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.

No, I think it has been officially published. Hasn’t it? I ordered it through the usual channels

Oh wait, I see, it's the ebook that isn't out yet.

It's been out in the UK for a couple of months and is as good as Josefa says.

I just came across a listing for Innovations in British jazz by John Wickes with a blurb from the people selling it which sounds interesting. Anybody come across it or even read it?
Seems to tie things in with various strands of prog and other improvisatory rock among other things. So sounds like something I want to read but thought I would see if anybody here is familiar with it.

Yes, it's a good and very thorough study of the British progressive jazz scene of the 60s and 70s. I've tended to dip in depending on my interest/current research rather than read cover to cover - although it has an overall chronological/thematic approach it's not really a narrative history. It's also a bit unwieldy with small print, so it's not the kind of thing I'd take to read on the bus as it were. As you say, it does a good job of tying progressive jazz with the prog and rock scenes. Maybe less strong on scenes outside London, but then that's a history that's still to be fully researched/written. Duncan Heining's Trad Dads, Dirty Boppers and Free Fusioneers covers some of the same territory, although is more rooted in the modern scene around Ronnie Scott et al. Both writers take a broadly Marxist approach, which is fine with me. They could both do with more feminist input though - Maggie Nicols' forthcoming memoir should help redress that balance.

Brix Smith’s book is interesting. I had forgotten how much of a West L.A. rich girl she was; there is overlap with stuff from the memoir from Cary Grant/Dyan Cannon’s daughter, as they both went to Crossroads in Santa Monica, and Rob Lowe was a mutual friend of theirs

For #NonfictionNovember a stack of my favorite 2022 music books. I’m partial to that one on top but you should read and buy all the great volumes here by @anniezaleski @carynrose @FrancescaRoyst1 @MarissaRMoss @johnlingan Greil Marcus and Bill C + Bobbie Malone 1/2 #musicbooks pic.twitter.com/F6NuXoVHnW

— The Running Kind: Listening to Merle Haggard (@dlcantwell) November 2, 2022

Recently read — or listened to, more accurately — “Major Labels” by Kelefa Sanneh. Enjoyed it a great deal more than I thought I would. He was nicely inclusive and open-minded, but not so much that the wind blows through. I gather he’s not rated ‘round these parts.

KId Congo's memoir was really good. Read it in 3 days, Some New Kind Of kick. Hope he writes some more even if not memoir. THink he was writing reviews and things for fanzines so wouldn't sneeze at him looking into his own aesthetics and music and stuff. Just reallly hope this isn't his sole published written work.

I need to read the Kid Congo book

hopefully getting Holy Ghost the Albert Ayler biography tomorrow for Xmas.
Looked good when I saw it in local bookshop last week.
Don't think I had been aware of it but saw title in psychedelic font and thought it must be interesting.
Writer was apparently a friend of Albert's brother Donald

It's very good; I wrote it up for The Wire not long ago (paired up with the massive Sonny Rollins bio).

I also have my eye on the recent Eric Weisbard book.

If this is Songbooks, I have read (most of) it. It's a history of American music writing, organized by topic under the heading of the book that originated this particular strain of discourse. For instance, books about metal are discussed in the chapter "Pimply, prole, and putrid, but with a surprisingly diverse genre literature: Chuck Eddy, Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe, 1991".
He suggests in his introduction that it's not necessarily meant to be read cover-to-cover, so I read about two-thirds of the chapters. There are a gigantic number of books that are discussed or at least mentioned, from criticism to histories to fiction, and so it's great to whet your curiosity for all the other music books you could be reading, but I found that Weisbard's commentary on the individual titles is so compressed it's almost as cryptic as Christgau at his most. It would have been a relief to have a few more definitive declarative sentences instead of a lot of equivocating about how "more investigation is needed" into this or that topic.

I really want to get the Kranky Records book

Does Weisbard acknowledge that he was replaced as Voice Music Editor by Eddy? To whom I hereby acknowledge my personal and professional connections, also that I'm mentioned among the acknowledgements in that book, before saying that the author sticks his pimply prole neck out into some writing that pushes itself into more vividly descriptive indications of just why we should bother with this stuff, much of which was hard to find and/or expensive, in whatever condition, with whatever reputation it already had, if any.
The kind of thing that got Eddy into the Weisbard-edited Spin Guide To Alternative Music (before The Great Replacement). That's still worth looking for, at least in libraries, and there's at least one ILM thread about it.

Also worth looking for at the library: Dylan's mostly good new music book (pix are always good), which I posted about and from on Is Bob Dylan overrated?

Xpost. The Kid Congo book is great. A very solid memoir about bands that were not very well documented from the inside. I was so happy when I stumbled across it in the library.

Amazing it being recognised enough for library to pick up copies. It was something I had hoped for for years. Kid had said he kept a diary when I met him in Gun Club days so I hoped he might have kept them and be able to write something from them as aide memoire and this is so much more.
Great book as was Barry Adamson's which I had read a couple of weeks earlier.

Now just read Ribby Krieger's Set The Night On Fire which is also pretty great. His life told in short paragraphs not fully chronologically but I think pretty truthfully. Including looking into his bandmate's memoirs and attempting to correct various myths including those created by the film by Oliver Stone.
Quite a good read.

Also just coming to the end of Tricky's Hell Is Round The Corner which is also a pretty honest look back at his life/career I think. Shows his weaknesses etc
Worth a read if you enjoy his music. Quite good anyway I think.

I really want to get the Kranky Records book

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, December 22, 2022 9:51 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

after seeing this post i read the amazon sample. seems really well-written and illuminating. love how it really goes heavy into the business side of things. i kind of forgot how much i was an indie trainspotter around 2000, especially around that chicago milieu, fun to read about the ins and outs. how did i never know that smashing punpkins were a chicago band? haha weird.

i always assumed they were l.a. from the get go, but i was never a big fan anyway

I remember some grumbling at the time about a Chicago band trying to sound like they’re from Seattle.

Just learned that Karl Bartos put out a 600+ page memoir recently. Anyone read it?

i just finished the kranky book. i found it pretty dry. lots of facts, not many anecdotes. also in one paragraph of this book about chicago indie rock, he calls the wilco album “yankee foxtrot motel” three times

haha burn

if it was an intentional burn, it was very out of character with the rest of the book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfRJ87W_5Yk

Oh wait sorry, you said indie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6rgOFPZ7X8

Holy Ghost is pretty good. Nice to have a coherent narrative behind Ayler's music.
Hadn't realised the trip he recorded his first couple of lps on was one he'd headed over to under his own steam thought he was still in the army stationed in Europe.

Need to find what Ayler I have. Thought I had the studio ESP stuff now not sure. At least on cd. Think I did on vinyl but long gone.

After a tough year of losing my dad, my mom carried on a fine tradition of getting me music & music book Xmas pressie - her choice was great- really enjoying Quest love’s ‘Music Is History’ book. His 1990 Living Colour ‘Time’s Up’ chapter was particularly affecting. I saw em at Town & Country club while studying abroad that year, & the feelings of climate change/globalization/racial issues felt more underlined with his take. Such a great record.

i'm sorry to hear about your dad, and the year in general. that's really cool of your mom to keep that tradition up

Has anybody read " Loft Jazz Improvising New York in the 1970s" by Michael C. Heller
or know anything else on the New York Loft Jazz scene worth reading?

Yeah, that's a pretty good (though somewhat incomplete) book. You should read it alongside George Lewis's A Power Stronger Than Itself (a history of the AACM) and Benjamin Looker's Point From Which Creation Begins: The Black Artists Group of St. Louis to get a fuller picture of what was going on in the early 70s.

There's also The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957–1965, which is pretty fascinating (and shows that there was a "loft scene" prior to the '70s).

right will add to my want list. Don't seem to be on Irish library system unfortunately.

thanks

I seem to recall somebody mentioning a recent book that had a lot about Jazz and The Outfit but can't remember anything else.

Was it in Bob Stanley's book?

I seem to recall somebody mentioning a recent book that had a lot about Jazz and The Outfit but can't remember anything else.

Dangerous Rhythm by T.J. English. I've got it here but haven't cracked it yet.

R.J. Smith's Chuck Berry bio is one of the best written, most insightful I've read in years.

I've heard very good things about his James Brown bio too.
Seems like maybe 10-12 years ago that the NYTimes did a good feature about W. Eugene's own scene--in an isolated-looking building, actually like later pix of the South Bronx if not even later Middle Eastern urban warfare coverage: this cube in a vast plain of rubble. In there, he kept the reel-to-reel going for years, so you get conversations, housecleaning, conversations, bottles and plates. chairs, records, radio, TV (maybe some musicians dropping in as well)---don't recall any indications of outside connections with any other scenes (or whether the building was surrounded by rubble all those years). The pix he took in there were considerably more varied than his official product (a friend who knows the history of photography was amazed that the otherwise constrained W. Eugene could roll like this).

yeah Smith's James Brown book is fantastic, cant wait to dig into the new one.

there was W. Eugene Smith "Jazz Loft" doc a handful of years ago with tons of his tapes and audio material, rehearsals, jam sessions, stoned bull sessions, amazing stuff

for round 8, mccarthy's nominator is going with "support the troops", and "it brings a tear to my eyes, yes it does" *applause*

_I seem to recall somebody mentioning a recent book that had a lot about Jazz and The Outfit but can't remember anything else._

_Dangerous Rhythm_ by T.J. English. I've got it here but haven't cracked it yet.

has anyone here read Needles & Plastic: Flying Nun Records, 1981-1988?

I've been skipping around it. Of course I love it, it covers my all-time favorite label at the height of their powers! It gives you great insight into each release during that time, using primary sources from the time and no retrospective views.

Roger Shepherd's memoir In Love With These Times: My Life With Flying Nun Records was quite good too.
got it really cheap from FOPP a few years back.

Got Needles & Plastic for Christmas; will check it out sometime soon.

Mentioned this on ILB:

I've started Dilla Time, the recent bio about J Dilla, and it looks like it's going to be more ambitious than I thought. The author is really intent on making the case for Dilla radically altering ideas about time signatures and contextualizing him in music history.

I'm about halfway in, it's fantastic so far.

How about that Kranky Records book?