The first book to explore the extraordinary musical life and remarkable paintings of one of America's greatest ever songwriters.Best known for having written and produced some of the seminal records of American popular culture from Big Girls Don't Cry for the Four Seasons to Silence Is Golden for the Tremeloes and Lady Marmalade for LaBelle Bob Crewe was a multi-faceted artist for whom a passion for painting and the visual arts provided a lifelong counterbalance to music. Collected here are more than eighty of Crewe's artworks, stretching from his first forays into Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s and 1960s to more complex, tactile compositions made on his full-time return to painting in the 1990s accompanied by archival images and ephemera that reflect Crewe's simultaneous contribution to popular music. Essays by Jessica May and Peter Plagens explore the development of an artist whose influences ranged from Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns to Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon; legendary record producer Andrew Loog Oldham captures the period of radical experimentalism in which Crewe wrote many of the most memorable songs in the canon of modern pop; and Donald Albrecht's introduction ties together the many complementary aspects of Crewe's personal and creative lives.Donald Albrecht is an independent curator and writer living and working in New York City. Jessica May is an independent curator and formerly Deputy Director and Robert and Elizabeth Nanovic Chief Curator at Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Andrew Loog Oldham is an English record producer and author. Peter Plagens is an artist and writer, whose writing has appeared in Artforum and Newsweek