Good books about music

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.

Still have too many books I haven’t read, but reviving this thread to take a look at more I want

Wondering about that collection of Lou Reed interviews book- My Week Beats your Year , that Pat Thomas edited, and Mike Heath gathered.

Already mentioned but the Celine Dion 33 1/3 book. The themes extend beyond music really

really impressed by Liz Phair's memoir so far. no false advertising here with the title (Horror Stories), thus far it's basically just a compendium of awful things she's done or witnessed or been a part of in some way. as she stresses herself at the beginning, it's the kind of book that could really have been written by anyone, we've all Been Through Some Shit in other words. not much so far to do with being an indie-rock queen or anything like that.

I am quite extensively quoted in that Celine Dion book, from a series of reports I wrote on Eurovision.

that collection of Lou Reed interviews book- My Week Beats your Year

this seems like a thing I should read

xp - re: Liz Phair
Yeah, I thought it was alright. The only essential chapter as far as being read by an audience was the one where she talks about working with Ryan Adams. The other chapters, eh. Not essential, "could be written by anyone" otm

Also she talks about her body A LOT

Honeyboy Edwards's autobiography, The World Don't Owe Me Nothing. Lively transcription of his tale-telling, which is prodigious and credible.

I want this stupid Butthole Surfers coffee table book so bad

any good recent books in the country /bluegrass space?

doesn’t have to be too recent. for my stepdad, who LOVED the louvain bros one i got rec’d on this thread a few years back

i highly, highly recommend Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and "Inventor of Jazz", by Alan Lomax, first published in 1950.

tbh i have only a mild interest in the music which holds the story together, the origins of jazz as it grew from blues and ragtime. but morton is a masterful storyteller and clearly a genius, and led one of the most interesting lives that i have ever come to know. most of the book's chapters consist of him telling his own story to lomax in a series of recordings for the library of congress in the late 1930s, at a time when morton's life was in shambles. other chapters are filled with brief recollections from others, along with some very good "interludes" by lomax which help to provide a historical context to morton's tale. he's a great writer. here is lomax's description of those interview/recording sessions with morton:

Morton was very polite and kind to me. Although Creole folklore and the street-songs of New Orleans were not in the forefront of his mind, he obligingly recalled them. He performed blues that reminded him unpleasantly of environments where the lice had crawled along his collar. Protesting that the blues were "lowdown, illiterate" music, he nevertheless moaned the blues by the hour, ladling down the cheap whiskey I could afford to buy, warming up his dusty vocal chords and discovering in himself a singing style as rich as Louis Armstrong's. He recreated the piano styles of ivory wizards a generation dead, recreations which turned out to match the exact sound of the old piano rolls. To every query his responses were so instant and so vivid with time and place and who was there and what they said that I knew Jelly was seeing it in fancy if not in actual recollection. Forgotten by almost everyone, shut out of the palace he had planned and built, this tired old Creole brought to life again, singlehanded and by sheer energy, the golden period of New Orleans jazz.

morton's tale starts in new orleans in the late 1890s but quickly takes him all around the united states (and i mean ALL around - it is insane) as he brings new orleans jazz to new audiences. he is boastful about his role as a jazz pioneer but also has the goods to back it up. he was the first person to formalize the new language of jazz and set it down to paper, and owns the first composing credits in the genre. then he traveled the country with countless bands in the 1920s. he made a ton of money but perpetually spent it all, living extravagantly, with a trunk stuffed with 150 suits and socks that cost $5 a pair (in early 20th century dollars). he talked constantly and made sure that everyone knew that he was the best pianist alive.

a recurring theme is of morton running into trouble in some town and hopping a train to a new city, a new state, with people who had never heard of him, and then proceeding to blow the socks off of everyone. and then, parallel to these musical proceedings, also embarking on a quest to be the best pool player in the world as well, scamming others, playing left-handed against other sharks who were unfamiliar with him until the bets ran high before switching to his right hand to clean them out (then, often, getting confronted by near-mythical angry violent men who would steal his money and prompt him to high-tail it to the next town on the line). it's really hard to believe that all of this happened to the same person, but recollections by his contemporaries verify most of his story, and lomax is there to provide gentle, sympathetic corrections to the parts of his tale that get a little too tall.

one very interesting aspect of his life is that he didn't seem to recognize the role that racial discrimination played in his life, in ways both large and small. he was a light-skinned Creole who was hated by many of his peers with darker skin because of the way that he benefited from straddling the white and black worlds. at the same time, of course, the white world was fleecing him at every turn, even though he didn't seem to attribute that to racism. in the same way, even though the white men who were developing the modern music industry systematically stole his songs and copyrights and made fortunes, he seems to attribute that to individual actors and the hoodoo/voodoo curses laid upon him. lomax's "interludes" provide a very useful complement to his story, for this reason, as he makes it vividly clear what really went down, even if morton didn't see it himself.

anyway, i may be giving too much away. what a great book! has anyone else read it? i was very surprised that it hasn't been mentioned in this thread before.

wow

i def want to read it now. thx karl!!

Thanks for reading through that! I was hoping to convince at least one person to give it a shot. :)

It's every bit as good as Karl says.

I think Lomax, in spite of his gentle fact-checking, was a fairly gullible audience, but this was a "print the legend" situation if there ever was one.

Surely Morton knew he'd been a victim of racial discrimination and had his own reasons for editing most of those experiences out of the tall tales he was spinning for Lomax (who was, however good his intentions, one more white man taking advantage of him). I think Morton loved the improbable idea of his name ringing out as the sole inventor of jazz, and he knew it was only fitting that the person capable of such genius had been an effortlessly gifted and stylish rambler who'd gone everywhere, dazzled everyone, and moved on over and over again. If this account wasn't exactly the factual history Lomax had hoped to excavate, he was still captivated by it, and Morton had a good time entertaining them both. It's a bravura performance that gets quite raw at times (as when he describes those threats of violence).

Something called the The Complete Congress Recordings is on Spotify, and there are also big chunks of the Lomax tapes up on YouTube; it's pretty cool to hear some of those stories in Morton's own voice and unexpurgated language.