Brian Fairbanks – författare

The tragic and inspiring story of the leaders of Outlaw country and their influence on today's Alt-Country and Americana superstars, tracing a path from Waylon Jennings' survival on the Day the Music Died through to the Highwaymen and on to the current creative and commercial explosion of Chris Stapleton, Brandi Carlile, Tyler Childers, Jason Isbell, and the HighwomenOn February 2, 1959, Waylon Jennings, bassist for his best friend, the rock star Buddy Holly, gave up his seat on a charter flight. Jennings, 21, joked that he hoped the plane, leaving without him, would crash. When it did, killing all aboard, on "the Day the Music Died," he was devastated and never fully recovered.Jennings switched to playing country, creating the Outlaw movement with Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson, and later forming the Highwaymen, country's first supergroup, with them. The foursome battled addiction, record companies, ex-wives, tragic violence, and the I.R.S. and D.E.A., en route to unprecedented mainstream success. Today, their acolytes Jamey Johnson, Zach Bryan, Tyler Childers, Brandi Carlile, and Taylor Swift outsell all challengers, and country in its various forms is the most popular of all genres.In this fascinating new book, Brian Fairbanks draws a line from Buddy Holly through the Outlaw stars of the 60s and 70s, all the way to the country headliners and more diverse, up-and-coming Nashville rebels of today. He brings the reader deep into the worlds of not only Cash, Nelson, Kristofferson, Jennings, and Jessi Colter, but artists like Chris Stapleton, Sturgill Simpson, Ryan Bingham, and Jason Isbell, stadium-filling masters whose stories have not been told in book form, as well as new, diverse artists like the Highwomen, Brittney Spencer, and Allison Russell, and shows how a twenty-one-year-old bass playing plane crash survivor helped changed the course of American popular music.

The untold story of the real, extraordinary people who inspired Christopher Isherwood's characters in Cabaret, the landmark Broadway musical and Oscar-winning film, and the vibrant Bohemia that escaped from Berlin or endured under the Nazi regimeEven diehard fans of the movie remain unaware that Isherwood's Berlin Stories, celebrated as one of the best novels of the 20th Century, is based on a true story—and real people, from the larger-than-life landlady to the immortal, flighty, fantastical Sally Bowles, whose escapades in 1930s Weimar Berlin were comically exaggerated in one of the most memorable characters in Broadway history.In a novelistic style that captures the joyful art-making and wild final parties of a democratic Germany before Hitler, Life is a Cabaret is a group biography of these enigmatic and provocative muses. Thanks to exhaustive research, investigative reporter Brian Fairbanks recounts the weird and wondrous lives of Jean Ross (the real Sally, a brilliant writer, free-loving film critic secretly working for Stalin's communists), Wilfrid Israel (who saved more Jews than Oskar Schindler), Gerald Hamilton (a gay conman with questionable Nazi ties), and all of the others immortalized in the iconic, eternal Berlin Stories. Fairbanks unearths belief-defying details of survival, tragedy, sex, and brilliant art from these people and the world they inhabited--a world with illuminating, and at times disturbing, parallels to the one we live in today.