Rock ’n’ Reads: December
BOOKS WE LOVE: In which we editors gush about some music books (old and new) that have knocked our respective socks off.
Love & Hate in the Heart of Best Music Writing
by Marc Smirnoff
BEST MUSIC WRITING 2010
Guest Editor: Anne Powers
(Da Capo Press)
Every year, without fail, Da Capo's BEST MUSIC WRITING anthology impresses. Even when writers drop the ball here or there (inevitable) or guest editors reveal bias or quirks of temperament (inevitable again, especially when guest editors have included such oddballs as Mickey Hart, Matt Groenig, and J.T. LeRoy; I'm half-expecting Jerry Springer to get a shot), the collection remains a must-read for open-minded music fans.
This year, a non-celebrity but very skilled music writer named Ann Powers, whose own articles have been selected five times for the anthology, guest-edits. As a guest editor, Powers proves to be fervently multicultural. This is not always a good thing. Before ending this review with praise, I'd like to focus on what I think are the flaws of the collection.
In her introduction, Powers complains about the "irritating stereotype" of the music writer as nerdy, white, and male. This stereotype, she says, operates as a "bane...[that]...prevents others—women, queer men, people of color—from seeing themselves in...the role [of music writer]."
She goes on:
I hope the diversity in this book sheds a final corrective light on the truism that a music writer can be only one kind of person.
Such diversity should be a welcome jolt, especially for Old School squares like me who tend not to think first about race and gender and sexuality when thinking about music (which is probably both a bad and good tendency).
In Powers's hands, and the hands of the women, queer men, and people of color who do a lot of the writing in this book, the jolt is welcome...most of the time. Most of the time, I found the book roused me to consider aspects of music I normally don't home in on (we've all got special interests). The collection fails, though, when it allows ideology to trump reasoning. Coincidentally, this failing can be evidenced in Powers herself, whose very next sentence after the one quoted above reads:
The institutional racism and heterosexism that afflicts every aspect of our culture still affects music writing, lending more opportunity to a privileged few.
Every aspect? Every? Is Powers out there, 24/7, checking the pulse, and inspecting the ethics, of every aspect of our culture while lazy, white male nerds (and others) selfishly sleep or toss and turn the night away?
Do institutional racism and heterosexism go hand in hand at all times or is that just a slapdash and imprecise pairing? If they don't go hand in hand, may we ask if institutional racism affects every aspect of the culture of, say, rap music or African-American comedy? Is heterosexism even prevalent at lesbian websites or in lesbian fiction?
The problem with ideological warfare is not only that it tends to ignore inconvenient truths—truths that don't jibe with the favored mindset—but that it forces the enemy (I guess that would be me) to respond in kind. When such battling extends to music writing, the music sometimes gets short shrift.
A case in point is Michelle Tea's "The Gossip Takes Paris," which originally appeared in THE BELIEVER, and which Powers uses to lead off BEST MUSIC WRITING 2010 and which she cites as one of her favorite pieces of the year because, among other qualities, it has "plenty of room for others to speak."
A few things about "The Gossip Takes Paris": It focuses on Beth Ditto, The Gossip's humdinger of a lead singer (from Searcy, Arkansas!), as she treks around Paris with fellow feminists Tara Parker (her manager) and Tea during Fashion Week. (The Gossip are fabulously popular in Europe.)
Tea is a spunky writer: ribald, playful, alert. But she's also a bit uncritical about Ditto—and herself. One of the sub-themes of the piece is how Ditto (who is XX large) will be outfitted and posed for the cover of LIBERATION NEXT, a trendy Paris magazine:
Magazines are always wanting to dress Beth burlesque, in feathers and corsets and other looks that died out around the turn of the present century, or else they want her to be naked.... Putting a girl of Beth's size boldly nude on the cover also has both a radical freshness and a more cynical shock appeal, and both surely sell magazines, but at this point Beth has been nude on the cover of the now-defunct lesbian sex mag On Our Backs, NME, and Love.
Some of this tendency, Tea writes, "has to be laziness on the part of stylists unused to dressing fat girls."
When, finally, we learn that LIBERATION NEXT will put Ditto on their cover "half-naked in a corset and feather boa and arrange[d in] cheesecake-style," the clear implication is that The Man has forced Ditto to do his bidding.
The problem here is that Tea makes Ditto out to be strong-willed and utterly true to herself. Tea even quotes manager Tara as saying (about another matter): "Believe me, Beth would not let me do any of that if it's not what she wanted.... You know her. She does exactly what she wants to."
So what's really going on here...are there money or fame issues involved in the cover shoot that Tea hasn't discussed forthrightly enough with the reader? Or, is Ditto just a pretend radical thinker, a person who brags about being different but is actually quick to follow the herd?
We don't know because Tea leaves us with no analysis or reportage on this point. We just intuit, thanks to the framing, that somehow or another The Man did it to The Woman. Again.
(I guess it's lucky for The Man that The Woman shuts up and does as she's told.)
Moving along, here Tea rhapsodizes about The Gossip's fame:
...I still cannot get over how this little band that I have known for so long, this indie queer feminist punk band, is the absolute star of the Fendi show. The reality is staggering. In many ways it shouldn't be a surprise—less-talented, less-interesting, less-charismatic artists get famous all the time. They just tend not to be so outspokenly queer, so flamboyantly fat, so poor in their roots, so disconnected from the music industry, with no secret dad producer or mom publicist.
I was flowing with this vibe until...the "so poor in their roots" part.
In fact, being born and raised poor is almost a prerequisite for becoming famous in the pop-music world. Start thinking about famous musicians who started off poor and suddenly they seem endless: Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Hank Williams, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Muddy Waters, Carl Perkins, B.B. King, Elvis Presley, James Brown, John Lennon, Loretta Lynn, Eminem, 50 Cent, and so on and so on and so on.
What's extra weird about Tea's statement is that she devotes a lot of space in the article to discussing poverty. She mentions that she, Tara, and Ditto all grew up poor. She mentions how that background causes the three of them to be at unease in posh surroundings. She includes a longish paragraph about hearing Dorothy Allison talk about her poverty.
So why would an intelligent writer like Tea make such a blatantly untrue statement about the background of famous pop stars? Why would her intelligent editors at both THE BELIEVER and BEST MUSIC WRITING 2010 let such anti-historical nonsense slide?
My only guess is that Tea and her editors ideologically approve of the sentiment behind the falsehood and therefore didn't bother to think it through.
As if being outspokenly queer, flamboyantly fat, and disconnected from the music industry weren't enough to prove Ditto's victim-status bona fides, Michelle Tea has to claim that other pop musicians were never as poor as poor Beth Ditto!
Another piece, "Phil Ochs Greatest Hits" by Chris Estey, is also damaged by ideological desire. I might as well point out here that I would be just as annoyed, if not more so, by an edition of BEST MUSIC WRITING that was overrun by conservative ideology. (What would that be like? P.J. O'Rourke bloviating about the "punk amateurishness" and socioeconomic underpinnings of Mike Huckabee's (comically stiff) TV house-band?)
In her intro, Powers calls Estey's piece a "beautiful and gut-wrenching memoir [that is] told through the grooves of a Phil Ochs album." I found Estey's own story to distract from the writing about Ochs, which is so riveting that it convinced me to revisit Ochs's music. But the memoir stuff consists too often of disjointed anecdotes.
At one point, Estey mentions that he and his friend Billy were Catholics even though "we hated organized religion."
At another point, Estey talks about returning from church only to tell a noisy neighbor "to shut the fuck up":
"I'm sorry, man!" he said. He was wearing a baseball cap. He seemed genuinely apologetic. "It's the middle of the afternoon, I didn't think anyone would mind."
"But it's Sunday," I said. I was tired from lectoring at Mass that morning and was enjoying my reading of the Gospel of St. John.
First: After lectoring at Mass, and after being interrupted reading the Bible, Estey feels compelled to tell a neighbor "to shut the fuck up"? That's how going to church and reading the Bible worked on Estey?
Second: If the unexamined life is not worth living does that mean it's also not worth reading about? If you are curious as to how Estey went from hating organized religion to lectoring at Mass, don't ask me, because if Estey knows, he's not saying, at least in this piece. Memoir or not, we're on our own.
In another place, he talks about "the cross-tops (speed) I scored from the guy whose marriage I fucked up." Want to know more about that guy, or the marriage Estey fucked up? Well, you came to the wrong memoir—that's all he wrote.
Here is the entirety of Estey's analysis of one Diane:
When Diane kept me in a room next to hers in her apartment in West Los Angeles, demanding that I clean her house several hours a day, I cried at night. Watching TV preachers on a small set I borrowed from her and taking diet pills so I wouldn't have to eat her food. Praying, even when she forced me to wear her clothes.
Well, that certainly clears up the matter of Diane, doesn't it?
More memoir. Estey talking about his former lover David:
His family prized intelligence, and David converted them all to Scientology. Which he later left and now opposes. His brother committed suicide because he had dented the family car and he thought their father would be so angry about it. David said it was stupid, he shouldn't have taken the cyanide, there were other ways of handling their dad. You just don't have to die because authority is angry at you.
I don't know how to read this paragraph. As funny, because a family that prizes intelligence would never "all" be converted to Scientology, right?
Or as rigid because that language about how David "now opposes" Scientology is clearly a sincere throat-clearing to give David his politically correct props?
But what about that last line, "You just don't have to die because authority is angry at you"? Is that supposed to be an insight (pretty lame, if so) or sarcastic (pretty damn cold in the face of the brother's suicide)?
Powers can call this a good memoir; I call it messy, confusing, and possibly glib.
Estey is mostly on the ball when talking about Ochs. With choice words and examples, he presents a complicated and tragic figure.
Okay, he does flub it when calling Ochs's "Gas Station Women" the "best C&W song ever written, because it's utterly fake...." You can get away with that kind of jibe against a mostly white genre, but use that trope with music made by people of color and suddenly it's offensive: "That's the best reggae song ever written, because it's utterly fake...." Or "That's the best blues song ever written, because it's utterly fake..."
And when discussing Ochs's suicide, of all things—Ochs killed himself in his sister's house, by the way—Estey steam-rolls us again with ideology:
They say that as America withered, so did Ochs—but what's clear is, as the 'revolution' became compromised, we killed Ochs.
That's clear? That we killed Phil Ochs? We? We?
Speak for yourself. I, for one, had nothing to do with Ochs's suicide. (What about you, dear reader? Were you in on Ochs's suicide and you're just not telling me?)
Maybe a poet could pull off blaming a whole country for one man's horrific suicide. Maybe an argument could be made that Ochs's perception of America "killed" him, but that's not the argument Estey is making and the ugly fact that Ochs hung himself in his sister's house should make it clear that the man had demons that weren't all about you and me or this country.
Less offensive in BEST MUSIC WRITING 2010, of course, are the occasional aesthetic missteps.
One of the most stylish and penetrating music writers extant, Robert Christgau, is represented by a so-so (by Christgau standards) piece, which is bragged on in the intro:
Robert Christgau's essay on Brad Paisley [appeared] on the website for the big-box bookseller Barnes & Noble. There was a time when something published on a retail outlet website would have immediately been disqualified as catalog fodder, not real music writing.
Unfortunately, bits—just bits—of Christgau's piece read exactly like catalog fodder. After a wordy paragraph about how Paisley met his movie-star wife, Christgau writes:
The couple split their life between a farm near Nashville and a house in Malibu. They have two sons, the oldest born in 2007 and christened William Huckleberry—Huck for short.
That's the kind of pablum I'd expect to find in the Brad Paisley Fan Club Newsletter or on the Sam's Club website, but not in the writing of Robert Frickin' Christgau—The Dean of American Music Writers for short—or in THE BEST MUSIC WRITING collection.
Obviously, I'm nitpicking, especially since sublime Christgauian insights run rampant in the Paisley article. But my point is, nitpicking is what a hell of a lot of the writers in this collection do (including Christgau), so what's fair for them is fair for the reader. (And one couldn't nitpick if there weren't nits to pick....)
Actually, my point is that it's premature to gloat about big-box commercial websites as being cool modern repositories for our best music writers (who may not, in fact, be as well-handled or challenged there as they would be in other venues).
The more complete triumphs in this year's BEST MUSIC WRITING 2010 are the ones that bring us closer to the music or an artist's art.
Jody Rosen's piece on a lost Vaudeville star named Eva Tanguay immediately got me YouTubing her. Thanks for the intro, Jody!
Calm but piercing Alex Ross prompted the same from me, for Marian Anderson, whom I had heard of but hadn't really pursued. Thanks for the nudge, Alex!
Hua Hsu's piece on "The End of White America" earns its place not through facile sloganeering but through the strength of a real sense of history and intelligent forecasting supported by numbers, not emotion. Thanks for that, Hua!
More: Chris Willman's spin on the recent Bob Dylan Christmas album is a hoot—if not wise. The same should be said for Mary Gaitskill's quick riff on Lady Gaga. Randall Roberts sallies forth with absorbing reportage about the U.S. band Ozomatli's complicated and dangerous outreach program in Rangoon. Timothy Quirk's analysis of how his record company neglects him also shows how prone the business is, accidentally or otherwise, to cheating artists. Philip S. Bryant's "Stompin' at the Grand Terrace: Excerpts from a Jazz Memoir in Verse" makes me hungry for the whole shebang. Two fine essays memorializing Michael Jackson (by Greg Tate and Jason King) validate editor Powers's idea that a volume of essays about Jackson would make for great reading.
Flaws and all, this volume makes for great reading. I have long admired Ann Powers, and just a few months ago I even invited her to write for this magazine. I hope I am being fair to her, and myself, when I commend Powers for the successes in BEST MUSIC WRITING 2010, even while I own up to being irritated by its failings.
—Marc Smirnoff
THE HERO AND THE BLUES
by Albert Murray
(Vintage paperback ed., 1995)
Even if the language is a tad more arch than what you can find in his later, more swinging books, the thinking in THE HERO AND THE BLUES positively glows and qualifies as a superb intro to Albert Murray (who was born in Nokomis, Alabama, in 1916). The main argument presented is that to be a hero a person needs to struggle. Without struggle, heroism is impossible, literally, because only by opposing antagonistic forces can one test or, really, even develop heroic capacities. (You’re not a hero if you’re just taking candy from a baby or smacking around a smaller sibling. Try snatching something from a homicidal mobster or go up against Mike Tyson if you want to know the status of your mettle.) In some sly way, then, we should almost be grateful for tribulations or what Murray calls, almost serenely, “antagonistic cooperation.” Murray: “Thus difficulties and vicissitudes which beset the potential hero on all sides not only threaten his existence and jeopardize his prospects; they also, by bringing out the best in him, serve his purpose.” Murray sees his approach as literary theory with real-life implications. Here is one example he uses to buttress his argument: “Schools with the most difficult course requirements turn out the best trained graduates.” Some critics are repulsed by the notion of a black man (Murray is black) who accepts, or even welcomes, difficulties and vicissitudes. They say a black man should be protesting life’s hardships, not accepting them! But Murray is that rare creature who adamantly opposes the idea that all black Americans should think as one. After graduating from the Tuskegee Institute, Murray began a long career in the U.S. Air Force and retired as a major. His unorthodox-for-a-writer background—Murray didn’t publish his first book until the age of fifty-four—might also be what some find puzzling. Late bloomer or not, he is a major American writer and thinker.
LINES WE LIKED: “Implicitly, experimentation is also an action taken to insure that nothing endures which is not workable; as such, far from being anti-traditional, as is often assumed, it actually serves the best interests of tradition, which, after all, is that which continues in the first place.”
—MAS
CONVERSATIONS WITH ALBERT MURRAY
edited by Roberta S. Maguire
(University Press of Mississippi, 1997)
Even when he’s repetitive, and he is, Murray is always interesting and eloquent. One favorite set-piece, repeated almost verbatim in a number of articles in this book, goes: “Man, most critics seem to feel that unless you [meaning: him, a black writer] are pissing and moaning about injustice you have nothing to say.” On which he improvises: “In any case it seems that they find it much easier to praise black (brown and beige) writers for being angry (which requires no talent, not to mention genius) than for being innovative.” But it’s not Murray’s own perception that we must refer to. Duke Ellington, of all appraisers, said: “Albert Murray is a man whose learning did not interfere with understanding…. He is the unsquarest person I know.” Even a partially unsympathetic profiler, like the late Joe Wood of THE VILLAGE VOICE, still has to wrangle with the “old man’s” powers point by point before scoring one of his own (the one criticism of Wood’s that I think has traction concerns Murray’s fiction). When another writer wonders if a Murray argument can be labeled “conservative,” Murray responds: “You can’t solve problems with epithets.” (I’d like to see that response get air-time on Fox News if only to see Sean Hannity duck.) One writer tries to find a discrepancy between something Hemingway wrote and how he lived, to which Murray responds: “The man has to live up to everything he wrote? That’s what I tell people about Jefferson when they go about him owning slaves. He put the basis for their freedom into the Declaration. Don’t tell me about Thomas Jefferson owning slaves; he wrote the Declaration of Independence.” It’s not an idle point; at least, not if you want to consider the long-term ramifications of Jefferson’s contribution (rather than just his short-term flaws). Murray makes a similar point in discussing how important the idea of freedom was to blacks even if the reality didn’t exist for them yet: “The point is: The promises, the guarantees of the Constitution became the birthright of all Americans…. Were they free in Africa? They were owned by their chief. The first they ever heard of freedom as a right was over here…. The important thing is that the official promise existed: ‘All men are created equal.’ Now you had something to appeal to.”
LINES WE LIKED: Murray on how the emergence of white jazzmen begin to change white America’s racial attitudes: “[E]ven while there was such prejudice that would make these guys say that Benny Goodman was the king of swing…[and] he could never approach Earl Hines, let alone Count Basie or Duke Ellington. But the white guys are already contaminated, because they’re playing Negro music! They’re not playing Jewish music or Irish music—they’re playing Negro American music! No jazz musician wants you to say, ‘He sounds like a white guy.’ ”
—MAS
STOMPING THE BLUES
by Albert Murray
(Da Capo Press, 25th Anniversary edition, 2000)
A richly illustrated volume that also happens to hold some of Murray’s most provocative writing about music, which is saying much. His first accomplishment is to emphasize the difference between the condition of the blues and blues music. Despite common thinking (and writing) to the contrary, the two are not interchangeable: “The blues are synonymous with low spirits. Blues music is not…. Not that there is no such thing as sorrowful blues music. But not so much as people seem to think.” As usual with Murray, the implications of his thinking extend far. When he writes that “blues music regardless of its lyrics almost always induces dance movement that is the direct opposite of resignation, retreat, or defeat,” he is challenging us to get beyond dogged preconceptions. Are we up to that? With a song title that contains the words “Weary Blues,” we expect certain sounds or effects…even if they are not there. It’s worth noting, Murray says, that Louis Armstrong’s version of this song “expresses not weariness but stomping exuberance.” Let’s put that in our pipe and smoke it! For far too long, popular music criticism (especially in ROLLING STONE) focused on lyrics, probably because they are the easiest qualities in music to hold onto and discuss. But, as Murray puts it: “Words as such, however well chosen, are secondary to the music. What counts for most is not verbal precision (which is not to say vocal precision) but musical precision, or perhaps better still, musical nuance…. Blues singers almost always seem to be much more preoccupied with vocal subtleties than with rendering the lyrics as written.” Murray’s writing and thinking in STOMPING THE BLUES can safely and without exaggeration be called essential.
LINES WE LIKED: “Nor was the voice of any scat singer ever played more like an instrument than that of Bessie Smith, who…could get the same musical effect with the most banal, inconsequential, and indeed non sequitur lyrics as with those of the highest poetical quality, which she often misquoted.”
—MAS
RAT GIRL: A MEMOIR
by Kristin Hersh
(Penguin, 2010)
Written by the muse of Throwing Muses, an angsty and artful post-punk band formed by Rhode Island high-school kids in 1981, RAT GIRL explores a year in the life of a troubled young musician. Drawing from the diary she kept at eighteen, Kristin Hersh intersperses the narrative with song lyrics and other, earlier memories. The layered structure works—it's energetic but it breathes. This material could have been milked for sensational effect but, instead, Hersh keeps the burners low, showing turmoil from the inside so you can understand it without drowning in maudlin effects. She explains that her songwriting gift/curse was the direct consequence of a hit-and-run car accident (she was riding her bike to a summer job when a whirlwind driver plowed into her). Recovering in a hospital, she starts hearing noises that are imperceptible to her nurse. Relief comes only when she channels the cacophony into written songs. Then: increasingly frequent hallucinations (snakes mostly and rats) and suicidal impulses, one of which lands her in the gentle hands of mental-health professionals (she calls them "soothers"). Armed with the "Band-Aids" of psychiatric treatment, she moves with her TM bandmates to Boston, where they jam in "the Rat," an underground club at "the epicenter of this subculture's subculture." She also discovers she's pregnant (and decides to become a mother) and records TM's debut album with 4AD, Britain's esteemed indie record label. All this (and more) in one year! You don't expect a songstress whose haunting music evokes your own '80s tumults to pull off a literary triumph that makes sense of madness and inspiration—TM songs, after all, were more about sound than sentences—but she does. Hersh, it turns out, is morbidly shy, self-effacing ("I'm not a particularly creative person"), unintentionally heroic, and reveres art and even humanity; by the end, you pretty much want to friend her, which is exactly what you do.
LINES WE LIKED: "When music walks into the room, we all know it. It isn't delivered to an audience by musicians, it happens between people." AND: "Living in a van's the dream and living in a van'll stay the dream. We'll just have to keep playing until we can afford a van."
—CAF
POSITIVELY 4TH STREET: THE LIVES AND TIMES OF JOAN BAEZ, BOB DYLAN, MIMI BAEZ FARIÑA AND RICHARD FARIÑA
by David Hajdu
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001)
Hajdu's account of the rise of the folk movement in the early-to-mid '60s is a tight little time capsule of a book. It follows the four titular characters—most notably the Baez sisters Joan and Mimi—as their lives and musical pursuits intertwine. Hajdu links the true ascent of folk music into mainstream acceptance with Joan's rise to stardom from Cambridge coffee shops, and along with Joan comes the charismatic Cornell dropout Richard Fariña, and, of course soon after, the bumbling "boy-poet" Bob Dylan. Culled from various interviews, memoirs, and even photographs, Hajdu presents a fairly even and absorbing chronicle of the fraught relationships between young and volatile artists who find themselves in a tenuous time at the helm of a movement that would change the power of popular music for generations.
LINES WE LIKED: "Making do, Dylan crouched a bit and sang a couple of songs. Then he lit a cigarette and started a third song, singing through the corner of his mouth as he smoked: 'It ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe...'—'Don't Think Twice, It's All Right.' As he continued the lament to a doomed romance (his own 'Bye Bye Love'), Joan walked to the stage and sat in a chair next to Bob, on his right as he stood signing.... With her left hand, she began slowly rubbing the small of Dylan's back. Bob continued the song without acknowledging her, and Joan closed her eyes as he sang."
—NE
SUN KING: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SAM PHILLIPS, THE MAN BEHIND SUN RECORDS
by Kevin & Tanja Crouch
(Piatkus, 2009)
The story of Sun Records is so much more than the blinding Sunny stars—Elvis, Jerry Lee, Carl, Roy—who are generally associated with the label. To get the full story of Sam Phillips (from Florence, Alabama) and his mystical label, you have to dig into the nooks and crannies, which the Crouches do. The result is SUN KING, a romp and a riveting story of success & failure; friendships & betrayals; poverty & riches; the dawning of both rock & roll & rockabilly; drugs & alcohol; hip swinging & piano torching; major breakthroughs for both racial equality & gender equality in the music industry; record-label rivalries; payola scandals; the Million Dollar Quartet; affairs, divorces, one infamous marriage to an underage cousin; artistic visions & creative disagreements; accidents; toupees; and, of course, Cadillacs.
LINES WE LIKED: "'Music has done more to bring glad news and to bring nations and peoples into an understanding of each other than anything else. I don't care what anybody says. All the diplomacies in the world can't hold a candle to that one damn common denominator called music.'" —Sam Phillips
—KW
TEXAS TORNADO: THE TIMES & MUSIC OF DOUG SAHM
by Jan Reid with Shawn Sahm
(University of Texas Press, 2010)
Another worthy read from University of Texas Press, which is compiling a track record of putting out terrific music books. In TEXAS TORNADO: THE TIMES & MUSIC OF DOUG SAHM, Jan Reid (with help from Doug's son, Shawn) delivers the life of the maverick musician whose influence can fairly be said to rank with such Texas stalwarts as Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Janis Joplin, and Stevie Ray Vaughn. Sahm, who was a child "pedal steel prodigy," became a deft musician of blues, country, rock & roll, Western swing, Cajun, and polkas. He's credited as one of the forerunners of country-rock, as well as one of the most important figures in Tejano music. Reid's biography vibrates with what Bob Dylan described as Sahm's "heavy frequency," faithfully chronicling the extent of the artist's reach—from his San Francisco years with The Sir Douglas Quintet to his New York recording DOUG SAHM & BAND, with the likes of Bob Dylan, Dr. John, and Flaco Jimenez, and to his return home, where he was hailed as "the voice of Texas."
LINES WE LIKED: "'And he's stoned New Orleans Bayou,' Doug went on, 'while I'm stoned Texas country Chicano. And Fathead, well, if you had been here the other night you would have seen him come in and play 'Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues' with Bobby [Dylan]—Fathead playing the guitar. Playing authentic T-Bone Walker lines, and those are the best lines I think you can play. Fathead comes from Texas and brings in that whole other side of soul."
—JB
BECOMING JIMI HENDRIX: FROM SOUTHERN CROSSROADS TO PSYCHEDELIC LONDON, THE UNTOLD STORY OF A MUSICAL GENIUS
by Steven Roby & Brad Schreiber
(DaCapo, 2010)
Roby and Schreiber tell Hendrix's story as if he were kin, disclosing his demons—insurmountable immaturity, violence toward his female beneficiaries, etc.—while maintaining a fierce fondness toward him. BECOMING JIMI HENDRIX reads something like a star-studded (and drug-addled) version of The Ugly Duckling and reminds us that Hendrix's anachronistic style was once the future we all feared.
LINES WE LIKED: "Jimi would even use the guitar to do his talking for him: 'How are you doing, Jimi?' 'Bading dada dooo' on the guitar. 'Is it cold outside?' 'Wheeoooow.'"
—MTP
PHOTOGRAPHS BY SOUTHERN GIRL
