Good books about music

Terry Teachout's Pops (Louis Armstrong bio) is great and extremely readable at a quick-paced 300 pages.

OTOH an 800 page Frank Sinatra bio that stops in 1953 strikes me as too detailed - anybody read this?

^^Frank by James Kaplan

Christgau offered a mixed take on the Teachout book (and on Teachout himself)(see link below) earlier in the year that was discussed or mentioned somewhere here on ilx. Am wondering now if reading this book, is like reading a George Will book on baseball? Your (coleman) take suggests I need not worry which is good to know.

http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Rock-Roll/Pops-as-Pop/ba-p/2578

Mark Anthony Neal's Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic has some really good writing on R. Kelly...

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I'm no fan of Teachout's neoconservative theatre criticism to put it mildly and Pops is surprisingly balanced w/little or no politicized axe-grinding. even better than Xgau is willing to admit IMO.

If you like Van Morrison, the Greil Marcus book was very good.

I just knew of his Dylan collection book, Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010, but yep Listening to Van Morrison is out too.

Sean Wilentz' book on Dylan, Bob Dylan in America came out in 2010 too. I haven't read any of these yet!

What do you guys like/want for coffee table books?

The Jazz Loft Project by Sam Stephenson

Who Shot Rock and Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present by Gail Buckland

Jazz by photographer Herman Leonard

Sacred Steel

The Boombox Project

Alex Ross' new book (Listen To This) is good so far.

Just bought Husker Du: The Story of the Noise-Pop Pioneers Who Launched Modern Rock . Haven't cracked it yet.
That's uh some title.

^it's tru, tho.

This Rob Young book is so good it has me purring with pleasure. I'm 100 pages in and he hasn't even got going on folk music in earnest yet. Instead he's making me want to check out Vaughan Williams, Holst and Bax, which is no mean achievement.

― margana (anagram), Wednesday, August 25, 2010 7:10 AM (3 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

really, really want to read this. Vaughan Williams is really good too.

Amused/bemused that the Rob Young book is featured in the Toast catalogue.

And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records by Larry Harris

this was so much better than I expected, as advertised an insiders account of disco era excesses and the subsequent near-collapse of the record industry.

oops published in nov 09 but worth a look regardless

i want to read that. i need all disco books.

OK so I just finished Wald's How The Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music and if you go into it with the latter half of the title more in mind rather than the attention-grabbing former, it's really a very fine book. It could definitely stand pruning and the six-page epilogue, "The Rock Blot and The Disco Diagram," is a mess (if not an offense - thanx for the parenthetical mention of gays in relation to disco). But he does a great job of recreating some of the ways in which music was actually lived and how they've been distorted by recording-based histories.

As for The Beatles, well, we already knew that they kinda sorta destroyed rock 'n' roll (as opposed to rock) in addition to laying waste to Tin Pan Alley and Johnny Mercer (although they only kinda sorta did that too).

Here's his basic theory and how he ties The Beatles to the rest of the book:

"(The Beatles) had led their audience off the dance floor, separating rock from its rhythmic and cultural roots, and while the gains may have balanced the losses in both economic and artistic terms, that change split American popular music in two. When similar splits had happened in the past, the demands of satisfying live audiences had always forced the streams back together, but by the end of the 1960s live performances had lost their defining role on the pop music scene. So the Beatles and the movement they led marked the end not only of rock ’n’ roll as it had existed up to that time but also of the whole process explored over the course of this book, in which white and black musicians had evolved by adopting and adapting one another’s styles, shaping a series of genres—ragtime, jazz, swing, rock ’n’ roll—that at their peaks could not be easily categorized by race." 246

― Kevin John Bozelka, Sunday, August 2, 2009 4:47 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark

this book is A++

so many books to read

any good stuff coming out in the next few months?

Good boobs about music

The new SReynolds might be interesting?

I'm currently readin John Powell's "How Music Works" (simple and entertaining - lots of stuff I didn't know), and Oliver Sachs' "Musicophilia" (also very interesting).

Is there such a thing as a book about IDM/electronica scene early-90s to early 2000s?

"(The Beatles) had led their audience off the dance floor, separating rock from its rhythmic and cultural roots, and while the gains may have balanced the losses in both economic and artistic terms, that change split American popular music in two. When similar splits had happened in the past, the demands of satisfying live audiences had always forced the streams back together, but by the end of the 1960s live performances had lost their defining role on the pop music scene. So the Beatles and the movement they led marked the end not only of rock ’n’ roll as it had existed up to that time but also of the whole process explored over the course of this book, in which white and black musicians had evolved by adopting and adapting one another’s styles, shaping a series of genres—ragtime, jazz, swing, rock ’n’ roll—that at their peaks could not be easily categorized by race." 246

i don't know if i agree with any of this. especially the live performance thing. unless you don't think consistently filling football stadiums with 100,000+ people all throughout the 70's wasn't some sort of social pop phenomena. it was the decade of live concert "events".

and as far as the genre thing goes, there was plenty of music not easily categorized by race in the 70's. fusion, free jazz, disco, soft rock, singer songwriter pop, lite pop soul, etc.

and people dance to beatles music all the time. the beatles were very much in touch with their rhythmic roots. i can play you 4 zillion 70's r&b beatles covers that were played in black clubs filled with black audiences as evidence if needed.

oh i could go on...

i mean the some of the biggest pop acts in the u.s. in the early 70's were pop/jazz/r&b/rock hybrids like chicago, blood,sweat&tears, and three dog night. and they packed in the fancy dancers everywhere they played. so what did the beatles kill again?

http://www.twitteringmachines.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/the-recording-angel.jpg
Highly recommend this, which I just discovered (first published in 1987, I think). It's all about how the experience of listening to music on records — as opposed to live concerts — has changed the direction and development of music itself.

yeah you get to raid the fridge and don't have to pay for parking.

plus, no long lines in the bathroom.

The new SReynolds might be interesting?

― ford lopatin (dog latin), Monday, April 4, 2011 7:54 AM

oh man, fantastic -- thanks for the heads up

So Reynolds' 2010 "Totally Wired: Postpunk Interviews and Overviews" consists of a mixture of old and new interviews he did plus previously written pieces and a little bit of new analysis?

Pretty much. All interviews with people like David Thomas, Lydia Lunch etc. Plus a nice little write up all about Mutant Disco. Basically it's Rip It Up Extra.

The new one coming out is about retro culture and our relationship with it. I don't know how much there is let to say on the subject - it sounds a bit meta tbh, but I've enjoyed nearly all his books I've read (especially Rip It Up) so I'll be getting it when it comes out.

I really like Bez's Freaky Dancin book, though I guess it's not really about the music at all

just ordered phill brown's "are we still rolling?", supposed to be really good:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0977990311
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/5179zRQa4CL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Phil struggles to balance his home and family with a job where drug abuse, chaos, rampant egos, greed, lies and the increasingly invasive record business take their toll.

read excerpts of it in tape op, it was entertaining though i didn't really care about a lot of the musicians/bands involved

should i get a tape op subscription?

you might as well, it's free. it's usually too tech-y for me but they have good interviews occasionally.

Sammy Hagar's book #1 on NYT bestseller list.

RED ROCKER BIO BOOK BOX OFFICE SOCKO SHOCKER!

but who will play him in the movie...

XP - Yes you should.

I read that Philllll Brown book a couple of weeks ago, interesting stuff, he's obviously a contrary bastard, and he misses out loads of bands I would have liked to have read about (Eat, Bark Psychosis) and mentions a lot that I wouldn't give a ha'penny for but it's still pretty great. i reckon a lot of people will be reading it to get some sort of scoop on those arcane Talk Talk sessions, but there's not much that hasn't been written about beforehand in Sound On Sound magazine or in other PB interviews.

I never knew that his brother Terry moved to Canada and was *the* Terry Brown that recorded a lot of the classic Rush albums.

oh sweet, for some reason i thought tape op was only free in the uk.

Anybody seen the new Will Friedwald 800 page book on jazz vocalists?

anybody?

Once looked at an earlier book of his on the subject. Seemed pretty good, although he hated a certain strain of cabaret singer. Just downloaded a sample of this one.

Joshua Clover's new one on 1989 was excellent.

OK, Curmudgeon, I just skimmed the first few As, starting with Ernestine Anderson. Definitely looks like a keeper.

Ha. Thanks. Didn't Christgau or someone once complain about Friedwald's writing (or maybe that's just me remembering something I did not like about it?).

Pricey though, which is I guess why you are asking.
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