Rating: 
Summary: Are we talking about the same book?
Review: "Exploding is populated by music stars like Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Lil' Kim, Dr. Dre, the Grateful Dead, Queen, Madonna, Ice-T, Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa, Neil Young, Alice Cooper, and dozens more".Yeah? Where? The artists are merely footnotes in this saga; weirdos to be tolerated (barely) and joked about. I spent a lot of money on this tome hoping to read about some of them. Instead I got 450 pages of business talk with about 4500 witticisms to amuse and confuse. At least I found out why their awesome back catalogue has shamefully been left to earn whatever dollars it can in crappy 80's CD output (in the main) while other labels remaster properly and expand on their reissues - Warners just don't give a damn. Won't be reading it again, I assure you.
Rating: 
Summary: On living for the music, memories and more....
Review: "Exploding" not only gives a very thorough and complete historical structure of how Warner Bros. became a film and music leader, but gives outsiders the intense understanding of what the "insiders" were dealing with, when the company and the music industry went through the myriad changes of the 20th century.It's a time-line saga and sensory experience of all that the Warner Music business was and later became. The book gives readers both funny, poignant and enlightening glimpses into the key players and other personalities of the Warner Music Group, and describes how the rock industry's stars rose and fel. After working in the music industry for many years, I learned even more than I ever previously knew about how WB began and evolved. From mostly behind the scenes and through mainly a mere few "big-wigs" the cards were dealt or held for many future careers at the WB family of labels. Musicians, songwriters, radio and record neophytes could learn alot from reading this book. Industry veterans will enjoy the trips down memory lane, and ultimately, be carried along it's emotional currents. Coryn's writing is witty and he gets to his well-crafted points with style and substance. After dozens of years working deep in the creative trenches as the changes occured, he is well-suited to tell the tales, both bitter and sweet.
Rating:
Summary: Which is more interesting...
Review: ...music and the people who create it, or music executives and the deals they grind out? If you answered the latter, this book is for you. If you answered the former, you will be exasperatingly disappointed by this book. Good writing, tedious content.
Rating:
Summary: "Exploding" Is Pure TNT of the Record Industry!
Review: At age 44, and with an album collection of over 400 LP's, I have been an avid music fan since age 10, as a wide-eyed, curious kid in 1968. I have always wondered just how the record industry worked, besides what I have learned over the years. Stan Cornyn's new novel "Exploding", is everything I could have asked for and then some! This book is very well written, concise, and stuffed full of details only an insider such as Stan Cornyn would know. This book had me turning pages late at night as I felt like a confidant to Cornyn, in that this book was written for me personally. I am a huge fan of 70's music, and what went on during this era at Warner / Reprise was simply unbeleivable, author Stan Cornyn will take you on a rollercoaster ride of this crazy time in the Record Industry, as well as American History, and how music is the bridge that connects it all. I highly recommend this book to all serious music fans. Now, whenever I play an album with the Warner Brothers label, I see much more than "just" a label, thanks to a brillantly written book by Stan Cornyn. Well done, this was money well spent for me, I learned a lot about music and record companies, as well as being entertained and amused with each page I read. Excellent work, Mr. Cornyn!
Rating:
Summary: A must-read for anyone interested in the industry of records
Review: Cornyn's role at Warner Brothers Records throughout its incredible rise and fall provided him a bird's-eye view of the construction, and eventually disassembly, of what was at its peak, the world's most artistically and commercially successful record company. As the company's creative director (he was the mind responsible for Warner's two-LP samplers in the 1970s, and the twisted copy with which they and other releases were advertised), Cornyn had a keen eye for the people and forces that shaped the label's growth, and its eventual fall. Together with co-writer Paul Scanlon, Cornyn is truly engaging as he discusses the label's early history as an offshoot of the movie studio, and the numerous tributaries (artists, producers, label heads, subsidiary and sister labels) that flowed into its eventual success. The arc traced by the record business from the late 50s (when studio head Jack Warner decided it was time for the studio to try the record business again) through the early part of this century is a fascinating path of continual reinvention. Cornyn's story takes in the rise and fall of 45s, LPs, independently programmed radio stations, syndicate-like consulting, not to mention numerous well-known artistic and corporate personalities. He even covers the beginnings of the industry's current battle with file downloading and swapping. The chapters discussing Warner's merger with Time-Life, and the resulting culture clashes and misplayed opportunities are fascinating. It's too bad that Cornyn retired before he could chronicle the subsequent Time-Warner merger with AOL. On the other hand, one might suspect that the personalities involved in the latter merger were nowhere near as colorful as the long-time record industry execs in the former. This book is a fine mix of personal memoir and chronicle, written in witty prose that is surprisingly lacking in jaundice. This is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the record industry, yesterday and today.
Rating:
Summary: "Entertainment Weekly" March 22 issue
Review: EDITOR'S CHOICE
Long-in-the-tooth music fans may remember those flippantly
hilarious print ads Warner Bros. Records and its sister label
Reprise used to run in the late '60s/early '70s. You could win a
dream date with one of the plug-uglies in the Fugs, enter a
Pigpen look-alike contest, or score a double-LP sampler for two
bucks. Those campaigns were created by Stan Cornyn, a
30-plus-year Warner vet who, with Paul Scanlon, has just written
Exploding: The Highs, Hits, Hype, Heroes, and Hustlers of the
Warner Music Group (HarperCollins, $ 39.95). Beginning with movie
mogul Jack Warner's decision to enter the music biz in 1958, the
book presents an insider account of the company's history. As
fly-on-the-wall tomes go, Exploding rates five flies, thanks to
its plethora of dish about machers like Frank Sinatra, Ahmet
Ertegun, and David Geffen. Cornyn's prose is laced with his
trademark barbed wit, which is so penetrating it pulls you
through the dull passages about warehousing and distribution.
The music biz may not be what it once was, but thank God Cornyn
escaped with his irreverence intact. A- --Tom Sinclair
Rating:
Summary: Highly recommend for insomniacs
Review: I expected a book with some inside dirt on the recording industry but this is a sleeper recounting the author's 40 years working in Warner management. Those 100 or so souls who actually care about the mundane history of Warner records will enjoy this book. The rest of us would be better off with a subscription to Rolling Stone.
Rating:
Summary: Highly recommend for insomniacs
Review: I expected a book with some inside dirt on the recording industry but this is a sleeper recounting the author's 40 years working in Warner management. Those 100 or so souls who actually care about the mundane history of Warner records will enjoy this book. The rest of us would be better off with a subscription to Rolling Stone.
Rating:
Summary: Barney Hoskyns in MOJO
Review: LET ME 'fess up. This is a book I would kill to have written.
It's a book I've been saying should be written for the last
ten years a book, a huge book, about possibly the hippest,
bravest, most nurturing record company rock'n'roll ever spawned. Now Stan Cornyn, a Warners "insider's insider" if ever there was one, has gone and done it with help from smart Rolling Stone vet Paul Scanlon. "The really important factor was that we were a younger company than Columbia," Cornyn said when I interviewed him in 1993. "We weren't structured so tightly that we couldn't bend." Bend Warner Brothers did or at least Warner Bros. and Reprise Records,under the inspiring helmsmanship of sometime Sinatra accountant Morris "Mo"Ostin and Boston disc-jock Joe Smith. For a golden half-decade, roughly 1967-1972, Warner-Reprise was the ultimate haven for the crème of the talent pouring out of (and into) the canyons of Southern California. Between 'em, Mo'n'Joe bagged the signatures of Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young,Randy Newman, Joni Mitchell, Ry Cooder, Fleetwood Mac, Van Morrison, James Taylor, Frank Zappa, Little Feat, Van Dyke Parks and on and on and on. Cornyn calls that "a spurt of prescience heretofore unknown in the record business". Frankly, it's hard to argue. Warner-Reprise didn't do too badly either side of those halcyon five years, of course: from the Everlys to REM, Ostin and Smith green-lit signings that helped the WM Group shift gazillions of albums. But that heady turn-of-the-decade stretch, full of bold impulses and daring risks, is the guarantor of Warners' place in the history tomes. It's also why Exploding is as much a lament a "They Don't Make 'Em Like That Anymore" about record execs as it is a racy, fact-packed narrative about company politicking. Like Cornyn, the Creative Services ace who conjured up mad as for the emerging underground press ("Win a Dream Date With the Fugs", "the Pigpen Lookalike Contest"), Mo'n'Joe 'n Lenny Waronker, and others like them cared deeply about talent. And the talent,generally, cared about them. Don't get me wrong: Stan's yarn is first'n'foremost about players,workaholic Jews jockeying for position in worlds of fast deals and loaded stock options. Stan, a token Burbank goy, is as besotted by the greed and manoeuvring of the David Geffens and Bob Krasnows as he is by the talent-rich rosters of Warner-Reprise, Atlantic, Elektra and the other labels woven into the WM fold. Written in prose that's at once manic and
jovial and with both eyes on a Vanity Fair serialisation Exploding contains swathes of detail about money, sales, executive toilets and, above all, who reported to whom. If you want to read about Joni'n'James and all the other ladies'n'gents of the Canyon, you may be better off elsewhere. If, on the other hand, you dig sweeping accounts of musical empires, and you loved Hit Men and The Mansion on the Hill, get your teeth into Cornyn, whose sardonically honest take on the vanity, megalomania and brilliance of the key dramatis personae from Ahmet Ertegun and Jac Holzman to Steve Ross and Seymour Stein is never less than entertaining and nearly always affectionate. ("There are the shrewd," he writes nicely, "and then there are the shrewder.") Cornyn, retired for several years and living the sweet life in Santa Barbara, says he still talks to people at Warners. "Stan, it's just not like it was," they sigh to him. "Now it's just about money and covering your [rear]." Once 'pon a time, it was about money, covering your [rear] and making astonishing music. Who's to say it couldn't still be?
Rating:
Summary: Fast Times at Warner High
Review: Not only is this a wonderful and ambitious book by Cornyn & Scanlon, but it is also a great tool for young musicians because this book takes the mystery out of the record business. Cornyn has a wonderful appreciation for great stories, but he's also bright and is able to recount the stories behind the signings of artists and the whys in great detail. He also captures the energy and team effort of all of those Powers-That-Be (Were) at Warners because it was for the love of the music.
The turning point in the book is when after an exhaustive 8-10 hr meeting about sales units, how to change the corporate structure Cornyn got into this car to drive home and realized that during the whole 8 - 10 hr meeting, no one mentioned music. These guys were from the streets and got into the industry because of their passion for music. The pace of the book is terrific, starts at the biginning of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Studio, builds up to the peak, then the reader is slowly let down when Cornyn starts talking numbers instead of artists. It's a fun ride thru the "inside track"....enjoy!
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