The North American Soccer League - at its peak in the late 1970s - presented soccer as performance, played by men with a bent for flair, hair and glamour. More than just Pelé and the New York Cosmos, it lured the biggest names of the world game like Johan Cruyff, Franz Beckenbauer, Eusebio, Gerd Müller and George Best to play the sport as it was meant to be played-without inhibition, to please the fans. The first complete look at the ambitious, star-studded NASL, Rock 'n' Roll Soccer reveals how this precursor to modern soccer laid the foundations for the sport's tremendous popularity in America today. Bringing to life the color and chaos of an unfairly maligned league, soccer journalist Ian Plenderleith draws from research and interviews with the men who were there to reveal the madness of its marketing, the wild expectations of businessmen and corporations hoping to make a killing out of the next big thing, and the insanity of franchises in scorching cities like Las Vegas and Hawaii. That's not to mention the league's on-running fight with FIFA as the trailblazing North American continent battled to innovate, surprise, and sell soccer to a whole new world. As entertaining and raucous as the league itself, Rock 'n' Roll Soccer recounts the hype and chaos surrounding the rapid rise and cataclysmic fall of the NASL, an enterprising and groundbreaking league that did too much right to ignore.

They say if you remember the Swinging '60s, you weren't there. And surely no other football club encapsulated that momentus era of change more than Chelsea. As Britain's youngest football agent, Greg Tesser lived the 1960's dream. As an eighteen-year-old publicist he helped launch the careers of the likes of Eric Clapton and Georgie Fame, before promoting the King of Stamford Bridge himself, the legendary Peter Osgood. It was all showbiz glamour down the Fulham Road in those halcyon, hedonistic years, with Hollywood stars Steve McQueen and Raquel Welch choosing to worship at the shrine of Ossie and co. Football become fashionable with all the Beautiful People - Greg and Charlie Cooke even wrote for Vogue! - QPR legend Rodney Marsh modelled for upmarket glossies, and Ossie morphed into a true '60s icon. A first FA Cup, a first European trophy, all Chelsea fans, indeed all fans of football, will enjoy this journey down memory lane when soccer swung and it was hip to kick a ball.

From a legendary music journalist with four decades of unprecedented access, an insider’s behind-the-scenes look at the major personalities of rock and roll. Lisa Robinson has interviewed the biggest names in music—including Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, John Lennon, Patti Smith, U2, Eminem, Lady Gaga, Jay Z, and Kanye West. She visited the teenage Michael Jackson many times at his Encino home. She spent hours talking to John Lennon at his Dakota apartment—and in recording studios just weeks before his murder. She introduced David Bowie to Lou Reed at a private dinner in a Manhattan restaurant, helped the Clash and Elvis Costello get their record deals, was with the Rolling Stones on their jet during a frightening storm, and was mid-flight with Led Zeppelin when their tour manager pulled out a gun. A pioneering female journalist in an exclusive boys’ club, Lisa Robinson is a preeminent authority on the personalities and influences that have shaped the music world; she has been recognized as rock journalism’s ultimate insider. A keenly observed and lovingly recounted look back on years spent with countless musicians backstage, after-hours, and on the road, There Goes Gravity documents a lifetime of riveting stories, told together here for the first time.

An account of the heyday of rock & roll through the lens of Allen Klein, the business manager, producer, and gadfly who "broke up the Beatles" and showed the Rolling Stones how to become the pre-eminent dynasty in popular music.

"Rock 'n' Roll spans the years from 1968 to 1990 from the double perspective of Prague, where a rock 'n' roll band comes to symbolise resistance to the Communist regime, and of Cambridge where the verities of love and death are shaping the lives of three generations in the family of a Marxist philosopher." "Rock 'n' Roll premiered at The Royal Court Theatre, London, in June 2006." --Book Jacket.