Good books about music

Haven't read it yet, but just ordered Harry Sword's Monolithic Undertow: In Search of Sonic Oblivion, a book on the history of drone. Based on the blurb below, I'm hoping for something in the sweet spot between Julian Cope and Joe Carducci:

Monolithic Undertow alights a crooked path across musical, religious and subcultural frontiers. It traces the line from ancient traditions to the modern underground, navigating archaeoacoustics, ringing feedback, chest plate sub-bass, avant-garde eccentricity, sound weaponry and fervent spiritualism. From Neolithic beginnings to bawdy medieval troubadours, Sufi mystics to Indian raga masters, cone shattering dubwise bass, Hawkwind's Ladbroke Grove to the outer reaches of Faust and Ash Ra Temple; the hash-fueled fug of The Theatre of Eternal Music to the cough syrup reverse hardcore of Melvins, seedy VHS hinterland of Electric Wizard, ritual amp worship of Earth and Sunn O))) and the many touch points in between, Monolithic Undertow explores the power of the drone - an audio carrier vessel capable of evoking womb like warmth or cavernous dread alike.

In 1977 Sniffin' Glue verbalised the musical zeitgeist with their infamous 'this is a chord; this is another; now form a band' illustration. The drone requires neither chord nor band, representing - via its infinite pliability and accessibility - the ultimate folk music: a potent audio tool of personal liberation. Immersion in hypnotic and repetitive sounds allows us to step outside of ourselves, be it chant, a 120dB beasting from Sunn O))), standing front of the system as Jah Shaka drops a fresh dub or going full headphone immersion with Hawkwind. These experiences are akin to an audio portal - a sound Tardis to silence the hum and fizz of the unceasing inner voice. The drone exists outside of us, but also - paradoxically - within us all; an aural expression of a universal hum we can only hope to fleetingly channel...

It's coming out from White Rabbit Books, a UK publisher with no US distributor that I can find, but if anybody wants to buy it without paying more for shipping to the US than the book itself costs, Blackwell's offers free shipping to the US.

Got the first Noise For Heroes through the post earlier this week. Seems pretty good. Think I got it right at the right time cos I saw it had doubled in price on there today. & seems to be the one place I can find the books online.
Book depositary doesn't appear to have them.
Did have Gardner's first 2 volumes of punk history though.

impulse bought al jourgensen's "memoirs" cheap, it's really bad, he's really fucking stupid.

i dont know what i expected lol

Is there a Please Kill Me/We Got The Neutron Bomb-style book on the mid-60s London rock scene?

Days in the Life by Jonathon Green might be just the thing.

That Jourgensen book is pretty bad. I interviewed him once and it was fun for the 20 minutes it lasted. I couldn't imagine dealing with him for the weeks and months it must have taken to co-author that thing. I know the guy who did it, but I've never asked him about the experience.

First time I've seen this--came out in December.

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ivXojm6wPU8/X9zyiWIooRI/AAAAAAAAODU/RcKLvb4HleAIhWxYvxZYhHSzy-48u2b4wCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h640/131692600_1096289257473106_5517825509382928784_n.jpg

I would read it for sure, but Starz? Isn't that just a whole different level on the fame/success spectrum? Wikipedia says they were a major influence on other bands...I guess I missed that. They were real second-string at the time.

I'm reading the book mentioned above - They Just Seem a Little Weird; How KISS, Cheap Trick, Aerosmith and Starz Remade Rock and Roll.
Starz seem to get into the book because they shared management with KISS and played with Aerosmith. There's a lot of testimonies throughout the book from young fans of these groups who grew up to become 80s or 90s musicians, and Starz seem to have been as beloved a group as the others were. A lot of fans and people in the industry apparently expected them to do a lot better than they did.
The book itself is well-written enough, anecdotal and not theoretical at all. There's almost as much on the managers, scenesters and business dealings as on the music.
I'm pondering a poll on the four bands mentioned in the title, though I'm sure three of them are well-represented in threads.

Book I want to read is the new one by Rob Bowman, who wrote a book about Stax. This one is called The Last Soul Company: the Malaco Records Story. Malaco had success with Zz Hill, Denise Lasalle, & Bobby Bland plus lots of gospel.

I've seen a couple of Bowman's lectures. I wished that he had expanded his liner notes to Funkadelic's Music for Your Mother into a book.

I'm old enough to remember when he worked at Records on Wheels in the late '70s, just below Yonge and Bloor.

I assisted Doug the author variously on this book project and have been wondering if anyone on ILM would ever take notice… ILM is wild on Cheap trick, seems tepid on Aero, and I am fairly confident that I am one of like three ILMniks out of the thousands over 20 years that love Kiss. Furthermore, the climate for music in 2018-2020, which is the period in which the book was produced, is not hospitable to examinations of hard rock of the 70s; I do think Scott Seward, one of the ILM superstars and lamentably gone, would like this book.

Among Doug's intentions, which differentiates it from fannish books about these acts, is to examine why Starz did not succeed and the other three did… they had many of the same opportunities but are now obscure…my own view is, having listened to two of the records while helping him, is that Starz is not anywhere near as good as the other three… I would be delighted to say "oh look, this band was like the Nick Drake/Big Star/Frankie Beverly & Maze of cock rock, I can't believe how amazing this is" but Starz seems very ordinary to me… could this be that getting into the other acts in the late 80s /early 90s when I was a budding record collector/musician in my teens imprinted their shit on my psyche, and then hearing a band like this now when I listen to Drake leaves me cold? Probly, but in 2003 when Ryko reissued them, I listened to them then and didn't dig it.

I also think that each of these bands reflect a change in american popular rock music. Prior to the emergence of each, the prevailing rock band paradigm was crunchy, anti-flash, post-hippie, let it all hang out, "show biz is false, maaaaaannn," "we the long hairs oppose the war and straight society and are pointing the way for a virtuous future" : the Eagles, CSNY, Doobies, the Dead. The Stooges and the Dolls did not reach the teenage audience at this time, and Alice Cooper and Grand Funk were considered to be hideous aberrations appealing to the worst instincts of those selfsame teenagers. but the rock bands that embraced flash, show biz, artifice and spectacle were British. Each of the bands focussed on in Doug's book did not like the above american paradigm, and aspired to be like the British bands of the time. And they were, and they changed what american rock bands emblemised and how they behaved and operated for the next, oh, 25 years.

I would be happy to discuss more about Doug's book with you guys…

Gonna assume that’s in Toronto. Although Bowman had moved to Memphis, Tennessee for a bit when he was getting a graduate degree ( in Stax basically from David Evan’s) . I had posted about the Malaco book chat Bowman just did with writer Scott Barretta on the Chitlin Circuit soul thread. The virtual talk was done via Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi

My post is a x-post to Clemenza

The Brod book has the potential to be interesting, but of the four groups the only one I like is Aerosmith, and I don't really understand how they were pathbreaking in the same hypercommercial "big show" way as KISS, for example. Yes, they were working on a specifically British model — they were basically the next evolution after the Rolling Stones, with a very similar frontman/lead guitarist dynamic, and blues-based but forward-looking music coupled with a broad appreciation for black music (covering James Brown live). But at the same time they were closer to punk and bar rock than the Stones ever got, and never did the sneering country pastiches the Stones did. Like I say, they were the next step. But did they have a big light show or some other showbiz element that helped them "remake rock 'n' roll"? Seems like Blue Öyster Cult were a better example of that kind of thing, but I'm too young to have seen any of these acts in their prime.

Yeah, and in interviews quoted in the text, both Aerosmith and Cheap Trick distanced themselves from the spectacular side of KISS ("we're a rock band, we go on stage and play music", etc.).

I'm reading the Matos 1984 book now, then excited to start the Fred Wesley book, then the books on Flying Nun and Sarah. With fiction and non-music non-fiction in between, I expect.

you don't like Cheap Trick, Unperson? huh… that is right re: CT and Aero (in particular Aero is discomfited by Kiss; Tyler looks down on Kiss), but the key point is that bands like the Move, Slade and the glam rock cohort were gleefully outré and considered to be greasy kids stuff relative to the post hippie likes I mention above… in the 80s, the rock band archetype had everything to do with Kiss, Aero and VH, and thus no teenager who wanted to be a rock star wanted to emulate, like, Paul Kantner. And it also maybe is hard to remember now, even as the fucking internet has to talk endlessly about Mick Jagger doing some dumb song with Grohl, how dominant the Rolling Stones were in the 70s, how they seemed so sinister and unconcerned with evincing sincerity a la the american bands I mention.

I should stress that my thing with british band's influence on the four central to the book is my thing, and Doug doesn't necessarily go along with it. It's his book.

you don't like Cheap Trick, Unperson?

I've only ever heard four Cheap Trick songs that I'm aware of. "Surrender" is OK. "The Dream Police," "I Want You To Want Me" and "The Flame" are all terrible. Those aren't the kind of odds that'll make me dig deeper into a band's catalog.

Their first album (which doesn't contain any of those songs) is pretty aggressive hard rock for 1977.

Indeed, the Rolling Stone Record Guide referred to them as the "heavy-metal highlight of the late 70's."

Curmudgeon: Toronto, yes. At the time, I think he was know as the Grateful Dead guy there. (Great store, by the way.) I believe the popular music course he started at York was the first of its kind here.

is to examine why Starz did not succeed and the other three did

That's actually a great idea and answers whatever puzzlement I expressed above. A similar idea was part of the one and only 33-1/3 proposal I submitted 15 years ago. It was for the Shoes Black Vinyl Shoes, and I said one of the things I'd try to figure out is why the Cars and other (much inferior, to my mind) new wave bands had big mainstream success and the Shoes didn't.

Love the first two of those Cheap Trick songs; no use for the third. "He's a Whore" and "Southern Girls" and "Downed" are even greater.

I remember Bowman in the late 80s working at (running? owning?) a record store on Queen St. W.

Don't remember that--I thought he'd moved full-time into teaching by then. I didn't really frequent any stores west of Spadina, though, so you might be right.

Bob Gluck's You'll Know When yOu Get There was pretty interesting. Might give the miles Davis Lost Quintet etc a shot at some point. had me wanting to listen to teh band more anyway.

I got Rose from ISB's book through teh mail this week but not read it yet.
Hoping it adds to the Mike Heron one a lot. Hope there are others coming.

Stranded by Clinton Walker on the Australian underground scene since just prior to punk. Very interesting.

Need to get the new Boy On Fire on eo n early Nick cave etc

& must get Richard Thompson's Beeswing.

Got “Nothin But A Good Time: The Uncensored History of the 80’s Hard Rock Explosion” by Tom Beaujour & Richard Bienstock

150 pages in & it’s great.

New to me: the Don Dokken/George Lynch soap opera (it is A Whole Thing™️ that goes back to Xciter & the first Dokken album) I sorta knew they hated each other but no idea it was a whole saga

Max Asher & Josh Lewis from Warrant named the band after Warren De Martini which is the dumbest thing i have ever heard & i love it lmao

Jack Russell from Great White robbed a house while high on pcp and shot a woman (she survived, luckily)- that was fkn crazy to read

Lots of props for Quiet Riot opening the door for hard rock radio play/label interest which is cool

It also supports my dislike for Ratt & confirms their “idiot wannabes” vibe

I dont think I knew that Axl’s first name was Bill?

It's the W. in W. Axl Rose!

I saw Dokken live in the '80s once and George Lynch got pissed off about something and slammed his guitar down and walked offstage in a huff. No idea why, now I wonder if it was something to do with the singer. He certainly projected disgruntlement at the time.

Quiet Riot are one of those groups that had been around much longer than people realized (Twisted Sister was another one). I remember Quiet Riot got big in Japan before anywhere else, but I think with Randy Rhoads? Anyway, the book sounds like a blast.

Don Dokken comes across like a lone wolf who was v opportunistic & hungry, and bc he never really had a band of friends with him, he was willing to do more for the sake of fame at the expense of anyone around him

Lynch seemed more like a super-talented guy who wanted a band that had his back. But he was in need of a gig when Tooth & Nail was happening - he had gotten passed over for Ozzy’s band in kind of a shitty way when they hired Jake Lee so he was in a “better the devil you know” situation w Dokken. It was kinda doomed from the getgo since they ~already~ couldnt stand each other

and yeah, they talk a lot about how the early bands that got over were the guys who had been working for years before - Quiet Riot & Twisted Sister had been working solidly since the 70’s, Motley had Nikki who’d worked w London etc, etc

just going to chime in here to say George Lynch is a sick guitarist

100%

I've never listened to Dokken's popular albums, but I heard a live CD from 1981 that came out in the mid-2000s that was pretty impressive.

VG or anyone else, check out these cheapie Inside Metal documentaries about the roots of the LA metal scene, really cool.

at one point Don Dokken says he used to sell coke to Keith Morris and Black Flag, also that he was someone getting it indirectly from Pablo Escobar

https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Metal-Scene-Explodes/dp/B078TND9ZW?ref_=d6k_applink_bb_dls

Dokken was the first band I ever saw live! my friend's dad took us to see Aerosmith in 87 and they opened

Martin Popoff's The Big Book of Hair Metal has a lot of colourful pictures and talks about a wide range of bands of that era, it's neither academic not especially gossipy.

xposts thanks for the rec ums! i will check those documentaries out!

I love the first 3 Dokken albums, and their live album Beast From The East is pretty great. Don is kind of douchey but he has a great voice & Lynch obv shreds

What I posted about Bowman's book over on the Sweet Soul Music thread:

Really appealing Memphis Commercial Appeal feature by Bob Mehr, reThe Last Soul Company: The Story of Malaco Records, by Rob Bowman, ethnomusicologist and author of Soulsville U.S.A., a study of Stax. He also wrote the notes to Malaco box in the 90s, for the label's 30th Anniversary---for the 50th, a Malaco co-founder pitched him the idea to write "a lavish coffee table book that would tell the company's complete history." (So it's authorized, I take it, but on this piece, Bowman doesn't always agree w co-founder's comments). "It's the longest-running independent record label in American musical history," RB mentions, and and Mehr specifies, "It's existed in various forms: first as a booking agency, then a recording studio, then home to a hot house band, and ultimately a record label that has flirted with and found success across a number of genres from soul-blues to gospel." Mississippi Fred McDowell, King Floyd, Jean Knight, Little Milton, Johnny Taylor, Denise LaSalle, and (I think) ZZ Hill, many more were on there, and the house band also recorded with the Pointer Sisters, Rufus Thomas, and Paul Simon as mentioned here.
https://www.commercialappeal.com/story/entertainment/music/2021/03/23/malaco-records-the-last-soul-company-rob-bowman-music-books/4735772001/

As far as oral histories, testimonies, more in-the-moment than retrospective, that go back and forth between cute, alarming, and sad, leave us not forget each screen doc (Hair Metal->Punk->Leftovers)in The Decline of Western Civilation trilogy (so far): the overall title comes to seem more "you decide" than tongue-in-cheek.

Speaking Aerosmith and so, on from a geezer's POV (but as briefly as possible): the critical and commercial success of Bowie in the States, starting with his first in a long line of radio hits, "Space Oddity,"plus his increasingly popular live presentation, may have helped the theatricality and (initially)good hard pop-rockin' records of Aerosmith and Kiss. And for those of us who followed Creem, in middle school, high school, college, and now-whatta-I-do, this last being the Creem Michigan core's peers there was a pop-rockin' continuity of Grand Funk (late 60s-mid-70s), Stones (up to Exiles, back with Some Girls, in between, the interest was more in their shows) Stooges, Dolls, Bowie, Reed, T. Rex (most visible w "Get It On," but along through late 70s w some faithful LP buyers)
---and yeah okay welcome young Aerosmith and even K*I*S*S*, although they went from gaudy to garish, and settled into grinding albums out every six months (when they needed a new crop of 15 year-olds, as somebody remarked). They may have stayed good longer than I thought, but who could keep up, ballin' on a budget? (Plenty of people caught up later, judging from the twentysomething oollectors I met in 90s CD stores and record shows in nostalgic for the K-men as they were for the hair metal emerging in their own middle school days)( and Gene Simmons eventually admitted to being fazed by for instance fans from ancient times coming up to him after shows on the memory circuit, requesting no more blood, you scared my grandbaby "B-but-we're still K*I*S*S*!")
Aerosmith played it cooler, though Tyler agreed with Simmons that good taste was a bunch of shit, esp. in rock, and their 70s albums filled the aforementioned Stones vinyl gap: nuthin too quirky, just killer--a guy walked into my room during Rocks, and asked, "Is this a new Zep record?" A huge compliment, then and now. Some good live albums too.
They started loosing it with A Night In The Ruts, and never really came back for long, quality-wise, far as I could tell.

Sorry for lack of edits in that, but you get my drift. Oh, again party re the budget, partly through the fairly enthusiastic but unremarkable Creen reviews, Starz just never seemed, to me, all that worth checking out. Cheap Trick quickly became known more as reliable arena rockers, also good on the state fair etc. oldies circuit, maybe to this day, though w/o orig drummer(again, early albs got some good reviews, but unperson prob heard most of the key songs). Shoes never made anything like the big media push, and never got the big promotional backing, of any of these other bands, though certainly Black Vinyl Shoes and several others have stood the test of time.

always interesting to hear how they were perceived at the time

big difference for me is Aerosmith's world class rhythm section vs. Kiss's pathetic chops

I definitely see them having the same audience at that time but to me Kiss isn't even on the same planet as Aerosmith

Cheap Trick are a treasure to me, the first three are perfect and they are still a great live act (my friend saw them jam out "waiting for my man" by vu for a state fair crowd a couple years ago).... they have such a cool vibe, kind of half winking and smart but also arena rockers

I only heard Kiss on the radio and at other people's house parties, may never have heard a whole Cheap Trick album anywhere, so I'm hardly the best judge. Yeah, Cheap Trick flaunted their 2 Nerds x 2 Studs visual hooks, and they could all play, for sure.

I was only a kid but Kiss fully just *poof* disappeared as soon as they took off their makeup - the only thing that hit after that was God Gave Rock & Roll in the early 90’s. But thet were so indefatigable it didnt seem to matter, they seemed to already have nostalgia-touring figured out 20 years before it became a thing for washed-up hair bands. They didnt ever seem to care that no one else cared about them.

I think Lick it Up was pretty big


but in another thread someone pointed out that if you look up their album sales even in the mid/late 70s they didn't sell nearly as many records as you'd expect

I just looked and their biggest album is Destroyer, only 2X platinum

kinda wild, Rocks is 4X, Toys in the Attic is 8X platinum

Cheap Trick studio albums never go more than platinum but Budokan is 3X

I would have guessed Destroyer would have been closer to Aerosmith numbers*

*though in fairness I bet Aerosmith's old albums sold quite a few more copies in the 90s when they were huge

leave us not forget each screen doc (Hair Metal->Punk->Leftovers)in The Decline of Western Civilation trilogy

dow is misrecalling these docos slightly but any recommendation is worthwhile.

(Punk -> Hair Metal -> homeless street kids, each of the three specifically in Hollywood)

xp I have to imagine Double Platinum by Kiss is at least, um, 2X platinum?

oh yeah I was just doing studio albums except Budokan but Alive as well