Good books about music

Shock & Awe is the first Reynolds book that I'm kind of "eh" about reading. Just don't see what could be added to the wealth of information about glam that's already out there.

it's good so far, but I've never read an entire book about glam so ymmv. it's a nice mix of history and criticism, certainly not as heavy on the latter as Retromania from what I recall, for better or worse. but it's interesting for instance to see Reynolds chart Bolan's transformation from woodland hippy to glam progenitor, and then step outside the narrative to ruminate on whether Bolan was just cynically faking the hippy thing before T. Rex or if he just happened to get really swept up and committed to these different styles as they emerged.

hold onto your dreams is a very good, very full, very entertaining bio. (with some flaws. lawrence has a tendency to drop large chunks of studio/personnel/recording date info into the main body of the text instead of footnotes/endnotes.) if nothing else it enlarges and complicates the picture of russell as an actual (sometimes petty, usually flawed, often inscrutable) human being who happened to make (very good) music, versus the deified portrait of a cipher/savant that's come to define him during the whole 21st century reissue/documentary/hagiography deal.

Thanks! Will def get that. This AR documentary is really good too; the basic movie is on youtube at the moment, I think, but DVD is worth getting for the bonus material etc. (trailer etc here)
http://www.arthurrussellmovie.com/

AR book is good and Strongo otm but Love Saves the Day is on another level and probably my favourite good book about music...in the end it's just a better story.

Just picked this up. Anyone read it yet?
http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/wm/live/1280_720/images/live/p0/49/cf/p049cf74.jpg

Reallly getting in to the Flying Nun memoir In Love With these Times by label head Roger Shepherd.
Just read the chapter on the Fall record In A Hole which was released without full approval by the band since the test copy never made it over to the UK. So Shepherd got hit with a cease and desist when mark E Smith started seeing expensive import copies appearing in Manchester.

I need to grab the Gordons lp, had the e.p a long time back and it was great. Also finally need a physical copy of the Clean's Anthology. Will probably need other stuff as I go on.

Pretty good:

http://03fcd67fd51850d3ba6b-6cb392df11a341bce8c76b1898d0c030.ssl.cf3.rackcdn.com/large/9780/5930/9780593074862.jpg

(North American cover's slightly different.)

1972's always been my favourite year for pop music, but Hepworth makes a good case for '71 as the peak year for albums, starting with Never a Dull Moment, Riot, Who's Next, Tapestry, Sticky Fingers, and Hunky Dory. He has a habit of doubling back again and again--"Wasn't that already covered?" I'd catch myself thinking throughout--and I didn't like it as much as David Browne's 1970 book, Fire and Rain. Good bit near the end, something worth taking note of and thinking about:

"Most of the musicians who became superstars in 1971...were slightly older than rock and roll itself, and therefore they could remember a world before it existed."

Try that again (North American cover):

http://i1059.photobucket.com/albums/t427/sayhey1/never%20a%20dull%20moment_zpssn2s9zga.jpg

Don't know about 'good' but Peter hook's new order book is 99p on Amazon today

^ uk

NB Kindle not paper

sorry, yes. it's a kindle daily deal.

He's dislikable and candid in equal measure, of course it's 95% contrarian against everything to do with Barney who is the focus of most of the ire, however it's not a bad read for all that.

https://www.palazzoeditions.com/psychedelia
this just got released psychedelia by Richard Morton Jack.
Looks like it should be pretty interesting. That website has extracts you can look at.
But I think Amazon currently has it cheaper.

https://www.press.umich.edu/23532/before_motown

^this book really is good, although I think I found a mistake in it

What mistake?

Says Paul Chambers and Doug Watkins were cousins. Seems like they only pretended to be.

Although some say cousins by marriage

It's no secret that Nile Rodgers' autobio is good stuff but I was still surprised, not by the tons of interesting anecdotes but by the generosity of spirit, this Zen like gratitude from an artist who had such a tragic childhood

Not out till October, but will read this for sure.

http://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51UmoDX0Z1L.jpg

http://i1059.photobucket.com/albums/t427/sayhey1/sticky%20fingers_zpsymwf2una.jpg

uh the title

I don't get that either--just creates confusion (should have lifted a line from the Dr. Hook song). Don't know how accurate it was, but I liked Robert Draper's Rolling Stone history from many years ago.

I'm kinda curious about Shake It Up, the new Library of America collection co-edited by Jonathan Lethem. It does look a little too canon-heavy in its subject matter for my tastes, and they are definitely trying to cover all the bases in terms of (American) names, but I trust that I good number of these pieces are at least worth reading:

https://www.loa.org/books/544-shake-it-up-great-american-writing-on-rock-and-pop-from-elvis-to-jay-z

man Lethem is so useless these days

David Weigel's book about prog, The Show That Never Ends, is a lot of fun. Out next month.

Scott Miller, the late frontman for Game Theory, compiled his personal best-of singles lists from 1957 to 2011 into a book called Music: What Happened that is pretty slight, but really struck me at the time i bought it on a whim and has stuck with me for the past few years. great, kind writer, even though his and my tastes don't align that much.

I'm in the middle of reading that Scott Miller book. Still in the 60s but I like the focusing on the ten-songs-a-year aspect of the book's structure.

I liked the Scott Miller book, but that undoubtedly has a lot to do with loving Scott Miller. His selections do get a little too strictly Amerindie from the 90s onward, but he writing is so creative and engaging that I enjoy reading him no matter what the subject.

Shea Serrano's Rap Year Book is a good read, if you're not allergic to a certain amount of hahaha rap lyrics but like all stodgy and proper english

Finished Barry Miles' Macca bio which was good but imo could be vastly improved upon by excluding most of the stuff about 1) Indica 2) Apple 3) Movies after AHDN 4) Who Paul thinks wrote what percentage of some b-side

This looks like fun (if you're into 00s-indie like I am)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062233092/_encoding=UTF8?coliid=I1NZUS22LS2SXP&colid=37BC7UITIYJNR

hmmm:

This book is not at all what I expected. I had actually heard of it through an ad and it sounded really interesting. The way it's presented is that it's stories from these bands/artists. I expected a chapter or at least a page from each. But it's not like that at all. Every single page (there are well over 500), is basically quotes from people. Some times the quotes are very very short and seem irrelevant to the chapter they're placed in. Example: In the chapter titled "I don't know who was paying for the drugs. It wasn't me." There's a quote saying, "Gordon Raphael: We recorded Is This Is between March and April 2001 at Transporterraum in Alphabet City." That's it. That's the end of the quote...
They all just seem like extremely random thoughts. So far, I'm very unimpressed and a bit bummed. Given the size of the book, I was pretty stoked to read some first hand accounts (who doesn't love having a peak into the mind of someone famous?). But this is just a let down :/ Every single page looks like the picture provided (except for a few photograph inserts). There is literally zero story anywhere in the book, just quotes.

this oral history has too many quotes

if you're not allergic to a certain amount of hahaha rap lyrics but like all stodgy and proper english

oh boy, i sure am

Yeah, I'm used to reading these oral history style books, so the "bunch of quotes" complaint doesn't bother me as much.

i was so ready to rip into meet me in the bathroom but listening to and reading some interviews with lizzy i'm really excited now, i feel like it's everything besides the "nostalgia for the hype" book i thought it might be

*gonna be everything besides, i haven't read it yet so i can't know for sure

I just finished Meet Me In the Bathroom. It's made me dig up a lot of my old emails and mailing list posts and post them to facebook as I partake in debates with other early 00s NY scenesters. I really liked the book, it's not everything to everybody, but it worked for me on several levels. A lot of those people I'm fans of and friends with and I was there so that's great (even though I only got one brief mention and not the chapters I deserve), and the other half I never met and didn't care for musically or whatever but even that stuff is interesting in the way that I'll watch just about any biopic ever made and enjoy watching the journey to success, or the flame-out. There's a lot of interesting talk about the changes of the time and how various folk dealt with them. You might agree this was something important and if you don't it's an interesting story about people who think it was. Or you can just accept that this is somebody else's story and take it for that. I'm planning on writing something longer about the book, both a reflection of it as well as my personal addendum.

And I love Oral Histories but I feel like they need to have people's bios after their name every single time because I couldn't keep up with it.

I'm about ~150 pages into it and yeah it's a ton of fun. All the characters are really interesting and she does a good job of sketching out the scene through interviews. I've never been to New York but this book makes it sound like quite the experience (though it's probs very different now).

This is the first oral history I've read, do they usually have bios after the names? It's a chore to keep up with it all but I'm just trying to get used to it

No I don't think they usually have bios. I actually never read Please Kill Me but I read the one about the LA punk scene, We've Got the Neutron Bomb. This book just covers a big enough scope that if you can't remember the name of the dude from The National you might get confused.

Here's Kid from Oneida's take:

http://www.talkhouse.com/was-this-it/

His interest kind of points to one of the things missing from the book. If I was to simplify it greatly, I think the book could've spent more time on the Brooklyn scene, and also more discussion of the dance music scene(s) and how they related. But even both of those things at least got their shout-out at some points. A lot of is just about the author's perspective and where she and her friends were coming from. Namely they were manhattan-based bloggers and Spin and Rolling Stone writers, so it's not surprising they'd miss out on some of that. Reading Rob Sheffield talk about Brooklyn like it was some scary foreign land says a lot. There's no question that manhattan was more important than brooklyn at that point, 90% of the shows and parties and bars etc were all still in the east village and lower east side, but most of us living in brooklyn and whatever underground scene had been there for many years was bubbling over. The book does talk about that, especially in the TV on the Radio section, but not enough. I'm also surprised Animal Collective didn't come up once.

I can't totally speak to how different New York is now as I don't get out that much, but it's hard to explain what was exciting. I mean New York is always New York and there's always 1,000 things to do and a million new people moving here every year to make it or whatever, but the book is right that things were dull in a way for a while, and I always go on about what I felt was boring, you had noise rock indie rock bands in the Sonic Youth to Blonde Redhead type world and people would go to those shows and stand around and you had techno parties where they just played a specific kind of techno and house clubs and it was all very separate and what the book touches on, about that time when the Strokes hit and the DFA started up, it coincided with/caused all these bands to move to New York. Maybe the year before is SF or Portland or Chicago, but suddenly it was New York again and I met a new band every day, and the scene isn't that big, like, maybe in other cities you go to one party than maybe you drive to some other party, but in NY you just walk out the door and down the block to the next party. And disco-punk and electroclash and who knows what else started breaking down those walls between styles and you would find yourself dancing to disco after a night of noise bands or whatever.

It seemed new at the time. Maybe it was just because it was my mid 20s and I was part of it but also knew my history enough to get that it was cyclical and we were academic about it. We'd sit around and talk about The Mudd Club and Danceteria (Madonna played with A Certain Ratio! Let's do that!) or we'd talk about madchester or whatever. I know I was going out in NY in the late 90s and I felt the difference, and I specifically remember being at an art opening w/ Nick Zinner, who was older and who'd been struggling in NY bands for a few years and saying "is it me or are things just getting better? I know I wasn't going out that much before but now it seems like there's cool stuff all the time" and he said "no you're right, it's changed and it's definitely better".

Not to say there was nothing special going on, but like, I was more interested in seeing Elliott Sharp at the Cooler or something. The young rock bands weren't that exciting. I mean there was some good indie/noise rock stuff and a lot of what I keep referring to as the Johnny thunders poseurs, a kind of new york cool rock band vibe that was really lame and boring. So when you suddenly had all this stuff happening at once, it was pretty exciting. And there was a lot of dancing. And you didn't have to do any drugs, despite what most of the people in the book say.

rereading that post I will say that some of what made NY special during that period has been lost because of gentrification and real estate...namely, that ability to just hop from party to party in the east village is kind of fading away as all the cool stuff is spread out through ridgewood or some other distant locals. Parts of bushwick might have that feeling now and some of Williamsburg, but I can't imagine anything like what it was like when manhattan was still fun, and I can't imagine that existing in most other cities.

Great posts, dan. Thanks!

Great posts, dan. Thanks!

He said, twice.

thanks. there's a lot more where that came from. I covered a lot of that from my perspective here some years ago: http://acuterecords.com/blog/?p=32

I'm reading Elijah Wald's How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll, which (so far at least, and I'm about halfway into it) is not about the Beatles at all, mercifully. It's about what was actually popular throughout the 20th century in America, vs. what critics prefer to remember about the music of the 1920s-1950s. One major example: Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings are commonly regarded as his best/most important work, but those groups were entirely assembled for the studio, and never played live. In many ways, his reputation was established entirely on the back of records, but what he was actually doing most of the time in the 1920s (playing as a featured soloist with big dance bands and orchestras) is forgotten.

Forgotten by whom? His live activity is noted in bios---for instance, the night he got to be the first black man introducing a jazz band/speaking on live radio in Louisiana, because the white announcer couldn't bring himself to do it--and fairly well documented recording-wise, especially in later decades of course.