Good books about music

For #NonfictionNovember a stack of my favorite 2022 music books. I’m partial to that one on top but you should read and buy all the great volumes here by @anniezaleski @carynrose @FrancescaRoyst1 @MarissaRMoss @johnlingan Greil Marcus and Bill C + Bobbie Malone 1/2 #musicbooks pic.twitter.com/F6NuXoVHnW

— The Running Kind: Listening to Merle Haggard (@dlcantwell) November 2, 2022

Recently read — or listened to, more accurately — “Major Labels” by Kelefa Sanneh. Enjoyed it a great deal more than I thought I would. He was nicely inclusive and open-minded, but not so much that the wind blows through. I gather he’s not rated ‘round these parts.

KId Congo's memoir was really good. Read it in 3 days, Some New Kind Of kick. Hope he writes some more even if not memoir. THink he was writing reviews and things for fanzines so wouldn't sneeze at him looking into his own aesthetics and music and stuff. Just reallly hope this isn't his sole published written work.

I need to read the Kid Congo book

hopefully getting Holy Ghost the Albert Ayler biography tomorrow for Xmas.
Looked good when I saw it in local bookshop last week.
Don't think I had been aware of it but saw title in psychedelic font and thought it must be interesting.
Writer was apparently a friend of Albert's brother Donald

It's very good; I wrote it up for The Wire not long ago (paired up with the massive Sonny Rollins bio).

I also have my eye on the recent Eric Weisbard book.

If this is Songbooks, I have read (most of) it. It's a history of American music writing, organized by topic under the heading of the book that originated this particular strain of discourse. For instance, books about metal are discussed in the chapter "Pimply, prole, and putrid, but with a surprisingly diverse genre literature: Chuck Eddy, Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe, 1991".
He suggests in his introduction that it's not necessarily meant to be read cover-to-cover, so I read about two-thirds of the chapters. There are a gigantic number of books that are discussed or at least mentioned, from criticism to histories to fiction, and so it's great to whet your curiosity for all the other music books you could be reading, but I found that Weisbard's commentary on the individual titles is so compressed it's almost as cryptic as Christgau at his most. It would have been a relief to have a few more definitive declarative sentences instead of a lot of equivocating about how "more investigation is needed" into this or that topic.

I really want to get the Kranky Records book

Does Weisbard acknowledge that he was replaced as Voice Music Editor by Eddy? To whom I hereby acknowledge my personal and professional connections, also that I'm mentioned among the acknowledgements in that book, before saying that the author sticks his pimply prole neck out into some writing that pushes itself into more vividly descriptive indications of just why we should bother with this stuff, much of which was hard to find and/or expensive, in whatever condition, with whatever reputation it already had, if any.
The kind of thing that got Eddy into the Weisbard-edited Spin Guide To Alternative Music (before The Great Replacement). That's still worth looking for, at least in libraries, and there's at least one ILM thread about it.

Also worth looking for at the library: Dylan's mostly good new music book (pix are always good), which I posted about and from on Is Bob Dylan overrated?

Xpost. The Kid Congo book is great. A very solid memoir about bands that were not very well documented from the inside. I was so happy when I stumbled across it in the library.

Amazing it being recognised enough for library to pick up copies. It was something I had hoped for for years. Kid had said he kept a diary when I met him in Gun Club days so I hoped he might have kept them and be able to write something from them as aide memoire and this is so much more.
Great book as was Barry Adamson's which I had read a couple of weeks earlier.

Now just read Ribby Krieger's Set The Night On Fire which is also pretty great. His life told in short paragraphs not fully chronologically but I think pretty truthfully. Including looking into his bandmate's memoirs and attempting to correct various myths including those created by the film by Oliver Stone.
Quite a good read.

Also just coming to the end of Tricky's Hell Is Round The Corner which is also a pretty honest look back at his life/career I think. Shows his weaknesses etc
Worth a read if you enjoy his music. Quite good anyway I think.

I really want to get the Kranky Records book

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, December 22, 2022 9:51 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

after seeing this post i read the amazon sample. seems really well-written and illuminating. love how it really goes heavy into the business side of things. i kind of forgot how much i was an indie trainspotter around 2000, especially around that chicago milieu, fun to read about the ins and outs. how did i never know that smashing punpkins were a chicago band? haha weird.

i always assumed they were l.a. from the get go, but i was never a big fan anyway

I remember some grumbling at the time about a Chicago band trying to sound like they’re from Seattle.

Just learned that Karl Bartos put out a 600+ page memoir recently. Anyone read it?

i just finished the kranky book. i found it pretty dry. lots of facts, not many anecdotes. also in one paragraph of this book about chicago indie rock, he calls the wilco album “yankee foxtrot motel” three times

haha burn

if it was an intentional burn, it was very out of character with the rest of the book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfRJ87W_5Yk

Oh wait sorry, you said indie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6rgOFPZ7X8

Holy Ghost is pretty good. Nice to have a coherent narrative behind Ayler's music.
Hadn't realised the trip he recorded his first couple of lps on was one he'd headed over to under his own steam thought he was still in the army stationed in Europe.

Need to find what Ayler I have. Thought I had the studio ESP stuff now not sure. At least on cd. Think I did on vinyl but long gone.

After a tough year of losing my dad, my mom carried on a fine tradition of getting me music & music book Xmas pressie - her choice was great- really enjoying Quest love’s ‘Music Is History’ book. His 1990 Living Colour ‘Time’s Up’ chapter was particularly affecting. I saw em at Town & Country club while studying abroad that year, & the feelings of climate change/globalization/racial issues felt more underlined with his take. Such a great record.

i'm sorry to hear about your dad, and the year in general. that's really cool of your mom to keep that tradition up

Has anybody read " Loft Jazz Improvising New York in the 1970s" by Michael C. Heller
or know anything else on the New York Loft Jazz scene worth reading?

Yeah, that's a pretty good (though somewhat incomplete) book. You should read it alongside George Lewis's A Power Stronger Than Itself (a history of the AACM) and Benjamin Looker's Point From Which Creation Begins: The Black Artists Group of St. Louis to get a fuller picture of what was going on in the early 70s.

There's also The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957–1965, which is pretty fascinating (and shows that there was a "loft scene" prior to the '70s).

right will add to my want list. Don't seem to be on Irish library system unfortunately.

thanks

I seem to recall somebody mentioning a recent book that had a lot about Jazz and The Outfit but can't remember anything else.

Was it in Bob Stanley's book?

I seem to recall somebody mentioning a recent book that had a lot about Jazz and The Outfit but can't remember anything else.

Dangerous Rhythm by T.J. English. I've got it here but haven't cracked it yet.

R.J. Smith's Chuck Berry bio is one of the best written, most insightful I've read in years.

I've heard very good things about his James Brown bio too.
Seems like maybe 10-12 years ago that the NYTimes did a good feature about W. Eugene's own scene--in an isolated-looking building, actually like later pix of the South Bronx if not even later Middle Eastern urban warfare coverage: this cube in a vast plain of rubble. In there, he kept the reel-to-reel going for years, so you get conversations, housecleaning, conversations, bottles and plates. chairs, records, radio, TV (maybe some musicians dropping in as well)---don't recall any indications of outside connections with any other scenes (or whether the building was surrounded by rubble all those years). The pix he took in there were considerably more varied than his official product (a friend who knows the history of photography was amazed that the otherwise constrained W. Eugene could roll like this).

yeah Smith's James Brown book is fantastic, cant wait to dig into the new one.

there was W. Eugene Smith "Jazz Loft" doc a handful of years ago with tons of his tapes and audio material, rehearsals, jam sessions, stoned bull sessions, amazing stuff

for round 8, mccarthy's nominator is going with "support the troops", and "it brings a tear to my eyes, yes it does" *applause*

_I seem to recall somebody mentioning a recent book that had a lot about Jazz and The Outfit but can't remember anything else._

_Dangerous Rhythm_ by T.J. English. I've got it here but haven't cracked it yet.

has anyone here read Needles & Plastic: Flying Nun Records, 1981-1988?

I've been skipping around it. Of course I love it, it covers my all-time favorite label at the height of their powers! It gives you great insight into each release during that time, using primary sources from the time and no retrospective views.

Roger Shepherd's memoir In Love With These Times: My Life With Flying Nun Records was quite good too.
got it really cheap from FOPP a few years back.

Got Needles & Plastic for Christmas; will check it out sometime soon.

Mentioned this on ILB:

I've started Dilla Time, the recent bio about J Dilla, and it looks like it's going to be more ambitious than I thought. The author is really intent on making the case for Dilla radically altering ideas about time signatures and contextualizing him in music history.

I'm about halfway in, it's fantastic so far.

How about that Kranky Records book?

Anyone read Susan Rogers's This Is What It Sounds Like?

Didn’t know it existed!

I often buy books like that but am usually disappointed by them.

Hmm. First musical example, in the Authenticity section, is The Shaggs, and the writing is pretty good, so looks I might take the bait yet again.

I"m really enjoying the new book about Some Bizzare, 'Conform to Deform". It's in an oral history format which can be a bit hit-and-miss sometimes, but the participants are pretty great so far, time is given to the lesser-known acts and non-musicians who were in the scene at the time.

It also nicely weaves together the many connections between the various musicians and bands, some of which were pretty interesting.

Stevo is in there, an unreliable narrator as you'd expect, making dubious claims. Quite often there's a statement from him that is then contradicted by two other people directly afterward, which is kinda funny.

Oh, thanks for the reminder, need to get that one!