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

Nirvana: The Biography

by Everett True

Da Capo, 635 pp., $19.95 (paper)

Nirvana. Three syllables, three members, three proper albums. The most influential group to hit pop music in three decades, this publicity-shy Seattle trio who wasn't even from Seattle, supplanted Michael Jackson at No. 1 in January 1992, perhaps the least of their accomplishments. They broadened mainstream rock & roll's parameters to include, finally, the forgotten hordes of freaks and losers, securing them an unprecedented stake in popular culture that continues today in ABC's Ugly Betty and the Spider-Man movies. Lest we forget, Nirvana also unleashed a tide of shitty, self-indulgent songwriting that shows no signs of abating, but that wasn't really their fault. Improbably named UK journalist Everett True, whose wanderlust led him to file the first significant account of the Pacific Northwest "grunge" phenomenon for Melody Maker in early 1989, was there at every step, or most of the important ones anyway. True struck up a fast friendship with the band that first trip, so his biography sacrifices any pretense of objectivity for a fascinating fly-on-the-wall perspective. True puked in Nirvana's van any number of times, may or may not have introduced Kurt Cobain to Courtney Love (and may or may not have hooked up with Love himself), and wheeled Cobain onstage at the 1992 Reading Festival, the precise moment when they became the biggest band in the universe. When his memory gets fuzzy, which is often the case, he says as much and coaxes the same candor out of the subjects he employs in his forthright prose. Books about Nirvana could fill one of their early tour vans, but as of now, True's assiduously annotated tome is the only one for the ride.