Rock & Roll Books

• Rock & Roll Books

  All the Townes Van Zandt, Texas Troubadours, Southern hip-hop, Zen punk, and Phil Spector, Warren Zevon, and Joe Strummer you can shake a bottle of sunblock at

• To Live's to Fly: The Ballad of the Late, Great Townes Van Zandt

  BY DOUG FREEMAN

• He's a Rebel: Phil Spector: Rock and Roll's Legendary Producer;
  Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector

  BY AUDRA SCHROEDER

• Texas Troubadours

  BY RAOUL HERNANDEZ

• Lonely Avenue: The Unlikely Life & Times of Doc Pomus

  BY SHAWN BADGLEY

• Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe

  BY MARGARET MOSER

• Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer, The Definitive Biography

  BY DAN OKO

• Babylon's Burning: From Punk to Grunge

  BY MARGARET MOSER

• I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon

  BY JIM CALIGIURI

• Nirvana: The Biography

  BY CHRISTOPHER GRAY

• Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music

  BY DAVID LYNCH

• Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries;
  My So-Called Punk: How Neo-Punk Stage-Dived Into the Mainstream;
  Punk Love

  BY DARCIE STEVENS

• Third Coast: Outkast, Timbaland, & How Hip Hop Became a Southern Thing;
  Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women;
  To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic

  BY GRAHAM REYNOLDS

• Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life

  BY CHRISTOPHER GRAY

• Modest Mouse: A Pretty Good Read

  BY MELANIE HAUPT

• You Don't Love Me Yet: a novel

  BY JAY TRACHTENBERG

• Inside the Music of Brian Wilson: The Songs, Sounds, and Influences of the Beach Boys' Founding Genius

  BY GREG BEETS

• Jimmy Page: Magus, Musician, Man, an unauthorized biography

  BY AUSTIN POWELL

• Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry

  BY JIM CALIGIURI

• The Rockabilly Legends: They Called It Rockabilly Long Before They Called It Rock and Roll

  BY GRAHAM REYNOLDS

To Live's to Fly: The Ballad of the Late, Great Townes Van Zandt

by John Kruth

Da Capo, 318 pp., $26

When Townes Van Zandt died on New Year's Day 1997, his life was already enshrouded in myth, and perhaps the greatest achievement of John Kruth's new biography of the tragic songwriter is his balance of the legend with the life, giving credence to both rather than performing a revisionist history. A clear portrait of Van Zandt never quite emerges from the extensive interviews with family, friends, and fellow artists but rather more through Kruth's discerning analysis of the songs themselves, appropriate for an artist whose life was so indelibly furrowed into his music. Accordingly, the uneasy alternation between oral history, criticism, and first-person accounts of the author's search for traces of the self-destructive troubadour leaves the book never quite reaching a sufficient narrative stride. Throughout, however, Kruth offers anecdotes ranging from insightful, such as the mining of Van Zandt's literary influences, to bizarre, such as his short stint rooming with Roky Erickson and auditioning on bass for the 13th Floor Elevators. Guy Clark's irascibility stands in place of his best friend's equally tempestuous personality, while the digression into Blaze Foley's searingly honest but calamitous life and death provides a fitting parallel. The person closest to Townes, Clark's wife, Susanna, remains unfortunately evasive. While hardly the final word on TVZ's life or legacy, Kruth's work is invaluable for its accounts of those who knew, loved, and hated the enigmatically unattainable man. They all remain in awe of a genius exhausted for the sake of the song.