Good books about music

if crimson's your favorite prog band you should totally ask for it. fripp comes off as the central figure in the whole scene

TBF, he also comes off as a gaping asshole, though.

"Led Zeppelin All The Songs The Story Behind Every Track". Just WOW. Amidst the usual band history stuff and occasional dopey sidebars there is a feast of nerdy studio facts ( instruments and effects, mixing boards, studio engineer and Page anecdotes on mic placements et al) and great photos. I love this shit. Probably my favorite Zep book after "Trampled Underfoot".

― An Uphill Battle For Legumes (Capitaine Jay Vee), Wednesday, November 21, 2018 4:14 PM (six days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I flipped through this at a bookstore the other day and it looked awesome, but didn't have a good chance to really look at though as my daughter has no interest in reading up on Zep with me ("yeah hold on sweetie Dada is reading about how many takes of "Stairway" they did"), but if it is in league with the Hoskyns book that is high praise indeed.

There's a few books like that about. The Grateful Dead one isn't bad. That is song by song, album by album.

I enjoyed Jeff Tweedy's memoir though it's more about him than music.

xp — that must be one long Dead book!!

Speaking of Robertson, I still haven't read his autobio, but a couple of friends tell me that it's well-described by this appealing WSJ review:

By WESLEY STACE
Updated Nov. 11, 2016 6:08 p.m. ET
Robbie Robertson, the lead guitarist and main songwriter of the Band, is in the unenviable position of never having been much of a singer. (He posits asthma as a factor.) Luckily, the Band was blessed with three of the greatest vocalists of the rock era (Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Levon Helm), who were able to give his beautiful melodies and lyrics their fullest possible emotional expression. In “Testimony,” however, the “voice” is not in question. Robust, wry, gritty and wise to the vicissitudes of a career in rock ’n’ roll, it is just what the reader wants, marred only occasionally by stiff dialogue.
TESTIMONY
By Robbie Robertson
Opening with a train ride, Mr. Robertson captures the rhythm of rock’s mystery train, even its final lurch into the terminal. In this memoir named for a song from his solo debut, Mr. Robertson bears witness to his life in music, from his precocious success in Ronnie Hawkins’s “raging rockabilly” Hawks to that band’s historic involvement in Bob Dylan’s mid-1960s “explosive electric sacrilege”; the subsequent retreat to Woodstock, N.Y., for the “loose as a goose” sessions with Mr. Dylan that became known as “The Basement Tapes” to the group’s rebranding as the Band, whose career climaxed, as this book wisely does, with “The Last Waltz,” a 1976 concert in San Francisco that was filmed by Martin Waltz,” a 1976 concert in San Francisco that was filmed by Martin Scorsese.
“Testimony” comes 23 years after drummer Levon Helm’s memoir “This Wheel’s on Fire,” notable partly for its extremely negative portrayal of Mr. Robertson. Of that book, Mr. Dylan enthused: “You’ve got to read this!” The blurbs here are by Mr. Scorsese and David Geffen, neatly delineating the great divide in the Band. But after the deaths of Manuel (suicide, 1986), Danko (heart failure, 1999) and Helm (throat cancer, 2012)—which triumvirate he often pits himself against in his memoir—Robertson is one of the two men left standing (along with keyboardist Garth Hudson). His may be the last word.
Helm took to the grave. Resentments had long simmered: The film “The Last Waltz” seemed contrived to put Mr. Robertson center-stage, as the genius Mr. Scorsese clearly believed him to be, yet he was the only member of the Band who actually wanted that Waltz to be the Last. His Band-mates were happy to play on, and this was by no means the final Band concert, though it was the last to feature Mr. Robertson. If you saw a later incarnation of the group, you heard precisely what you would have wanted to hear: the singers singing their beloved songbook accompanied by a great rhythm section. If anything, one later felt the lack of Manuel more than of Mr. Robertson.
Half-Jewish, half-Mohawk, Jaime Royal Robertson was brought up on the streets of Toronto and on the Six Nations Indian Reserve, where he was “introduced to serious storytelling. . . . The oral history, the legends, the fables, and the great holy mystery of life.” The reader might suppress a groan, but add to the mix a steel-trap memory and a muddled childhood—featuring two fathers, numerous gangsters, alcoholism and some diamond smuggling—and you have the makings of a Dickensian bildungsroman.
“Testimony” next becomes a bible of road lore, a lurid coming-of-age story that veers wildly between the sweet and the brutal and a how-not-to guide to running a band. The Hawks, formed at the whim of Arkansawyer Ronnie Hawkins, who enjoyed regular residencies in Toronto, take off on the road, and the craziness of these early days is presented in brilliant Technicolor, with Helm cast as blood brother and Hawkins as amoral Virgil. A 16-year-old Mr. Robertson, too young to frequent any of the joints he’s playing, descends into an underworld of torched nightclubs (the arsonists thoughtfully remove Leon Russell’s band’s equipment before they light the match), bitten-off nipples (word to the wise: Don’t “taste her milkshake” while traversing bumpy terrain in the back seat of a car) and a vast choice of artificial stimulation.
As for Mr. Dylan, a key attraction, the book offers a refreshing account all the better for starting no earlier than the recording of “Like a Rolling Stone,” to which Mr. Robertson was escorted by producer John Hammond Jr. in 1965. Here is by far the fullest first-person account of the early electric tours of Mr. Dylan, not to mention an astonishing tale of a “passed out sitting up” Mr. Dylan, “deliriously exhausted” after the final date of the emotionally and physically exhausting 1966 tour, whom Robbie and Mr. Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, try to revive him in a bathtub (returning once to find him submerged) while four Beatles await an audience in the adjacent hotel room. The account of Mr. Dylan’s 1966 motorcycle accident is refreshingly lucid, as is that of the subsequent making of “The Basement Tapes,” as the Band improvises around Bob’s “vibing vocables.”
The Nobel Prize winner himself will probably not opine on Mr. Robertson’s livelier claims, among which is that he clothed Mr. Dylan (the classic ’66 houndstooth tweed: “Bob didn’t seem like much of a suit guy, but Lou [the designer] was on top of his game”); suggested the iconoclastic cover design of “Blonde on Blonde”; gave Mr. Dylan’s song “Obviously Five Believers” its title, adding that witty adverb—both positively (4th Street) and absolutely (Sweet Marie) something Mr. Dylan might have come up with himself; finished the editing of Mr. Dylan’s film “Eat the Document”; taught the neophyte rocker how to stretch guitar strings to keep them in tune; and saved Mr. Dylan from his musical self (by refusing to clutter the sparse perfection of “John Wesley Harding” with the requested overdubs). And of course he is responsible for creating the circumstances, and ambience, that brought the “The Basement
Tapes” into existence. I am not suggesting that these claims aren’t true, merely that the abundance of them becomes slightly comical.
Occasionally one has the impression that Mr. Robertson is tiptoeing around awkward issues, always to the detriment of the book: Helm’s 1993 account of the various delegations sent in to get Mr. Dylan onstage at “The Last Waltz” is agonizing (the singer didn’t like it assumed that he had given his consent to being filmed, fearing a conflict with a forthcoming movie of his own, “Renaldo and Clara,” shot the previous year). But Mr. Robertson barely scratches the surface, preferring to deal with the technical problems involved in creating the movie.
Mr. Robertson’s writing about music, either from inside looking out or simply from the point of view of an audience member at a Bo Diddley or Velvet Underground concert, can be beautiful, as when, in the closing pages, he pays full tribute to each Band member and their role within the overall sound, repeating, as if in litany, “God only made one of those.” Here “Testimony” becomes a testimonial, and the effect is redemptive. Generosity suits him, and whatever the truth, “Testimony” is a graceful epitaph.​

the rest is noise is fuckin' phenomenal btw

Amen to that!
xpost Sorry for the typos, which are from my hasty paste, although the reviewer and/or his copy editor are responsible for conflation of John Hammond Sr., who signed nerdy little against-the-grain Bobby D. (AKA "Hammond's Folly") to prestigious Columbia, with blues-singin' Jr.(some of the Hawks, inc. Robertson, played on some of his tracks).

Wondering about this---anybody read it?

Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, Vol. 1: 1957 - 73
Clinton Heylin

A leading expert on the life and work of Nobel laureate Bob Dylan—most notably the author of the often-updated Dylan biography Behind the Shades—British music writer Clinton Heylin here begins his two-volume analysis of Dylan's songs. We learn that the middle verse of "Blowin' in the Wind" was written much later than the first and third verses, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" was based on a complete distortion of the facts of the case, and "Fourth Time Around" was a direct response to John Lennon's "Norwegian Wood."

"Prolific Dylanologist Heylin makes his arguably greatest contribution with a painstakingly researched consideration of every song Dylan is known to have written. Drawing from manuscripts, studio logs, concert recordings, and other sources, Heylin traces Dylan's career by listing the songs in order of writing rather than public presentation. This first of two volumes collects everything from juvenilia predating his 1961 arrival in New York to his 1974 comeback album, Planet Waves. Even songs that were never recorded or performed are noted, but the major ones receive multipage write-ups that are, in essence, insightful, revelatory mini-essays. Documenting the mercurial performer's transitions from Guthrie-influenced folkie to raging rocker to laid-back country singer, Heylin, who appears to have heard virtually all of the concerts Dylan has performed during the past 20 years of what has come to be known as the 'Neverending Tour,' reveals how vintage songs take on new meanings as they're recast by their author on stage decades later."—Booklist

Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise? That one IS very good. Haven't read Listen to This yet. For a somewhat more academic look at modern compositional music, Joseph Auner's Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries is excellent imo. I used it as a textbook.

yes! i've been moving through it very slowly bc i often want to stop and familiarize myself with some of the more major pieces he talks about, but the quality and depth of the writing never flags and it's a million pages long, what an achievement

Recently bought a couple of others, Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989 by Tim Rutherford-Johnson and Musical Modernism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century by David Metzer, but haven't done much more than leafing yet*. I have Listen to This and erm think I've read it, but don't get much recollection -- was that more of a loose essay collection than The Rest Is Noise or something?

*) oh and The Spectral Piano: From Liszt, Scriabin, and Debussy to the Digital Age by Marilyn Nonken, but there I'll really have to do some active immersion work to get anywhere I guess; I find the premise fascinating but am not an extremely big fan of piano music per se (which in this case may possibly not be a bad thing).

bitten-off nipples (word to the wise: Don’t “taste her milkshake” while traversing bumpy terrain in the back seat of a car)

why include this

lamonti, thanks for the reminder on the Tweedy memoir, been meaning to read it. how much is Jim O'Rourke in it?

The book on bad taste/celine dion by wilson was written for me. Resonates so deeply.

Attali's Noise was amazing as well. Read that over a decade ago.

tweedy's book was entertaining — he pretty much covers everything a fan would be interested in. a fair amount of o'rourke!

I have that book on the spectral piano, have not read it yet. Title was designed to grab me though, I eat an drink solo piano stuff.

haven't read it but this sounds interesting: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/making-music-american-9780190872311?cc=us&lang=en&

Page not found

That sounds really interesting. Just requested a review copy.

Okay, now I see

That looks awesome

Oh yeah, I need to find some recordings of James Europe's orchestra (for instance!)
Here's one I read last year:
Edd Hurt aside, I mostly occasionally skim country music writing for info these days---but did fairly recently read Southwest Shuffle: Pioneers of Honky-Tonk, Western Swing, and Country Jazz (handsome trade pb w good pix, Routledge, 2003), by Rick Kienzle, who also contributed to the useful Country Music Magazine (RIP). Apparently 0 copy editing in early chapters, but then it's smooth or smoother sailing.
He doesn't just enthuse, he describes what made and still makes the heyday of Western Swing so musically gratifying, and isn't shy about detailing how and when and sometimes why (increasingly desperate attempts to biz-adapt) the recorded offerings of his protagonists, incl. heroes, turned to shit.
It's kind of Four Lives In The Be-Bop Business in reverse, with questing young musos from hither and yon peaking early in California, then scuffling, going back to the boonies and/or hitting a wall re The Nashville Sound and Countrypolitan.
Although there are exceptions! To any predictable arc, anyway--for instance, one of these guys got to play on Frank Sinatra & The Red Norvo Quintet: Live In Australia, 1959, which deftly demonstrates how to perform depresso classics when you're happy and you know it, without lapsing into cheesy Rat Pack mannerisms. On another curveball, Ray Price went to honky tonk with a strong beat, drawing the livelier geezers and some youngsters, without actually playing that rock&roll stuff---then he decided he *did* want to do the genteel Nashville thing, not only on record but replicated live, challenging his carefully established audiences and hardened swing-to-tonk road dawg band---never mind we don't have no orkystraw or choir, just do it. And you out there, you better like it.
And the saga of impressionable former teen swing fan Willie Nelson, whose vocal timing (also some of his lyrics) broke the tried & true Hit Factory assembly line, as far as the suits and producer Chet Atkins was concerned--well, you've heard about that, but maybe not in such telling detail (come to think of it, maybe he was influenced by the tenacity of Price, an early employer).
Very handy discography of reissues too.

*were* concerned dang it

To any predictable arc, anyway--for instance, one of these guys got to play on Frank Sinatra & The Red Norvo Quintet: Live In Australia, 1959

haven't read it but this sounds interesting: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/making-music-american-9780190872311?cc=us&lang=en&

― tylerw, Saturday, 9 February 2019 23:18 (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thanks for the heads-up, this is of interest.

Don,
Jazz GUITAR poll

Wow, great post on a great thread that I'd never seen---thanks, James! Please do write more about him whenever so inclined. I'll prob comment there on Dennis Coffey when Live At Baker's comes out March 1.
Despite the sharp profiles of ornery individualists, My favorite parts of Michael Streissguth's Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville are the aerial views, especially the intriguing 60s mix of Vanderbilt's periphery dwellers with increasingly restive Music Rowers, especially after Mr. D. kicks off his Nashville visits with Blonde On Blonde. The saga of Exit Inn, a musical convergence point for various mainstream and counter-cultural and other factions (somewhut like Austin's Armadillo World Headquarters) is illuminating---I've got tapes from there, incl. one-night-stands of knowns and unknowns, but here we also get bands I'd never heard of, appealingly described as they live out most if not all of their lifespans together at this joint.
He briefly mentions star studio rats/Nashville Cats-as-Outcats who got to make their own albums, mainly Barefoot Jerry and the sometimes audacious Area Code 615. But I want a lot more of this, like we get re Memphis, in furious.com's Insect Trust archives and Robert Gordon's books.
Anyway, he makes good use of Kristofferson as tracking device through this era, and further inspiration to it, as Willie already is, going from suits-persecuted studio hopeful to the Entity sometimes descending from his Bus in a cloud of green smoke and adoring songwriters.
Kristofferson comes off as the L. Cohen of Nashville, with an even/much more limited voice, as he knew, and colors himself astonished, if not appalled, when Fred Foster insists on signing him to a performing contact and a writing contract. Foster evidently knew that instant cornball classic "Help Me Make It Through the Night" was an anomaly, and that the growly epics Foster favored were unlikely to be covered (this was before K came up with "Sunday Morning Coming Down," I think and def. before "Me and Bobbie McGee," which would be inspired by La Strada and the name of one of Foster's other employees, it says here.)
We also get the influence of fuckin'-finally affordable and widely available cocaine (esp. after the War on Drugs made it more practical than bulky etc. ol' maryjane). Influence incl. on Waylon, who was already driven and drivin', with much more of the earlier zig-zag career than I'd realized (had the big country version of "MacArthur Park"!) Also quite the appetite for pinball and good cover material, which he could find even or especially on the shittiest-sounding demo tapes. Thought, as the author depicts, that the Outlaw hype was a crock, and of course he did sound more like a big ol' teddy bear, even then.
A bunch more characters I'd heard much less or nothing about; it's pretty good overall. (Although, come to think of it, he completely leaves out the alkyhaul factor re KK's showbiz trajectory, despite the star's own candor elsewhere, starting way back.)

Furious.com's *Insect Trust* archives, of course, sorry.

Has anyone read "this is your brain on music?"

I did. It ended up annoying me for some reason, can’t remember exactly why.

Will give it a try. (It was mentioned in Carl Wilson's book on bad taste.)

Has anyone read "this is your brain on music?"

― nathom

yes, it's fucking awful. author lost me forever when he bald-facedly asserted that van halen's "you really got me" made an uncool song cool.

Argh. Good god. Think I'll skip.

xp @flappy bird, tweedy doesn't bother with an entire chronology but like someone said above he hits all the bits you'd ant to read about. i thought the bits about his health and his parents were moving. i haven stopped listening to wilco since either after a few years off

i would say there's some o'rourke in it, nota huge amount. some on the start of YHF era Wilco/Loose Fur/Kotche/Bad Timing's influence.

nice, i keep forgetting to check the book out, thanks for the reminder

Aaron Copland's 1939 book, What To Listen For In Music is a really good all-round read concerned with breaking down/listening to modern classical music.

Just got first few chapters into the Sylvain Sylvain memoir There's No Bones iN Ice Cream. Seems pretty great so far & ghe's still a kid in Paris.

Jesse Locke's Heavy Metalloid Music is really great on Simply Saucer

I am about one third of the way through Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD. Enjoying it very much, but it's pretty much for completists like me who bought every release back in the day. Lots about Vaughan Oliver and the artwork. Lots of input from a very forthright Robin Guthrie. Loved the label at the time, but never knew this stuff.

i also read this is your brain on music. it was a long time ago but i nearly threw it across the room when i was done. the author is really a pompous asshat and can't seem to resist the temptation to drop anecdotes about how he's friends with and/or respected by well-regarded musicians and scientists

i also read that copland book! it was enjoyable tho certainly not earth-shattering.

Facing The Wrong Way was a great read. It was around as a 2 for £5 in FOPP for a while

Can't praise 'Facing the Wrong Way' enough, really eye opening about the 4AD family. Conversely I was disappointed about his history of LGBTQ music 'Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache', felt just a bit too episodic.

The music writing of Ted Gioia has been vigorously criticized on this board, but I'm 1/3 into his new book Love Songs: The Hidden History and it's loaded with info and ideas to grapple with. As the title suggests it purports to be a history of the "love song" form since the earliest traces of it in antiquity. Clearly a ton of research went into this, although it's cut with a hell of a lot of speculation too. There's a basic underlying thesis, which is that the innovations in the form have tended to come from women or marginalized groups, the names of these innovators often not recorded. Fwiw Gioia claims he didn't set out to write a book with a pc/revisionist angle, but the research led him there.

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.