More music history and biography
I occasionally review books on the history of rock and roll music. After reaching a critical mass of reviews, I periodically post a recap on the subject. This is the third of such “omnibus” posts, the prior installments being Rock and Roll (Auto)biographies and Rock and Roll, Part 2. Highlights of the past have included memoirs by Bobby Womack, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young, oral histories of Warren Zevon and Sly and the Family Stone, and a biography of session man Nicky Hopkins. Below are ten new selections reviewed by Old Books by Dead Guys over roughly the past year and a half. Click on the titles below to read the full reviews.
Tom Petty’s lifelong guitarist Mike Campbell presents this candid account of his career as one of rock’s greatest sidemen. The story of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (and their earlier bar band, Mudcrutch) is an engaging rags to riches tale, and as Campbell tells it here, they wore rags for a long time before the riches showed up. Campbell also details his work as a sought-after session man and producer for other artists, including Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac, and Don Henley. Everything you'd want in a rock autobiography is here: every recording session, every touring milestone, every band personnel change, every interior personality conflict, and every record company business deal. Campbell’s humble and likable voice shines through in this very well-crafted narrative. This is one of the best rock memoirs I’ve ever read.Drums & Demons: The Tragic Journey of Jim Gordon by Joel Selvin (4.5 stars)
Jim Gordon was one of the top rock drummers of the 1970s. He was briefly a member of Derek and the Dominos and Traffic, but he was also a session musician on thousands of recordings by many other artists, including the Beach Boys, George Harrison, John Lennon, Steely Dan, the Everly Brothers, and even television theme songs. This book provides a fascinating look inside the career of an expert session man. Behind this great talent, however, there was a darker side to Jim Gordon. A longtime sufferer from undiagnosed schizophrenia, he eventually went insane, killed his mother, and died in prison. Gordon’s tragic downward slide into insanity is riveting, and veteran rock journalist Joel Selvin delivers a compassionate and moving account free of tabloid sensationalism.
John Hammond is a legend in the music industry. As a talent scout, record producer, and Columbia executive, he was one of the most influential trendsetters and tastemakers in 20th-century American music. Rock fans will know him as the man who discovered Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, but Hammond started decades earlier as a jazz impresario who helped launch the careers of Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, and Count Basie. Hammond was also instrumental in desegregating the music industry and also served on the board of the NAACP. Author Dunstan Prial delivers a well-researched, balanced, and comprehensive biography that really gives you a sense of the personality of the man behind the music.Why Bob Dylan Matters by Richard F. Thomas (3.5 stars)
An odd but interesting study of Dylan’s music by a professor of classics at Harvard University. Richard F. Thomas uses his prodigious knowledge of Dylan lyrics and classical (ancient Greek and Roman) texts to point out parrallels between the two. Focusing mostly on Dylan’s highly regarded work of the 1960s, his 1976 album Blood on the Tracks, and his late '90s and early 2000s renaissance, Thomas makes a reasonably convincing case that Dylan has drawn ideas and phrases from the works of Virgil, Ovid, and Homer and is somewhat obsessed with The Odyssey. Like most books of Dylanology, the depth of minutiae will be too much for casual readers, and not everyone is going to appreciate lengthy discussions of Cicero, Virgil, and Catullus.
Glyn Johns is one of the most highly respected record producers and sound engineers in the history of rock. He worked with the Who, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Eric Clapton on albums like Who's Next, Abbey Road, Let It Bleed, Led Zeppelin I, and Slowhand. Johns gives the reader a whirlwind tour of his career, recalling recording sessions with a multitude of arts, from Rock and Roll Hall of Famers to obscure has-beens. This is primarily a music-business memoir about making records. There aren’t a lot of anecdotes here about rock stars’ personal lives, with the exception of the Rolling Stones. If you’re a classic rock fan, you’ll enjoy Johns’s perspective on the music biz of the ’60s and ’70s.
Sly Stone was a genius songwriter, musician, and record producer who changed the landscape of soul music. He was also kind of a scary character, with a drug problem that allegedly fueled a vindictive demeanor and violent tendencies. That’s the picture that his bandmates and colleagues give in Joel Selvin’s book Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History. Here, Sly has the chance to set the record straight, if indeed it needs to be straightened, but he mostly glosses over all the negative stuff and focuses on upbeat anecdotes about recording sessions and talk show appearances. The text, written in the hip conversational voice of Sly, is fun to read, but you don’t end up liking the guy.
British rock journalist Philip Norman provides an overview of Clapton’s life, but it’s not particularly well done or pleasant to read. It focuses heavily on Clapton’s early career and doesn’t cover much after about 1986. Because Norman is known as somewhat of an expert on the Beatles, nearly half of this book is about the relationship between Clapton, George Harrison, and Pattie Boyd (the woman who married them both). Norman has nothing good to say about Clapton in this book and seems to enjoy digging up dirt on him, so it’s a book about a not very nice guy written by someone who doesn’t like him. Sound like fun? You’d be better off just reading Clapton’s autobiography. It gives you a better understanding of the man and his music.
Minneapolis post-punk band Hüsker Dü never became a household name on the level of Nirvana, but they had a profound influence on all alternative rock that followed in their footsteps. Author Andrew Earles is so awed by this influence that he would rather write about all the bands that learned from Hüsker Dü rather than concentrate on a biography of the band itself. This book is more of a music-business narrative about recording, touring, and selling records, with little information about the personal lives of the band members. Earle also digresses into stories about every obscure band of the Minneapolis scene. Drummer Grant Hart and bassist Greg Norton participated in interviews for this book, while guitarist Bob Mould did not.
Clinton Heylin has written at least a dozen books on Bob Dylan, but does he even like his music? He certainly doesn’t like the period he’s writing about in this book: Dylan’s three gospel albums from 1979 to 1981—Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love—and the tours that followed them. Heylin has assembled a detailed chronology of events from this period, much of it too trivial for all but the most diehard of Dylan fans. I like this period in Dylan’s music, so I liked learning more about it, but I couldn’t stand Heylin’s snarky, pompous attitude and the way he denigrated Dylan throughout the book. The artist and this work deserve more respect and consideration. Read Scott Marshall’s Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life instead.
Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema by Odie Henderson (4.5 stars)
This is actually a film book, but if you know anything about the Blaxploitation genre you know that the music made to accompany these films was some of the best soul and funk music of the 1970s. Maybe about 15% of this book is about the music, discussing soundtracks and scores by such artists as Isaac Hayes (Shaft), Curtis Mayfield (Super Fly), Marvin Gaye (Trouble Man), James Brown (Black Caesar), Willie Hutch (The Mack), Bobby Womack and J. J. Johnson (Across 110th Street), Roy Ayers (Coffy), the Staples Singers (Let’s Do It Again), The Impressions (Three the Hard Way), and more.
This is actually a film book, but if you know anything about the Blaxploitation genre you know that the music made to accompany these films was some of the best soul and funk music of the 1970s. Maybe about 15% of this book is about the music, discussing soundtracks and scores by such artists as Isaac Hayes (Shaft), Curtis Mayfield (Super Fly), Marvin Gaye (Trouble Man), James Brown (Black Caesar), Willie Hutch (The Mack), Bobby Womack and J. J. Johnson (Across 110th Street), Roy Ayers (Coffy), the Staples Singers (Let’s Do It Again), The Impressions (Three the Hard Way), and more.
