Clinton Heylin - Babylon Is Burning: From Punk to Grunge C/D

Though I'm sure Laurence Olivier in "Richard the III" and Wilfrid Brambell in "Steptoe and Son" are mentioned!

Past page 300 and it's really rolling around in the personal drama amongst the British punks. It's a decent read though. I've brought out my CDs of Kilburns, Eddie & the Hot Rods, The Ramones, Vibrators, Chelsea, The Damned, Buzzcocks, Rich Kids, The Only Ones, and other stuff I hadn't listened to much lately during reading sessions.

October 1977 was an interesting point in time. In conjunction with releasing four albums simultaneously - Richard Hell & the Voidoids' Blank Generation, Talking Heads' '77, The Dead Boys' Young, Loud and Snotty and the Ramones' Rocket To Russia, Sire launched a campaign, "Don't Call It Punk," to advocate the term "new wave," because Stein felt that punk would be long dead before most of his bands were fully developed. He was partly right, though many felt the Voidoids and Dead Boys missed their moment, and Ramones had peaked.

Rather than declare punk dead, writers for Sounds, Jon Savage, Vivien Goldman and Sandy Robertson, tried to create a different term in New Musick, applying it to Siouxsie & the Banshees, Wire, The Pop Group, Throbbing Gristle, Devo, The Residents, Pere Ubu, Subway Sect and The Slits.

It's interesting to cross reference with George Gimarc's Punk Diary. The Heartbreakers' L.A.M.F. was released then, as was Ultravox's Ha! Ha! Ha!, The Sex Pistols' Never Mind The Bollocks and EPs by XTC and The Soft Boys.

Wonder if his (latest) Dylan book is any good.

All the reviews I’ve seen have focused on what an asshole he is. I read his book on Dylan’s gospel years and got increasingly sick of his writing even though it had lots of interesting material - I wanted to throttle him after the fiftieth reference to “girlsingers.”

He can be annoying but the Fairports history was pretty thoroughly researched.
I read something connected to Sgt Peppers by him and did want to throttle him by the end. Maybe too much of him in the book over the subject or something.
Has been a while since I read him but that Fairports history had a lot of new details in.

As a researcher, he's the best (but not infallible) in a crowded field. There's no shortage of writing on Dylan's best years, but if you want to know, say, Street-Legal, the misbegotten 1978 tours or the '80s in microscopic detail, Heylin's definitely your man. NOBODY will bring the same level of scholarship as him.

However the guy's mental - he lashes out at his peers in all of his books, and it seems to have gotten exponentially worse. What was a minor oddity then a grating annoyance has become intolerably off-putting.

I agree about his thoroughness, what I hated about his Dylan books was his complete certainty that he knew what songs/takes/sessions Bob should have put out, and criticizing him for his weakness or cowardice for not issuing them at the time.

I'm curious, but I just don't know that I have the patience for another round of Heylin disparaging everyone else's research. From what I've heard, this new one is apparently even worse on that count.

Ha, the first few pages are full of that stuff. I couldn't stomach it.

By the Fairport book, do you mean the Sandy Denny bio?

I agree about his thoroughness, what I hated about his Dylan books was his complete certainty that he knew what songs/takes/sessions Bob should have put out, and criticizing him for his weakness or cowardice for not issuing them at the time.

That was certainly what I took away from his Bruce book; not just the criticism/certainty but also a nasty sense of contempt for the artist, like Bruce's failure to put this or that song on this or that record completely erased any credit he got for writing the songs in the first place.

But I kept reading it because he'd dug up so many great quotes from Bruce interviews that I'd never seen anywhere else.

Wonder if he was the first one to record Kinky Friedman saying “it’s a short step from the limo to the gutter.”

I actually agree with his criticisms when it comes to albums like Infidels (at least in terms of the worst songs and the three outtake that should've made it), Oh Mercy and his argument that the original all-NY version of Blood on the Tracks was even better. So many others have made similar arguments so his criticisms of those three LP's never seemed unusual. But he gets really presumptuous about why certain choices were made, and more often than not he makes his arguments with a lot of bile and arrogance. And he can greatly exaggerate the differences - like, an alternate take can seem better, but that doesn't necessarily mean every other one (including the chosen master) is a garbage track.

my first encounter with clinton heylin was his dylan recording sessions book, where he begins by explaining that his book is not dissimilar to mark lewisohn's book on the beatles except that he, heylin, is far superior to lewisohn and his subject is far superior to lewisohn's subject.

I like his Dylan book, dislike -- disliked at the time-- his contempt for women