Sonic Boom: The Impossible Rise of Warner Bros. Records, from Hendrix to Fleetwood Mac to Madonna to Prince

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 His offbeat crew reinvented the way business was done, giving their artists free rein while rejecting out-of-date methods of advertising, promotion, and distribution.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 the Author :
Peter Ames Carlin is a writer and the author of several books, including Bruce, a biography of Bruce Springsteen; Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson; and Paul McCartney: A Life. He has also been a free-lance journalist, a senior writer at People in New York City, and a television columnist and feature writer at The Oregonian in Portland. He is a regular speaker on music, art and popular culture. David de Vries, an Earphones Award-winning audiobook narrator and veteran stage actor and director, spent three years in the cast of Wicked and was the last Lumiere in the Broadway production of Beauty and the Beast. He has also appeared in numerous films and voiced commercial campaigns for companies large and small, including American Express, AT&T, UPS, Motorola, Georgia-Pacific, Delta Airlines, Coca Cola, and Ford, among others. He can be seen in a number of feature films, including The Founder, The Accountant, Captain America: Civil War, and Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. On television, his credits include House of Cards, Nashville, and Halt and Catch Fire.

Review :
"A sweeping and vital music history...written by a rock geek with an eye for storytelling...Sonic Boom will make you pine for a time when true artists were supported, whether they sold 50 albums or 5 million." -- "Washington Post" "Chronicles this unusual bit of popular music history in a breezy and irreverent style, a perfect match for the story...an entertainingly informative read." -- "Booklist" "It's a book about how music is made but it's also a book about how companies are run and then go off track. It's also a biography of sorts of Mo Ostin." -- "Wall Street Journal" "There will never be another record company quite like Warner Bros Records...Sonic Boom does justice to the label's accomplishments." -- "The Economist (London)"