On Record - Vol. 4: 1981: Images, Interviews & Insights From the Year in Music

by G. Brown

Overview

Chronicles the first stirrings of synth pop writ large (the Human League, Soft Cell), the gated reverb drum sound that became ubiquitous (Phil Collins), superstars from Stevie Nicks to Billy Joel to the Police, and a full complement of one-hit wonders and R&B, country and jazz sensations.. The On Record series is an year-by-year, comprehensive look at the evolution of popular music from 1978 to 1998. Colorado Music Experience founding director and author G. Brown covered popular music at The Denver Post for 26 years, interviewing well over 3,200 musicians, including Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, and Kurt Cobain, all of whom recounted their escapades and reminisced about what their time on the charts meant to them personally and musically. Over the decades, G. also amassed an archive of close to 15,000 rare promotional photos. Each volume of the On Record series presents nearly 200 rare archival images and 100 interviews with an array of performers, from the late Jerry Garcia and Dave Matthews to Bono and Santana. Beautifully crafted, these books belong in the library of every music fan and music institute. Proceeds from book sales benefit Colorado Music Experience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780991566860
Publisher:	Colorado Music Experience
Publication date:	09/19/2023
Series:	On Record , #4
Edition description:	200 plus photos
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	10.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

G. Brown has navigated the Rocky Mountain musical landscape for decades, both as a journalist and as a radio personality. He covered popular music at the Denver Post for 26 years, interviewing well over 2,500 musicians, from Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen to Bono and Kurt Cobain. Published in numerous national magazines, including Rolling Stone and National Lampoon, Brown also covered music news and hosted and programmed for a myriad of Denver-based radio stations.

He is the author of four other books, including the award-winning Red Rocks: The Concert Years, Colorado Rock Chronicles, and Telluride Bluegrass Festival: The First Forty Years. And he is the founding director of Colorado Music Experience, a nonprofit cultural and educational organization established to preserve the legacies of Colorado music.

G. currently lives in Colorado.

FB: @colomusic.org

Editorial Reviews

"I've had the good fortune of doing many interviews with G. Brown. He has created a wonderfully interesting retrospective about popular music culture as vinyl morphed into multiple formats. I am honored to be part of G's On Record book series, which is both a compelling read and a joy to look at."

Kenny Loggins

10/01/2023

Colorado Music Hall of Fame founding director Brown (Red Rocks: The Concert Years), who worked as a music journalist for the Denver Post for 26 years, compiles 206 of his articles from 1981 about musicians on the Billboard 200 and Hot 100 charts, plus 22 more musicians represented in one-line capsules and press photos. Although focused on album releases and some of their covers, the page-length articles go beyond simple reviews by incorporating background material and quotes from musicians. The articles provide a window into a time when U2 was just "a band from Ireland," and less-enduring artists were big names, but the entries are not dated, which may frustrate some readers. Given recent interest in '80s music (Kate Bush, for instance) and in overlooked or previously derided genres, such as disco, this book may provide fodder for the dedicated music archaeologist. For general readers, the entries—often too similar to one another—will come across as straightforward music journalism without much flair or depth. But Brown's introduction, describing how music journalism changed in the time leading up to 1981, shows what the book could have been. VERDICT Only for scholars of popular music or the time period.—Robert Mixner

Library Journal