GIORGIO GOMELSKY 'FOR YOUR LOVE' https://ift.tt/3VribKq

In the annals of music history, promoters and club owners rarely take center stage. Even so, these behind-the-scenes figures offer a rare perspective on the industry. With this biography, the author relates the adventures and anecdotes of his friend Giorgio Gomelsky, the owner/operator of the Crawdaddy Club, a hotbed of Britain’s rhythm-and-blues music in the early 1960s. Gomelsky is best known as an early manager of Crawdaddy Club house bands the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds, but his influence extended beyond London’s early rock scene. His promotion of bands like Soft Machine, Gong, and Magma helped cultivate the nascent European progressive rock circuit, and his New York–based recording studio provided a space for further musical experimentation throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Born in Soviet Georgia and raised in Switzerland, Gomelsky led a colorful life, working at various times as a jazz musician, filmmaker, record producer, and early evangelist for the personal computer. Dumaurier, a music fan whose friendship with Gomelsky lasted for over 30 years, writes of his subject with deep familiarity and enthusiasm. His prose captures the chaotic spirit of the times, as when he discusses seeing Gomelsky in and around the latter’s New York loft: “Years would pass but sometimes I would see him at shows or when I was a moving man and I had to load in an all-girl punk-polka band called Das Fürlines who were rehearsing there. It was Saturday night and we had to navigate the gear through an S&M party that was there called Paddles.” There are fun bits of classic rock trivia—Gomelsky claims to have given Eric Clapton the nickname Slowhand and to have introduced the Beatles to the Rolling Stones—but the book’s greatest virtue is that it extends past the 1960s and through the popular music genres of prog, punk, and glam. Gomelsky’s true talent, in Dumaurier’s reckoning, was always finding his way to where the interesting people were.

from Kirkus Reviews https://ift.tt/07UHVDC