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 Rock. The 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.
