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

Texas Troubadours

by Steve Harris

University of Texas Press, 127 pp., $39.95

Kinky Friedman knows Lone Star State singer-songwriters. "Needless to say," he writes in the forward to Texas Troubadours, "these critters are often lonesome, ornery, and mean." Houston-based photographer Steve Harris, onetime house cameraman at Rockefeller's Nightclub, therefore shoots more than 50 of them in a saturated black and white that looks like an oil stain. In first portrait Billy Joe Shaver ("Simplicity don't need to be greased"), Harris gets close enough in that the old five and dimer's Man of God is closer to the surface than the cowpoke caricature often captured. Guy Clark's close-up is stunning as well, while Mingo Saldivar proves brown is beatific. The Continental Club's Mike Barfield gives up a portrait that might have been shot anytime between the Civil War and Deadwood. Ditto for James McMurtry's mad marauder. Jesse Dayton's matinee idol shot matches up with Rick Trevino's and Alejandro Escovedo's cattle rustler mugs. A few of the ladies – Trish Murphy, Sara Hickman, and Abra Moore – make out similarly flattered. Not so of Kris Kristofferson, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Terri Hendrix, Robert Earl Keen, Rosie Flores, and angry frat-boy Jack Ingram. Others, like Friedman, Shake Russell, and Tom Russell, are little more than snapshots. That's when Don Walser brings a tear to your eye. Needless to say, some critters are angelic.