn’t sure he’d be able to talk to most of the major players in Don’s story.  However, after reading the book it seems like he did pretty well in getting almost everyone to agree to interviews – and made a lot of connections and friends along the way! (With the exception of Carole King, who rarely gives interviews.)

Don is credited as coining the term “demo” as a shortened version for the phrase “demonstration recordings” which was being used previously.  Don started out with his pal Bobby Darin, going door to door trying to sell songs and get Bobby a career.  Once Bobby’s career took off, he was forced to fire Don, but it gave Don a connection and ideas.  Most of the places that Don and Bobby went to didn’t care to look at young kids writing rock songs.  Don ended up starting his own company where he signed young writers and ended up with many, many hits over the years!

To name a few of the people he worked with – Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil (who actually co-wrote a song with Hanson for their debut album Middle of Nowhere – I Will Come To You)   Neil Sedaka and sometimes his writers teamed up with the legendary Leiber and Stoller.

He became quite the mogul and could have made a lot more money but at the time he did not realize how much there was to be made in royalties by his songs being played on Oldies stations, since those stations didn’t exist back then.

Kirshner is also credited with the early success of The Monkees, but they fired him because they wanted more control over what they were singing and playing.  Interestingly enough, they had several top 3 hits with Kirshner picking the songs, but once he was fired nothing above a top 3 ever again.  Hmm…

It was interesting to read a bit of behind the scenes of a bunch of songs that I am familiar with – Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, Stupid Cupid, The Locomotion, just to name a few, with a lot of first hand accounts from those who wrote it or from those who were around at the time.

The book is due to be released March 6, 2012.

About the Book

Book Review: Hearts That Survive

Katie March 1, 2012 0 Comments

Hearts That Survive: A Novel of the Titanic is a Historical Fiction novel by Yvonne Lehman.  The story start with Lydia who is on the Titanic with 2 men. John and Craven. Craven works for her father’s business and is a bit older than Lydia and John is more Lydia’s age but makes toy trains (Lydia’s father’s company is with real trains).  John proposes to Lydia and they decide to get married on the Titanic on the grand staircase.  After a night of partying, they don’t hear the sounds of the ship’s engines anymore and realize that the ship is not moving.  Of course, we all know what happened and now there is a frantic scramble to get life boats.

Lydia had become fast friends with Caroline while they were planning the wedding and both end up in the same life boat along with Caroline’s maid, Bess.  Also with them are Phoebe and Henry, two children that belong to an author on board who leaves to help his ailing mother while Caroline takes the children to meet up with their father later.  Lydia’s new husband tries to get on the lifeboat with her, but is told women and children only and stays back to wait for a lifeboat when men are allowed to board.  Meanwhile, Craven says he is the only one that a little girl has and gets in a life boat even though he is of no relation to the girl.

The first half of the book covers about 3 days on the Titanic and the second half of the book covers years and years where Lydia, Caroline and Bess keep in touch and move on with their lives after the tragedy of the Titanic.  We get to find out about their families and how their lives were affected by the Titanic.

The book comes in at over 400 pages but flows really well and is a quick read.  The story is great and will keep you wanting to read more.  Don’t assume that you know what is going to happen because you know the story of Titanic because that is really just a small part of the book!  There are however a lot of characters in the second half of the book, you may want to make a family tree to keep track of who is who 😉

About the Book

On April 15, 1912, Lydia Beaumont is on her way to a new life with a boundless hope in love and faith. Her new friendship with Caroline Chadwick is bonded even more as they plan Lydia’s wedding on board the “grandest ship ever built.” Then both women suffer tragic losses when the “unsinkable” Titanic goes down. Can each survive the scars the disaster left on their lives?

Decades later, Alan Morris feels like a failure until he discovers he is the descendant of an acclaimed, successful, heroic novelist who went down with the Titanic. Will he find his identity with the past, or will he listen to Joanna Bettencourt, Caroline’s granddaughter, who says inner peace and success come only with a personal relationship with the Lord?

Will those who survived and their descendants be able to find a love more powerful than their pain?