Good books about music

I encounter a lot of books like this, but from more of an academic perspective--the heavy metal audience, pop stans etc. There was that Nathan Rabin book about Juggalos and Phish fans too.

I think my interest was prompted by a reaction to Andrew Hickey's 500 songs podcast. It's excellent, of course, but he's very much one for "If so and so hadn't lived/made this record then the whole future of rock would be very different" statements, which I'm always a bit suspicious of (the latest figure being Tommy Steele!). So as a kind of alternative to that, I got an itch to read something very much less personality-driven.

So, not actual studies of specific fandoms, but histories of music that look at it more in terms of currents of listening/taste/fan behaviour.

The B-Side by Ben Yagoda might have some of what you're looking for. Its scope goes all the way from the 1880s to the late 1960s and its main subject is the question of where songs come from - so lots of stuff about the songwriting and publishing business - but there's also a lot about the demand side, investigating how and why tastes changed among music consumers at certain times.

"If so and so hadn't lived/made this record then the whole future of rock would be very different" statements, which I'm always a bit suspicious of

I think my interest was prompted by a reaction to Andrew Hickey's 500 songs podcast. It's excellent, of course, but he's very much one for "If so and so hadn't lived/made this record then the whole future of rock would be very different" statements, which I'm always a bit suspicious of (the latest figure being Tommy Steele!). So as a kind of alternative to that, I got an itch to read something very much less personality-driven.

― Alba, Wednesday, 13 September 2023 15:07

Hmm, to be honest I can’t think of many music writers / podcasters who are less personality-driven than Hickey (maybe it’s a low bar). He is always keen to point out how there is no first anything, and how great music comes out of scenes as much as individuals.

He said of Steele “without him, there would be no British rock and roll industry as we know it” and I do think that is true. Steele was the first British rock and roll star and the club he was discovered in, the 2i’s, was mined for talent after his success, giving us the likes of Adam Faith, Tony Sheridan and Cliff & the Shadows). He was the model all the other early British rock stars were based on including Jim Dale, George Martin’s first pop signing. I don’t think it’s too much to say a huge chunk of the 50s and 60s British pop industry comes directly from Steele - he was Lionel Bart’s first success, Larry Parnes’ first star, the satirised subject in Expresso Bongo, the catalyst for Six-Five Special and the first guest on Oh Boy!. In the UK, he managed loads of firsts - he had the first UK number one album by a British act, recorded the first British rock album, was the first rock star to appear at the Royal Albert Hall and the first pop star to receive an Ivor Novello.

(I’m not Tommy Steele honest :) )

Yeah Steele is a major figure and, like so many figures in pre-Beatles UK pop, is gravely underrecognised.

Enjoyed this post by the film critic Jonathan Rigby on Facebook a little while ago:

I've just been reading, as one does, about the 1983-85 London Palladium production of SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, which of course had a long life on tour for several years after that, circling back to the Palladium in 1989. Throughout, Tommy Steele was the director as well as the star.

These lines in a September 1985 profile amused me: "In the last couple of years, Tommy Steele reckons he has been soaked to the skin 930 times. For the gap-toothed Cockney lad from Bermondsey has been sploshing through 400 gallons of water every night of the record-breaking musical SINGIN' IN THE RAIN."
What a waste!

Then again, was it just water? According to showbiz legend, the gap-toothed Cockney lad from Bermondsey was so loathed by the show's crew members that, up in the flies (as it were), the giant water containers would be regularly topped up by them on a 'when nature calls' basis, prior to the containers being flipped at the appropriate moment and jettisoning their load onto the stage, and onto Tommy. A case, I suppose, of being p***ed on from a great height.

I was listening to Hickey's bonus episode on Long John Baldry this morning, and it ended with this statement:

Baldry never had the kind of success his peers did, but without him the whole world of music would be profoundly different, and the lives of a generation of children would also be that little bit less happy.

That said, I 100% agree on this:

Hmm, to be honest I can’t think of many music writers / podcasters who are less personality-driven than Hickey

Yeah, I think it’s just the butterfly effect thing he means but it is a bit of hokey device.

given what he has managed to accomplish with the podcast, i view that tic mostly as a rhetorical flourish, and in some sense a way of giving props, rather than some profound dictum

X-post — just saw a freelancer review of the girl group oral history book in Washington Post . It says in part:

_But Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” has an unusual and sometimes troublesome format. It consists of edited transcripts of more than 100 interviews with notable artists, such as King, Ronnie Spector, Diana Ross, Patti LaBelle, Cher and Johnny Mathis, but we also hear from their managers, producers, songwriters, various band members, DJs and family members. These shared stories foster intimacy, conflicting memories and sometimes confusion. But reader persistence pays off_

Okay, I’m in!

This book…does not seem very good.

Perhaps I haven’t applied enough Reader Persistence yet.

Jann Wenner could have told you that.

Lol

What do you expect if you're reading a book of interviews with people who can't articulate at Bono level?

someone was saying My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize has been reissued and is newly available. i remember fortunate hazel buying a copy in london the one time we met up, in a shop on charing cross road that no longer exists (was it books etc?)

What do you expect if you're reading a book of interviews with people who can't articulate at Bono level?

This review makes Thurston Moore's book sound intriguing. I flipped through Gordon's book in the Seattle airport (did you know Sub Pop has a store in the Seattle airport?) a couple of weeks ago but didn't buy it. Maybe I need to read both, I don't know.

Like Patti Smith’s Just Kids, much of this book doubles as a cultural ethnography of a city that doesn’t exist anymore, as Moore meticulously reconstructs the nightlife, scene politics, and artistic cross-pollination that catapulted local stars like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Madonna Ciccone, Jenny Holzer, and Jim Jarmusch (all of whom Moore brushed elbows with) into national prominence. He apparently attended every consequential show and purchased every consequential record, while barely getting by in a dilapidated Alphabet City apartment through a series of odd jobs. This young man, as he reflects, was not fit for steady employment — he would be an artist and nothing else. Early on, he flirted with being a musician-critic like Smith and even aspired to write for the seminal rock magazine Creem, which eventually led to a brief series of sweet interactions with the late Lester Bangs. You can glimpse that in the adjective-heavy, overly enthusiastic way he writes about his favorite performers: “a righteous celebration of hypersonic beauty” (Bad Brains), “the sound of every alien artist in the city looking to find sense in a reality infused by perversion and absurdity” (Teenage Jesus & the Jerks), “psychedelic heavy metal no wave rainbow spiraling into their ears and hearts” (his own band).

An editor might have trimmed the surplus of described shows — one chapter is wholly dedicated to a raucous Public Image Ltd. gig — but the ground-floor perspective of this fertile milieu is definitely interesting. More conspicuous, the longer he goes on, is Moore’s emotional absence in these pages. He doesn’t appear to have many close friendships, not even within the band; there is such little accounting of his relationship with Ranaldo or Shelley that around the 300-page mark, I looked up and wondered aloud, “Are he and Lee … friends?” He doesn’t really date; by his own telling, Gordon, whom he met at age 22, was his first serious girlfriend, and he’s drawn not just to her looks, her demeanor, and their mutual friendships but by what she represents. “It was obvious that she was genuinely devoted to being an artist, a stance that she embodied naturally and that attracted me profoundly,” he writes. “Her feminism was a radical revelation to me, and it would inform my own self-awareness.” He depicts himself as a loner and voyeur, hovering on the margins and waiting to be invited into some grand party of his fantasies, a mentality that serves him well for the stardom Sonic Youth does achieve. He talks about his personal feelings with a stoic’s remove, reserving his enthusiasm for whenever he’s engaging with music.

Sonic Youth die-hards will appreciate the rigorous accounting of the band’s working process, from the way they selected album art through the unconventional guitar tunings they used on particular songs. But the more Moore writes, the more he circles a lacuna at the heart of his story: his relationship with Gordon. It’s not that he avoids her altogether, but his reticence to divulge entirely may be logistical or even legal: Moore is now married to “the other woman,” and the knottiness of how to write about the ex-wife who despises your current wife (feelings that, I imagine, are mutual) is not for me to untangle.

Yet given how much of the band’s experience is wrapped up with his previous marriage, the glancing way he talks about Gordon feels increasingly incomplete, certainly every time we get another story about some great concert. “The gathering energy of Sonic Youth and the growing intimacy of my relationship with Kim had subsumed my earlier ideas of what my life and my art should be,” he writes of the band’s chemistry taking shape. While discussing how they fell in love, he describes their respective personalities: Gordon “possessed a sensitivity that could be emotionally raw or coolly distant,” while Moore himself is “a younger, somewhat on-the-loose rock-and-roll boy.” This dynamic was reified in the band’s own music, both in their voices — Gordon’s breathy and mysterious, Moore’s flat and sneering — and in their song material. The breadth of Sonic Youth’s output makes it unwise to erect a barrier between “the Kim songs” and “the Thurston songs,” but it’s true that Moore did sing more of the better-known songs that conventionally “rocked” — a role that may have carried over from his marriage.

And when he does dig into some facet of their relationship, like how they fell in love or their shotgun wedding or the prickly nuances of cohabitating in the same band, it’s instantly more compelling than whatever else he’s just been talking about. Here’s what passes for a juicy admission: “I got jealous sometimes about the way Kim gave attention to other male musicians, men whom it was obvious that she admired, either intellectually, emotionally, or both,” he writes. “She seemingly took in stride my platonic friendships with other women. Whatever feelings may have lingered within us, neither of us ever felt the need to confront the other in any accusing way.” He doesn’t name names, but if you want to connect the dots, it’s notable how much Gordon wrote about her affection for Kurt Cobain in her memoir — and, in turn, about her disdain for Courtney Love, whom Moore seems to like just fine.

The best celebrity memoirs demonstrate a willingness to grapple with how their author is perceived and to unpack their own feelings about that perception. (The most memorable one I’ve read in the last ten years is Jessica Simpson’s Open Book.) One of the book’s most revealing passages is when Moore describes hanging a calendar bearing a cheesy pinup girl in the apartment he shares with Gordon, on which he scrawls a bit of “punk art” poetry. Whatever clever commentary he intends is received differently by Gordon, who takes that bit of writing and turns them into the lyrics for “Flower” (“There’s a new girl in your life … hanging on your wall”), which would appear on their 1985 album, Bad Moon Rising. “In this bit of lyrical interplay,” he writes, “lay the seed of a conflict in our relationship, one that would remain unspoken but that would someday contribute to its dissolution.” Moore, despite his repeatedly stated feminist bona fides, “couldn’t deny [his] attraction to the nude calendar girl.” And though he believes he can turn his lurid appreciation “into a statement of solidarity and a sublimation of beauty,” the truth is that it’s only so interesting for a straight man to be turned on by a sexy woman — something Gordon picks up on instantly and turns into her own, more thoughtful art.

> An editor might have trimmed the surplus of described shows — one chapter is wholly dedicated to a raucous Public Image Ltd. gig
Glad this editor wasn't around, this sounds like a good chapter to me?

it’s true that Moore did sing more of the better-known songs that conventionally “rocked”

dunno, "kool thing" and "bull in the heather" have to be up there with the most well-known Sonic Youth songs, right?

that public image show was big news at the time and pretty important when it came to drawing artistic lines lol

assuming it's the "we are not a rock band we are a happening" ritz riot

Looks like you're atrial fibrillation buddies w/Thurston.

Idk I think I want as much "I was there" hipster shit out of a TM book as possible, and would not expect any insightful emotional analysis.

otm, also

Sonic Youth die-hards will appreciate the rigorous accounting of the band’s working process, from the way they selected album art through the unconventional guitar tunings they used on particular songs

definitely feels more interesting to me than the 'what really happened in the divorce' stuff

i loved kim's book for what it's worth

kim's book is great, yeah, but i agree — I don't really want a thurston tell-all.

If you don't want to hear more about the Ritz PIL riot, I don't want to know you.

actually surprised someone hasn't written an entire book about that one show (maybe someone has?)

the big new Two Tone book is in the amazon monthly deal (uk) this month (which surprises me as it is kinda new. maybe it sold better than expected in hardback)

I picked up the Hungry Beat oral history on Scottish indie cos I saw it in a charity shop. Very interesting, also that a load of English bands got picked up by small labels up there. Didn't know Gareth Sager was originally Scottish. running through my head that I've seen him in a kilt but wouldn't have made that connection.
book is by Grant McPhee and Douglas MacIntyre with Neil Cooper.

I'm reading Paul Becker's HOW WE MADE THE KICK INSIDE by Paul Becker. It's kind of a freaky, free-jazz fantasisa on the Guardian's How We Made format, with an imaginary Kate quoting Claire Lispector, describing how she wove a nest out of electrical cables, and recounting how she feel into and got trapped inside a 70 foot tall Wicker Man style effigy of herself in her back garden. Not sure it illuminates the music very much but an interesting essay on *creative process* (the writer is a fine artist).

It's by Paul Becker in case I didn't make that clear.

Fast Product is more than a small label, really one of the pioneering forces of UK indie.

The Light Pours Out of Me: The Authorised Biography of John McGeoch
Rory Sullivan-Burke

I talked a little bit about this book on the McGeoch thread: John McGeoch

i almost never read books about music, but i loved kyle gann's article on robert ashley as a minimalist so reading his ashley book now. starting with the chapter on the tetralogy (since 'improvement' is my favorite of ashley's works), it's good but feels like he rushed it to completion or condensed it or something. it's more like the outline of a really good, in-depth book or article. he drops some good insights that i want him to explore further, then it's over.

Ah, felt sure the thread revive would be about the new (due 2024) Simon Reynolds book.

xxps

I think one of the most intriguing things Fast Product put out, in terms of how did that end up on there, was putting Out Of Vogue by the Middle Class on one of their Earcom compilations. I suppose they had a connection to the California scene because they also put out California Uber Alles by the Dead Kennedys.

is My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize worth reading if your interest in Creation is largely restricted to pre-Oasis? it is now available again

It’s a pretty good primer for things you already know, CP, ie the uk indie scene 1979-83, then its a fairly faithful account afaict of the per-oasis years, i recall nothing of the later part of the story- it perhaps I stopped readers my it.

My gripe with it was that it didn’t seem to try any critical reappraisal, so the stuff which got the attention then (eg House of Love, Primal Scream) got good coverage and things I’d loved that I thought underexposed back then were barely touched on (eg Jasmine Minks, even Biff Bang Pow!). I accept this is primarily my problem.

It’s solid, interesting, no fireworks that I recall.

I read some complaints that they hadn't reappraised MBV at all so most of it was complaining about how much money they spent.

I would probably have similar gripes by the sounds of it. it's not expensive atm though so might be worth a go or something I can ask for as an xmas present maybe

Given all those stiff Thurston quotes---the more earnest he gets, the more awkward the phrasing, like he's sweating through his rental formalware----don't think I'll be seeking it out, but will take a look if library gets it, esp. that Public Image experience.

Noh Mercy on the earcom comp was also Bah area I think.

Anyone else read Michael Cragg’s Reach For The Stars? Can’t recommend it highly enough.

Anymore For Anymore: The Ronnie Lane Story by Caroline and David Stafford

Published by Omnibus Press (out now)

This is a fascinating account of a key player in the late 60’s British music explosion. There are many great stories here from his peak years with the Small Faces and the Rod Stewart-led Faces. Ronnie Lane was at the heart of the storm, playing bass, singing and writing. But it’s not all “happy days toy town” – it’s depressing to read of yet another young musician ripped off and exploited by the music biz sharks, and the last section of the book describing his lingering decline and death from MS, which makes for some grim reading.

The book doesn’t dwell too long on his East End childhood, so we’re spared the usual guff about jellied eels and Pearly Kings. Fortunately, his older brother Stan was well into music and Ronnie was playing in bands from a young age.

Just read the girl group oral history, But Will You Love Me Tomorrow?. I should have been warned by a couple of the comments upthread.

Frustrating. This book really needed to be edited with a heavier hand - to clean up grammar, to explain confusing quotes, to reconcile contradictory testimony, to add any kind of context. Dates! It needed far more dates.

For better or worse it gets quite gossipy. Some big names don't come off very well. Most of the new information the book left me with has to do with developments of the last 25 years, stuff not covered in Alan Betrock's Girl Groups: The Story of a Sound (1982) or John Clemente's Girl Groups: Fabulous Females that Rocked the World (2000). Was struck by one thing, which is the seemingly high rate of depression and mental issues associated with people who were involved in the girl group business.

Now I'm in the middle of Listen: On Music, Sound, and Us by Michel Faber, which seems mainly concerned with questioning assumptions we make about music that are tied up in our listening habits. So far so interesting.

The novelist?

Yep