Sunday, December 22, 2019

Ugly Things magazine has a pretty, pretty, pretty good review of The Show Won’t Go On

Ugly Things? Pretty Cool! That’s the word from our pals Jeff Abraham and Burt Kearns, as the revered music magazine offers the latest praise for their book, The Show Won’t Go On: The Most Shocking, Bizarre, and Historic Deaths of Performers Onstage.

Noted writer, critic and editor Alan Bisbort reviewed the book from Chicago Review Press  in #52, the Winter 2019 issue of the  jam-packed rock ’n’ roll magazine that celebrates “wild sounds from past dimensions.” Bisbort wrote that the book is “touching... dramatic"... and that the authors "have combed the morgues of entertainment history to offer more than mere titillation.

“Though their book charts moments of human tragedy, the treatment does not feel cheap or exploitative. Rather, they use the death as a means by which to reexamine the careers of the fallen and set the stage, so to speak, for their swan songs... All of these performers may have fallen, but their beats will go on, thanks to Abraham and Kearns."

The issue also features an extended interview with coauthor Kearns.

From the Ugly Things interview with
The Show Won’t Go On coauthor Burt Kearns
Ugly Things was founded in 1983, is based in La Mesa, California, and edited by Mike Stax. It focuses on beat, garage rock, and psychedelic music from the 1960s. The magazine’s name? It’s a tribute to the rock and blues band, The Pretty Things.

Buy this issue 152-page issue and other Ugly Things merch by clicking this sentence!

Click here to follow Ugly Things on Facebook.

Visit The Show Won't Go On website for lots of extras.

And Abraham and Kearns’ appearance with Shut Up I Love It podcasters Steven Cohen and Sasha Feiler at Stories Books and Cafe in Los Angeles’s Echo Park is now a bonus episode of Shut Up I Love it.


Saturday, December 21, 2019

The Show Won’t Go On goes on author's arm

The Show Won’t Go On tattoo, freshly inked on 21 December 2019

Burt Kearns, who, with Jeff Abraham,  wrote The Show Won’t Go On: The Most Shocking, Bizarre, and Historic Deaths of Performers Onstage, has commemorated the publication with a different kind of ink.

Crankee of the Inkpire Tattoo Studio in Northridge, California, was the artist.  Kearns also has a tattoo for his book, Tabloid Baby.

Tuesday, December 10, 2019

Buffalo News excerpt from 'The Show Won’t Go On' features native son Dick Shawn

The Buffalo News of Buffalo, New York published an excerpt from The Show Won’t Go On: The Most Shocking, Bizarre and Historic Deaths of Performers Onstage in its Sunday Gusto section on December 8.

The adapted passage centers on brilliant comedian Dick Shawn, who died onstage in 1987, and as a special introduction to the excerpt showed, never forgot his roots in upstate New York.