Machers and Rockers: Chess Records and the Business of Rock & Roll (Enterprise)

Rating:
Summary: I had no idea
Review:
I read this book in one sitting, it just flows. But it's also full of surprises and things you will want to tell people about.

I had no idea who Leonard Chess was before this, and now I cant believe that was the case.



Rating:
Summary: Tough Blues
Review: Another addition to the "hey I never knew" series of books put out by this author. Gritty, tough, hard to put down. This is a great read and short enough that it doesn't give you a hand cramp. What could be better? Okay, so maybe Chess was a bit of a thieving creep, but he was interesting and did something with his life. No? You might also check out: Tough Jews. Different characters, same gestalt, more blood.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent survey
Review: Avid followers of popular music will readily understand the importance of Chess Records in the early to modern business of rock and roll production, and won't want to miss Rich Cohen's Machers And Rockers: Chess Records And The Business Of Rock & Roll, an excellent survey of the two immigrants who changed the course of musical history by recording such artists as Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry. Cohen's lively coverage tells how Chess rose to become a multi-billion-dollar business, aggressively marketing artists and riding the rock and roll wave.


Rating:
Summary: Machers and Rockers: Chess Records and the Business of Rock
Review: Cohen's style reflects the emotion and soul of the music and characters he writes about. The best book I've read in a long time!

Rating:
Summary: entertaining, but unreliable
Review: i liked rich cohen's previous books, and this one is filled with juicy anecdotal detail and a fresh perspective on the emergence of rock & roll. but it's filled with factual errors: bo diddley's name is misspelled throughout (in a history of chess records!); ben e. king is identified as the lead singer of the moonglows (it was the drifters); twice, cohen says that sam phillips sold elvis' contract to columbia records; he places the who's 'who's next' tour in '77 (the album came out in '71); dion & the belmonts didn't record 'stagger lee'...dion did as a solo artist. cohen's writing is vivid, and the story he has to tell is an important one, but when the story is riddled with mistakes (there are plenty more), it becomes frustrating.

Rating:
Summary: Machers and Rockers
Review: Machers and Rockers is an embarrassment to the publishing industry. Just about everything the author knows about Chess Records and the Chess brothers was lifted from Nadine Cohodas's vastly superior book, Spinning Blues Into Gold. Cohen manages to insert a mistake onto every other page of his book, even to misreading Cohodas's book. For example, the address of the Macomba was 39th and Cottage Grove, not 47th and South Karlov, Muddy Waters was NOT pioneering his new sound in the Checkerboard (a club that came way after the 1940s), Chess was not recording in makeshift studios early on, but in the top-notch Universal Recording, he has Sam Phillips selling Evis's contract to RCA for 30K in one place and 35K in another, he has Etta James singing "Don't Go to Strangers" instead of Etta Jones and then pretends to have listened to it with an evocative description, he has 2120 the last address of Chess when the address was it was 320 E. 21st, he has Ben E. King leading the Moonglows when it was Bobby Lester, and on and on and on. Not only can Cohen not get the facts right, he has absolutely no understanding of the label and its recording legacy. This is a dishonest book written by an author who has absolutely no quams on foisting a worthless book on the public.

If you plan to spend money on a book about Chess Records and the Chess brothers I emplore you to invest it in the tremendously researched and far more interesting Spinning Blues Into Gold. Books like Marchers and Rockers need to be ground up into pulp as fast as possible to avoid infecting the public discourse on this famous label.

Rating:
Summary: Machers and Rockers--5 Stars!!
Review: Rich Cohen has done it again--this time with the blues and the business of rock and roll. What an amazing story. I read the entire book in one night while listening to good old Muddy Waters. Five Stars!!!!

Rating:
Summary: An Extraordinary Book That Is It's Own Soundtrack
Review: The author tells the stories of the Chess Family, the Northern Migration, Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry and how they turned into Elvis and everbody else, how regionall culture turned into pop culture and then into world culture, and what it's like bid goodbye to a generation of fathers. It's an American story, and a great one. This is non-fiction at the highest level -- non-fiction where the writing pushes it into the realm of the classic. It's the best book about music I've ever come across: You'll smell the sweat and the Thunderbird, hear the feet stomping on pine floorboards, taste the cigarette smoke, and watch a whole new world get born before your eyes

Rating:
Summary: like a clean guitar line
Review: this book reminds me of a great old rock and roll song. more than any other book or movie i know, it makes clear all the connections, where the blues turns into rock and roll, and where the businessman becomes the rock and roll executive. it is also the bigger story of race and culture, and how that old nation became the new America.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Book
Review: This is a book about American Pop Culture. About music, yes, but also about a certain type of person, and and a certain time, and a certain culture that is on its way out. Or already gone. I think it is really like a Chicago version of that Irving Howe book, "World of Our Fathers." It is about Jews, blues and the old city of Chicago. I reccomend it highly.