2010 Holiday Gift Guide

Amazingly, only one autobiography from a member of The World's Greatest Rock Band has hit bookshelves in their now half-century career: 1990's Stone Alone, in which bassist Bill Wyman spent an inordinate amount of ink detailing his sexual conquests. But now we have a tell-all from one of the Glimmer Twins themselves -- and Keef does indeed tell all in this highly-anticipated memoir, which details the friendship between him and Mick that kept the franchise going... and why it hasn't been a friendship for the past two decades.

By contrast, this DVD/Blu-Ray is a snapshot of the band at their peak: the 1972 tour behind their most acclaimed album, "Exile On Main Street," filmed at four Texas gigs, dumped on an apathetic public in 1974 theaters and completely forgotten afterward. Considering how rarely the band has been caught at its live zenith -- the myriad of DVDs and CDs out there usually showcase the Stones live experience as some combination of muddy, boring, and sloppy -- this is a real milestone. With unseen rehearsal footage and two interviews from Mick (Jagger), one new!

The soundtrack to the Cirque Du Soleil Vegas hit "Viva Elvis" takes the mythologizing of the King's life and career to heights unforeseen during Presley's heyday, so naturally, as with the Cirque production of the Beatles' "Love," "Viva" had to have a CD release. The method's a little different here, however: rather than recontextualizing the classic Elvis songs by threading different ones together, this soundtrack updates several of his standards, "A Little Less Conversation"-style, with modern production techniques. From "2001" to "Suspicious Minds," this disc makes it seem as if Elvis never left the building. Or if you have the scratch, just book someone a ticket to the Viva Elvis show itself!

Rather than a coffeetable book about rockabilly music and its golden years, this two-pound wonder from the University of Virginia's historic "Center For American Places" series offers something equally intriguing and arguably more interesting -- portraits of modern-day hipsters who cultivate the rockabilly look as a personal style. Shot by Greenburg mostly around her native Chicago, these lush color portraits are staged and treated to look like vintage snapshots, which serves as a testament to the enduring appeal of the America they missed. Rock and Roll is here to stay!

This, on the other hand, is the real deal from back in the day, perhaps the most definitive document of the Fifties rockabilly musical movement yet, now in paperback. Musical historian and rockabilly fiend Decharne fills nearly 400 pages with stories about the genre's few big successes and its numerous hard-luck cases, while simultaneously giving the Big Picture on the music's massive impact on later genres and lifestyles. Max proves his chops as a historian, too, especially with the accompanying CD, which mixes a few standards ("Mystery Train," "Train Kept A-Rollin'") with a whole lot of honk you'll never hear on the radio.

Sinatra bios are, by now, nearly as ubiquitous as the barroom and bedroom ballads Ol' Blue Eyes built his rep on. But by all accounts there's never been one this extensive: Kaplan, who's already steered Jerry Lewis through his memories, surgically dismantles Frank's historically complex ego from the bottom up, beginning with his Hoboken childhood and taking us through his many ups and downs without ignoring the thornier aspects inherent in the Chairman Of The Board's chosen lifestyle.

Neil's recent comeback has been nearly as satisfying as the one producer Rick Rubin engineered for Johnny Cash, reducing an icon to his basic elements in a setting that isolates him completely from fad and fashion. But "Dreams," his first cover album, is a bold move indeed for one of rock's founding singer-songwriters, as he relies on nothing but his signature style and interpretive ability to make warhorses like the Beatles' "Yesterday," the Eagles' "Desperado," and Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again Naturally" (!) his own.

For the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's quarter-century milestone, seemingly everyone still alive and in the Hall (and some future guaranteeds) came out to celebrate. This HBO special, hosted by Tom Hanks, captured it all: an astonishing 67 performances featuring the kind of once-in-a-lifetime duets and jams only the Hall could pull together. Consider: Smokey revisiting "The Tracks of My Tears" with Stevie Wonder; CSN sharing "Teach Your Children" with Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and James Taylor; Ray Davies teaming up with Metallica for "All Day and All of the Night," Springsteen taking Dave Prater's place with Sam and Dave on "Hold On I'm Comin'," and Mick Jagger recasting "Gimme Shelter" as a duet with Fergie, with U2 as backup!

You could be forgiven for wondering aloud why the world needs to revive these twin 1973 double albums, since the monumental Beatles 1 already served as a great way to get the biggest hits, while the new remastered albums now give you everything in context. Fact is, the Beatles' legacy is too enormous to fit on one CD: you need these near-perfect collections, created way back when to foil bootleggers, in order to hear "Drive My Car" or "Strawberry Fields Forever" or "Please Please Me" without the distraction of the lesser material. Newly remastered, the "red" and "blue" albums (here in one package) remain the perfect intro to the group.

No TV show in recent memory has done more to popularize the music of the postwar era than AMC's Mad Men, the acclaimed drama about advertising men in 1960's New York. Now you can catch your friends up on the phenomenon with this 3-DVD set of complete episodes from the first three seasons, where the workers of Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency live, work, and love (and hate) with a backdrop of classic adult contemporary, R&B, pop, and rock and roll. Martinis and Italian suits not included!