Product Description

"Music From Big Pink" is a factional novella: a place where fictional characters rub shoulders with real people, and where actual documented events thread their way through the text alongside imagined scenarios. Through the eyes of twenty-three-year-old Greg Keltner, drug dealer, wannabe musician, and hanger-on, we witness the gestation and birth of an album that will go on to cast its spell across forty years. John Niven brings these characters to life with remarkable skill, and the result is an exhilarating, vivid, and powerfully moving book about the highs - and lows - of creating musical history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29222 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Review
'A brilliant series of pocket-sized books focussing on a classic album. Each one a work of real love.' --NME Magazine

About the Author
John Niven toured and recorded as a guitarist in the Wishing Stones (their sole LP Wildwood owes more than a passing debt to the music of The Band), before becoming an A&R man and working with acts like Travis, Mogwai, and Sigur Ros. He lives just outside of London, and this is his first book.

Customer Reviews

Into the frazzled world of alchemists...
No doubting it, The Band were musical alchemists. Niven has written a novella inspired by listening to one of the greatest and most moving albums ever created. Members of The Band, mainly Richard Manuel and Rick Danko, are introduced to us through factual occurrances and imagined scenarios where the main character Greg is drawn into their circle of friends and hangers-on.

I am impressed by the merging of the real and imagined scenes: The mercurial, troubled Manuel is brought back to us in the prose and dialogue, and through references to his beautiful voice and songwriting on the Big Pink LP. If this book acheives anything for readers unfamiliar with The Band, it will move them to buy a copy of the remastered CD, or maybe even search out an original gatefold copy of the album.

A powerful, insightful and clever piece of writing.

Nice One Mr. Niven
Having adored Kill Your Friends, and appreciated The Amateurs, it seemed only fair to read Mr. Niven's 1st offering, Music from Big Pink, and disappointed I was not. This guy can really write. I found this book highly emotive and the fact and fiction most skilfully married. He seems to have completely, and I'm not quite sure how, captured the essence of the period. One feels privileged to be part of it, and genuinely moved when everybody moves on.

Well done Mr. Niven. Now could we please have the further adventures of Mr. Stelfox? He could and should be the Harry Flashman of the future.