Saturday, December 31, 2016

The First and Last Death of 2016

HAPPY NEW YEAR, AMERICA AND THE WORLD. In a few hours, 2016 -- which, rightly or wrongly, people started cursing around the time of the death of a musical prodigy from North Minneapolis -- will be no more, and no one the Beast knows has come out unscathed. Yes, the TIME cover below is fake; we all know who's the real POTY as much as we cannot stomach it.


At least with past historical events such as Columbine or 9/11, the ornate grisliness was live and televised (followed by the endless Moebius-strip replays) and could not be avoided. But there was a sort of catharsis there -- there was no Matrix-like veil. We saw the worst we possibly could see and were awash in the direct and decisive complications. On 11/9, the profound sense of switcheroo was so violent that is nearly caused air bubbles in the blood -- if these indeed were the "bubbles" people kept talking about. Only this time, the slowly dawning horror was recorded not in scenes of collapsing buildings or bodies being pulled out of classroom windows but in a decidedly different kind of graphic imagery: cable-news chyrons, virtual-reality pie charts and wonky ballot tallies. It was a slow and stealthy choke for those of us who did not adequately prepare ourselves for the fact that their fellow countrymen could give the collective Republic such a decisive shotgun blast to the face. Not to resort to hyperbole or anything, but this it was cultural, moral and civic suicide on a Biblical level.

America in its immediate aftermath was like someone once described Eastern Europe before 1989: "One giant, dimly lit prison yard." The Beast lives in a Mediterranean climate and even the golden sun looked baleful and sickening. (Shouldn't the weather at least CHANGE to suit the mood?) Of course there was jubilation, but not not the pleasant kind. Quite the opposite, actually.

In the last two months, a deranged and violent kind of retribution has coalesced like an army massing beyond the trees: 1,094 reported incidents of hate crimes and counting. (And this doesn't even include post-holiday mall violence.) Sure, some of them might even be fake but so what? It's their meaning -- that they are even in the air and part of our sloppy under/overground discourse, like the rumors after the Twin Towers fell that all Jewish employees at the WTC had received phone calls warning them to "stay away" that day. It was bunk of course, but the rumor made it into a poem by Amiri Baraka. The poet was heavily condemned for this, but the Beast always felt that his point was this: Such hearsay was part of the paranoid ether of post-9/11, and its very presence -- even if on the fringes -- boded the question: Why is this still here? Why is it even being thought, much less said so flagrantly and cruelly? Of what acrid residue of our collective past was this and why does it keep bubbling to the surface?

And then came Election Day. Now, what was on the fringes has turned jarringly mainstream. Now, to paraphrase Gust Avrakotos in Charlie Wilson's War, "the crazies are rolling into D.C. like it's a fuckin' bathtub drain."

Not soon after the election, the Beast traveled to a family outpost in the middle of Doug Ducey's dog-dick Red State of Arizona -- Maricopa County to be exact, until recently Joe Arpaio's racial-profiling gulag. Our mood was quietly foul, emotions rolling around like ball bearings, wanting to be festive but guardedly so. One had the sense of having tripped on an edge of carpet and tumbled face-first through the looking glass. Five minutes after we crossed the border, we caught sight of a biker in the next lane with 'FUCK ISLAM' emblazoned (oddly, in the old-timey script of a saloon sign) on the back of his leather jacket. We stopped at a Waffle House for lunch and overheard adjacent bloviating from guys in trucker caps about California's new "plastic bag tax" as if that proved all their sneaking suspicions about their neighbor to the west. We rode up the US-101 outside of Phoenix which turns out is festooned with and endless parade of for-profit colleges, all lined up by the interstate like a main drag of used-car lots.

Not helpful. You cannot escape the zeitgeist, and its color is the smeared orange of a smog-choked L.A. sunset in the '70s and it will be on all screens for at least the next four years.

You prayed that there would be some sort of band-aid for all this free-floating bad juju, and there was. Actually, there was a lot of them, and they had been ripped off at once, and someone was not being gentle about it. It was ugly and it was everywhere and it was inescapable. Things were speeding up and slowing down simultaneously. Reality was hyper- and hypo- and post- and meta-. It couldn't get any worse than if the entire nation was a bunch of junkies watching each other nod out. The new regime wasn't in for another two months and the menace was already snuffling its dragon-breath on our doorstep. It was bad but it was going to get much, much worse. The exhaustion of the endless, cancerous campaign made us feel like we had already been through four years of Suck -- but those four years hadn't even started yet. Nope, it quite simply could not get any worse.

And then, like a methhead with an elephant gun, my sister made it worse.

image courtesy of Tsoku Maela

It started around the open kitchen island as the holiday meal was coming together, with me noting the small immigrant communities of Bulgarians and Romanians that had nestled themselves in the Southwest. The retirement community our family matriarch lives in is run and staffed almost entirely by those who fled the insanity of the Ceausescu regime. "They grew up under a Communist dictator and they know about the repression of the Left," Mom explained without elaborating on why they thought of the current president-elect would be any better.

As for the Bulgarians, I had met only one, at a Christmas party in Santa Fe several years ago. My sister introduced us to a friend of her nicknamed Tedi. She was a six-foot tall, vivacious, fiercely smart brunette with a bewitching Eastern European accent and rocking a shimmering long black cocktail dress and hefting a goblet of wine without an ounce of pretension. (Think Charlize Theron mixed with Marion Cotillard -- both in exuberant and unguarded moods.) The Beast doesn't remember how long our conversation lasted, because we walked away from it in a bewildered, head-spinning fog. "I think I have a crush on Tedi," I confessed to my sister, who laughed and touched my shoulder: "Everyone has a crush on Tedi."

More so when we learned about her: associate professor of internal medicine at the UNM School of Medicine; internist at both the UNM Health Sciences Center and the Raymond G. Murphy VA Medical Center in Albuquerque. Tedi began her career at UNM in 2003 as one of the pioneering members of the New Mexico VA Hospitalist Group. According to a local newspaper profile, she "dedicated her professional life to the care and education of our veterans." She was kind and patient with them -- even when they were hostile to her. It must have worked. My sister told me that when Tedi was doing her rounds, they would line up eagerly to see her. Her very presence, just entering a room, was a temporary balm for some truly damaged souls.

But now, just after the ascendancy of a Gangster Capitalist and His Cabinet of 'Orribles, my sister sits at the marble kitchen island amid the smells of roasting turkey and tells me that Tedi did not even made it 48 hours into 2016.

It was early morning on a Saturday in downtown Albuquerque. Tedi was on her way to the medical center. Miles away at a local diner, a 29-year-old waitress showed up for her shift, argued with her manager and abruptly quit. She then proceeded to get into a red Ford Ranger pickup truck and sped off. Sometime after this, she picked up two men. Or maybe the men were already in the truck when she left the diner. Or maybe there was just one man. Nobody really knows. What is known is that minutes later, as Tedi was waiting at a stoplight, the red truck plowed into the back of her Mercedes Sedan at over 70 miles an hour, demolishing its rear-end into a gaping wound.

image courtesy of Jim Thompson

Tedi's neck was broken instantly. But she was not killed outright. In the OR they deployed the countermeasures of trauma. "They had to open up her skull," my sister cried.

Later that day, Tedi died. This literally happened January 2, 2016. She was 51 years old.

But there's more to the story -- disturbing tendrils that don't quite connect.

After the collision, the young waitress emerged alive from the wreckage. Dazed and hysterical, her shirt covered in blood, she ran a couple of blocks to a dialysis center, whose staff immediately called 911. Whomever else was in the truck with her also made it out alive. And ran. They have since fled the state. Witnesses to the crash have also vanished.

The driver's name was released earlier this month. It took almost a year for a grand jury to reach an indictment of vehicular homicide and leaving the scene of an accident. During that time, Tedi's grieving friends were asking questions and not getting much from the local cops -- they wanted to know if the woman was texting, if she was on drugs or intoxicated. "How dare you call me this late?" seethed the press spokesman for the ABQ PD to a retired and respected veteran reporter (remember those?) who had phoned him at his house. Tedi's coworkers were dumbfounded when they were informed that the young woman had not been charged, that she had been released pending trial and -- inexplicably -- had been permitted to keep driving the streets for the next 10 months.

There was the whiff of conspiracy -- although the who/what/why of it all remained maddeningly murky. In the absence of any tangible or logical flow of information from official sources, the grieving inevitably turned to innuendo and rumor. One of Tedi's friends told me that "some sort of high level intervention" occurred in the case, although exactly what this meant they could not elaborate. The accused is from a family without means, but a high-profile defense attorney stepped in to take her case. Whisper, whisper. Tedi's case is being handled by a public prosecutor who has no prior experience in a courtroom. Whisper, whisper.

But the true cause may have been more prosaic. "The Bernalillo County District Attorney's office says missing evidence and court backlog are the reasons why it took nearly a year to indict a woman accused of killing a doctor," KQRE recently reported.

Absorbing all of this in less than ten minutes after we arrived, and already shaky because of the current national mood, the Beast never felt so frozen in the helplessness of fate and utterly indifferent violence. To quote the writer Denis Johnson: "It made God look like a senseless maniac."

It was now open season to be senseless maniacs for God and mortals alike. Usually it's one or the other, not both. Now it's both. The body politic does not fall apart piece by piece; it fails all at once after rotting in plain sight.

But what is the rot here? Someone on the bottom of our socioeconomic ladder wipes out an immigrant doctor beloved by veterans, many of them from the very same rung of that ladder. You know, the same mensches who volunteered as human shields for First American protesters in the brutal North Dakota cold; who have had to clean maggots out of their wounds in shabby VA hospitals; who have landed in homeless shelters as addicts. There is no irony or satire to wring from this. This is America eating itself.

At Tedi's memorial, her shattered husband, also a doctor and professor, told the assembled that when he first spotted Tedi as one of his students, sitting in the lecture hall at the University of Medicine in Sofia, it was "like being hit by an asteroid."

"Every day, I have seen people's lives end, or changed by tragedy in one day," Tedi once told my sister. "That's why you have to make the most of every moment you are alive. You don't know when it will end."

Tedi wasn't supposed to be working at the hospital that day. She had a bag of fresh bagels on the passenger seat next to her. They were for her staff.

When you write for a living (or at least convince yourself that you do) you can't help but court pretension. You can't help but seeing the random occurrences in life as metaphors. It can be dangerous and counterproductive -- you feel battered by hidden meanings with no solutions, you feel oppressed by portents and symbols. But sometimes, even as you know it is just a coincidence, tiny things crystallize, and this sad tale really had it all: the triumphs and tragedies of our immigrant population; war trauma and veterans' rights; the grinding plight of the working poor; alcohol and drug abuse (alleged); institutional neglect and overwhelmed public servants; the dangers of technology and social media, even the whiff of "fake news" when there is no other option, or when governmental bodies build informational firewalls. And sudden violent death with no winners. It was the face of America 3.0, Year Zero.

Tedi's life ended on a street called Constitution.

Saturday, December 3, 2016

THE 50 BEST MUSIC BOOKS OF 2016


Q: "Will two-aught-sixteen -- already being referred to as either a Year in Disappointment or a Year We Got Everything Wrong that will haunt us for decades -- come to affect our judgment of its music books?"

A: "Are you kidding? What kind of stupid question is that? Who gives a %$*&? DRAIN THE SWAMP! BUILD THE WALL!! LOCK HER UP!!!"

But is it a stupid question really? In many cases the picks on this year's list can enhance one's understanding of this new upside-down-funhouse-mirror mortal coil in which we now find ourselves entwined.

Yes, out of the 200+ music books released in 2016, there are the pervasive trends from previous years: Splashy memoirs from music-industry insiders (Carole Bayer Sager, L.A. Reid), the recently departed (Maurice White) and unemployed MTV VJs (Matt Pinfield); the scruffy struggles of failed-but-ahead-of-their-time bands (The Hollywood Brats) and punk-rock survivors (Dave Dictor, Keith Morris); inspirational narratives from rappers you've either never heard of (Lecrae Moore?, Jensen Carp??) or who have been incarcerated (Lil Wayne); the packaging of underground D.I.Y. punk culture into glossy and expensive coffee-table art books; these persistent mixtape-and-Spotify inspired "Listicle Books" (spurred by that overripe "A History of [INSERT TOPIC] in [INSERT # OF EXAMPLES]" trend) that use the almighty playlist as a narrative device (or a replacement for lack thereof); continuing excavations of regional jazz scenes (Portland, Boston) and yes, more goddamn "Boomer Books" on Dylan, the Beatles, Grateful Dead, NYC in the '70s, the Doors and the Rolling Stones.

On the other hand, anyone concerned or at least academically interested in music as protest, satire or just plain defiance will find plenty to enjoy here. To whit: Woody Guthrie, nearly a half-century dead, had a very good year. (You think Dave Eggers invented the anti-Trump "30 Songs in 30 Days"? Think again.) You will find not one but two nominees from what possibly is the hippest and scrappiest little press out there: the Minnesota Historical Society. Despite the white riots going on in electoral campaigns in Europe and America, one might find the vitality of Afrofuturism and Post-millennial Feminism surprising and uplifting. Ditto to anyone interested in the tangled racial roots of America, or the global impact of the punk and rap on civil-rights movements. There's even a book here about HATING music -- if that indeed is your thing. Because after all, we really loved to hate in 2016, didn't we?

And of course, if none of this matters to you, a lot of these books are simply a hell of a lot of fun. Like the tour diary written entirely on the back of airplane vomit bags. The Christmas story written by a stoner country legend. The speculative novel about the many children of an obscure and bizarre voodoo-soul singer. The anthropological comparison of the tribes of Trump supporters to the fans of the Insane Clown Posse.

Yeah, right?

So let's get to the list:

WHO KNEW?
Topics Obscure Yet Fascinating
X-Ray Audio: The Strange Story of Soviet Music 'On the Bone' by Stephen Coates
Kīkā Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed Modern Music by John W. Troutman

FIRE MUSIK
Jazz in the '70s
Beyond Jazz: Plink, Plonk and Scratch: The Golden Age of Free Music in London 1966-72 by Trevor Barre
Loft Jazz: Improvising New York in the 1970s by Michael C. Heller

GREY MATTERS
Stuff That, Like, Makes You Think
The Hatred of Music by Pascal Quignard

LA-LA LAND
For a City That Can't Stop Reading About Itself
Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk by John Doe w/ Tom DeSavia
Slash: A History of the Legendary L.A. Punk Magazine: 1977-1980 ed. by J.C. Gabel & Brian Roettinger
Woody Guthrie L.A.: 1937 to 1941 by Darryl Holter & William F. Deverell
Original Gangstas: The Untold Story of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and the Birth of West Coast Rap by Ben Westhoff

HELLO AGAIN
The Year's Best Reprints
SON OF HELLO AGAIN
The Year's Best Collections
Music in the Air: The Selected Writings of Ralph J. Gleason ed. by Toby Gleason
Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Jazz and Blues ed. by Paul Devlin
Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader by Greg Tate
Virgil Thomson: The State of Music & Other Writings ed. by Tim Page
Jazz on My Mind: Liner Notes, Anecdotes and Conversations from the 1940s to the 2000s by Dr. Herb Wong & Paul Simeon Fingerote

"MIPPLES, MINN"
Books About the Minneapolis Music Scene of the '80s To Tide Us Over Until Someone Writes the Defintive Bio of His Purpleness
Heyday: 35 Years of Music in Minneapolis by Daniel Corrigan w/ Danny Sigelman
I Live Inside: Memoirs of a Babe in Toyland by Michelle Leon
Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements by Bob Mehr

GROK U
The Continuing Excavation of the '60s
Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III by Robert Greenfield
Small Town Talk: Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock by Barney Hoskyns
1966: The Year the Decade Exploded by Jon Savage
Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock's Darkest Day
by Joel Selvin
Music + Sex + Race
Sing for Your Life: A Story of Race, Music, and Family by Daniel Bergner
The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band by Michelle Cruz Gonzales
Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination by Jack Hamilton
Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout by Laura Jane Grace w/ Dan Ozzi
The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar by Franz Nicholay

ARCHITECTS
Best Books About Pioneers

DISPOSABLE HEROES
Music 'n' Politics
7 Days In Ohio: Trump, The Gathering Of The Juggalos And The Summer Everything Went Insane by Nathan Rabin & Danny Hellman
26 Songs in 30 Days: Woody Guthrie's Columbia River Songs and the Planned Promised Land in the Pacific Northwest by Greg Vandy & Daniel Person

FICTION + COMIX
The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes
Screamin' Jay Hawkins' All-Time Greatest Hits by Mark Binelli
The Incantations of Daniel Johnston by Scott McClanahan & Ricardo Cavolo

OVERSIZED 'N' OVERPRICED
The Best Art Books For Conspicuous Display on Faux-Rustic Glass Coffee Table in Hipster Airbnb in Your Liberal Sanctuary State

OH DEAR ME
The Year's Best Memoirs
The Sick Bag Song by Nick Cave w/ Andrea Joyce
Porcelain: NYC, 1989-1999 by Moby
Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen
I Am Brian Wilson by Brian Wilson w/ Ben Greenman

ROLLING PAPERS
Best Christmas Books Written by Willie Nelson
Pretty Paper: A Christmas Tale by Willie Nelson w/ David Ritz

HONORABLE MENTIONS
The Great American Songbook by Sam Allingham
Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in Post-World War II Paris by Rashida K. Braggs
The Banjo: America's African Instrument by Laurent Dubois
Shit People at Gigs by Olivia Grbac
Sticking It Out: From Juilliard to the Orchestra Pit, A Percussionist's Memoir by Patti Niemi

Thursday, November 3, 2016

SOUNDPRINTS (Nov/Dec edition)


NEW MUSIC BOOKS FOR NOVEMBER + DECEMBER

Nominally a jazz writer-blogger, Marc Myers collects some of his Wall Street Journal columns in Anatomy of a Song: The Oral History of 45 Iconic Hits That Changed Rock, R&B and Pop. (Read this interview with Myers about the Clash's "London Calling.") The sad departure of the Purple One this year coincides with a wave of nostalgia for the scruffy but hugely influential Minnesota music scene: photographer Daniel Corrigan collects his favorite images in Heyday: 35 Years of Music in Minneapolis (check out this Pitchfork profile) and veteran Twin Cities music scribe Jim Walsh collects his own Bar Yarns and Manic-Depressive Mixtapes. Pittsburgh U music prof Michael C. Heller delved into the personal collections of many of New York's finest jazz masters to tell the story of Loft Jazz: Improvising New York in the 1970s. As they always do towards the end of the year, bios and memoirs are coming fast and furious: Tool/Puscifer frontman Maynard James Keenan's A Perfect Union of Contrary Things (watch the book trailer here); former enigmatic guitar whiz for the Smiths Johnny Marr's Set the Boy Free by Johnny Marr (go here for a recent interview); Testimony by Robbie Robertson (read an excerpt here); and Against Me! frontperson Laura Jane Grace's Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout (go here for an excerpt). But probably the most out-of-the-box choice for a music bio would be a famed LSD chemist, but in Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley IIIRobert Greenfield makes the case for the man Steely Dan once dubbed "Kid Charlemagne." (Go here for Greenfield's Rolling Stone profile of Stanley.) The handsome oral-history volume No Half Steppin' also collects photographer Claude "Paradise" Gray's documenting of the pioneering hip hop scene at NYC's Latin Quarter club. Those who loved 1Q84 and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami know that music often plays subtle but pivotal roles in his novel; his new collection Absolutely on Music: Conversations should not disappoint. And for Ed Ward's first volume of The History of Rock & Roll, Volume I: 1920-1963, we pray that its fascinating epic scope (part 1 starts in 1920) will not render it as virtually unreadable as Ward's 1986 tome Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll. FINGERS CROSSED.

Thursday, October 6, 2016

SOUNDPRINTS (Oct. edition)


NEW MUSIC BOOKS IN OCTOBER:

First Third Books unveils the photo album Big Star: Isolated in the Light while, to the immense consternation of its control-freak subject, writer Nick Hasted unveils Citizen Jack: How Jack White Built an Empire From the Blues. Amend these volumes with Michael Buffalo Smith's Capricorn Rising: Conversations in Southern RockThe life of the great soul auteur Curtis Mayfield is remembered by his son Todd in Traveling Soul while roots-Americana auteur T-Bone Burnett is given the same treatment in Lloyd Sach's A Life in Pursuit. Emily Lordi adds to Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series with Donny Hathaway Live. A month after Beach Boys blowhard Mike Love's bitter autobiography comes bandmate Brian Wilson's long-awaited (and thrillingly titled) memoir I Am Brian Wilson. Coinciding with Jim Jarmusch's eagerly awaited documentary Gimme Danger comes the Jon Savage/Jeff Gold-edited Total Chaos: The Story of the Stooges. Historian Toby Mott curates Oh So Pretty! Punk in Print, 1976-1980. With the rise of interest in Afrofuturism, Paul Youngquist illuminates one of its architects -- the mercurial "Space Jazz" bandleader Sun Ra -- in A Pure Solar World. Another kind of futurism rears its mascaraed eyes in Simon Reynolds' Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-first Century. David Hadju gives his own "personal and idiosyncratic" memoir of pop music in Love for Sale. The bowler hat-wearing Rice Miller was actually the second blues harpist known as "Sonny Boy" Williamson; author
Mitsutoshi Inaba searches for the life of the first in John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson: The Blues Harmonica of Chicago's Bronzeville. Now that it's October and the weather's getting shittier, why not load up on the pleth of books about Great Britain -- Rizzoli's deluxe $160 doorstop God Save Sex Pistols, Lol Tolhurst's Cured: A Tale of Two Imaginary Boys, Jenn Pelly's The Raincoats, and synth wizard Thomas Dolby's memoir The Speed of Sound -- and New York -- Steven Blush's New York Rock, Lil Wayne's Riker's Island memoir Gone 'Til November and Peter Ames Carlin's Paul Simon bio Homeward Bound. And just the title of dark Americana prince Nick Cave's new tour memoir seals the deal: The Sick Bag Song -- essentially, a diary written entirely on airplane vomit bags. Awesome.

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

SOUNDPRINTS (Sept. Edition)


ON DECK FOR NEW MUSIC BOOKS IN SEPTEMBER:

The reprint of Ed Ward's Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall of an American Guitar Hero apparently has so much new material it should be considered a brand-new book. (Watch the book promo here.) Chuck Eddy's Terminated for Reasons of Taste: Other Ways to Hear Essential and Inessential Music makes a case for an "appreciation of the lost, ignored, and maligned." (Read a review here.) For over a decade, Guido Harari was singer Kate Bush's official photographer; The Kate Inside, 1982-1993 is a limited edition collection of his most indelible images of the British siren. (See a smattering of them here.) Jim Marshall, another veteran photog, trains his camera eye on the Jazz Festival. (Read a profile of Marshall here.) Barry Miles reveals the little-known history of The Beatles' short-loved experimental record label in The Zapple Diaries. Barry Miles adds to a recent spate of superb studies of race and American music in Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination. Thames + Hudson rolls out a pricey 400-page coffee table celebration of Motown: The Sound of Young America. This couldn't have been more well (or sadly) timed: The recently departed Maurice White's posthumous memoir My Life with Earth, Wind & Fire.


Rush drummer Neil Peart continues his road diaries with the new volume Far and Wide: Bring That Horizon to Me! Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series continues unabated with The Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy. (Read a Q&A with author Paula Meija here.) L.A. Weekly scribe Ben Westhoff tells a LoCal tale in Original Gangstas: The Untold Story of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and the Birth of West Coast Rap. Daniel Bergner went from trailer park with an abusive mother to juvenile solitary confinement to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in New York; read about how he got there in Sing for Your Life: A Story of Race, Music, and Family. Tim Lawrence focuses on a vibrant and gritty account of Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983 while the hangovers of AIDS and Reagan were beginning to kick in. Nathan Rabin follows up his 2013 study of musical subcultures with an intriguing side-by-side comparisons of music and politics in the ebook 7 Days In Ohio: Trump, The Gathering Of The Juggalos And The Summer Everything Went Insane. Martin Hawkins excavates the life of Slim Harpo: Blues King Bee of Baton Rouge. With the death this year of the colorful Texas troubadour Guy Clark, Tamara Saviano's bio Without Getting Killed or Caught couldn't have come at a more poignant time. Clark, along with Townes Van Zandt and Kris Kristofferson, is part of an academic collection of articles in Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas.

Oh, and this guitarist from New Jersey has his first memoir coming out:

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

SOUNDPRINTS (Summer 2016 edition)


ON DECK FOR NEW MUSIC BOOKS THIS SUMMER:

Following recent "pivotal year" books on 1965 and 1966, David Hepworth declares 1971 "the year that rock exploded" in Never a Dull Moment. (Read a review here.) The great tenor saxophonist Benny Golson recalls his tutelage under John Coltrane (and many other memories) in Whisper Not. (Read a review here.) George Plasketes plumbs the life and career of L.A.'s answer to Elvis Costello in Warren Zevon: Desperado of Los Angeles. (Read about Zevon's wild life here.) Brendan Mullen, Jello Biafra, Mike Watt, Lorna Doom, Ian Mackaye and Malcolm McLaren all contribute to The Fucked Up Reader. Martin Power offers No Quarter in his new biography on the life -- well, three, actually -- of Led Zeppelin guitarist James Patrick Page. Newly reminted Hold Steady keyboardist Franz Nicholay tours the global punk underground in The Humorless Ladies of Border Control. (Read an excerpt here.) It's been delayed for at least a couple months, but let's hope Hat & Beard's 500-page Slash: A History of the Legendary LA Punk Magazine: 1977-1980 lives up to all the hype. If not, Circle Jerks head honcho Keith Morris' My Damage: The Story of a Punk Rock Survivor should prove to be a lively companion. One of the founding members of NYC's Black Rock Coalition, Greg Tate, releases his second essay collection Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader, while Ed Piskor adds a fourth volume to his gorgeous graphic novel series The Hip Hop Family Tree. The Library of America celebrates the life and career of an influential American composer with the collection Virgil Thomson: The State of Music & Other Writings. For better or worse, dance music is finally getting the rigorous academic treatment with Grafton Tanner Babbling Corpses and the essay collection RAVE. Not exactly beach reads, these.



Ricardo Cavolo's hallucinatory folk art is the highlight of Scott McClanahan's graphic novel The Incantations of Daniel Johnston. (Read an interview with McClanahan here.) The concert festival that allegedly killed the 1960s finally gets its own book in Joel Selvin's Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock's Darkest Day. Yacht rock's gruesome twosome of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen get their laundry aired in a new expanded reissue of Brian Sweet's Steely Dan: Reelin' in the Years. When the Brooklyn alt-rock venue Death by Audio shut its doors in 2014, they held an epic 75-day goodbye party that was documented by photog Ebru Yildiz in We've Come So Far. (Look at some of her amazing images here.) If you enjoyed the recent documentary about John Lennon and Yoko Ono's epic citizenship battle, Leon Wildes, the lawyer who took their case, tells the inside story of John Lennon vs. The U.S.A. Meanwhile, back in the UK: Punk London. 1977: The Roxy, The Vortex, King's Road and Beyond as photographed by Derek Ridgers. Indie-rock godheads like he Sea and Cake, Interpol, Low, Vandermark Five, The Arcade Fire and The Flaming Lips all played Chicago's Empty Bottle bar; now the plucky lil' dive gets an extravagant art-book treatment in John Dugan's The Empty Bottle Chicago: 21+ Years of Music / Friendly / Dancing.



John Powell endeavors to explain Why You Love Music while Olivia Grbac attempts the same for Shit People at Gigs. Paul Morley looks back on The Age of Bowie. Almost by accident, Jace Clayton becomes a DJ and winds up traveling the world; he tells what he found in Uproot: Travels in21st Century Music and Digital Culture. Andrew Matheson's memoir Sick on You: The Disastrous Story of The Hollywood Brats satisfies our taste for glorious unsung failures, while our fascination with "playlist lit" (a.k.a., "listicle lit") continues with Michael Rubens' YA novel The Bad Decisions Playlist and ex-MTV VJ Dave Holmes' Party of One: A Memoir in 21 Songs. And, barely six months after the death of David Bowie, Your Band Is Killing Me author Rob Sheffield offers perhaps the first significant piece of posthumous appreciation in On Bowie. (Check out Sheffield's Spotify playlist here.)

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

75 HOT LINKS (w/ Dirty Rice & Sausage Gravy)


Mmmff, this should keep us all full for awhile...

(THE ATLANTIC)

(DANGEROUS MINDS)

A Guide to the Work of Diamanda Galás (RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY)

(THE A.V. CLUB)

ARCHITECTURE + EXPLOSION: Cecil Taylor, The Composer (DARK FORCES SWING BLIND PUNCHES)

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

SOUNDPRINCE (May Edition)


ON DECK FOR NEW MUSIC BOOKS IN MAY: Bruno Ceriotti's exhaustive e-book My Little Red Book: Love Day-By-Day 1945-1971 charts the L.A. cult band's tumultuous rise and fall. Premier punk press PM publishes the second edition of George Hurchalla's Going Underground: American Punk 1979–1989. He's not dead, so you can still read Philip Norman's Paul McCartney: The Life without crying to a Spotify playlist. Rolling Stone editor Mark Binelli reanimates a gonzo R&B singer in his 'What If?' novel Screamin' Jay Hawkins' All-Time Greatest Hits. Caroline Gnagy follows in the footsteps of John and Alan Lomax in Texas Jailhouse Music, a fascinating history of prison bands. David Toop has written some of the most sublime books on the holistic effects of sound and music; now he just may top himself in Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom Before 1970. In Beethoven for a Later Age, classical violinist Edward Dusinberre interweaves the history and challenges of Beethoven's 16 string quartet compositions (written between 1798 and 1826) with the history of his own Colorado-based Takács Quartet.

Honestly, we're getting kind of tired on books about the "World's Greatest Rock & Roll Band," but Rich Cohen's The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones examines the group through the contradictory lens of journalistic fandom. (Be forewarned: Cohen, along with Mick Jagger, is one of the co-creators of HBO's execrable Vinyl, so bring along a couple grains of salt.) John Troutman excavates an underrated and misunderstood instrument in Kīkā Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed Modern Music. Ex-Grantland scribe Steven Hyden brings a kind of Monday Night Football blow-by-blow commentary to classic musician rivalries (Biggie vs. Tupac, Stones vs. Beatles) in Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life. (Read an interview with Hyden here.) Since the turn of the millennium he's been a tireless booster for the West Coast, but in his memoir PorcelainNYC, 1989-1999 technopop auteur Richard "Moby" Hall looks back on his early DJ career in Urinetown. Yale University Press's twin volumes Conversations In Jazz and Music in the Air aim for reappraisal of the pioneering jazz writer Ralph J. Gleason. (Read The New Yorker's take on Gleason here.) Happily, the prolific Ted Gioia, who wrote the introduction to Conversations in Jazz, also has a new book, the accessible primer How to Listen to Jazz. (The Washington Post reviews it here.) Minnesota University Press collects the rare and unpublished essays of jazz and blues critic Albert Murray in Murray Talks Music. (The LA Review of Books reviews it here.) And rounding out the month for you Geminis are two very different titles from Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series: Jovana Babovic's Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out and Rolf Potts' The Geto Boys. Trevor Barre plumbs the early days of the London free-jazz movement in Beyond Jazz: Plink,Plonk and Scratch. Originally published in 1994, Edward Berlin's King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era gets a reprint from Oxford University Press. In his novel Imagine Me Gone, Adam Haslett novel seamlessly mixes mental illness and music-as-therapy for a memorable coming-of-age tale. (Read an interview with Haslett here.)

Thursday, April 21, 2016


There is a woman who sits
All alone by the pier
Her husband was naughty
And caused his wife so many tears
He died without knowing forgiveness
And now she is sad, so sad
Maybe she'll come 2 the park
And forgive him
And life won't be so bad
In Paisley Park