Bob Andelman has 7 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 7 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 20 ratings. The most-rated is Built from Scratch.
Built from Scratch
Summary
When a friend told Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank that "you've just been hit in the ass by a golden horseshoe," they thought he was crazy. After all, both had just been fired. What the friend, Ken Langone, meant was that they now had the opportunity to create the kind of wide-open warehouse store that would help spark a consumer revolution through low prices, excellent customer service, and wide availability of products. Built from Scratch is the story of how two incredibly determined and creative people - and their associates - built a business from nothing to 761 stores and $30 billion in sales in a mere 20 years. Built from Scratch tells many colorful stories associated with The Home Depot's founding and meteoric rise; shows that a company can be a tough, growth-oriented competitor, and still maintain a high sense of responsibility to the community; and provides great lessons useful to people in any business, from start-ups to the Fortune 500.
©1999 Homer TLC, Inc. (P)2017 Tantor
The Toni Tennille Interview
Summary
Toni Tennille: A Memoir is an okay title for the Alabama native’s life story, but once you read it to the end, you might agree with me that "Toni Tennille: Happy at Last" is more fitting. I cannot deny that I had low expectations as I began reading the autobiography of this singer who I always adored as a teen and held on to over the decades as a guilty pop pleasure. The glamour, the celebrity friends, parties, etc. - ho-hum, we’ve certainly heard it all before. But trust me, you haven’t heard this story.
If, like me, you are old enough to remember The Captain and Tennille as a top of the charts recording and touring sensation, you’ll remember Toni Tennile’s soaring vocals, her Southern charm, and her big-as-all-outdoors smile. As for The Captain - Daryl Dragon, the former keyboardist for The Beach Boys - what you’ll recall of him was that he rarely spoke while glowering at his wife and everyone else most of the rest of the time. He always wore a hat, eventually hiding behind sunglasses, too.
I spent a lifetime thinking it was an act. Toni Tennille spent a lifetime wishing it was an act. Turns out, The Captain was a miserable wretch of a human being and spent decades treating his wife like crap. Reading Toni Tennille: A Memoir is a soul-crushing experience; turning each page you’ll find yourself screaming, “Toni! Get away from that bastard!” But as anyone who has ever suffered emotional abuse at the hands of a spouse knows, it’s not always easy to make a clean break. I’m glad I read Toni Tennile: A Memoir; I’m even happier to know that the subject of the book is finally free.
Key interview moments:
4:40 - Toni Tennille describes her rough road with former husband Daryl Dragon - The Captain in The Captain and Tennille - but refuses to blame him or play the victim. Instead she blames his father, Academy Award-winning composer Carmen Dragon.
23:45 - Why has Toni Tennille dedicated “Muskrat Love” to former US Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger at every performance since 1974?
©2016 Bob Andelman (P)2016 Bob Andelman
The Tommy Roe Interview
Summary
There are two pictures on Tommy Roe’s website of him with The Beatles. I glanced at them the night before this interview and then moved on, looking for ideas about what to ask the man behind such immortal 1960s bubblegum hits as “Sheila", “Dizzy”, and “Jam Up and Jelly Tight". The morning of the interview, I got to thinking about it some more. Those were some very young Beatles in those photo, gathered around behind Roe. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr are dressed alike in suits and ties, not unlike what they wore on the cover of their first album, Meet the Beatles. Hair is about the same length, too. So, I did a little more research, and this is the moment when my eyebrows shot up. Two days after The Beatles made their American debut, February 9, 1964, on The Ed Sullivan Show, they made their first-ever US concert appearance at the Washington Coliseum in Washington, DC. According to a website called PopHistoryDig.com, the opening acts on the bill were Jay and the Americans, The Righteous Brothers...and Tommy Roe. But wait, it gets better: The Beatles already knew Roe; they were one of the featured acts on his top-billed tour of the UK a year earlier! And they recorded a cover of his number one hit from 1962, “Sheila". Let me give you a quick overview of Tommy Roe’s success: He had his first number one with “Sheila", of course, and subsequently charted a number of songs on the Top 10, including “Everybody", “Sweet Pea”, and his biggest single, “Dizzy", which was number one in the US, UK, and Canada in 1969. And as much as I love that song, I’ve always had a special fondness for his other '69 hit, “Jam Up and Jelly Tight". Interview bonus: Listen for the moment when Tommy picks up up the guitar behind him and demonstrates how a few songs came together and plays the one hit he thinks got away from him!
©2014 Bob Andelman (P)2014 Bob Andelman
Will Eisner
Summary
An audiobook narrated by author Bob Andelman, Will Eisner: A Spirited Life is the authorized biography that explores Eisner's amazing life, detailing a career that spanned 70 years. The biography features interviews with many of Eisner's contemporaries, such as Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Neil Gaiman, Denis Kitchen, Jim Warren, Dave Sim, Denny O'Neil, and Stan Lee. Bob spent almost three years interviewing Eisner, researching his life and work, and interviewing friends, family, and the creative talents the comics master inspired throughout his career. Internationally recognized for his genre-busting 1940s art and storytelling style on The Spirit, Will Eisner's greatest legacy may be the graphic novels he championed and created. A Spirited Life explores Eisner's amazing life, detailing a career that spanned 70 years and saw him educate several generations of Army soldiers in the innovative PS magazine and create the first widely known graphic novel, A Contract with God.
©2005 M Press (P)2009 Tampa Digital Studios
The Paul Cowsill Interview
Summary
It was a week or so before Christmas, 1968, and I owned fewer than five long-playing record albums, including The Monkees’ Headquarters and the first two Beatles albums. I played them endlessly on what was essentially a toy record player. That its sound was tinny and that it didn’t get very loud didn’t matter; I had my very own music. I well remember that holiday season, visiting my parents’ friends, Mickey and Ginny and their infant son, Mickey Jr. Mickey Sr. was a New Brunswick, New Jersey, cop, and the family lived in a modest apartment in a small complex above the Raritan River. The visit was largely uninteresting for me except when Ginny handed me a wrapped present from under the family Christmas tree: a new record! What else could it be that shape? Eight-year-old me quickly tore off the wrapping and discovered The Rain, The Park and Other Things: The Best of The Cowsills inside. I didn’t know anything about The Cowsills yet, but it had a funny caricature of the family on the cover, and I couldn’t wait to get home and put it on my cheap turntable to hear it. Instead of being appreciative of the gift, however, I became a bit of a brat, because I couldn’t wait to get out of there and hear it! Songs such “Hair", “We Can Fly”, and “Indian Lake” became lifetime favorites that I have yet to tire of hearing. Like a lot of bands from that era, The Cowsills soon disappeared from view - 1910 Fruitgum Company, anyone? - and I didn’t give them much thought, until last week, when I was invited to watch a new documentary film by Louise Palanker, Family Band: The Cowsills Story, about the real family behind the singing family. Joining me today to talk about his family, the band, and the documentary is Paul Cowsill. Paul still leads The Cowsills, but his day jobs are equally interesting: He was an “extreme” landscaper on the NBC fantasy series Grimm, having previously worked on TNT’s Leverage and the first Twilight movie.
©2013 Bob Andelman (P)2013 Bob Andelman
The Wawa Way
Summary
Grahame Wood opened the first Wawa Food Market in 1964 as an outlet for Wawa dairy products. Since then, the convenience store has grown into a well-known company that competes against the biggest industry players in the world in three areas: fuel, convenience, and food, all while maintaining their personal approach and small business mentality. Now, almost 50 years later, Wawa has opened its first store in Florida and begun to play on the national field. How did it happen? What are the reasons for their success? Why have they been able to go up against the big guys with nothing more than homegrown talent? With a mixture of personal history and business advice, Howard Stoeckel shares the last 50 years of Wawa’s growth, development, and expansion. It’s the story of how a small company with a funny name made a big difference and all it took was a little goose sense.
©2014 Howard Stoeckel (P)2014 Gildan Media LLC
The Charlotte Stewart Interview
Summary
When you pick up a memoir - particularly a celebrity memoir - part of the inherent appeal is that you can safely be a voyeur at arm's reach. But when that celebrity memoir falls short on sharing names and intimate details, well, that’s not a great listen. Because if you just wanted to hear how swell everybody is and how perfect a celebrity’s life is, you could just tune in to Ellen. So, in this interview, when I tell you that actress Charlotte Stewart's autobiography delivers on both boldface names and remarkably personal details, trust me, I’m underselling her book. Like who? Well, she had a long getaway weekend with singer Jim Morrison of The Doors shortly before his fateful final trip to Paris. She was married to actor Tim Considine, one of the sons in the CBS hit comedy My Three Sons - although that didn’t keep her from leading a wild life of sex and drugs of which her husband knew nothing. One of the few men she turned down was her boss for four years as she played the reserved schoolmarm Miss Beadle on Little House on the Prairie. The boss’s name? Pa Ingalls himself, Michael Landon. A few more names in her life’s story: Elvis Presley. Kevin Bacon. Kyle McLachlan. Neil Young. Joni Mitchell. Jimmy Stewart. Oh, and she inspired a scene in Tom Wolfe’s novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities. She also co-starred in David Lynch's breakthrough cult film Eraserhead as Mary X. And while she and the director never got together off the set, she did live on and off through the years with Eraserhead himself, Jack Nance. (And Lynch gave her the recurring role of Betsy Briggs on his legendary TV show Twin Peaks, a role she returned to in the show's third season in early 2017 on Showtime.) During today’s conversation, Charlotte will also read a short passage from Little House in the Hollywood Hills, which she co-wrote with Andy Demsky. Her book will blow your mind. Promise.
©2016 Bob Andelman (P)2016 Bob Andelman