"Opal is a fiercely independent young woman pushing against the grain in her style and attitude, Afro-punk before that term existed. Coming of age in Detroit, she can't imagine settling for a 9-to-5 job--despite her unusual looks, Opal believes she can be a star. So when the aspiring British singer/songwriter Neville Charles discovers her at a bar's amateur night, she takes him up on his offer to make rock music together for the fledgling Rivington...

"Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go-Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it's the rock and roll she loves most. By the time she's twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things. Another band getting noticed is The Six, led by the brooding Billy Dunne....

A "narrative of [rock guitarist and actor Brownstein's] escape from a turbulent family life into a world where music was the means toward self-invention, community, and rescue. Along the way, Brownstein chronicles the excitement and contradictions within the era's flourishing and fiercely independent music subculture, including experiences that sowed the seeds for the observational satire of the popular television series Portlandia years later"--Dust...

Greta James's rise to indie stardom was hard-won. Before she graced magazine covers and played to sold out venues, she spent her girlhood practicing her guitar in the family garage, full of big dreams and determination. Her first fan was her mother, Helen, who always encouraged Greta to follow her heart. But her father, Conrad, was less supportive; he saw only a precarious road ahead for his daughter, and always pushed her to make more practical choices....

"With her arrival on the pop music scene in the early 1980s, Madonna generated nothing short of an explosion-as great as that of Elvis or the Beatles or Michael Jackson-taking the nation by storm with her liberated politics and breathtaking talent. Within two years of her 1983 debut album, a shopping mall in California was nicknamed "The Madonna Mall" because it was overrun with "Material Girls." Later that year, the flagship Macy's store in Manhattan...

"Irish singer-songwriter Sinéad O'Connor burst onto the pop scene in 1987 with her album The Lion and the Cobra, and followed it with the Grammy-winning I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got (1990), which featured a cover of Prince's song "Nothing Compares 2 U." In 1992, she infamously tore a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live to protest the sexual abuse committed by priests and covered up by church authorities. O'Connor was immediately...

"Once upon a time, the pressure to be the perfect daughter nearly broke Kayla Whitman. Desperate to find an outlet away from her controlling mother, she picked up a pair of drumsticks, forever altering the rhythm of her life. Since then, shes been determined to make her own way, finding her home with her bandmates even as she fights to keep her past and her present firmly separate. Things were simple enough when the Lillys were playing local gigs...

"He was the troubled face of rock 'n' roll...until he suddenly disappeared without a trace. Jane Pyre was once one half of one of the most famous rock 'n' roll duos in the world, the Lightning Bottles. Years later, she's perhaps the most hated--and least understood--woman in music. She was never as popular with fans as her bandmate (and soulmate), Elijah Hart--even if Jane was the one who wrote the songs that catapulted the Lightning Bottles to instant,...

"A tender and intimate memoir by one of the most remarkable, trailblazing, and tenacious women in music, the two-time Grammy Award-winning "premiere song-stylist and songwriter of her generation" (New Yorker), Rickie Lee Jones. Have you met Ms. Jones? One weekend night on primetime television, a then-unknown singer and vital part of the burgeoning Los Angeles jazz pop scene skyrocketed to fame overnight after a now- iconic performance on Saturday...

Cherie Currie, with her signature Bowie haircut and fishnet stockings, was the lead singer of seventies teenage all-girl rock band the Runaways. At the tender age of fifteen, she joined a group of talented girls--Joan Jett and Lita Ford on guitar, Jackie Fox on bass, and Sandy West on drums--who could play rock like no one else. Arriving on the Los Angeles music scene in 1975, they catapulted from playing small clubs to selling out major stadiums...