It's time I give some overdue props to three R&R books that can provide us business wisdom and life lessons.

In 'Shoulda Been There: a Novel on the Life of John Winston Lennon', Jude Kessler affords us an intimate view of Lennon's troubled young life, until the time that Brian Epstein took over management of the early Beatles.

There's much to learn here about how the most commercially successful musical team in history came together, despite their adolescent differences and jealousies.

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Today marks the seventy-fifth birthday of Elvis Presley, a fellow I too often overlook in my rock & roll ruminations. (I tend to favor revolutionaries like Chuck Berry and Little Richard who broke the mold with their strikingly original tunes in the mid '50s.)

But given the biases of those times it took a white guy to make this new music acceptable to a wider demographic swath, and Elvis was the one who lit up the pop world with his bluesy singing and pelvic swagger.

He was also the lightning rod for bizarro attacks against "the devil's music" from religious conservatives, many of whom assumed Elvis was black until they saw him on TV. (Also who knew R&R was a KGB-engineered Stalinist conspiracy?)

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