{"product_id":"broken-music-isbn-9780385338653","title":"Broken Music","description":"\u003cb\u003e“Sting’s gift for prose and reverence for language, nearly the equal of his musical gifts, shine on every page. Even when \u003ci\u003eBroken Music\u003c\/i\u003e addresses the quixotic life of an aspiring rock \u0026amp; roller, it reads like literature from a more rarified time when adults didn’t condescend to the vulgarities of pop culture.” —\u003ci\u003eRolling Stone\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHaving been a songwriter most of my life, condensing my ideas and emotions into short  rhyming couplets and setting them to music, I had never really considered writing  a book. But upon arriving at the reflective age of fifty, I found myself drawn, for  the first time, to write long passages that were as stimulating and intriguing to  me as any songwriting I had ever done.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e And so \u003ci\u003eBroken Music\u003c\/i\u003e began to take shape.  It is a book about the early part of my life, from childhood through adolescence,  right up to the eve of my success with the Police. It is a story very few people  know.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I had no interest in writing a traditional autobiographical recitation of  everything that’s ever happened to me. Instead I found myself drawn to exploring  specific moments, certain people and relationships, and particular events which still  resonate powerfully for me as I try to understand the child I was, and the man I  became.“Sting’s gift for prose and reverence for language, nearly the equal of his musical  gifts, shine on every page. Even when \u003ci\u003eBroken Music\u003c\/i\u003e addresses the quixotic life of  an aspiring rock \u0026amp; roller, it reads like literature from a more rarified time when  adults didn’t condescend to the vulgarities of pop culture.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eRolling Stone\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e“You  can’t fault his scrupulous candor.…A natural storyteller.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eLondon Sunday Times \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e“Sting mixes tenderness, sadness and humor in his narration, indulging readers with  the same style of descriptive, pensive words that characterize his songs….Even readers  unfamiliar with Sting’s music will find the book compelling.” —Associated Press “A  beautifully styled, elegantly crafted and intelligent portrayal of Sting’s own life…[it]  ranks on the highest shelf of literary debuts.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eToronto Globe and Mail \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e“A first-rate  memoir…Engrossing…With writing that is both witty and refreshingly self-deprecating,  this book has pleasures that extend well beyond interest in the man’s music alone.”  \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003ePeople \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e“An engaging, lucidly written reminiscence…intellectually vigorous…elegant  and thoughtful.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eEntertainment Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eSting\u003c\/b\u003e is an award-winning singer, songwriter and human rights activist.Music has always been my refuge from sadness. The guitar I inherited from my uncle  John now has decent strings, and I’m no longer making the “broken” music that so  upset my grandmother; in fact I’m making a lot of progress, but the limitations of  my first instrument are holding me back. There are things that I simply can’t do  with this primitive heirloom.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e From the money I earned on the milk rounds I have  saved up enough for a new acoustic guitar that I’ve had my eye on. It has been hanging  from the wall in Braidford’s Music Shop for three months now. I go and see it after  school every evening, praying that no one has bought it. It is a beautiful steel—stringed  instrument with a blond finish, an ebony fingerboard, and delicate marquetry inlaid  around the sound hole. It costs me sixteen guineas, which is a large amount of money,  but I’m in love for the very first time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I first heard the Beatles in my final year  at junior school. I remember being in the changing rooms of the swimming baths. Mr.  Law had just supervised one of our chaotic and impossibly noisy trips to the baths—by  “supervised” I mean that no one had actually been drowned. We were drying ourselves  off and, as was our custom, flicking towels at each other’s genitals. It was at this  point that we heard the first bars of “Love Me Do” from a transistor radio in the  corner. The effect was immediate. There was something in the sparseness of the sound  that immediately put a stop to the horseplay. John’s lonely harmonica and Paul’s  bass played “two to the bar,” and then the vocal harmony moved in modal fifths up  to minor thirds and back again to a solo voice on the refrain. Not that I could articulate  any of this at the time, but I recognized something significant, even revolutionary,  in the spare economy of the sound, and the interesting thing is, so did everyone  else.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e By the time “She Loves You” reached number one in the charts I was already  at the grammar school, but it wasn’t the confident primitivism of the “yeah yeah  yeah” chorus that excited me so much as the G major chord with an added sixth that  colored it at the end of the coda. Again, I couldn’t articulate this then, but I  knew as the G major chord with an added sixth that colored it at the end of the coda.  An old dance band cliché, but when the Beatles used it there seemed to be a subtle  irony at work. Again, I couldn’t articulate this then, but I knew instinctively that  it was pointing to a level of sophistication that I hadn’t been aware of in pop music  until then. The Beatles would succeed in manipulating as many musical forms into  their songs, whether classical, folk, rock and roll, the blues, Indian raga, or vaudeville,  in a dizzying and seamless pastiche of ideas and cultural references. It was music  without frontiers and the ubiquitous soundtrack for a generation that thought it  could change the world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Jim Berryman, in his otherwise excellent biography, \u003ci\u003eA Sting  in the Tale\u003c\/i\u003e, claims that I was outside the City Hall when the Fab Four played there  in 1963, and that I managed to grab a lock of McCartney’s hair. This is of course  fantasy, and would have been out of keeping with the budding intellectual pretensions  that I was nurturing at the time. But it is impossible to stress too much the influence  that the Beatles had on my early life, and the fact that they came from a similar  background to my own was fundamental to the vague plans of escape and glory that  I was hatching in my imagination. Lennon and McCartney were both grammar school boys  from humble roots in Liverpool, a town not dissimilar from Newcastle. From their  initial chart successes they went on to conquer the world with songs that they wrote  themselves. This gave an entire generation of musicians the confidence and permission  to at least attempt the same feat.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I pore over Beatles albums with the same obsessive  and forensic scrutiny that I’d applied to Rodgers and Hammerstein, only now I have  a guitar. I have an instrument that can reproduce the practical magic of the chord  structures and the network of riffs that their songs are built on. And what songs,  one after the other, album after album. I learn to play them all, confident that  if I persevere, what I can’t play immediately will yield its secret eventually. I  will reapply the needle of the record player again and again to the bars of music  that seem beyond my analysis, like a safecracker picking a lock, until the prize  is mine. No school subject ever occupies as much of my time or energy. I’m not claiming  that any kind of prescience about the future is at work here, but there is something  in the driven and compulsive nature of this obsession that is unusual, something  in the unconscious saying, This is how you escape. This is how you escape.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It is  1966 and England, having won the World Cup against Germany that summer, is at last  enjoying the fruits of the postwar boom and is considered to be, in the quaint argot  of the time, “swinging.” In Newcastle, however, the hedonism of social change and  cultural revolution is limited to a small enclave surrounding the university. King’ s College gives the pubs and clubs and bookshops an air of musty intellectualism  and bohemian sophistication. Wittgenstein, of all people, is supposed to have spent  some time in the city during the war—I can just see him trying to explain the more  difficult passages of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the coves in the Haymarket  snug in a blue haze of Woodbines and brown ale.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The Club A Go-Go is above some shops  in Percy Street, behind the Haymarket.  It was originally a jazz club catering to  the sophisticated tastes that developed in and around the university. The Go-Go is  where the Animals had their residency before they hit the big time, and living proof  that the Beatles miracle could be repeated, even in Newcastle. When I am fifteen  years old, the first live band I ever see is there: the Graham Bond Organisation.  It is a fortunate introduction. Graham Bond is a big round-faced man with long greasy  hair and a mandarin mustache. He plays Hammond organ and alto sax and sings in a  gruff and passionate baritone. His band contains figures who will soon become legends:  Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, who will become more famous as members of Cream, on  bass and drums respectively, and Dick Heckstall-Smith on tenor. The music is harsh  and uncompromising and I’m not sure if I like it, but I have a strong sense that  what is being played has a weight and a seriousness that will later be characterized  and then caricatured as “heavy.” Graham Bond would later become obsessed with the  occult and end his own life under a train in London’s Underground.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I go to see John  Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, again at the Go-Go, although I don’t remember which of their  subsequently legendary guitarists was on duty that night. It certainly wasn’t Clapton,  though it may have been Peter Green. But it wasn’t until December of that year that  I really had my mind blown.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I would watch Top of the Pops with a religious devotion  at 7:30 every Thursday evening. I loved this show with a passion. Almost forty years  later I can still see a picture of the DJ, Jimmy Savile, standing in front of a large  chart of the top twenty, circa 1966, and am able to sing a line from every entry.  Such familiarity with the music of the time could not, however, have prepared me  for the whirlwind, the tidal wave, the earthquake, the force of nature that was Jimi  Hendrix.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The Jimi Hendrix Experience appeared on Top of the Pops in December of  1966 and changed everything. Hendrix had transformed “Hey Joe,” an old folk song,  and propelled it by the elegant ferocity of his guitar playing into a sassy, bluesy  vehicle of awesome power. His vocal was as sulky and offhand as it was passionate  and openly sexual, and as the three-piece band stormed through the three-minute song,  I imagined everyone in whole country in front of their tellys sitting bolt upright  in their chairs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e —excerpted from BROKEN  MUSIC: A Memoir by Sting\u003cbr\u003e Copyright © 2003 - by Sting\u003cbr\u003e Posted with permission. All  Rights Reserved.","brand":"Dial Press Trade Paperback","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302061265125,"sku":"NP9780385338653","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780385338653.jpg?v=1767723101","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/broken-music-isbn-9780385338653","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}