Sonic Boom, Peter Ames Carlin
Sonic Boom, Peter Ames Carlin
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Sonic Boom
The Impossible Rise of Warner Bros. Records, From Hendrix to Fleetwood Mac to Madonna to Prince

Author: Peter Ames Carlin

Narrator: David de Vries

Unabridged: 10 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 01/19/2021


Synopsis

The most compelling figures in the Warner Bros. story are the sagacious Mo Ostin and the unlikely crew of hippies, eccentrics, and enlightened execs who were the first in the music business to read the generational writing on the wall in the mid-1960s. By recruiting outsider artists and allowing them to make the music they wanted, Ostin and his staff transformed an out-of-touch company into the voice of a generation. Along the way, they revolutionized the music industry and, within just a few years, created the most successful record label in the history of the American music industry.

Ostin ushered in a counterintuitive model that matched the counterculture. His offbeat crew reinvented the way business was done, giving their artists free rein while rejecting out-of-date methods of advertising, promotion, and distribution. And even as they set new standards for in-house weirdness, the upstarts' experiments and innovations paid off, to the tune of hundreds of legendary hit albums.

It may sound like a fairy tale, but once upon a time Warner Bros Records conquered the music business by focusing on the music rather than the business. Their story is as raucous as it is inspiring, pure entertainment that also maps a route to that holy grail: love and money.

About Peter Ames Carlin

Peter Ames Carlin has been a columnist for the Oregonian newspaper since 2000, and he is the author of Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, which was acclaimed by Wilson collaborator Van Dyke Parks as "the essential Beach Boys saga." He has also worked as a freelance writer and as a senior writer at People magazine. Carlin lives with his wife and three children in Portland, Oregon.


Reviews

This was a fascinating and entertaining read about Warner Brothers Records ("WBR") and its history. WBR was well ahead of its time culturally and I saw so many parallels between what it was doing in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s for its clients (artists) and employees that companies are still trying t......more

Goodreads review by Stewart

Full disclosure: I won a free ARC of this book in a Goodreads giveaway. And apparently I’ve won often enough that I can just type “Full” and then keep selecting the middle option to let the predictive text finish the sentence for me … This is one of those books where the front cover tells you pretty......more

Goodreads review by Michael

Another pop music/record company history, catnip to me. I believe I have read another book about Warner Bros. Records, or at least some chapters in a larger history because some of this was not new to me. The author did a great job with research, talking to Mo Ostin, who was there at the beginning,......more

Goodreads review by Martin

This was a quick read, well researched book about Warner Brothers Records and focusing on the time when Mo Ostin was involved (the mid-60’s to the mid-90’s). It is more a book about the business rather than the music. The artists and albums are framework, but the meat comes from the company interwor......more