BOOKS: DECEMBER

(MUSIC) BOOKS WE LOVE: In which we editors gush about some recent books that have knocked our respective socks off.

BLUES & CHAOS: THE MUSIC WRITING OF ROBERT PALMER
by Robert Palmer, edited by Anthony DeCurtis
(Scribner, 2009)

We know people who swear by Robert Palmer’s 1981 book, DEEP BLUES. Certainly, it is an important and well-written book, but the blues is a field that has, thankfully, inspired quite a number of important books (some even well-written). We admired DEEP BLUES, but even so, it did not prepare us for this. This is BLUES & CHAOS, a posthumous collection of music writing that single-handedly justifies Palmer’s inclusion into the pantheon of Essential Music Writers. Hear ye Bangs, Guralnick, Hornby, Booth, Lowe, Marcus, Christgau, and the rest of you, make room for Comrade Palmer!

We are not trying to suggest that calling Robert Palmer (who was born in Little Rock, Arkansas) an excellent writer is news—for one thing, he already has a cult following. But he died in 1997 and his last book came out in 1995 and because of drug and personal problems, he was sporadic in his publishing. Anthony DeCurtis, his introducer, calls him “extremely prolific,” but I count six books in the “Also by Robert Palmer” category and two of those, ROCK & ROLL: AN UNRULY HISTORY and THE ROLLING STONES, are coffee-table volumes with more photos than verbiage. Three others—JERRY LEE LEWIS ROCKS! (1981); A TALE OF TWO CITIES: MEMPHIS ROCK AND NEW ORLEANS ROLL (1979); and BABY, THAT WAS ROCK AND ROLL: THE LEGENDARY LEIBER AND STOLLER (1978)—I’ve never seen and though they might each contain thousands of pages, they are out of print and I couldn’t even find them on eBay.

Yes, Palmer was the NEW YORK TIMES’ first pop music writer, but you know that only if you are of a certain age—or keep stacks of newspapers in your bedroom—and extremely prolific or not—BLUES & CHAOS could be, for the uninitiated, a revelation.

This guy’s interests were extraordinary. Here are examples of subjects that he writes intelligently and even poetically about: the history of Texas blues, Ornette Coleman, The “5” Royales, Led Zeppelin, Yoko Ono, Richard Hell, “Third-World” Music, Philip Glass, the Isley Brothers, Otis Rush. It doesn’t end. This elasticity is not accidental or forced. In fact, it’s at the core of the man and his legacy. He wants to help us hear beauty in all its multiple forms. He wants to remind us that the notion that art only appears in forms already recognizable to us is not only foolish, but anti-art.

Here are some thoughts from Chairman Palmer:

“The history of American music is the history of America, no more and no less.”

“For the fact of the matter is that America’s many vernacular musics are dialects—not separate, mutually exclusive languages.”

“The rock & roll attitude says, ‘Look at me!’ At first, in the 1950s, it was strictly an adolescent attitude, a youthful response to the public and private banalities of the Eisenhower years. It was widely perceived as a rebellion, but it was more an assertion of personality and possibility than anything else.”

“Could any of his contemporaries have come close to equaling the sheer force and the haunted immediacy [Robert] Johnson communicated? This, finally, is his bid for status as ‘the greatest’…. The music has a power that age cannot dim. Familiarity with his work, even over many years, breeds only a finer appreciation and a more acute sense of awe.”

And on and on, gloriously. Writing like Robert Palmer’s can be as thrilling as great music. Thank you, Anthony DeCurtis, for a fluid and forceful presentation; thank you, Robert Palmer, for caring about the things you cared about.

—MAS

BLACK POSTCARDS: A ROCK & ROLL ROMANCE
by Dean Wareham
(Penguin, 2008)

A memoir about the music industry that confounds expectation. In some indie-rock circles, the author is revered as the lead singer from Galaxie 500 and Luna, two alternative bands featuring languid tempos, dreamy lyrics, and minimalist, fuzzy-guitar arrangements. Not to be relegated to the music shelves, however, this rock & roll odyssey is short on ego and long on colorful detail. Born in New Zealand and transplanted at fourteen to the Upper East Side of New York City, Wareham is able to describe his life thus far (he’s forty-six) with enough detachment to actually make it interesting. This is not about stardom but its flip side: the long, punishing album tours, the fierce arguments (and secret liaisons) among band members, the aggressive fans, and the pressure to sell records or get dropped by your label (unless, of course, it goes under first). Wareham seems like a decent guy, finding his way to adulthood like we all do with successes and missteps, and you don’t have to know or like his music to enjoy this book. It’s a treat, however, to see what he’s been doing lately with former-Luna-bassist-turned-second-wife, Britta Phillips, in the fetching duo Dean & Britta. They’ve got a groovy 1960s French-pop vibe (check out their videos) and are looking mighty sharp at middle age.

Lines we liked: “Joining a band is like joining a cult.... At first, it is fun being in this cult together, this secret society. But you become more involved with one another’s lives than you ever anticipated. Instead of being friends, it’s more like you are lovers.”

—CAF

LIKE A ROLLING STONE: THE STRANGE LIFE OF A TRIBUTE BAND
by Steven Kurutz
(Broadway, 2008)

Much of contemporary music journalism—and of music fandom, for that matter, among the Pitchfork crowd and beyond—could be described as a quest to discover and crown the Next Big Thing, with writers and their readers barely pausing to draw a breath before moving on. In LIKE A ROLLING STONE, Steven Kurutz turns his attention not toward the sorts of groups who might be hailed as The Next Pavement or The Next Radiohead, but to a peculiar subset of musicians for whom there is no “Next.” As Kurutz discovers over the course of a year following a Rolling Stones tribute band called Sticky Fingers, the definition of success is not building on, or breaking away from, what came before, but on being what came before: the poutiest Mick; the “Keithiest Keith,” in the words of a bandmate (that’s real hair, and those are real subway tokens, glued to his leather headband). In addition to profiling the members of Sticky Fingers, led by the temperamental “Mick,” Glen Carroll, Kurutz also hits the road with Stones-tribute rivals the Blushing Brides and stops to ponder other stations of the tribute-band cross, from Zoso, a Zeppelin tribute that has garnered fame on the frat-party circuit, to Dark Star Orchestra, whose members noodle and jam their way through the historically faithful recreation of entire Grateful Dead shows. Over the course of his adventure, Kurutz ponders the utter lack of irony (today, of course, a staple of the hipster music scene) and the bizarre questions of identity and musicianship raised by the phenomenon of the tribute band. Ultimately, however, the reader simply takes a lighter pleasure in being along for the ride, and might close the book hoping that AC/DShe, The Australian Pink Floyd Show, or The Bootleg Doors will show up soon at a local venue.

Lines we liked: “Tribute bands might seem a lightweight subject, but on closer examination they reveal semi-serious things about our culture: our celebrity worship, the baby boomer nostalgia that pervades modern entertainment, the seeming exhaustion of new ideas in art, film, fashion, music. In fact, the essential notion of a tribute band—that is, something directly inspired by what has gone before—extends beyond music to the entire culture.”

—SCA

EDDY ARNOLD: PIONEER OF THE NASHVILLE SOUND
by Michael Streissguth
(Mississippi University Press, 2009)
   
If you’re like me and don’t understand how someone with the last name of Urban could ever be considered country, much less the genre’s boy wonder, Michael Streissguth’s biography of Eddy Arnold, the pioneer of the Nashville sound, is a helpful guide to understanding the music’s evolving style. Taking neither a purist’s stance nor an apologist’s view on Music Row’s slick pop production, Streissguth uses Arnold’s career to tell the history of country music from the early rural idiom of local barn dances to the commercial success of Nashville’s well-oiled sound factory. Whereas Jimmy Rodgers, Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, and Johnny Cash are the oft-named legends of country music, Streissguth honors the legacy of the Grand Ole Opry veteran turned country-politan crooner whose staying power and innovation transformed mainstream attitudes about the “hillbilly” music of the South and expanded its audience when rock & roll threatened to take over the airwaves. 

“Middle-of-the-road” is how the book repeatedly describes Arnold’s later and highest-selling songs, a term Streissguth convincingly spins in a positive light. Rather than taming his down-home spark, Arnold discovers his true voice in the lush, mid-tempo ballads that reflected his charming yet equanimous personality. Crossing-over to pop was part of Arnold’s quest for authenticity, wherein he finally gave up the stale hayseed act he found humiliating and became an original singer, not of pop or country, but of a new sound that he, Chet Atkins, and the session players concocted in their RCA laboratory that charted 147 of his songs. Like most country artists, Eddy’s music was informed by his sense of home. He never forgot the Tennessee cotton farm he grew up on, but he also never lost his desire to see the world beyond its fields.
 
Lines We Liked: “Eddy struck a bond with his audience.  Many of the older fans felt like they had completed an odyssey with Eddy, from simplicity in the ’40s to prosperity in the ’60s.  In step with Eddy as he journeyed to popular circles, they had realized their own versions of the American Dream.”

—BS

HEROES AND VILLAINS: ESSAYS ON MUSIC, MOVIES, COMICS AND CULTURE
by David Hajdu
(Da Capo, 2009)

Not many culture critics have the scope of expertise like David Hajdu. Having made a name for himself with LUSH LIFE, the biography of the pop songwriter Billy Strayhorn, Hajdu has long shown a piercing intellectual interest in pop music, and beyond that, the whole plastic realm of pop culture. HEROES AND VILLAINS is a best-of collection, gathering many of Hajdu’s most intriguing essays from an array of noteworthy publications: the NEW YORKER, NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, ATLANTIC MONTHLY, and THE NEW REPUBLIC, among others.

Many of the essays are grouped together with loose thematic leads including, “Blues and The Abstract Truth,” “Growing Up,” and “Cultural Machinery”—all of which could basically describe anything. The reader leaps from an essay on the curious cherubic asexuality of Elmer Fudd to a dissection of Fred Hersch’s jazz composition inspired by LEAVES OF GRASS. However, each topic is discussed with such intoxicating gravity the chapter subheadings hardly matter—it’s more lively to see the 1940s comics of Will Eisner treated with the same critical plunge as mainstay subjects like Alan Lomax.   

Hajdu’s most temporally engaging critiques thankfully tackle new-media phenomena such as the insipid Starbucks record label, Kanye West’s open-source sampling, the “random” mystique of the iPod playlist, and D.I.Y. musician self-marketing on My Space. Hajdu explores these strange worlds not with the Luddite eye of an out-of-touch geezer, but rather with the awestruck observation of a willing participant. He has not only embraced the twenty-first-century way of communicating music, his work in HEROES AND VILLAINS establishes exactly how invaluable he is to interpreting its cultural relevance.
 
Lines we liked: “Starbucks produces and markets several lines of CDs, one of which, the Opus Collection, picks up the company’s principles of linguistic obfuscation and tactical packaging and carries them into music. The series title appropriates the classical-music term for a collection of concert pieces, in order to conjure gravitas, while meaning, essentially, the Collection Collection.”

—NE

HOLD ON TO YOUR DREAMS: ARTHUR RUSSELL AND THE DOWNTOWN MUSIC SCENE, 1973–1992
by Tim Lawrence
(Duke University Press, 2009)
 
With the release and critical acclaim of last year’s documentary WILD COMBINATION (dir. Matt Wolf), it appears an overdue Arthur Russell revivalist movement has arrived some seventeen years after his death. The documentary is an effective introductory homage piece, offering as much detail as possible in a seventy-one minute span. However, the new biography from Tim Lawrence picks up where the documentary leaves off, providing the most fascinating recount of the unfairly condemned-to-obscurity experimental musician.
 
Russell happened to be present during some of the most culturally celebrated eras in American music: he fled Iowa to hang out in San Francisco in the late ’60s, where he studied Buddhism and music theory. After touring with Allen Ginsberg, he moved to downtown Manhattan, where he befriended Philip Glass, and collaborated with Talking Heads among others, all during the establishment of the eponymous SoHo art community. Despite his constant association with figures who went on to become basic legend, Russell’s music has somehow remained disconnected from these names in discussions of New York musical taxonomy.
 
Lawrence’s biography faithfully sketches this conundrum: Russell was simply unlike anyone else composing and producing at the time. In the age of lofty avant-garde composers, he was booking The Modern Lovers instead of Rhys Chatham. In the height of anti-pop like Talking Heads, Russell obsessively penned nine-minute disco epics with DJ Larry Levan. In brief: Russell’s unrequited love for pop music seemed to always preclude his artistic success. A success he strove for until he became a second-wave casualty of the AIDS epidemic in 1992. Russell’s unprecedented genre-merging deserves this kind of exploration, and Lawrence approaches with a delicacy and direct intimacy reminiscent of the music itself.
 
Lines we liked: “For Arthur, there was no cachet to being eclectic. Rather, he played across genre because it would have required a colossal and entirely counterproductive effort on his part to stick to one sound…. Drifting into an ethereal, gravity-defying zone, Arthur had come to embody the interconnectivity of music.”

—NE

JERRY LEE LEWIS: LOST AND FOUND
by Joe Bonomo
(Continuum, 2009)

With short asides on the Killer’s personal life, which was also a hell of a ride, Joe Bonomo, a professor at Northern Illinois University, follows the rollercoaster ride of professional success and failure that Jerry Lee Lewis has faced since the late 1950s. Bonomo spends a considerable amount of time celebrating the brilliance of Lewis’s live album “LIVE” AT THE STAR CLUB—recorded in Hamburg, Germany, in 1964. He just can’t get enough of Jerry Lee’s ability to mesmerize crowds of teen rockers during his live performances, which were a dazzling display of standing up at the piano, the backup players struggling to keep up, tossing his sweaty hair, and making those trademark suggestive dance moves. The book characterizes Lewis as an egomaniac who was so talented he had a right to be full of himself.

Lines we liked: “The Killer is as big as Mount Rushmore, and he’s also as American, as revered, as clichéd, as misunderstood, as corny, and as taken for granted as that monument.“

—NR

LITTLE RICHARD: THE BIRTH OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL
by David Kirby
(Continuum, 2009)

In LITTLE RICHARD: THE BIRTH OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL, David Kirby tells the genesis story of rock & roll’s Prime Mover, the ever-willing showman and inveterate iconoclast whose sound, despite his own best efforts, could not be reformed. At the heart of the book is an entertaining account of a young Richard Penniman, a gay, black cripple from the segregated South, breaking rank with the antiseptic airwaves of the ’50s and announcing himself unrepentantly, if not articulately, with “A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop. A-lop-bam-boom!” Little Richard, Kirby claims, shakes American culture to its very core and henceforth liberates its music from the wolf pack of social conservatives. In his interviews with Little Richard, Kirby refuses to play the gushing fan and ultimately the conversational deadweight, but his storytelling falls short of that goal. His exaggerations of Little Richard’s historical significance, claims bolstered by Shakespearean allusions, aesthetic theories, and overextended metaphors, undercuts the real story as told by the songs themselves—sensational and raw. “Little Richard is not just a singer. To me, he’s a way of looking at the world,” says Kirby. In his finer moments Kirby tells us not how to view Little Richard, but shows us what his world was like, from the raucous Pentecostal worship services where he first learned to sing, to the grotesque medicine shows where he promoted quack tonics and wares, to the sonic alchemy of those early recording sessions at Cosimo Matassa’s New Orleans studio. Though the book gives an incomplete account of Little Richard’s life, it makes a respectable effort.
 
Lines We Liked: “Little Richard’s Macon was a small town in his childhood—it’s not that big these days—but it was big enough to attract the traveling shows that offered their gumbo of hokum and glitz and freakiness and showmanship. The shysters and sideshow acts and hoodoo men gave little Richard Penniman the exact list of ingredients he’d need for his future showbiz career.”

—BS

PHOTOGRAPHS BY SOUTHERN GIRL.