Good books about music

Please kill me.

Oh well. Read it anyway. It's amazing. And Our Band Could Be Your Life. If you're interested in criticism, check out Psychotic Reactions and Carbeurator Dung or anything by Lester Bangs or one or two Greil Marcus books (The Basement Tapes). I'd stay away from Camden Joy, contrary to popular opinion.

I need something that doesn't take too long to get into

But you're going to college, man! Just buy Adorno's Essays on Music and accept that the next 4+ years of your life are going to be like that mwahahaha...

I also enjoyed Last Night a DJ Saved My Life and there's the ever-classic Generation Ecstasy.

I had never heard of Tate until I saw him speak not long ago. He is a BAD. ASS. Does he still write for The Voice? I feel like I never see him in there. Does he have a blog?

I'm mostly interested in reading a book of his since his prose is fairly magnificent.

If you want a cracking funny read on hip-hop, though, pick up The Rough Guide to Hip-Hop by Peter Shapiro, which has just been updated and enlarged (it was a pocket-size the first time, now it's 8 x 10). Best line goes to the Bad Boy Records writeup, when he notes that Puff Daddy, having been responsible for 40% of all 1997's number ones, moved to the Hamptons "so he could live by the sea, just like his magic dragon namesake."

Same here! (Of course there's also the Led Zep bio.)

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.

Thanks for the 4AD history headsup, I had no idea this existed! The writing annoyed me very occasionally, especially when committing classic music-crit sins such as propagating stock phrases inappropriately (no, the video for "Dig for Fire" cannot have been "prohibitively expensive"; if it were, it would not have existed), but the research, scope, depth and detail are astonishing, and the enthusiasm both of author and quoted subjects has set me on an extended retro bender on Spotify here. (Damn, how insanely solid is the 1986 chapter of the catalogue?)

Ha, I found Donald Fagan's Eminent Hipsters at Dollar Tree! What the fuck, it was a buck, it's short so I bought it. I do see music books there from time to time - especially memoirs, so check the shelves.

bumped the Blonde on Blonde thread for this but Daryl Sanders' That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound is really good if you're into books that exhaustively detail every hour of the recording of an album.

Just came on to ask about that--was thinking about buying it. Great cover and title.

Mark Stryker’s Jazz From Detroit is an excellent overview. Tons of profiles of brilliant players from the 50s to the present, and lots of recommended albums. It’s amazing how many jazz legends came out of Detroit to make it in NYC or LA or elsewhere.

how many pages does he give to tribe ?

or Strata in general...

Hope Dennis Coffey's in there (will check thx)!

Detroit is where the very underage Sheila Jordan heard Bird live, a life-changing experience duh:
https://www.npr.org/2014/11/30/366792416/at-86-a-jazz-child-looks-back-on-a-life-of-sunshine-sorrow

Re Strata and all that, there's an entire section - roughly 30 pages - called Taking Control: Self-Determination in the 1960s and '70s, which includes the Detroit Artists Workshop, the Detroit Creative Musicians Association, Focus Novii, the Contemporary Jazz Quintet and the Strata Corporation.

Like that Sheila Jordan book, although I never know exactly who to recommend it to.

xp thanks, will check that out

well, this looks intriguing

I have found the greatest index ever compiled pic.twitter.com/tIpo9GSjK3

— Sharon Su (@doodlyroses) September 4, 2019

"This is all from Lexicon of Musical Invective by Nicolas Slonimsky and it’s literally a book of dunks on all your faves"

"Gallery of Harmonized Abortions"

Yes, I think that's what I like about Debussy

Pere Ubu the Scrapbook.
Collects the press stuff on the band from forming to 1982 when they split the first major time.
Has a several page band history and the lyrics to all lps and singles from the time.
Hadn't realised there were no outtakes for first couple of lps. Or that's what it says here. Modern Dance they recorded until they had 36 minutes down. Odd you'd think there'd be at least some part flues or something.
Anyway great to have in the absence of a dedicated biography.

The Henry Cow biography is due out today though some outlets have the 27th. So can't comment on quality yet though it has been reviewed well.

Good people, I'm looking for a recommendation. What are the best books on the Velvet Underground? Thanks in advance for any help proffered.

Uptight was the big one originally buit it's come out in several versions since and I'm not sure if you still get all the photos that were in the original release. Original version has them looking pretty iconic.

White Light White Heat the Velvet Underground day by day which i think was by Richie Unterberger but may be unavailable.

Notes From The Velvet Underground which i think was an expensive exhibition related book at the time.

Velvet Underground A Walk on the Wild Side by Jim Derogatis which i think has quite a few of the images from that Notes book.

From The Velvets to The Voidoids Clinton Heytlin starts with some oral history of teh band then goes on elsewhere.
I think Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil does similar,.

Cheers.

Still have too many books I haven’t read, but reviving this thread to take a look at more I want

Wondering about that collection of Lou Reed interviews book- My Week Beats your Year , that Pat Thomas edited, and Mike Heath gathered.

Already mentioned but the Celine Dion 33 1/3 book. The themes extend beyond music really

really impressed by Liz Phair's memoir so far. no false advertising here with the title (Horror Stories), thus far it's basically just a compendium of awful things she's done or witnessed or been a part of in some way. as she stresses herself at the beginning, it's the kind of book that could really have been written by anyone, we've all Been Through Some Shit in other words. not much so far to do with being an indie-rock queen or anything like that.

I am quite extensively quoted in that Celine Dion book, from a series of reports I wrote on Eurovision.

that collection of Lou Reed interviews book- My Week Beats your Year

this seems like a thing I should read

xp - re: Liz Phair
Yeah, I thought it was alright. The only essential chapter as far as being read by an audience was the one where she talks about working with Ryan Adams. The other chapters, eh. Not essential, "could be written by anyone" otm

Also she talks about her body A LOT

Honeyboy Edwards's autobiography, The World Don't Owe Me Nothing. Lively transcription of his tale-telling, which is prodigious and credible.

I want this stupid Butthole Surfers coffee table book so bad

any good recent books in the country /bluegrass space?

doesn’t have to be too recent. for my stepdad, who LOVED the louvain bros one i got rec’d on this thread a few years back

i highly, highly recommend Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and "Inventor of Jazz", by Alan Lomax, first published in 1950.

tbh i have only a mild interest in the music which holds the story together, the origins of jazz as it grew from blues and ragtime. but morton is a masterful storyteller and clearly a genius, and led one of the most interesting lives that i have ever come to know. most of the book's chapters consist of him telling his own story to lomax in a series of recordings for the library of congress in the late 1930s, at a time when morton's life was in shambles. other chapters are filled with brief recollections from others, along with some very good "interludes" by lomax which help to provide a historical context to morton's tale. he's a great writer. here is lomax's description of those interview/recording sessions with morton:

Morton was very polite and kind to me. Although Creole folklore and the street-songs of New Orleans were not in the forefront of his mind, he obligingly recalled them. He performed blues that reminded him unpleasantly of environments where the lice had crawled along his collar. Protesting that the blues were "lowdown, illiterate" music, he nevertheless moaned the blues by the hour, ladling down the cheap whiskey I could afford to buy, warming up his dusty vocal chords and discovering in himself a singing style as rich as Louis Armstrong's. He recreated the piano styles of ivory wizards a generation dead, recreations which turned out to match the exact sound of the old piano rolls. To every query his responses were so instant and so vivid with time and place and who was there and what they said that I knew Jelly was seeing it in fancy if not in actual recollection. Forgotten by almost everyone, shut out of the palace he had planned and built, this tired old Creole brought to life again, singlehanded and by sheer energy, the golden period of New Orleans jazz.

morton's tale starts in new orleans in the late 1890s but quickly takes him all around the united states (and i mean ALL around - it is insane) as he brings new orleans jazz to new audiences. he is boastful about his role as a jazz pioneer but also has the goods to back it up. he was the first person to formalize the new language of jazz and set it down to paper, and owns the first composing credits in the genre. then he traveled the country with countless bands in the 1920s. he made a ton of money but perpetually spent it all, living extravagantly, with a trunk stuffed with 150 suits and socks that cost $5 a pair (in early 20th century dollars). he talked constantly and made sure that everyone knew that he was the best pianist alive.

a recurring theme is of morton running into trouble in some town and hopping a train to a new city, a new state, with people who had never heard of him, and then proceeding to blow the socks off of everyone. and then, parallel to these musical proceedings, also embarking on a quest to be the best pool player in the world as well, scamming others, playing left-handed against other sharks who were unfamiliar with him until the bets ran high before switching to his right hand to clean them out (then, often, getting confronted by near-mythical angry violent men who would steal his money and prompt him to high-tail it to the next town on the line). it's really hard to believe that all of this happened to the same person, but recollections by his contemporaries verify most of his story, and lomax is there to provide gentle, sympathetic corrections to the parts of his tale that get a little too tall.

one very interesting aspect of his life is that he didn't seem to recognize the role that racial discrimination played in his life, in ways both large and small. he was a light-skinned Creole who was hated by many of his peers with darker skin because of the way that he benefited from straddling the white and black worlds. at the same time, of course, the white world was fleecing him at every turn, even though he didn't seem to attribute that to racism. in the same way, even though the white men who were developing the modern music industry systematically stole his songs and copyrights and made fortunes, he seems to attribute that to individual actors and the hoodoo/voodoo curses laid upon him. lomax's "interludes" provide a very useful complement to his story, for this reason, as he makes it vividly clear what really went down, even if morton didn't see it himself.

anyway, i may be giving too much away. what a great book! has anyone else read it? i was very surprised that it hasn't been mentioned in this thread before.

wow

i def want to read it now. thx karl!!

Thanks for reading through that! I was hoping to convince at least one person to give it a shot. :)

It's every bit as good as Karl says.

I think Lomax, in spite of his gentle fact-checking, was a fairly gullible audience, but this was a "print the legend" situation if there ever was one.

Surely Morton knew he'd been a victim of racial discrimination and had his own reasons for editing most of those experiences out of the tall tales he was spinning for Lomax (who was, however good his intentions, one more white man taking advantage of him). I think Morton loved the improbable idea of his name ringing out as the sole inventor of jazz, and he knew it was only fitting that the person capable of such genius had been an effortlessly gifted and stylish rambler who'd gone everywhere, dazzled everyone, and moved on over and over again. If this account wasn't exactly the factual history Lomax had hoped to excavate, he was still captivated by it, and Morton had a good time entertaining them both. It's a bravura performance that gets quite raw at times (as when he describes those threats of violence).

Something called the The Complete Congress Recordings is on Spotify, and there are also big chunks of the Lomax tapes up on YouTube; it's pretty cool to hear some of those stories in Morton's own voice and unexpurgated language.

I was intrigued by this one, which I spotted in the bookstore last week:
Why You Like It: The Science and Culture of Musical Taste by Nolan Gasser

Has anyone read it? Apparently it's written by the Pandora/Music Genome project guy.

I picked up the new bookon Garage Rock 5 years ahead of my time by Seth Bovey which I'm a coupe of chapters into and seems to be an ok overview so far. THink I've come across one thing I majorly disagreed with so far and I think reviews I'd read had some issues with it. BUt thought I'd pick it up since I like the genre even if it has accumulated a somewhat sheeplike audience in places.
Always think its a great launching spot for further musical investigation rather than being great to try to recreate everything in some search for a highly pseudo authenticity. I thought one thing the garage process replaced was the idea of authenticity as it recontextualises influences into the players home environment.

Also got Defying Gravity jordan's story the book about JOrdan the shop assistant in Westwood/Mclaren's shops so likely to cover Bowie fandom and early punk. BUt so far I'veonly gotteninto her childhood.

Got lucky with the new US zine Maggot Brain which is on its first edition and turned up in Rough Trade between a couple of visits on Thursday last week. I'd asked about it in the early afternoon and te assistant wasn't aware of it. When I went back for the Paul Morley/Kevin Cummings interview it had arrived and the sae assistant came up to me with it.

Picked up another copy of Memphis 68 cos I mislaid the earlier copy I bought last year. GOt a book by Mark Kermode on his musical experiences which was also in the 2 for £5 in FOPP.
Also MIke Heron's book on his 60s/ISb and earlier experiences which was in the same deal.

How is Maggot Brain? I was thinking of getting a subscription, but havent had a chance to leaf through one in the wild

Seems ok still haven't really read much of it put it in the wrong pile in my old bedroom so have been reading other stuff.
Neglected to mention the new Ugly Things had turned up in Rough Trade before my first trip Thursday last week so have spent more 6ime with that.
& I am reminded of Motorboooty and Grade Royale by what I have seen so far as well as a few other retro looking things.
Think it's worthwhile so hope it continues. Dunno how I'm going to get hold of more issues though . May be safer to get somebody in ireland to stock it anyway.

Is there a good book out there about Willie Nelson or am I best off just reading his memoir?

With musicians you gotta read the memoir AND the biography.

He's written books (or at least they have the grain and aroma of his words and music and oh yeah voice), and materializes memorably in xpost Southwest Shuffle: Pioneers of Honky-Tonk, Western Swing, and Country Jazz (handsome trade pb w good pix, Routledge, 2003), by Rick Kienzle and Michael Streissguth's Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville, but you might start with daughter Susie Nelson's Heart Worn Memories, which, despite its title, has a lot of spark and rueful humor, often at her own expense (in the church where she's about to marry Mr. Wrong, Willie observes that there's probably a back door to the joint). No scandal-mongering, but she lifts the lid of the Nelson Tennessee family complex, and cogently contextualizes, distinguishes the path of her short-lived brother Billy. Also good stuff about music (Dad climbs into the tent on her teen bedroom floor, smokes a joint with her while they listen to Hendrix).

Anyone read Tricky's autobiography yet?

No want to get it though.
Was looking at it in foyles yesterday.
Saw they had the Debbie Harry and Flea memoirs at half rrp if anybody needs them.
Think I will see what Waterstones has at post xmas cut price later this afternoon.

Oh yeah Foyles had signed copies of the Tricky.
My Defying Gravity is signed too which I hadn't noticed when I was looking at what I assume was the same copy on the shelf this time last week.

Waterstones has the new prince book on half price as well as the 2 I mentioned from Foyles.

Enjoyed the Jeff Tweedy book

I think Joe Nick Patoski’s book on Willie Nelson is supposed to be good.

Agree about the Tweedy book. He has a great way with a story.

I've waited years for a Todd Rundgren memoir, and it finally came out last year. The Individualist. He's also a good storyteller, very efficient with the written word, and it has plenty of the wry aphorisms you'd expect. But it has been poorly (i.e. not) edited, typos flying off the page everywhere. Looks like it came right out of his computer, first draft and autocorrected. (The Monkeys?!) Good read but frustrating as well.

I just got reminded that there is a book on Italian Prog and has been for the last few years. ItalianProg by Augusto Croce.
There is a Look Inside feature on Amazon that looks good.
But that's all I've seen on it. I have also seen mention that the translation is a bit rough and clunky etc.
Anybody got it and had a better chance to look at it?

the translation is a bit rough and clunky etc.

no it's actually like that in the original. author was really keen to capture the essence of the music in writing

I'd also be interested in finding out how good the Vernon Joynson book on punk/postpone etc etc is.
Just got the one by him on Latin America and Canada at the time of psych and prog . Somehow missed hearing it was around though did get the one released a few months earlier which was initially an expansion on part of the same book. Covered Asia the antipodes and Africa.
Got the book slightly used for a pretty decent price.