Merle/Rush Bundle

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Regular: $59.97 Bundle: $53.97

Bundle Includes: The Merle Travis Story: Sixteen Tons and Moving Pictures:How Rush Created Progressive Hard Rock’s Greatest Record.

The Merle Travis Story: Sixteen Tons. Authors: Merle Travis/Deke Dickerson. 6.5” X 9.5” 508 pages. Hard Cover. 468 pages text and 40 pages full color. Weight: 2.125 lb. ISBN: 978-1-947026-58-2. Price: $35.00.

Sixteen Tons: The Merle Travis Story is the story of Country Music Hall of Fame member Merle Travis, a brilliant, multitalented, and deeply troubled artist who is widely considered a genius. A world-class guitarist who dazzled audiences with his Kentucky thumb-picking style, Merle was also a pioneering country songwriter who wrote such classics as “Dark as a Dungeon” and “Sixteen Tons.” Additionally, he was responsible for early electric guitar innovations in the 1940s, and was a gifted actor, writer, and cartoonist, among many other talents. This definitive portrait of Travis’s life and career is the result of a recently discovered treasure trove of Merle’s unpublished autobiographical writings, which have been fleshed out with an immersive deep-dive biography by researcher and musical historian Deke Dickerson. It details the highs of a career that began with a string of nine straight Top 5 singles in the 1940s, and the lows of a lifelong struggle with alcoholism that developed into an addiction to pills that nearly killed Merle when he was running with Johnny Cash in the late 1950s. Travis ultimately reemerged to become a Grammy-winning artist who inspired millions and became a music legend.

Moving Pictures:How Rush Created Progressive Hard Rock’s Greatest Record. Moving Pictures:How Rush Created Progressive Hard Rock’s Greatest Record. Author: Will Romano, 6.04” x 8.83” inches 298 pages. Soft Cover. 290 pages text and 8 pages full color. Weight: 1.1 lb. Publisher: Backbeat. ISBN: 978-1-4930-6235-5. Price: $24.97.

There’s nothing like it in the Rush catalog, or, indeed, in the entire prog-rock canon. Stylistically expansive and intellectually ambitious, 1981’s Moving Pictures was a landmark release, one that helped define the progressive genre and that ensured Rush’s place in the rock pantheon. In this definitive account of the album’s creation and legacy, author Will Romano explores the rare alchemy behind a record that continues to inspire musicians and listeners even today.

The key to its lasting significance is the distinctive overarching vision that Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart brought to the album. As Romano shows, Moving Pictures reconciled opposing creative sensibilities to a remarkable degree, giving the record real thematic depth while at the same time rendering it the very antithesis of a “concept album.”

Filled with behind-the-scenes details based on new research and interviews, newbies and fervent fans alike will find this an illuminating exploration of one of the band’s most enduring achievements.

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