In the subUrban wasteland of my youth, in a tiny, bland town in Anywhere, U.S.A., there was
nothing except my malfeasance, which, as the Seventies drew to a close, took
the form of shoplifting.
Music is, of course, the soundtrack to most forms of rebellion, so I directed
my own personal crime wave thus, ransacking mailboxes for those Columbia House,
8-for-a-penny bonanzas, lifting Dylan’s Slow Train Coming from the
Christian book store, and in a more daring move, stealing almost the entire
music section from the local bookstore.
Nearly 20 years later, I’m completely reformed, and all those Columbia House
Chicago albums are gone — as is that Dylan tape — and I’ve lost track of all
my Roger Dean album cover artwork books. My Rolling Stone Record Guide,
however, the first one, the one edited by a couple of the original deans of
rock criticism, Dave Marsh and John Swenson — not the lame rewrite from a few
years back — sits right beside my computer with all my other primary reference
books.
Throughout my adolescence, the RSRG was my Bible, guiding me through
the rigors of AOR rock radio, informing me which albums were worthy of five
stars (Aftermath) and, which warranted the lowest rating, a block
(Laverne & Shirley Sing). I read every page, studied it, memorized
it, and based much of my record collection on it. In the early Eighties, when
the New Rolling Stone Record Guide was published I wept with relief,
believing the outdated had been updated. No such luck. Like the magazine from
which it sprang, it had become monolithic and staid, yet nothing ever took its
place. Then I discovered Ira Robbins’ Trouser Press Guide.
Like most things in my life, I came across it late, in graduate school earlier
this decade, when The Trouser Press Guide, having risen from the ashes
of the same-named magazine Robbins had co-founded in 1974, was in its fourth
printing. It was just sitting there on the table at the school newspaper, along
with a lot of promo tapes nobody wanted — totally up for grabs. So I took it.
And as with the Rolling Stone Record Guide, I fell into it, reading it
nightly and getting an education that would take years in nightclubs to equal.
Here it was, the almighty successor to my Rosetta Stone — an encyclopedia of
modern music for modern times. Out with CSNY, in with the Minutemen. There is
no other like it. The new New Rolling Stone Record Guide? Spin’s
Alternative Record Guide? Feh! Poseurs. There is only one reference book
for music of the last 20 years: The Trouser Press Record Guide.
Well, actually there are four. No, five. There’s a new one. When Robbins
announced at a SXSW panel last year that he was finishing up a new one I
started salivating. Finally published, The Trouser Press Guide to ’90s Rock by Ira A. Robbins (Fireside/Simon & Schuster, $24.95 paper)
isn’t merely an update to the fourth edition. As Robbins writes in the preface,
it’s brand new: “Other than a few thousand words carried over from the fourth
edition to prevent whiplash… this edition is completely new.” Aphex Twin,
Gastr del Sol, Chemical Brothers, Jessamine, Dirty Three, Portishead, Sky Cries
Mary, Tortoise, Tricky…. All the groups of tomorrow, summed up today.
And more than just modern rock, Robbins and 50 cohorts (Jason Cohen, David
Fricke, Bill Wyman, Jim DeRogatis, Neil Strauss, among them), pay close
attention to rap, Americana — even Austin; there are entries for the Bad
Livers, Junior Brown, Ed Hall, Alejandro Escovedo, Fastball, Flowerhead,
Johnboy, Evan Johns, Kathy McCarty, Pork, Seed, Sincola, Stretford, and T.I.
Each entry not only gives a mind-bogglingly complete discography (you try rounding up Giant Sand, Guided by Voices, Half Japanese, Daniel Johnston,
Residents, Sebadoh, Elliot Sharp, Wire, John Zorn, Zappa!) it also
collects all the off-shoots of the entry in question. Thus, under the Butthole
Surfers, you’ve also got Jackofficers, Daddy Longhead, Paul Leary, P, and
Drain. In addition, all the important precursors to “90s Rock” get listings:
Cale, Costello, Eno, Erickson, Pere Ubu, Iggy Pop, Red Krayola, Lou Reed, Neil
Young. Even artists you wouldn’t particularly expect in rock guides get listed
— Iris Dement, James McMurtry, Lyle Lovett. The critical assessments,
meanwhile, don’t fall all over themselves trying to be hipper-than-thou; they
like Dave Matthews and Sponge.
In short, The Trouser Press Guide to ’90s Rock is absolutely
indispensable. Nothing comes close and few have even tried. And if you can’t
find a Minutemen entry in the new one, its in the last one, which should be on
your shelf with the other four volumes. If you can’t envision a music library
without the Velvet Underground in it, this music reference book is for you. Ira
Robbins, you are my rock. — Raoul Hernandez
As music becomes increasingly cross-bred, compartmentalized, and commercialized, the elemental purity
that was once the only reason for people to make a joyful noise is ever more
compromised. That’s only one reason it’s so important for books like Woke Me
Up This Morning: Black Gospel Singers and the Gospel Life by Alan Young
(University Press of Mississippi, $18 paper) to exist. Telling the stories of
black Mississippi and Tennessee gospel performers in their own words, Alan
Young documents a niche of American music that has never been more vital and,
defying all odds, manages to remain contemporary.
As long as people worship God, they will sing His praises, and the men and
women of Woke Me Up This Morning live to worship God. That doesn’t mean
they’re not human; far from it, as Early Wright of Clarksdale, Mississippi
testifies: “I’m not the best person in the world. I don’t profess to be. I’ve
been wrong like everybody else and I still get drunk. I’m open-spoken. Anytime
you leave me with a smile, you can rest assured we’re all right.”
That live-and-let-live attitude is essential to the performers (including
Elder Roma Wilson, Melvin Mosley, Odell Hampton, and Leomia Boyd) in this book,
who sing for God first, their friends, family, and audience second, and
themselves last of all. Young has penned something that will last as long as
gospel music, an oral history of an oral people that resonates with the spirit
of the Lord. Calling Jesus on the mainline, twenty-six-year-old Rita Watson
never gets a busy signal: “I had a person ask me about two weeks ago, `Why do
you sing with your eyes closed?’ …when my eyes are closed, there’s a vision
of God sitting on the throne with a very pleasing expression on his face. And
when I’m singing, I’m singing to him.”
— Christopher Gray
|
always make for a good book. Such is the lesson of Mansion on the Hill by Fred Goodman (Times Books, $25 hard), a collection of fine music business
anecdotes, profiles, and insights that’s still far from a cohesive read.
Although Goodman is a daily business reporter smart enough to have long ago
recognized music’s standing as a real “industry,” in the process of undeniably
besting his book-bearing competitors with meticulous research and stunningly
on-the-record attribution, Mansion on the Hill‘s thesis is compromised
in the most basic of ways — it’s too broad.
As if by default, the point of Mansion on the Hill is that between 1962
and the present, rock & roll’s power base moved from the domain of
dope-filled lofts to the boardroom of Sony and MCA. And that the period
in-between — of “Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-on Collision
of Rock And Commerce,” as Goodman says in a subtitle far simpler than the book
— is, in the author’s estimation, the record industry’s golden days and the
quick birth and death of the rock star as “artist.” While that may be, it also
raises a bloated paradox Goodman never untangles — that with the lure of big
business, rock stars (Dylan, Young, etc.) inevitably sell out and that just as
often the collision of rock and commerce isn’t so much a collision after all
but a blurred line instead.
Nonetheless, Goodman’s onto something when he begins to detail the
transformation of “performers” into “artists.” Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan’s
surly manager, gets the credit for the semantical transformation, as well as
the procedure of referring to live dates as concerts, rather than mere
performances. “So you had an `artist’ appearing at a `concert,’ it always
struck me as funny. I considered an artist to [be] Isaac Stern. And here were
these folksingers,” Goodman quotes David Braun, the former head of Polygram
records, as saying. “Clive Davis said that as soon as they began being called
artists instead of performers the fees went up.”
With this, Goodman finds his first real theme and his first real antagonist in
Grossman — who also pioneered the art of collecting both a large chunk of
publishing income and an unheard-of 25% management fee. And yet, while
Grossman’s relationship with Dylan yields some of the book’s most insightful
stories of managerial mistrust and mishandling, Goodman’s best revelation may
just come from Grossman’s management of Peter, Paul & Mary — a deal
Goodman contends created the first true “creative control” of an artist’s
delivery, content and packaging of records. While the discovery of such ironies
(Peter, Paul & Mary as business moguls) is what often makes Mansion on
the Hill so rewarding in spite of itself, it’s hard to escape the fact that
it takes an 80-page build-up to find Grossman. Pre-Grossman, Goodman muddies
the story with fluffy hippie revisionism– awarding big impact points to Boston
and San Francisco beatniks who would have made better asides and footnotes in
the Grossman sections than as true subjects.
But as the Grossman investigations lead into Goodman’s other two primary
character vehicles — former rock critic-cum-Bruce Springsteen manager
Jon Landau and mailboy-cum-billionare David Geffen — Goodman truly
begins to lose control of his narrative. The new outlook, that managers have
grown as charismatic as the performers they represent, is a winner — and a
better candidate for Mansion on the Hill‘s thesis than the sprawling
mess of the “business ruined our art” theme Goodman chases. Using Grossman’s
managerial blueprints, Geffen and Landau indeed became the power-hungry
figureheads that Goodman so fears and loathes. Seemingly, neither manager has
met a conflict of interest they didn’t love — and watching Goodman untangle
their messes is indeed the book’s best cheap thrill.
This latter half of the book also begets Goodman’s largest trainwreck, where
the sheer number of concurrent storylines becomes baffling for the reader —
separate chapters on the three players would have better defined the stories.
In fact, by chasing the larger story of business history, both Goodman’s
musical omissions (punk, disco, Jackson, Madonna, and U2) and mechanical
omissions (distribution, retail, and radio) become even clearer than the story
he does present. Peter Frampton manages to be the last new musical character we
meet in any detail — wouldn’t this suggested inclusiveness just further bloat
an already 375-page text? Yes, which is why a refined concentration of
Grossman, Landau, and Geffen is all Mansion on the Hill needed in the
first place.
More troubling is Goodman’s righteous damnation of the “product” — where
despite his even tone in the historical portions he nonetheless manages to not
so subtly cry “sell-out” each time his favorite artists disappoint him. But if
rock & roll has truly become a “product,” isn’t it a chicken-and-egg
scenario as to who’s responsible — the industry’s proposal of bottom line
economics, or the musicians’ willingness to commercially compromise themselves?
Without each other, neither the artists or industry exist as profitable
entities, and less intelligent writers than Goodman have wisely stayed clear of
that unanswerable question — and instead, like Fredric Dannen’s Hit
Men, focused primarily on analyzing only a select piece of the equation.
And although Goodman’s fatal flaw is that he can’t resist the larger
challenge, the best paradox he ultimately presents is this book itself — for
it comes off as such a valuable historical read to even the most casual music
fan despite its narrative misgivings. Perhaps Goodman has himself perfected one
of the record industry’s best tricks — making a record with only a few good
songs that seem worth owning anyway. — Andy Langer
|
that endeavoured to capture the American punk scene: New York Rocker,
L.A.’s Slash, and S.F.’s Search & Destroy were chief among
them. A little deeper delving might turn up some regional prizes, like
Seattle’s Chatterbox, Sluggo! from Austin, or Skinner Box
from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Last fall, V.Vale — the former publisher of
Re/Search — brought out the first volume of this oversized,
true-to-original-size collection of the first six issues; this spring the
volume with issues 7-11 followed, Search & Destroy: The Complete
Reprint, V.Vale, editor (V/Search, $19.95).
Publishing these punk manifestos is a very good idea – most of these
were photocopied issues that fell apart quickly. The night I got it, I took it
home and immersed myself in it. The more I read it, the more I was absorbed
into the rambling consciousness of rage that was happening back then, the sense
of urgency we had about the music we heard. This, I realize, was the dawning of
the age of Generation X; that punk’s DIY ethic still fuels Gen X’s fire.
Later that night, after having read a story on X in S&D, I
coincidentally talked to Exene on the phone hours later, and doubtless bored
her silly with a rambling tale of being drunk and writing the words to “The
Have-Nots” on my bathroom door after having an epiphany at their Club Foot
show. Maybe it was just me, I finally muttered, re-living a last gasp of
nostalgia for a movement that’s been co-opted by itself. No, I could almost
hear her shaking her head. There really was something special to the music of
the original punk movement, she agreed.
What I’d really like to see is a comprehensive compendium of the best of these
punk publications. A complete collection such as the S&D series is
cool but terribly limited in scope, hardly the apex of punk glory or the “only
publication to fully document the punk cultural revolution” as the rather
grandiose notes on its splashy back read. Still, it’s a wonderfully evocative
trip down the smelly alley that was the heyday of American punk. What was it
that both Exene and I still hold close to ours hearts about those days? Ah,
yes. A lust for life. — Margaret Moser
This article appears in March 14 • 1997 and March 14 • 1997 (Cover).