[Cover photo credit to Adam Di Carlo, taken 10/1/2005]
Trouser Press Books will be releasing two notable books on the music history of important venues on October 15th, 2024, making for a bumper autumn reading season for fans. First of all, there’s the tome originally issued in 1988, and out of print for decades, This Ain’t No Disco: The Story of CBGB, by Roman Kozak, with a new introduction by Christopher Frantz of Talking Heads. Then there’s Marquee: The Story of the World’s Greatest Music Venue, touting the influential London club, written by Robert Sellers and Nick Pendleton.
This Ain’t No Disco: The Story of CBGB is a “detailed warts-and-all history,” with memories, stories and gossip from insiders who worked, played, or just hung out at CBGB. Written while the club was open and most of the musicians still alive, this work builds on “gritty, outrageous and sometimes hilarious detail.”
The text includes quotes from CBGB founder Hilly Kristal, Joey Ramone and Dee Dee Ramone (the Ramones), Clem Burke and Chris Stein (Blondie), David Byrne (Talking Heads), Jim Carroll, Willy DeVille (Mink DeVille), Annie Golden (Shirts), Richard Hell and Richard Lloyd (Television), Lenny Kaye (Patti Smith Group), Handsome Dick Manitoba (Dictators), Wendy O. Williams (Plasmatics) and others.
This new edition not only includes a foreword by Chris Frantz of Talking Heads, but 12 pages of photographs by Ebet Roberts and two pieces of historical reporting about the club’s closing in 2006. It retails at $22.95.
As for The Marquee, which started out as a Jazz club on London’s Oxford Street before relocating to Soho’s Wardour Street, it kicked off by presenting R&B with Alexis Korner, then also The Rolling Stones and The Yardbirds, and moved into Hard Rock with The Who, Cream, Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin.
It moved with the times into Progressive Rock with Jethro Tull, Yes and Genesis before the Sex Pistols, Stranglers, Damned, Sham 69 and Generation X. The Marquee also became home to the new wave (Adam and the Ants, the Jam, the Police) and to the New Wave of Heavy Metal (Iron Maiden, Def Leppard). AC/DC, Bryan Adams, Faith No More, Guns n’ Roses, INXS, Metallica, R.E.M. and ZZ Top all played there.
Marquee: The Story of the World’s Greatest Music Venue tells the club’s 30-year story. Co-written by the son of the club’s founders, the book is “packed with dates, memories, wild stories, musical milestones and behind-the-scenes drama, all as told by the musicians, management, staff and fans who were there.” It also retails at $22.95.
