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

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

by Philip Lambert

Continuum, 404 pp., $26.95 (paper)

Unless you can swim laps around music theory, this is not the best Beach Boys book to bring to the pool this summer. Eschewing familiar biographical territory, Baruch College music professor Philip Lambert takes us under the hood of Brian Wilson's music in order to reconstruct the evolving compositional framework that transported Wilson from "Pom Pom Play Girl" to Pet Sounds. Although Wilson was influenced by a wide spectrum of contemporary Top 40 music from his youth, Lambert pays particular attention to the Four Freshmen, demonstrating how Wilson looked to them for thematic elements as well as harmonies. For the novice, Lambert's ability to ferret out hints of musical sophistication in earlier, less heralded Beach Boys tracks and solo Wilson productions for Jan & Dean and the Honeys may occasion critical reappraisal. Lambert's elaboration on the compositional similarities between Smile and Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue is also insightful. Unfortunately, too much of the book reads like transcribed lecture notes. Lambert's fealty for Wilson's music is never in doubt, but his narrative bogs down in a turgidity that belies its subject matter's majestic lightness. Take a cue from the protagonist of "Fun, Fun, Fun" and ditch the library for the hamburger stand.