33 1/3 Series of books

i had trouble reading that air guitar book too!

okay, i think i got it now.

sorry, my jetlag is causing (unusually) tangled, pretentious writing

hot air guitar is more like it

ha ha "hot air guitar"= i am busted

no doubt people could balk at calling Eno an auteur but i think it still fits- I mean Eno's use of "oblique strategies" seems all about destroying the idea of personal, subjective auteur-ism in favor of some kind of distributed and non-subjective process approach, but he's got such a singular production fingerprint that even his supposedly self-less work sounds like him really clearly

the Love outtakes where Arthur Lee is making his guitarist go over a complicated pattern over and over til he gets it right are pretty direct evidence of his control freak grip on the recording process

but both books also wanna talk about "scenius" (in the case of Eno) or broadly shared public moments of revolutionary political feeling (in the case of Love/Lee) and not just bottleneck the whole thing through celebrations of an individual creative genius

so that figure/ground tension seems to be going on in even in two books which are really, really different from each other at the level of tone and sound and stuff

i am buying john d./drew/geeta books for myself for xmas. i am lame for not getting them before now. i've wanted to read them since i heard of them. sorry, guys!

do interviews w/the artist (or their producers, co-writers, engineers, record label staff etc) tend to be part of these books or are they verboten? would've loved to read about a carl wilson/céline dion interview.

― lex lex lex lex lex on the track BOW (lex pretend), Sunday, December 12, 2010 8:37 AM (53 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i've read about a dozen books in the series, and out of those only 3 or 4 had interviews with anyone involved in the making of the album. of course, sometimes the artist is deceased, or so famous that they're not necessarily accessible to the author, and sometimes their approach is kind of more about their reaction to the album and they might not want the artist involved, although it's definitely not 'verboten' in general.

but yeah a Celine interview totally would've been a better climax for that book than "and now I'm going to actually listen to the album and talk about the songs besides the one from Titanic."

xxxpost My surprise at NMH outselling Carl Wilson comes from how much coverage the latter got outside of music-geek circles - the James Franco plug being an extreme example - but I clearly underestimated the cult of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

xpost I thought the Loveless one was fine if you just want lots of back story and insight from Shields. Obviously the s(t)olid ones get overshadowed by Masters of Reality, 20 Jazz Funk Greats, etc but there's a place for books which just give you the facts in a likeable, readable way, which brings us back to the NMH book. Often I buy these for work-related research so maybe I'm more sympathetic to straightforward narratives than if I was buying them for dazzling prose and leftfield strategies.

my Bieber book is coming out next year

now i gotta listen to the little fucker

the book might be better if you didn't - keep it conceptual, yo

I'm psyched for the Tusk one--I work with Rob Trucks' wife and he is a super nice guy

I thought the Loveless one was fine if you just want lots of back story and insight from Shields. Obviously the s(t)olid ones get overshadowed by Masters of Reality, 20 Jazz Funk Greats, etc but there's a place for books which just give you the facts in a likeable, readable way

Well, that's exactly why I bought the Loveless book, so perhaps I'll be quite satisfied by it. And obviously I agree with your latter point since that's just the kind of book I wrote for Spiderland!

as a louisvillian who was once accused of being a "slint-worshipper" by crustypunks, i can't wait to read the Spiderland one, so thanks for writing it!

thanks! hope you like it.

as a louisvillian

And I'm all "What did LJ ever do to you?"

as a louis-villain

i'd be interested to know whether the dion book actually convinced any prejudiced music fan who didn't think she was worth taking seriously

Sort of? I'm old-ish; fairly rockist but open minded; need to have my hand held with a lot of cultural critical thinking... and I found a lot of it really interesting and eye-opening (and, most importantly, never condescending to anyone on any side of his arguments).

Or are you wondering if haters read the book and then, like, bought the album and now embrace and blast it?

Whiney you are ridic

http://i934.photobucket.com/albums/ad184/sdolnack/f6fa2dd6.jpg

lol

lmfao

Rly loving the <3 dotted "i"

<3bbbottt

You've got the same handwriting as my crazy ex-gf.

omg i want one of those

Well they make great stocking stuffers and are available on Amazon now!

yes, but signed w/ whiney dotted-i hearts?

Hate to spoil the lolz, but that is not whiney's handwriting(!)

omg you fraud

Phew, glad I was able to cancel my Amazon order in time!

Hate to spoil the lolz, but that is not whiney's handwriting(!)

― mmmm... yung hummus (Whiney G. Weingarten), Wednesday, December 22, 2010 10:48 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

i'm just going to continue to believe that it is

Oh God... why is she pretending to be an American rock critic...

can I just

http://i934.photobucket.com/albums/ad184/sdolnack/efab5013.jpg

no puppy no crumblability

got a couple 33 1/3s for xmas, just finished the Radio City one, which is really good and gives a much more direct and detailed look at Big Star than most stuff written about the band, but it's also easily the most sloppily edited book in the series I've ever seen, just a really disconcerting number of sentences that are missing a word or a clause and barely make sense.

scott, your book is great! you did an outstanding job. especially your descriptions of the actual music. i'll be honest, these are usually the parts of music books - the detailed descriptions of songs - that make me zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz unless a writer is really good at it. and you are really good at it. congrats on the whole thing! write more books for me to read.

and i feel like a big jerk for not reading more of these. no excuse. haven't read geeta's or drew's yet!? that's just so wrong. i am going online to get them.

am reading the Born In The U.S.A. book at the moment and really diggin it

thanks man, I appreciate it. Definitely working on another book though I'm at the earliest possible stage in the process - the basic idea and list of what the content will be. All that's left is me writing 50-75k words.

out of curiosity, what is the avg wordcount of the 33 1/3 books?

Something like 35-40k I think? Mine was right in that window. I'll never forget printing the whole manuscript when I was done and saying to myself "I spent a year and half on this and this is all I wrote??"

i just picked up yr book this weekend scott! about 50 pgs in and you've already shed so much light on the band.

thanks!

I met David Grubbs at EMP this weekend, as well as Clark Johnson's wife Diane, who was on a panel with Carl Wilson among others. Total trip - glad to note that David liked it, though he said it was (obviously) a strange experience to read about his teenage years.

it was nice to meet david. for some reason i refrained from mentioning my mad teen squirrel bait love.

I missed my opportunity to talk to him as if I were singing a Gastr del Sol song the whole time.

man im dying for one on hounds of love

Mark Richardon's book on the album Zaireeke by The Flaming Lips gives you a really detailed explanation of the album, the history of the band, and reader's thoughts and opinions of the album and how he personally ties in to the music. I recommend.

my mate was telling me last night about an anecdote in the bowie book where "David Bowie is sat in a studio with tape spool all around him listening to the same beat for 3 minutes then going '..aaand STOP', with a fully-formed song in his head by the end." what song was this?

also are any of these available for the kindle?