Good books about music

Next week on "The O.C.": Seth and Ryan get into a fatal disagreement over "James Taylor: Marked For Death," while Summer meets a new hottie who shares her disgust of Nick Hornby.

Dino by Nick Tosches (about Dean Martin; as deep as Catch a Fire by Timothy White, as entertaining as that Motley Crue book)

Backbeat: Earl Palmer's Story, by Tony Scherman (oral history/autobiography of the New Orleans drummer; had me at "Louis Armstrong was a pimp"...)

We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk by Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen (better than Please Kill Me, kind of like L.A. punk itself)

I was torturing this guy in the garage of my mom's house in this nice suburban neighborhood with my whole family inside eating Easter dinner... and I'd got this guy tied up in the rafter with a rope around his legs and I'm beating him with a two-by-four. I said, "Hang on a minute," and put the two-by-four down and walked into the house and kissed my aunt and said like, "Oh hi, how you doing?" I grabbed a deviled egg, told them I'd be back in a minute, and I went back out, grabbed the two-by-four, and kept workin' on the guy. I finally had to get out of Vicious Circle 'cause of the violence. There were constant stabbings and beatings and people cruising by my house at night, shooting up the neighborhood....

I did something pretty bad to somebody and they retaliated with guns. It was a big deal, I had to split to Alaska for a while, they cut the lines on my car, blew up my car... fuck...I don't wanna say who they were, but they weren't punks... boy, they were pissed off.

i went on holiday with the Deborah Curtis book and the Nick Drake biography once. happy times, let me tell you.

if you ever find dave rimmer's "once upon a time in the east", abt berlin east and west b4 the fall of the wall, i utterly UTTERLY recommend it: tho it's only somewhat abt music - unlike his earlier (and also good) "like punk never happened"

Joe Carducci's Rock and the Pop Narcotic is being reissued sometime this year.

Electronic and Experimental Music by Thom Holmes
also; Wireless Imagination (d kahn / g whitehead)
Paul Griffiths - A Concise History of Avant-Garde Music
Paul Griffiths - Modern Music And Beyond
Curtis Roads
William Duckworth : Talking Music
Cage: Silence / A Year From Monday
Cage / Feldman: Conversations
James Tenney : Meta / Hodos
Karlheinz Stockhausen - Stockhausen on Music (Compiled by R Maconie)
Sound By Artists (ed. Dan Lander)
Chris Cutler - File Under Popular
Attali - Noise
Russolo - The Art of Noises (get a hold of a copy any way you can)
Trevor Wishart - On Sonic Art
Douglas Kahn - Noise Water Meat

i think the attali book is lousy at book length—it's a good short polemic idea bulked out to a contradictory nonsense schema—and wireless imagination is patchy (which is a pity, cz it's a great idea for an essay collection)

The Elvis Guralnick books - again, you don't have to care about the subject matter to enjoy them (personally, I was so-so on Elvis before readin' 'em, am now an unabashed fan), and the second one is one hell of a car wreck: the descent starts like twenty pages into it, and by the end of the book you can't even feel sorry for the guy anymore, you just wonder why he hasn't kicked the bucket already.

"Where Did Our Love Go?" by Nelson George has some nice anecdotes, and is probably the best book on Motown around, tho to be frank I didn't learn all that much from it.

"The Heart Of Rock & Soul" seconded, and throw in the "New Book Of Rock Lists" too, if only for the sheer joy of reading the sentence "Tragedy The Intelligent Hoodlum Lists..." over and over again (not that book of rock jokes, tho, that was awful.) And also "Fortunate Son: The Best Of Dave Marsh", great stuff on Elvis, Muddy Waters, latino rock, etc.

I remember reading Maryiln Manson's "The Long Hard Road Out Of Hell" in my early teens and being surprised by how good it was (I'd always loathed the guy's music.) Dunno if it holds up.

"Sweet Soul Music", hell yeah.

I've read the entirety of Christgau's consumer guide online, and there's some great, great stuff there. So the books are recommended, too.

yay I've been wanting to read that one for a while!

adding to my prev post here leroi jones 'blues people' which I just finished this morning: most gd bks on music accept that they aren't just abt notes and chords.

You mean it's not long enough? I loved the book. Should re-read it...

I also loved the Lexicon Devil (bio on Darby Crash) though it's certainly not essential...

the ONLY thing wrong with JMC's line is that he somewhat slightly seems to accept the assumption that the social dimension—the "dance"—isn’t also always part of all music in the West (though he does this in the context of getting ppl to see/hear/look for the fuller sense of the meaning of music): taking his insights abt Africa (Ghana, to be more accurate) and applying them everywhere else is revelatory

Most of it is a charming telling of him learning African drumming in Ghana

And I hope someone someday undertakes a lengthy Sabbath bio.

Also, the massive "The Creation Records Story: My Magpie Eyes are Hungry for the Prize" by David Cavanagh would certainly be interesting to anyone with a major Creation bent. If you aren't down for hundreds of pages detailing the exploits of Biff Bang Pow and The Orange Juice, skip to the midsection for a compelling account of the Loveless miracle/ catastrophe.

The book works as both:

a) an academic (in content, but not in style) explanation of sampling in recorded music (Beadle devotes a chapter each to the careers of PWEI and The KLF),

and

b) an extended thinkpiece on pop music, dance music, and the populism that bridges both.

It's aged fairly well, having been written in 1993, and Beadle's tone is that of scholarly but uncondescending curiousity - a curious granddad who enjoys this newfangled music and wished to legitimize it to his peers. I've almost worn my copy out.

As noted, "The Dark Stuff" and both Lester Bangs anthologies are both totally essential reading.

milton, has "modern music and beyond" been updated at all?:

yes, there's a new version that tackles the 80's/90's and it's not bad, for him Boulez is the culmination so his take on post-1970 is a bit weird. but good. the early to mid 20th century sections remain the best, brought me up to speed on a lot of the basics very quickly. he writes clearly, you don't need to agree with him to figure out which pieces you're interested in actually hearing.

the second edition of Electronic and Experimental Music by Thom Holmes -- I was blown away by that, a fantastic overview. A great reference book. Though again, rocky once it gets to the 90's and interesting work starts to happen in pop.

Audio Culture is more of an epiphany-prompter, the number of ideas per page in that book... most of the featured texts are from the musicians. not the musicologists.

Talking Music by Duckworth -- Duckworth himself is an excellent composer. Probably the best collection of interviews with those composers I've ever read, and organized like a narrative of late 20th century musical development, especially the Young > Riley > Reich > Glass section -- those four nearly read like a soap opera

and the Cage books are just gifts. especially Silence & A Year From Monday, & Kostelanetz' 'John Cage: An Anthology' (xeroxed hand on cover) & the Feldman conversations (which are online at Internet Archive but Lovely Music is still selling copies of the book)

But on the other hand, the Clash book by their roadie, A Riot of Our Own, is a hilarious good read...

(I also enjoyed Last Gang In Town but that feels like another one for obsessive fans like myself.)

What really popped my eyes open was him and Mr Cooke having to sing naked in front of some southern sheriffs. Sad...very sad...

I never knew of this East book! I must have it.

Cavanagh's Creation book seconded. Also, Chris Heath's books on the Pet Shop Boys and Marc Almond's two autobiographical volumes.

if the new Carducci reissue has another rewrite/edit that reins it in a bit then it could be pretty great

TOTALLY AVOID the reissue of A Riot Of Our Own, all the Ray Lowry illustrations taht are at least 40% of the reason for purchase have been rendered completely illegible by editorial or pre-press morons, and look like faxes of blown-up thumbnails of low-res .gifs of the pictures as they appeared in the original

Sniffin Glue Anthology (don't know what the book is called; I have an original truncated version entitled The Bible); Brit punk fanzine '70s, interviews and rants, earnest, petulant, funny.
Francis J. Child ed. English and Scottish Popular Ballads (I've got an abridged version of which I've read 1/20th).
The Portable Ring Lardner and/or Shut Up, He Explained, for his radio reviews c. 1930. The first rock critic, proto-Meltzer.
Gene Fowler Schnozzola, bio of Jimmy Durante, haven't read this yet, but the title and blurb are promising: "The lusty saga of an uninhibited era - from the Coney Island honky tonks, through the wild and roaring twenties, to the fabulous role of clown prince of video."
Tom Wolfe The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Craig MacGregor, ed. Bob Dylan: A Retrospective, lots of early reviews, articles, interviews, love and hate, back when Dylan was the Eminem of "rock."
Charlie Gillett The Sound of the City
Bill C. Malone Country Music USA
John Morthland The Best of Country Music
Richard Meltzer A Whore Just Like the Rest
John Storm Roberts Black Music of Two Worlds
John Storm Roberts The Latin Tinge
Martin Williams The Jazz Tradition
Peter van der Merwe Origin of the Popular Style, a great book of music technical theory (like, what the musicians actually played) on the sources of 20th century popular music

Very hard to put down.

The best music book I've ever read was a list of the 100 "best" rock singles by Paul Williams, the one who ran rock zines in the '60's, but it seems to be long out of print. I disagree with his taste in many places, but the prose itself is awesome.

(if that hasn't been mentioned yet)

"New Orleans Rhythm and Blues" by John Broven is another great one, you'll learn everything you need to know about all those guys and then some.

As I did discuss somewhere else, Castro's book on bossa nova is magnificent. From the same publisher/editor, it's a long 'un but it's equally magnificient, Sublette's "Cuba and Its Music" is just essential, as a history of the island and as a much-needed corrective to the conventional "origins of rock and roll" theory you always hear...

I've been re-reading Alma Guillemoprieto's "Samba" recently too--fine reportage on the samba schools in Brazil. I'm a fan of her work.

Whatever it's called these days--"Rock from the Beginning" or "Awopbopaloobop"--by Nik Cohn, is still to my mind the single best and most stylish book ever written on rock up until 1968 or so.

David Henderson's "Voodoo Child of the Aquarian Age" (may have a new title by now, I have an old edition) is still probably the best book on Jimi Hendrix.

I second the above recommends on Guralnick, and yeah, his Elvis bios, while evenhanded and thorough, are actually...a bit boring somehow...something missing there...altho the bit on EP recording with Chips Moman is one of the best pieces of writing on Presley I know.

Steve Calt's book on Skip James, now OP and probably impossible to find, is certainly worth tracking down...as is his book on Charley Patton. Wrong-headed and cranky as they can be, they certainly are a nice alternative look at blooze culture and its discontents. (Steve's a friend of mine, and ailing these days, so help him out...)

Rob Bowman's book on Stax is exhaustive and very well done.

I also recommend, for lite reading that's of very high quality (and I generally don't like police/crime/novels), anything by George Pelecanos, who writes about D.C. Great fiction in the crime/police vein, very hip, uses music as reference/culture extremely well. I mean, "King Suckerman" is one of the few novels I know that references, intelligently, both "Clear Spot" and Big Star's "Radio City," so of course I like.

My fave Tosches is "Hellfire," his Jerry Lee bio, and second is "Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll." I think he lost the beam a bit with "Where Dead Voices Gather," ostensibly a book about Emmett Miller but really a Tosches-ean screed agin the modren world or something...nice bits but self-indulgent in a bad way.

And of course Meltzer's "Aesthetics of Rock" and his Da Capo reader "Whore Just Like the Rest," which is some of my favorite stuff ever. The man sets a bad example and I'm glad of it.

Relevant answer here if you can access it: https://greilmarcus.substack.com/p/ask-greil-may-10-2024🕸

Now thinking AF is like if James Lipton made a film about actors.

unperson, are they gonna have kindle version?

I assume so; it's the same publisher that did my 2022 book Ugly Beauty, and there was an ebook edition of that.

Relevant answer here if you can access it: https://greilmarcus.substack.com/p/ask-greil-may-10-2024

Scans about right. Again and again in the book he'll come across a wary interview subject, burned by bad Rolling Stone coverage - Allman Brothers, Jimmy Page - and his pitch is always "I'm a fan, and I'm going to write a piece for the fans!" He doesn't show much self-awareness that between stuff like that and ingratiating himself to labels and publicists by writing press kits, he's essentially a shill, though the way he writes about this non-strategy he seems to think he's some clever master of band psychology or something. On the plus side, *because* he is considered a safe-space, he *is* able to get people like Allman, Bowie or Page on the record where others couldn't, and safe-space or not people like that and others still had interesting things to say.

That's the thing about interviewing people. If you have a good interview subject, that's 90% of it right there. The other 10% is providing good (or even adequate) prompts and staying out of the way. That's what makes someone like Rick Beato a good interviewer. He often talks to relatively inside-baseball folks with stories to tell, asks them pretty straight-forward questions, then just let's them talk. When he does land a pretty big get, his questions are run of the mill enough that their charisma and experience answering similar questions takes over and they know just what to say.

I do like Almost Famous a lot, without thinking for a second it's accurate and not a little self-serving. "You are home" to punctuate the "Tiny Dancer" sequence is one of my favourite movie moments this century.

I haven't seen the movie for ages, but I guess I don't dread seeing it again, either. If his book is at all accurate, there are a few scenes in there that are more or less direct from experience.

What a cliff that guy ran off, an impressive run from his teens til he hit a dramatic midlife crisis around age 50, when his output suddenly sucked punchline-bad, he got divorced from a literal rock star, his "Almost Famous" musical flopped, he had a kid with a girlfriend 25 years his junior ...

if you can stomach the overwhelming earnestness, Springsteen's autobiography is a pretty good listen/read. it reads like a human wrote it, which is seemingly of increasing importance

Was thinking I had already posted on here about this, but not seeing it, so here's repost from Rolling Country:

Rosanne's autbio, Composed, takes you right through her life, from childhood w formidable parents, psychology w/o psychobabble---then her father astutely gets her a job w CBS Records in London, where she starts making her own connections---goes right though what was happening during the recording of each album, also a lot about the experience of performing live, medical stuff, also kid by kid, just whatever, w/o overcrowding. (Not a huge amount about her private life w Rodney, and it may not mention their coke years at all, come to think of it.) Says her current/long-time hub, John Leventhal, has encouraged her to write a follow-up, Decomposed, so maybe someday---

What a cliff that guy ran off

I'll say. I actually had mixed feelings about his films in general. As Marcus and others suggested of his print work, there's a shallowness and eagerness to please in his film work. Say Anything is probably the only one I'd go back to, partly because his shortcomings play better with those characters in that context, but there's no denying he was on a roll in terms of professional success. Almost Famous isn't great either, but it's still one of his better films and it finally landed him an Oscar. I had zero knowledge of anything happening after that, so when I looked him up to see what was going on 15 or 20 years after the fact, I was taken aback. One horrendous misfire after another (casting Emma Stone as an Asian???) and most startling of all was the divorce and what indeed read like a terrible midlife crisis.

Aloha is a truly deranged film. Not good at all, but a car crash worth watching. At one point a character refers to Facebook as a place that "helps teens meet and date". There's a Barbarella poster in a kid's room. Lots to ponder.

You know what's really strange? I've never met anyone, ever, that actually read the book "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." And in fact, it seems to be totally out of print, going for hundreds of dollars on eBay and the like. Considering it's the basis for an iconic film and written by a name author, that's pretty odd. Here's a brief interview I found with a (non) explanation:

The first time Cameron Crowe based a movie on a true story was nearly 30 years ago, when he wrote a screenplay from his first book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story. The Amy Heckerling-directed film became a sleeper hit and a cult classic. At 22, Crowe had spent a year as a senior at Clairemont High School in suburban San Diego, chronicling the experiences of his “classmates.” Typical of Crowe, the book played both funny and sweet. But if you want to read that book, be prepared to open your wallet: Fast Times has been out of print since the early ’80s, and copies can be found on eBay and other sites at prices ranging from $125 to $345. And Crowe tells THR he likes it that way:

Why hasn’t Fast Times been republished?

It’s the one thing that I still have the rights to, and I like that there’s one thing that’s not readily available. I like knowing that if you really want it, you can find it, but nobody’s pushing it in your face. I have been approached about republishing, but I haven’t done it. I like it too much as a kind of bootleg.

Are you surprised about the prices?

I like those prices.

How do you feel about the book now?

I love the book. It’s one of my favorite things that I’ve ever written. The book opens the door where all the stuff I learned as a journalist can be applied to a non-celebrity and it’s just as interesting. You can interview a kid sitting in his room, and it’s more interesting than Rod Stewart. It very much opened a door to being a screenwriter because it let you know that it was a level playing field, story-wise.

My theory? The book is full of shit and/or totally fabricated, and he doesn't want to open himself up to that charge. I found this old AV Club piece on the book:

https://www.avclub.com/book-vs-film-fast-times-at-ridgemont-high-1798214433

One conspicuous bit from Tasha's take:

Crowe did something authentically brave and interesting and unique, and he had a chance to file a detailed report on an extraordinary experience that virtually no one else is likely to have. Instead, he gave us a clunky, choppy novel billed as "a true story," though it contains any number of things that are hard to take as fact.

Without the intro, there'd be no reason to believe that Fast Times is based on real life instead of being pure clumsy fiction.

I watched some of Almost famous to see Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs. Was just like Wolfman Jack counselling Robbie Benson about zits in that ancient Clearasil commercial.

"I like that there’s one thing that’s not readily available"

"I love the book. It’s one of my favorite things that I’ve ever written."

I would believe this from Neil Young but otherwise it sounds like absolute horseshit

Lol dow at Wolfman Jack/Robbie Benson Clearasil commercial. Zits be not proud!

One conspicuous bit from Tasha's take:
Bonus points for Harlan Ellison reference.

Have we anticipated the new Simon Reynolds book Still In A Dream, about "the underground explosion of noisepop, shoegaze, slacker rock and grunge that reverberated through the mid-Eighties into the early Nineties"? I'll definitely be picking it up when it's published next week.

Totally stoked here, I live in the states and don’t think it’s coming out here for several months but ima get it from the uk

Subject matter of no interest (shoegaze suuuuucks) but Reynolds is always good.

It seems to cast a pretty wide net, definitely not just shoegaze. Galaxie 500, Liz Phair, and...Royal Trux?

There's a neat little "fanzine" bonus that's not available with the US edition, so I'll be ordering from the UK as well.

Just got Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music by Barry Walters, saw it at the store and bands in the chapter headings made it an instant buy, but it's so big and heavy I haven't taken it to a restaurant to read it yet!

been reading it on my phone.

Just saw it on the front table at the former UWS Shakespeare & Company that is now a Strand but did not buy.

Any thoughts on Major Labels by Kelefa Sanneh? I've listened to a handful of podcasts he's appeared on and really enjoyed how he discusses music history.

"Some may be turned off by how he's seemingly able to find something to like (or at least excuse) in nearly every corner of popular music"

I've really appreciate this, in other things he's done. I'm getting old and soft but I've lost all interest in critic-as-hater writings, and his ability to communicate enthusiasm for music I don't necessarily like or that may not even be good to begin with is refreshing.

I found a discarded copy of it on the street, picked it up and read it, but frankly nothing about it stuck with me. Not that it's not well-informed, but I guess by and large the insights in it were not revelatory to me.

I enjoyed the combination of music history and personal connection in Major Labels.

maybe not "revelatory" but i still enjoyed it. i don't mind his ability to find something likable/excusable in everything tho at times it could be a bit... idk, being able to listen open-mindedly to literal neo-nazi punk music, couldn't be me. made it even funnier when someone here approvingly referred to his shrugging-off of the morgan wallen racial slur scandal in this book tho