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To your average American, even if he is an aficionado, one for whom the
beat and the noise and fury was All, punk rock has remained merely a minority
musical taste. Hence, the above-named may find themselves puzzled by punk’s
insatiable thirst for documentation.
What these people are neglecting was that, in actual practice, punk was
primarily a socio-cultural phenomenon and a musical one secondarily. This
is the nagging-itch quality in punk’s makeup which has made the stuff uncomfortable
for both the average rock fan and the mainstream music business: It’s hardly
a disposable, fleeting pop moment, except as a commercial product. (And
believe me, punk’s moment in the American commercial sun is about to pass.)
This also explains that jones for documentation, as punk rock’s as much
an ongoing art project as anything else. And hey, a rock club’s hardly a
museum, and a well-scuffed 45rpm single or shiny new CD reissue can only
capture the sonic flavor. So, why not feverishly snap that shutter, stroke
that typewriter key, get that project preserved for posterity?
No doubt, the entire mallpunk commercial flare-up is as much the direct
catalyst for the recent flood of punk books as for the equivalent avalanche
of archival CDs. The question is, how well can you pogo to these pages?
Well, like the music, some books may be the Sex Pistols, some may be Eater.
Falling somewhere in between has to be the most celebrated punk book of
the season, Please Kill Me, by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain (Grove
Press, $25 hard). The book operates within a breathless/deathless gutter-Terkle
framework that sucks you in, then relies on grit and color to keep you there.
Particularly instructive are Wayne Kramer and Dennis Thompson’s accounts
of how much the MC5 really suffered for our salvation (not even the
Stooges faced either the continual bombing of their living quarters or concentrated
harassment from federal, state, and local authorities). Particularly hilarious
are Jeff Magnum’s tales of life in the Dead Boys, all of which seem to have
the refrain, “These people are insane. I left a job operating a drill
press in Cleveland for this?!! All I wanted to do was play my electric
bass really loud.” It’s no doubt a thrilling read, but it’s still a
botched one. Never has such a major book been released to the public so
in need of copy-editing: If the Cast of Characters section at book’s end
alone is to be believed, Heartbreakers guitarist Walter Lure and Clash guitarist
Mick Jones were both bassists; Jones no longer leads his 10-year-old Big
Audio Dynamite (for whom he also played bass, apparently); Sex Pistols guitar
hero Steve Jones played drums alongside Paul Cook (no wonder Never Mind
the Bollocks sounded so revolutionary — they figured out a way to make
drums sound like cranked guitars!); and Jac Holzman, the one-time founder
and president of Elektra Records who is actively running Discovery Records,
died in 1993. McNeil also attempts claiming authorship for the term “punk
rock,” more likely first used by Dave Marsh in a ? &the Mysterians
review published in Creem in 1970 and further defined by rock journalism
pioneers Lester Bangs, Lenny Kaye, and Greg Shaw as Legs attended high school
in Connecticut. With glaring factual errors like these, you’ve gotta wonder
how much credibility is to be invested in Please Kill Me.
Fortunately, those errors are all on McNeil’s part, which means you could
probably believe whatever parts of the tale aren’t told by McNeil. McNeil
might also be blamed for the book’s sordid tone. With the exception of the
truly gentlemanly Jerry Nolan (New York Dolls/Heartbreakers drummer) you
get the feeling the entire punk rock population of late-Sixties Detroit
and the Lower East Side was composed of degenerate scumbags, hustlers, dope
fiends, chicken hawks, and rampaging sluts. You notice scant documentation
of perhaps more sedate folks like Talking Heads. Andy Shernoff himself has
pointed out his old band, the Dictators, wouldn’t have made it in had singer
Handsome Dick Manitoba not gotten into a legendary bloody battle with Wayne
County onstage. Still, Please Kill Me is more fun and much livelier
than Clinton Heylin’s From The Velvets to the Voidoids, which covered
the same material in a far too sterile and clinical fashion. Even then,
Please Kill Me could have benefited from a touch more scholarship,
and it still leaves you with a nagging need to take a shower at book’s end.
Then again, Legs can’t help it. Somewhat of a weird, untutored genius,
his strengths were more intuitive and attitudinal than journalistic. His
initial fame was as the rampaging, alcoholic fuck-up mascot of Punk Magazine,
one of the pioneering punk rock fanzines, finally seeing some of its prime
moments anthologized in Punk: The Original (Trans-High Corp., $19.95
paper [235 Park Avenue S., Fifth Floor, New York, NY 10003]). Of course,
that could describe the mag itself, as glimpsed within these pages. Hardly
comparable to any mag alive, then or now, Punk was a deeply hilarious,
hand-lettered burst of snot and middle-finger aesthetics, willing to risk
anything for a reaction, transforming a bit of amateurish buffoonery like
asking Lou Reed what he likes on his hamburgers into a transcendent moment.
Punk wallowed in culture both high and especially low, talking poetry
and films with Richard Hell and Patti Smith, yet relying on John Homstrom’s
background in comic books for its look and layout. But the apex had to be
Issue #15, in which the entire mag was taken over by “Mutant Monster
Beach Party,” a hysterical photocomic salute to the Roger Corman oeuvre
starring Joey Ramone and Debbie Harry, apparently a key factor in the Ramones’
being cast in Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. It’s here, reproduced in
glorious black-and-white, alongside numerous other high spots in the lifespan
of one of the few mags sharp enough to see merit in both the Sex Pistols
and the Bay City Rollers.
Where Punk’s value lay in its spirit and presentation, San Francisco’s
Search & Destroy was thick in actual substance and content. Produced
for 11 issues from 1977 to 1979 by City Lights Books employee V. Vale (later
to co-mastermind the acclaimed Re/Search Books imprint with then-partner
Andrea Juno), S&D‘s outlook was expansive in scope, realizing
there was more than music and records shaping the revolution-in-progress.
During the course of its relentless Q-&-A approach to documenting punk, the mag would question musicians
and fans on the culture they were dumping in their heads, providing lists
of books and films they’d enjoyed, cataloging oddball collections and hobbies,
printing set lists, inventorying everything from the contents of Avengers
singer Penelope Houston’s wardrobe to comic book purchases made by Dee Dee
Ramone the afternoon of his interview to the decor of the apartment of a
budding young guitar whiz named Alejandro Escovedo. (Al also makes a hysterical
comment about a porno loop he’d just seen, and offers a list of people he
admires that numbers Godard, Artaud, Lautreamont, Phillip Marlowe, James
Williamson, and Brian Eno.) Equally valuable were the mag’s concise essays
on concepts like anarchy, black humor, and insurrectionist heroes like the
Marquis DeSade. It was features and qualities like these which made Search
& Destroy, alongside the L.A.-based Slash, possibly the best
and most important punkzine ever produced. Long unavailable except in ill-distributed
and now-crumbling back issues, Search & Destroy: The Complete Reprint (V/Search, $19.95 paper [20 Romolo #B, San Francisco, CA 94133]) presents
the complete run in two perfect-bound volumes, reprinted in their entirety
straight from the original layouts, ads included. Volume One is in stores
now, prefaced with a hilarious and informative interview with Jello Biafra
on punk’s progress, with the second volume comprising issues 7-11 due early
next year. Together, they present possibly the most complete and accurate
picture of punk, untainted by both the damage time wreaks upon memory banks
and the geographical myopia affecting after-the-fact memoirs like Please
Kill Me. They also proffer ideas and suggestions which still have an
urgency and a value.
And sometimes, it pays to shut up and allow the visuals to tell the story,
as two other recent volumes attempt. Former Austinite Stephanie Chernikowski‘s
New York-centric Dream Baby Dream: Images From the Blank Generation (2.31.61, $19.95 paper) succeeds far more than a similar attempt made by
her London equivalent Erica Echenberg, And God Created Punk with
Mark P. (Virgin Books, $17.95 paper). And it’s not for lack of striking
images: It’s just that you wish for larger, more vivid reproductions of
Echenberg’s snaps of the Clash overseeing a crew of female underlings stencilling
the clothes in which they’re to take the stage hours later, of Steve Jones
and Paul Cook shivering through an anonymous night out in decidedly un-Pistolish
civilian clothing, of the Slits’ Ari Upp howling at a terrified audience
like a vampiric flasher. Instead, they have to share space with long-winded
reminiscences of seminal U.K. punkzine editor Mark P., of Sniffing Glue/Alternative
TV fame. Once you get past a brief, thrilling, introductory passage describing
life at a punk gig reprinted from the debut Richard Hell novel, Go Now,
words are left at the door in Dream Baby Dream. There’s no verbal
embellishment necessary for these gorgeous, damn-near three-dimensional
images: Rick Hell brooding at himself in a mirror like a down-at-the-heel
Alain Delon, Iggy reaching down a pair of two-tone trousers with a deliciously
lascivious leer on his face, Lux Interior thumping a vein in his forearm
with only a top hat and black pants on his frame, Lydia Lunch adjusting
a shoe strap with a gleam of soiled innocence in her eye, Johnny Thunders
long past innocence in black bondage pants, both hands clasped around a
pair of drinks. Chernikowski’s own description of Dream Baby Dream is “a documentary film in stills,” and there’s no hubris in the
phrase. There’s a silent, noble beauty to these photos, and the book’s rich
production values really underline their cinematic qualities. Dream Baby
Dream outstrips every one of Please Kill Me‘s failures, in that
these pictures can’t lie.
 Jayne County in her glory |
Of course, rock bands can, and this explains the importance of
Last Gang in Town: The Story and Myth of The Clash by Marcus Gray
(Henry Holt & Co., $25 hard). More human and honest than the Sex Pistols,
and also more far-reaching in their ambition, the Clash were nevertheless
as entrenched in bullshit and myth-making as the band they would succeed
as the U.K.’s prime punk band. Denied access to the band members themselves,
Gray makes do with existing press material and observations from peripheral
Clash observers like Glen Matlock and on-again/off-again drummer Terry Chimes,
several Strummer and Jones pre-Clash bandmates and others. From this base,
Gray constructs a story that holds fast to the book’s subtitle, usually
first presenting the “official” version of the facts, then counterpointing
with the likely truth. What Gray manages to unearth can be damaging, including
the extent of how much reprogramming the privately-educated diplomat’s son
John Mellor had to undergo to become working-class hero Joe Strummer, and
how much more important trouser lengths were to Mick Jones than political
commitment, the Clash’s manifesto to the contrary. Last Gang could
stand some trimming at 500 pages, but it’s the closest thing yet to a companion
to Jon Savage’s Pistol-centric England’s Dreaming, telling virtually
the same story from the Clash’s viewpoint.
Some tales are only tangentially related to the punk epoch, such as that
of Jayne County. Sure, as the queen of transgender rock & roll, County
was a delightfully trashy presence on both the New York and London punk
scenes, and possibly helped pave the way for the dubious likes of RuPaul
and Boy George. But as her autobiography, Man Enough to Be a Woman by Jayne County with Rupert Smith, (Serpent’s Tail, $17.99 paper), there’s
far more to Ms. County’s timeline than its intersection with punk rock.
County spins a tale beginning with a boyhood far more sissified than the
Georgia backwater from whence he sprang could tolerate, continuing through
his transmogrification into a screaming queen running wild in Atlanta’s
homosexual community, grooving on rock & roll, drugs, and frightening
the rubes. County gets hippified, relocates to New York, winds up in the
thick of the Stonewall mel�e and helps fire the initial shots in
the gay lib movement. Soon after embroiled with pioneering, gender-bending
Warhol superstars like Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling, County rises to
prominence in the early Seventies shock theatre scene which helped pave
glam rock’s path, giving both David Bowie and the creators of The Rocky
Horror Picture Show a few ideas ripe for plunder. It’s only then the New York Dolls, Max’s Kansas City, punk, and all the rest enter the
picture — and that’s only three chapters out of 10! By turns trashy, dishy,
funny, profound, touching, and courageous, Man Enough to Be a Woman is far more than punk lit. It’s a heroic testament to the phenomenal life
and accomplishments of a seminal figure who receives too little glory, much
less credit.
 “If you don’t wanna kiss me…” The Divine Miss C with Tim Stegall |
Then again, this is the continuing story in the historical division of
punk literature. Punk books tend to get too colored by either the ongoing
geographical rivalries between New York and the entirety of the U.K., or
the age/prejudices of the authors, or too blind to the movement’s continued
growth and health past its media-sanctioned death the day the Sex Pistols
struck their last notes in San Francisco. Only Jon Savage’s classic England’s
Dreaming manages a degree of fair-mindedness and breadth of scope (i.e.
non-London locales like New York, Cleveland, San Francisco and Los Angeles
get their dues, albeit briefly), and its focus is London/Pistols-centric.
The entire story has yet to be told; the proper book needs to be written,
the one which acknowledges punk life beyond New York and London, which tells
the tales of Australia, Paris, Boston, Vancouver, even Austin. The one which
places the Saints, the Avengers, the Weirdos, La Peste, the Pagans, and
the Big Boys in their proper spots alongside the Pistols and Ramones. Sadly,
any candidate for the job is as fated to remainder-bin life as any of these
books. But dammit, history is waiting! Care to be the one to deny it?
— Tim Stegall
In the kaleidoscope of images that still burn in my brain from those
first few acid-laced Grateful Dead shows oh so many years ago, the one that
really stands out for me is that of a beaming Jerry Garcia, kindly shepherd
of good vibes, guitar nestled in his hands, smiling beatifically out upon
his flock of delirious Deadheads. Interestingly, “Jerry with the smiling
face” is the early recollection of Merle Saunders, a close friend and
bandmate of Garcia during this deliciously fertile period of the late Sixties/early
Seventies. These were among the best years. For better and for worse, however,
nothing ever seemed to stay constant for Garcia, whose rapid-fire intellect
and unquenchable curiosity were always leading him on to new discoveries
and endeavors; not all, unfortunately, to his benefit or to his family,
friends, and fans. But Garcia was almost a larger-than-life figure. Bursting
with creativity, his very presence, even early on, impacted everyone around
him.
“Jerry Garcia would have been famous even if rock ‘n’ roll had never
been invented” is one of the more memorable observations that abound
throughout Dark Star: An Oral Biography of Jerry Garcia by Robert
Greenfield (Wm. Morrow & Co., $22 hard), a fascinating piecing together
of Garcia’s life through the words of many of those closest to him. I’ve
always found oral histories to be particularly engaging and insightful;
this one is no exception. However, while we hear both wonderful and horrific
tales and tidbits from the likes of Garcia’s brother, his wives and girlfriends,
musical colleagues, innumerable Grateful Dead family members, and various
and sundry hangers on, the most glaring drawback here is the virtual total
omission of input from fellow Dead bandmembers who might have provided the
most intriguing and accurate insights of all. Nonetheless, the book covers
Garcia’s life quite thoroughly from his early youth until after his death.
As a devoted fan, it made for a spellbinding trip albeit the outcome is
ultimately tragic and depressing. Although not the primary focus of the
book, it also provides a fair social history of the so-called hippy counter-culture
of which Garcia and the Dead were a vortex.
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Garcia was an extraordinarily gifted individual whose foremost addiction
was playing music. That’s what he wanted to do more than anything else.
At one point during perhaps his most prolific period, he was playing in
four different bands including the Grateful Dead. Ironically, as much as
the Dead had always espoused the philosophy of a leaderless communal family,
Garcia had almost always been perceived as its leader. Unfortunately, his
talent and charisma inevitably had the undesirable effect of turning him
into not only the reluctant guru of the Sixties counter-culture but ultimately
into an American icon with bizarre repercussions such as having a flavor
of ice cream named in his honor and holding court with unlikely public figures
like 90-year-old Senator Strom Thurmond. As the Dead became increasingly
popular, that burden became harder to shoulder. Add to this an unendingly
generous nature that made it impossible to say “no” to those asking
of his musical services and a particularly bad track record in his relationships
with women, and it’s not surprising that his already legendary drug usage
would lead to the comforting buffer provided by heroin. It became a habit
he couldn’t totally kick and, until it was too late, it divorced him from
actually feeling the physical effects of his various medical problems. The
slide down makes for a long, painful read but one that all Deadheads will
want to venture.
From a far lighter perspective, Living With the Dead by Rock Scully
with David Dalton (Little, Brown, $24.95 hard) by the band’s former manager
Rock Scully, immediately brings to mind the old adage that proclaims “if
you can remember the Sixties, you probably weren’t there.” In a nutshell,
this is a rollicking tale of drugs, sex, and rock & roll — Grateful
Dead style. There are plenty of really hilarious and amusing moments here
but one has to question how much of it is hyperbole in light of the vast
quanities of mind-altering substances that are purported to have been ingested
along the way. If Owsley’s orange sunshine was that potent, how can you
recall conversations verbatim from 30 years ago? Scully is quoted at length
in Dark Star and, as you might expect, there is some overlap here.
It takes awhile, but by the very end of the book he finally gets around
to disclosing the ravages of addiction that plagued both him and Garcia
when they lived in adjoining abodes. If you want an insider’s account of
what it was like being “on the bus” with the Dead, you probably
won’t find a more entertaining roadmap than this.
— Jay Trachtenberg
Virgin bioraphical territory such as the
genius of Billy Strayhorn is prime real estate, indeed. After all, one doesn’t
just stumble upon American composers of Strayhorn’s stature every day —
no matter how elfin he was in real life. And it was no less than Gil Evans
himself, a composer of similar Mount Rushmore-sized repute, who prompted
this maiden biography on Strayhorn by telling its author, “That’s all
I ever did — [was] try to do what Billy Strayhorn did.” Twelve years
and literally hundreds of interviews later, the reportorial prowess qualifies
Lush Life by David Hadju (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux $27.50,
hard), as the first scholarly proof of what Evans and many jazz historians
have known for nearly three decades: That Strayhorn is as important a modern
composer as Evans, Gershwin, or Ellington. Let’s not forget Duke Ellington.
Like the contributions of countless orchestra members, Strayhorn’s musical
legacy had — until Joe Henderson’s Lush Life album in 1991 — been
mostly absorbed into the whole of the massive Ellington oeuvre. And smartly,
Hadju hasn’t tried to unravel what each composer brought to a lifetime of
collaborations; this is no hellishly dull annotated discography masquerading
as a book. Instead, Hadju, an editor at Entertainment Weekly (!!), lets
the unique details of Strayhorn’s typically sad and underprivileged upbringing
in Pittsburgh’s back-alley black community of the Twenties and Thirties
color in the charcoal outlines of flowering talent; the genius of an 18-year-old
classical music prodigy, who somehow managed to wrangle an audience with
the era’s greatest big band leader.
Auditioning for Ellington between the orchestra’s morning and matinee
performances one fall afternoon in 1938, Strayhorn quickly got the maestro’s
attention by playing “Sophisticated Lady” exactly the way the
bandleader had just played it. Then he played it again — his way. “Well…”
proceeded Ellington dramatically as he faced Strayhorn eye-to-eye for the
first time, Ellington gazing down, Strayhorn peering up. “Can you do
that again?” “Yes,” Strayhorn replied matter-of-factly. And
he did. Ellington was shocked, nevertheless, he told the kid to come up
and see him in Harlem. That’s exactly what Strayhorn did, showing up at
his doorstep several months later with a tune he’d composed from Ellington’s
instructions on how to find him; “Take the `A’ Train.”
“Why, I was just going to send for you,” Ellington is reported
to have said: “You don’t have to,” Strayhorn said. “Here
I am.” From that foundation of intuitive connectedness and mutual faith,
Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington began working together. And didn’t stop
for the next 28 years, until Strayhorn finally drank himself to death (“Lush
Life,” also the title of the composer’s signature tune) in 1967, when
he died from esophageal cancer at the age of 51. By that point, however,
“Strays” or “Swee’ Pea,” the openly gay, intellectual
socialite, who was content to remain in the shadows, and “Edward,”
the womanizing debutante, who stayed in the spotlight and on the road over
four decades, had created a body of work that would require DNA testing
to figure out exactly who did what.
Through Hadju’s book, and possibly with a little help from its tie-in
CD, Verve’s Lush Life, The Billy Strayhorn Songbook (a cross-medium promotion
also done with Donald Maggin’s tome, Stan Getz: A Life in Jazz), or Fred
Hersch’s recent tribute, Passion Flower — not to mention Ellington’s own
superlative elegy — And His Mother Called Him Bill — Billy
Strayhorn not only steps out from behind the figure of Duke Ellington, he
also lays claim to his portion of that grand legacy, and finally takes his
rightful place in the pantheon of jazz greats.
— Raoul Hernandez
In a world overflowing with music books, there are still a few in desperate
need of being written, and some of them have yet to see print because the
prospect of writing them is so daunting. Barney Hoskyns, one of Britain’s
most Americanophilic music writers (and one of the few), has, with Waiting
for the Sun: The Story of the Los Angeles Music Scene by Barney Hoskyns
(St. Martin’s, $27.50 hard), dived in where few have dared, endeavoring
to cover the world of pop music in Los Angeles from the immediate post-War
era, when Central Avenue throbbed to the sounds of jump blues, to the gangsta-rap
of the current day.
One wonders how many people told Hoskyns he was insane for mounting such
a project: a book gathering Roy Brown, the Penguins, Jan & Dean, CSNY,
Little Feat, Gram Parsons, Kim Fowley, the Germs, NWA, and Guns `n’ Roses
into 350 nicely illustrated pages sounds like sheer lunacy. Yet Hoskyns
has succeeded, to an extent, in making sense out of this parade of misfits,
idealists, money-grubbers, and wannabes. More, he has succeeded in rescuing
L.A. from the aura of second-rateness that has plagued its reputation since
the San Francisco hype of the Sixties. He’s zeroed in on a great number
of the important people who have made important, intelligent music and recorded
their comments not only on their own work and that of their peers, but on
the ephemeral. Los Angeles gave us Love, but it also gave us The Peanut
Butter Conspiracy; it gave us the overarching ambitions of Phil Spector
and Brian Wilson, and also the schlock of Cher and the Carpenters. And they’re
all here.
There are quibbles to be made, certainly. One of Hoskyns’ theses is that
the music industry in L.A. ignored blacks and the evolution of soul music,
an argument that sounds pretty good when he’s making it, but doesn’t entirely
hold water. He never even mentions the struggle of Loma, a label started
by Warner Bros. (at the time largely a soundtrack label) in the mid-Sixties
to record soul. Much of it, true, was done by East Coast producers, but
no label that gave us Lorraine Ellison’s magisterial one-take masterpiece
“Stay With Me” deserves silence of this sort. Much better is his
fully-integrated view of the interplay between the Industry and the Artists:
few musicians ever came to L.A. to be pure artists, but, rather, because
they knew that the people with access to media and production could see,
hear, and, with luck, exploit them.
The tension between the creators and the salesmen produced some important
turning-points in American music: One need only remember the friction within
the Beach Boys over Brian’s Pet Sounds project, or the internal conflict
as Elektra, until then a folk label, finally decided to go all the way with
the Doors, an act of a sort they’d never previously tried to promote. And
the same forces destroyed as much as they created: Hoskyns is particularly
good on the decline and fall of that quintessential L.A. institution the
Byrds, and the revival of their concept in the overtly commercial Eagles.
But Waiting For the Sun will also give comfort to those who maintain
that, in the end, L.A. is hollow inside, and here is where Hoskyns misses
a golden opportunity that, as a non-American, he might not have noticed.
For L.A. is unreality, and has been since the first movie companies moved
out there. And when you’re making your own reality daily, that which does
not exist is as important as that which does: thus, the hollowness has a
shape, and the shape is interesting and important in and of itself. What
Hoskyns misses is gossip, which, elsewhere, is an annoyance and distraction
to the orderly collection of facts. But Hollywood thrives on gossip, uses
it as a fuel, an alternative energy source. Bound to facts, Hoskyns misses
the alternate reality that existed alongside the facts and gave them their
shadows.
The book eventually seems dry, even though Hoskyns has interviewed people
like Van Dyke Parks and Kim Fowley (who even gets the last word in the book,
as only seems appropriate).
Enough criticism. The book is long overdue, and is better, even, than
a good start. The work Hoskyns has started here will need to be expanded
and, with luck, improved upon, but if you have the slightest interest in
the history of American post-War popular music, you need to pick up Waiting
For the Sun and get a start on understanding the music of this derided
and crucial city.
— Ed Ward
 The King and the King, from B.B. King’s Blues All Around Me |
A writer friend laughs when I describe the number of books I will be
writing about in terms of how high the stack is to my admittedly short legs.
Most of the time they hover mid-calf, standard height at any given time.
About once a year, it’s almost to my hip. That would be the thick and weighty
art and photography books during Christmas.
“Knee-deep?” he’ll smile a little later, and I’ll nod. That
would be rock & roll books, where those trade paperbacks of music charts
and photo collections plus at least a half-dozen sizable biographies stack
up quickly. For me to be ankle-deep in books is, relatively speaking, a
good thing.
The business of publishing rock & roll books is fascinating. Twenty-five
years ago, there were probably a few dozen titles on the subject — it is
almost impossible to imagine that when Woodstock happened in 1969, the major
documentation of it was on film, and not readily available on video until
the early Eighties. The only print documentation of the event was a fairly
comprehensive photo special that LIFE magazine published. I daresay there
are literally thousands of rock & roll titles now.
The smattering of books stacked here is mute testimony to that. Mute,
that is, until the books’ covers are opened and the sounds come blasting
out: blues, jazz, country, Seventies pop, roots, alternative, swamp pop,
charts, biographies, photograph collections… the array of books is astonishing.
So why is it that amidst comprehensive tomes such as Reading Jazz: A
Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now, edited
by Robert Gottlieb (Pantheon, $37.50 hard) and cool reissues like Awopbopaloobop
Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock, by Nik Cohn (Da Capo, $13.95 paper),
I take greater pleasure in a book like Rock Bottom: Dark Moments in Music
Babylon by Pamela Des Barres (St. Martin’s Press, $24.95 hard)?
Pamela (I’m With the Band) Des Barres is a very fortunate woman,
having successfully parlayed her infamous groupiedom into a successful career,
and not without a modicum of respect. Her writing is more ingenuous than
literary, but it no less legitimate a viewpoint for her 30 or so years behind
America’s rock & roll scenes. The reason I could never dismiss Pamela
as a writer is more than spiritual kinship. I have always felt that she,
like myself, was a fan with a typewriter.
In Rock Bottom, Des Barres scrapes along the edge of rock’s envelope
— digging up a little dirt here, raising dust there, exhuming a few corpses.
It’s a scattershot approach in which she hits a few bull’s eyes, detailing
the strange, sad sagas of musicians like Pink Floyd’s elusive Syd Barrett
and Eric Clapton drummer Jim Gordon, while including more predictable names
like Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. There
are also a few tut-tut entries, such as one on Chuck Berry’s less impressive
personal pecadillos, and more info on G.G.Allin than I wanted to know. And
I couldn’t put the book down.
Not that I couldn’t put down Reading Jazz, it’s just that I would need
a lot more time with it. This carefully cultivated tome is a virtual monument
to jazz writing and criticism. The anthology includes first-person narratives
from performers such as Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Hoagy Carmichael,
and Anita O’Day. The second part is a series of essays from writers like
Leonard Feather, Ralph Ellison, and Nat Hentoff; included here is a reminiscence
of Charlie Parker by Miles Davis. Part three offers criticism and opinion
from an array of writers including LeRoi Jones, Marshall Stearns, Stanley
Crouch, and others. Like Billie Holiday’s signature white gardenia, this
volume is elegant to behold, simple in appearance yet a complex structure.
Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, recently re-issued by Da Capo, is one of
the earliest books on rock music, first written in 1968 and then revised
in 1972. Cohn’s text is very Eurocentric but invaluable for its attention
to the link between jazz and blues into the emergence of rock & roll.
Sometimes books like these don’t seem to have much value after they’ve sat
for a few years their P.O.V. seems so specific to the period and reads like
a report on extinction after a while. In retrospect though, books like Awopbopaloobop
keep the flavor of the period intact — think of them as chapters, so to
speak, in the larger library of music books.
Wish I could say the same about Precious and Few: Pop Music in the Early
’70s by Don and Jeff Breithaupt (St. Martin’s Griffin, $9.95 paper), evidently
a labor of love for the sibling authors. Awash with trivia, personal anecdotes,
and nostalgia, Precious and Few is not a bad book — in fact, its fan-prose
is tendered quite lovingly — but this genre of Seventies pop is a huge
field that is barely mined here. Kaleidoscope Eyes: Psychedelic Rock From
the ’60s to the ’90s by Jim DeRogatis (Citadel Underground, $16.95 paper) is much more successful at its effort, linking the roots of acid rock from
its genesis in the hippie era right through its modern-day heirs Oasis and
Flaming Lips. What Kaleidoscope Eyes has that Precious and Few does not
is attitude — always a necessary component of rock & roll.
Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock ‘n’ Roll by Nick Tosches (Da Capo,
$13.95 paper) is a hands-down must-have, the grand prize winner of this
year’s crop for me — and it’s a reissue! Tosches wastes no words here in
his warts-and-tell-all update of country music’s dark side, the revised
1985 version of his 1977 book that treated country music with all the subtlety
of a blowtorch. Tosches’ approach ain’t pretty — he’s written similar biographies
on Jerry Lee Lewis and Dean Martin — but it rings so true that when he
describes Joan Baez as “butterfly of egalitarianism and wet-dream queen
of liberals,” I smirked with delight. When he closed a paragraph about
scholarly treatises on country music with the line, “and you thought
all they did was fuck chickens and pray,” I spewed Coca-Cola through
my nose and fell off the chair laughing. Murder, sex, mayhem, drugs, racism,
hypocrisy under the scrubbed aegis of Nashville… Country is wild, rude,
and wickedly obscene. Mr. Tosches, meet Junior Brown!
Contrast Country, then, with the more genteel Blues All Around Me:
The Autobiography of B.B.King, by B.B.King with David Ritz (Avon Books,
$23 hard). For all the knee-slapping yee-haw fun I got from the Tosches
book, I found King’s to be just as pleasurable, if more well-tempered. Not
that King whitewashes his history, he’s just a gentleman, and his book reads
as such, and co-author David Ritz (who has also bio’d Etta James and Marvin
Gaye) no doubt gives King’s writing its patina. King has a voice, and it
is one of tolerance and patience in a world that didn’t always accept him
but in which he earned respect and a place high in the music pantheon.
 Kim Gordon in Noise From The Underground looking much cooler than the book. |
You can read about B.B.King, or you can listen to him play the blues,
and one of the sources for his recordings is in The All Music Guide to
the Blues: The Experts’ Guide to the Best Blues, edited by Michael Erlewine,
Vladimar Bogdanov, Chris Woodstra, and Cub Koda (Miller-Freeman, $17.95
paper). I find books like this and The All Music Book of Hit Singles:
Top Twenty Charts from 1954 to the Present, compiled by Dave Aleer (Miller
Freeman Books, $22.95 paper) absolutely indispensable reference sources.
Guide to the Best Blues offers over 2600 reviews and ratings of blues records
and 500 musician profiles, an extensive resource for CD recordings. Hit
Singles likewise tracks the Top 20 charts (U.S. and U.K.) from 1954 and
drops in little tidbits about bands and the business to flesh out the lists.
Don’t think that the coffee table will be bare either. The Elvis Atlas:
A Journey Through Elvis Presley’s America by Michael Gray and Roger
Osbourne (Henry Holt, $22.95 hard) isn’t nearly as schmucky a book as it
might seem, though it could certainly be considered a little precious. Authors
Gray and Osbourne took great pains to piece together all of Elvis’ tour
dates throughout his career, arranged chronologically. I wouldn’t say that
the Elvis Atlas is for die-hards only, but if you know any other type of
Elvis fan, it’s news to me. Good thing this never happened to Buddy Holly.
Remembering Buddy: The Definitive Biography of Buddy Holly by John
Goldrosen and John Beecher (Da Capo, $18.95 paper) is a large coffee-table
style book, but it is a very text-heavy biography, well-illustrated and
referenced. Holly’s story always comes off as poignant, and this gentle
tribute does nothing to change that. And guess who else is still fodder:
the Fab Four. Beatles: At the Movies by Roy Carr (HarperPerennial,
$20 paper) is… well, pretty self-explanatory. If you’re holding up one
hand thinking, uh, how many films did they make? — join the club. Besides
the obvious — Help, Hard Day’s Night, Magical Mystery Tour, Yellow Submarine,
and Let It Be — the book also covers films the lovable moptops starred
in individually, including the Beatles cartoons. More than 200 behind-the-scenes
photos and anecdotes chronicle their brief moments on screen.
I wished that Noise From the Underground: A Secret History of Alternative
Rock photographs by Michael Lavine, text by Pat Blashill, introduction
by Henry Rollins (Fireside/Simon & Schuster, $25 paper) was as cool
as it looks. Maybe I’m just too bored with Henry Rollins’ yammering to think
that writing an introduction to a book means you get credited on the spine
as an author or maybe it’s just that the whee!-look-at-these-graphics manner
of Gen X books is generally lame, but this could have been so much more.
Lavine’s photography is at once both lush and stark, and former Austinite
Pat Blashill gives a knowledgeable link through it all with his thoughtful
commentary. The underlying irony of this book, though, is that this sort
of treatment of alternative is as anti-punk as the success that has embraced
alternative. Maybe, with a few years on the bookshelf, it will emerge as
a more important document. For now, it seems a little smug. But not as fatuous
as Teen Spirit: The Stories Behind Every Nirvana Song by Chuck Crisafulli
(Fireside/Simon & Schuster, $16 paper). Did you get all that — the
story behind every Nirvana song! ‘Nuff said.
 Gene Terry on the cover of Swamp Pop |
This book round-up being purely subjective, my favorite book (along with
Des Barres’ and Tosches) is Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm &
Blues by Shane Bernard (University Press of Mississippi, $17 paper).
A terse, dry, no-frills examination of the regional sound that sprang primarily
out of the Louisiana Gulf Coast region, swamp pop is notable as a sub-genre
partly because it is more readily defined by its sound than with words.
A peculiar hybrid of rock & roll crossed with black Creole and Cajun
influences, swamp pop hits dotted the chart landscapes of the Fifties and
early Sixties until it almost died out, its home turf conquered by the British
Invasion. Although swamp pop was deeply influential in the formation of
the pop side of rock, it has been criminally underrated as a genre.
Shane Bernard, a native Louisianan and historical writer, has done an
admirable job of bringing this oft-ignored sub-genre to the forefront with
his book. The son of swamp pop crooner Rod Bernard, the younger Bernard
has created an earnest, well-researched volume, the first time in the genre’s
35-years+ history a book has been dedicated to that history. Bernard has
poignantly noted how the prejudices against the Cajun and Creoles shaped
the music. The Cajuns were already an outcast culture, banned from speaking
their native language and crushed into submission; is it any wonder their
children rebelled, too, taking their cue from rock & roll and imbuing
it with local musical flourishes, such as the New Orleans-ish piano triplets
that virtually define the sound?
Think you don’t know any swamp pop? How about “See You Later Alligator”
or “Sea of Love”? Patsy Cline took “Sweet Dreams” higher
on the charts, but the song belonged to Tommy McLain. More than just half-familiar
titles, Swamp Pop is a loving tribute to these performers, largely forgotten
in the overall scheme but still revered names in their native Southwest
Louisiana. What Swamp Pop may lack in whiz-bang writing and graphics it
more than makes up for with lovingly well-documented history, interviews,
and rare photos. Not unlike the reissue of Nik Cohn’s Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom,
Swamp Pop is a book that will always have a place on the bookshelf, another
chapter in the ever-expanding world of music.
— Margaret Moser
This article appears in December 6 • 1996 and December 6 • 1996 (Cover).