Good books about music

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.

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.