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:
