Recommended Reading: Secrets of a Strip Club DJ

Dee Simon used to be the guy in the booth who welcomed Ginger/Destiny/[Insert porn name here] to the stage. He's written a book about his strip club experience in a book called Play Something Dancy.

He gave an interview to the San Francisco Bay Guardian:

San Francisco Bay GuardianStandard first question: how did you become a strip club DJ? 

Dee Simon I moved to SF in 2000 to pursue a career in broadcasting. Unable to land a paying radio job, I started hosting Rampage Radio at KUSF 90.3FM and eventually found a job in production at The Industry Standard magazine. The Standard was very successful for about a year and then folded once the crash happened. I was unemployed for about eight months until that fateful day I ran into my weed dealer who hooked me up with an audition at a club on Broadway, which launched my illustrious five-year career as a DJ at clubs across the city.

Click to read more ...

New Book on Cool Jobs in the Music Industry

That's what it's called:  Cool Jobs in the Music Business! (and yes, there's an exclamation mark at the end).

Written by Jeffrey Raban, an industry veteran and chair of the Clive Davis Recorded Music Program at NYU, it goes through a bunch of career options:  journalist, manager, producer, publicist, DJ, music supervisor and more.

Find it here.

Sound Recordings Made BEFORE Thomas Edison

Most history books say that recorded audio was born in mid-1877 when Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.  That's true.  He was the first guy to come up with a way of recording audio in a way that it could later be played back.

However, this did NOT make him the inventor of recorded audio.  People had been recording audio for centuries.  The problem is that none of the ways they did it could be played back.

Representations of sounds were first recorded on paper in 980.  No, that's not a typo.  I really do mean the year 980.  And I'm not talking about musical notations on sheet music.

Patrick Feaster has a book called Pictures of Sound: One Thousand Years of Educed Audio, a CD and book that brings these old, er, non-audio audio representations come to life with the use of some modern computing power.  

This is fascinating stuff.  I gotta get me a copy.  More at Buzzfeed.

Check Out This Amazing New Bowie Book

David Bowie Is Inside was produced for the Bowie exhibition that will open later this month at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.  It's stunning.

Fancy one?  The V&A shop will sell you one for £35.  If you want the collector's edition (which features a lithograph print autographed by Bowie himself), it's £395.

Read more about the book at Creative Review.

A Good New Book on the Women Who Built Guitars During WW II

We've all heard the stories about the women who worked on the assembly lines during World War II--the whole Rosie the Riveter thing--but I had no idea that women played such an important part in making guitars at the same time.

Kalamazoo Gals tells the story of the women who built Gibson Guitars, something that will be of interest to anyone interested in vintage instruments of the period.  Find it at Amazon.