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

You Don't Love Me Yet: a novel

by Jonathan Lethem

Doubleday, 224 pp., $24.95

Perhaps it's no coincidence that Jonathan Lethem's new novel shares its title with a Roky Erikson song. After all, You Don't Love Me Yet is the humorous tale of a young indie rock band and its members' search for art and love. Lethem returns to familiar West Coast stomping grounds, site of his earliest novels, as we follow the travails of a likable quartet of twentysomething bohos nominally plugged into the L.A. arts scene with no band name and no gigs. Protagonist/bassist Lucinda answers telephones at the Complaint Line, a performance-art project where people call in anonymous grievances. Intrigued by the captivating verbiage of a regular caller, she jots down portions of his ramblings and gives them to Bedwin, the band's writer, who turns them into pop songs. One becomes an instant "hit" with the L.A. underground, but who's the real author of the song? This light-hearted examination of "fair use" and intellectual property resonates directly with our current high tech, sampled, globalized music world. Lethem certainly has fun with the language, but those expecting the narrative depth of his two highly acclaimed, urban jungle novels, Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude, probably won't find this an otherwise appealing tale.