Johan Kugelberg – författare

Born out of a union of club bands on the burgeoning Austin bohemian scene and a pronounced taste for hallucinogens, the 13th Floor Elevators were formed in late 1965 when lyricist Tommy Hall asked a local singer named Roky Erickson to join up with his new rock outfit. Four years, three official albums and countless acid trips later, it was over: the Elevators’ pioneering first run ended in a dizzying jumble of professional mismanagement, internal arguments, drug busts and forced psychiatric imprisonments. In their short existence, however, the group succeeded in blowing the lid off the budding musical underground, logging early salvos in the counter-cultural struggle against state authorities, and turning their deeply hallucinogenic take on jug-band garage rock into a new American institution called psychedelic music. Before the hippies, before the punks, there were the 13th Floor Elevators: an unlikely crew of outcast weirdo geniuses who changed culture

The first book of essays by a long-time renowned chronicler of underground culture. Johan Kugelberg's book on the early history of hip hop won the NYPL books for the teen age award 2008 and his book on the Velvet Underground won the Foreword silver medal for music 2010. The way this book mashes up lo-bro and hi-bro is readable, funny and thought-provoking, and also downright provoking. Johan Kugelberg's essays on punk, style and pop culture have entertained readers of international publications including Dazed and Confused, Another Man, Ugly Things, Perfect Sound Forever, Spin, Raygun and Fact over the last couple of decades.

The Sex Pistols have defined the look, sound, and feel of the punk movement since they formed in London in 1975. Together for less than three years a short run that included just four singles and one studio album before they broke up in 1978 their impact on the musical and cultural landscape of the last forty years is nothing short of remarkable. The Sex Pistols Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock (later to be replaced by Sid Vicious) were brought together by the cultural impresario Malcolm McLaren. Between the cultivated attitude of the players themselves, the aggressive management of McLaren, and the tremendous success of their era-defining album Never Mind the Bollocks Here s the Sex Pistols, the band embodied the punk spirit and coloured the worlds of music, fashion, youth culture, and design forever.Published to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the band s formation, Johan Kugelberg and Jon Savage draw on an unprecedented wealth of mate- rial from McLaren s handwritten letters to never- before-seen photographs of the band, Jamie Reid s iconic album artwork, and a range of ephemera from concert tickets to fanzines to produce the most comprehensive visual history of the band ever produced and a bible of popular culture for years to come.