Michaelangelo Matos – författare

The gripping story of how Lou Adler made Los Angeles the musical center of the world in the '60s and '70s, in music and beyond, written by acclaimed music journalist Michaelangelo MatosFor decades, Lou Adler has been most recognizable as the clotheshorse basketball fan with courtside season tickets to the L.A. Lakers, where he watches the game with his best friend, Jack Nicholson. But from the fifties through the eighties, Adler was the key architect of Los Angeles rock-from the birth of soul to surf music to rock festivals and rock films, no one else had Adler's reach or his success.In California Dreamin', music journalist Michaelangelo Matos introduces readers to the West Coast's first independent rock producer, a songwriter and consigliere of Sam Cooke who co-wrote the classic "Wonderful World" in 1960, before running his own label as well as writing and producing its artists. From there, he worked with everyone from surf-music kings Jan & Dean to crooner Johnny Rivers, from hippie supergroup The Mamas & the Papas to trailblazing feminist songwriter Carole King to stoner comedy kings Cheech & Chong. Far from content to stop there, he reconfigured the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, ushering in a new era of rock festivals, and co-founded the Roxy, the Sunset Strip club that would, over the next decades, become a crucible for the emerging punk, new wave, and heavy metal scenes that dominated the Strip. As the seventies rolled into the eighties, Adler set his sights on a brand new frontier, bringing rock films like Monterey Pop, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Up in Smoke, and Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, to audiences worldwide.As unconventional a biography as Adler was in his own creative ventures, California Dreamin' is the first book to show how Adler became the pacesetter of the rock industry along the West Coast, a master tastemaker walking the razor's edge between highbrow and lowbrow, redefining the sound of a whole generation in his wake.

Everybody knows the hits of 1984-pop music's greatest year. From "Thriller" to "Purple Rain," "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" to "Like a Virgin," "Hello" to "Against All Odds," "Sister Christian" to "Love Is a Battlefield," "What's Love Got to Do with It" to "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go," they continue to dominate advertising, karaoke nights, and the soundtracks for film classics (Boogie Nights) and TV hits (Stranger Things). But the story of that thrilling, turbulent time, an era when Top 40 radio was both the leading edge of popular culture and a moral battleground, has never been told with the full detail it deserves-until now.Can't Slow Down is the definitive portrait of the exploding world of mid-eighties pop and the time it defined, from Cold War anxiety to the home-computer revolution. Big acts like Michael Jackson (Thriller), Prince (Purple Rain), Madonna (Like a Virgin), Bruce Springsteen (Born in the U.S.A.), and George Michael (Wham!'s Make It Big) rubbed shoulders with the fermenting scenes of hip-hop, indie rock, and club music.Rigorously researched, mapping the entire terrain of American pop, with crucial side trips to the UK and Jamaica, from the biz to the stars to the upstarts and beyond, Can't Slow Down is a vivid trip to a thrilling, turbulent time when pop was remaking itself, and the culture at large, one hit at a time. Let's go crazy!