I’ve been back at the books recently, after finally putting my annual re-reads of classic fantasy series aside.  I scored a good half dozen interesting music books off the clearance rack at Half Price Books and have been slowly making my way through them.  The first two actually represented the yin and yang of fanboy approaches and I decided it made sense to compare and contrast the two.

The first of the two books is Ashley Kahn’s The House That Trane Built: the Story of Impulse Records .  As you can guess, the book explores the history of Impulse Records, an imprint of ABC Records that began releasing albums in the early ’60s.  Most jazz fans, me included, consider Impulse to pretty much be “The House That Trane Built”, because the predominance of jazz saxophone legend John Coltrane’s catalogue was and continues to be released on Impulse.  I have had many an orange/black spine in my CD and vinyl collection over the years and, with the exception of the odd Pharoah Sanders, Keith Jarrett and Diana Krahl release, they have been Coltrane releases.  A Love Supreme, Africa/Brass, Live At the Village Vanguard, Sun Ship, Ballads, etc.  All Coltrane, all Impulse.

I found this book fascinating because I knew the Coltrane side of Impulse, but did not know that Impulse released a few rock records, some bizarre bossa nova and period piece releases, pretty much invented the gatefold album package and survived several label buyouts to continue releasing jazz albums to this day.  It largely tells the story of the two men most associated with the label, executive producers Creed Taylor and Bob Thiele.  I did not know that Creed, who had later success in the ’70s fusion era with his own CTI label releasing jazz-fusion/soul jazz covers of pop and R&B hits for George Benson, Joe Fariss, Stanley Turentine and many others, had cut his teeth with the advent of Impulse.  I knew Thiele was pretty much the house producer for Impulse but did not know that he was a player and had cut a few sides under aliases for Impulse over the years.  I also did not know that Alice Coltrane, John’s widow and last pianist, had begun releasing Coltrane archival material on her indie label prior to Impulse finessing its way back into the Coltrane stable.  And above all, the coolest part of this book are the 1-2 page in-depth analyses of pivotal Impulse releases.  And while you’d think most of them are Coltrane’s, you’d be surprised to find out most of them are for non-Coltrane related releases.  Comes with an annotated discography.  This book really inspired me to explore the Impulse catalogue online.

It makes perfect sense that Kahn would be the one to write such a book.  He first made his mark with an in-depth history of Coltrane’s 1965 masterpiece, A Love Supreme.  I have read that book and had the fortune of interviewing Kahn in connection to the release of that book for a short radio piece I did on the 40th anniversary of the album’s release.  I know for fact that Ashley Kahn is completely obsessed with jazz history and has devoted loving care and detail to his work.  You can read it in the language he chooses and the detail in which he researched the book and chose to present the material.  It’s reverential but not blindly so.  It’s definitely a good read for Coltrane fanboys as well as folks who are interested in the natural progression of post-bop jazz towards free jazz and the avant-garde.

On the flipside of such an approach you get Salon.com contributor Mark Simpson and his Saint Morrissey: A Portrait of This Charming Man By an Alarming Fan.  Well, alarming is right.  There is far more about the author in this book than there is about the subject.  That is not necessarily always a bad thing.  Nick Hornby has taken that approach in a handful of non-fiction books to stunning effect, and Chuck Klosterman is probably the current king of asserting his life and philosophy through music criticism.  Mark Simpson would love to be considered as a part of that group, but his writing is not of that caliber and, sadly, his approach is far more cloying than it is revealing.

I was really disappointed because I really don’t know that much about The Smiths’ origins.  Sure, I know the story of how average punk punter Steven Morrissey somehow made the leap from 1977 punk concertgoer and NY Dolls fanclub president to semi-androgynous frightening literal and deep frontman for one of the most innovative rock bands of the 1980′s.  What happened in-between those stages to turn that caterpillar into a charming butterfly?  Simpson doesn’t care, he’d rather tell you stories about how he made his dole payments stretch to maximum length.  It is not difficult to ascertain how much Morrissey’s work with The Smiths and on his own made such an indelible impact on the author, but it is difficult to obtain any sort of singularity of perspective.  Everything Simpson writes about his obsession he does completely through his lens.

And there’s where the difference lies.  Ashley Kahn cares as much about his subject matter as Simpson does.  Whereas the latter goes for a Generation X narrative approach (and fails, in my opinion), the former prefers to let brief moments of his fanboy gushing peek through occasionally rather than color his entire treatise.  Simpson exercises form over function, and would probably have been better off limiting this book to blog entries.  Probably one of the biggest wastes of $3 for me this year.  The Kahn book, however, was quite marvelous and highly recommended.

My family is awesome.  Rather than buy me a tie or something whack like that for Father’s Day I instead get music geek books, such as Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon  and the Journey of a Generation.

So when the family presented this book to me I freaked out a little.  The book looked fascinating to me.  I am a big Joni Mitchell fan and I count her 1976 album Hejira as easily one of my Top Ten Albums of All Time.  Although I love her music I have never read a biography of her life or a serious study of her music.  So not only would I get that information but I would also gain a perspective on all three performers at once.  I had some prior knowledge of Carole King, her history as a Brill Building songwriter in the early ’60s and her massively-huge Tapestry album, but I knew little of her life.  And I knew far less about Carly Simon, other than that she has a big sensual mouth and wrote a kiss-off song to Mick Jagger in “You’re So Vain” (turns out I was wrong – this one’s for Warren Beatty).  So…three for the price of one!

This book is thorough.  Lots of interviews with important people in these three ladies’ lives, as well as contextual archival interview material.  I learned a lot about how all three ladies grew up, how they weathered the ’60s and how all three contrived their personal experience at a new time for women into their music.  Weller writes that most women in the ’70s had no access to psychotherapy and, quoting an unnamed fan, that these ladies’ music was like “Prozac for us”.  It is under the context of feminism and popular culture that Weller writes.  That’s interesting to me to an extent.  I also want to know more about the nuts and bolts of how these ladies came to make the music itself, why they chose the sound they did.  Weller does not delve into that aspect hardly at all, preferring to make a sociological statement with the book.  Since I knew little to nothing about Carole King and Carly Simon I can say that I enjoyed her coverage of their lives and art.  As a Joni fan there was a lot to be desired.

Weller makes a big deal in the book about how inspiring Joni Mitchell’s confessional songwriting was to women who were tiptoeing their way through the sexual revolution, it’s idiosyncracies, ironies and the aftermath.  Musically, Joni married this highly personal method of songwriting with bare-bones backing, usually delivered with only voice and either piano or guitar.  As the ’70s progressed Joni’s musical approach began to become more complicated harmonically and Joni began to record with a band.  Joni could not find rock musicians who could follow her music so she instead mined for jazz-fusion players.  Pretty much from 1974 on her albums largely ignored the acoustic singer-songwriter base she debuted from.  And at about the same time Joni began to write story songs and reveal less and less about herself, preferring instead of turning her mirror outward for her life to be a reflection on the life of the Everywoman to turn her gaze towards the creation of characters.  The songwriting is no less personal, it is just not obviously so.  And the music certainly became more challenging.

It is at this point in Joni’s discography that I entered.  There is a similar minimalism to Hejira that is found in Joni’s early work.  Joni then preferred to work with slightly-phased multi-tracked electric guitars, hand percussion and the fluid, eerie contrapuntal fretless basswork of Jaco Pastorius.  It is rumored that Roland invented the chorus pedal for Joni when she asked for a way to reproduce the sound of overdubbed electrics live with one guitar.  Hejira‘s songwriting is completely confessional.  It is with the albums that immediately preceded and followed it that Joni largely announced that she intended to go elsewhere. 

I guess it is because I got a weiner and I’m a music dude that I don’t really care about Joni’s status as the 1970′s Everywoman.  I find her jazz-infused work from 1975-1978 to be highly interesting and poigniant.  The message, if there is one, really isn’t meant for me.  I think that, like Dylan & his protest songs before her, Joni largely wore out on draining her diary every time she recorded an album.  The operable quote (I paraphrase) is “You’re going to hang me if I continue to do the same thing for playing it safe and coasting, and you’ll hang me if I go out exploring new territory.  I’d rather be hung for pleasing myself than pleasing you”.  Word.  Weller at this point pretty much dismisses Mitchell’s work as tangential to her earlier more-important work.  I could not disagree more.  Of course, Weller has an agenda and she’s trying to shoehorn Joni into the same category as Simon and King and for the most part Joni’s music can fit into that mold.  It is when she stepped out that I and most music nerds think she really began to fluorish.  It is sad that Weller really can’t hear that for being too busy trying to tie music to sociology.  Sometimes music is just music and not a cultural force.

A very good and thought-provoking read.  Thanks to the family for getting this one for me.

Yet another book from the Half Price Books stash, another one that I probably would never have read were it not for the ridiculously low price.  I mean, not because I don’t dig on Roxy Music because I do, but mainly because I’m like every other rock snob and my love for the band pretty much ends after the departure of Brian Eno. 

I guess I should start with my RM history.  My freshman year of college I bought a box of records from one of my college professors at a garage sale and it included Avalon, the Roxy’s final studio album.  I’d heard so much about how awesome and, well, bizarre their albums were and I was completely underwhelmed by Avalon.  By later in the decade I’d discovered the incredible off-kilter glam pop solo albums of former Roxy synthesist Brian Eno which eventually lead me to the first three Roxy Music albums, which are generally agreed upon as essential listening.

Roxy Music’s first three albums are so strange.  Kinda glam, kinda rock & roll, kinda soul, kinda avant-garde, kinda chamber pop kinda arty prog…so many feet in so many camps that the music belongs to all and none.  The delight of oboe and VCS-3 alongside propulsive rock drums, brash rock guitar and a singer who managed to make singing off-key cool.  Roxy were a unique band, and author David Buckley tries hard not only to describe the beginnings of the band, its long journey through climactic personnel changes and the like, but he also goes into insane detail about the life of Roxy singer Brian Ferry.

Well, I would’ve preferred the book had included more about Brian Eno, who has arguably become one of the most important contributors to interesting rock music since his Roxy days, either as a solo pop artist, originator of ambient music (both by hisself and as a collaborator with King Crimson’s Robert Fripp) or definitely for his work as a record producer.  Artists as diverse as Television, the NYC no wave bands, Talking Heads, U2, and Coldplay have benefitted from Eno’s touch.  Of course, the book would have a different title were that the case.  But I at least learned more of the biography of Ferry and why I should never attempt to listen to any of his solo albums (although I do have access to his 2nd album since my wife Sarah has it and had at one point a crush on Ferry). 

I’d say fair enough for $3.  And I leave you with probably my favorite Roxy song, “Sea Breezes” from their debut self-titled album.

The Beatles are probably the most written-about musicians/composers of all time.  I’ve read my fair share, from the official Anthology through sociological studies, Abbey Road studio logs, Beatles as genesis of the bootleg industry, etc.  Recently I had the chance to compare and contrast three different points of view, from the Beatles’ recording engineer, publicist/errand boy, and Beatle wife/murderer.

It’s Geoff Emerick’s Here there and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of The Beatles vs. Tony Bramwell’s Magical Mystery Tours: My Life With The Beatles and Yoko Ono’s Memories of John Lennon.

We’ll start with Geoff Emerick.  Geoff began engineering for EMI at Abbey Road Studios in the early ’60s while he was still in high school.  For the first few years he was rarely involved directly with The Beatles but by Revolver Emerick was The Beatles’ full-time engineer.  Emerick tells a very familiar tale of experimentation, drug excess then Yoko-fueled emnity.  Emerick also goes on to tell interesting stories about working for Apple after The Beatles broke up (I didn’t realize the company kept running well into the ’70s), building Apple’s studio and traveling to Laos to help Paul McCartney record Band On the Run.

It is Paul that we learn more about with Emerick’s book, as like every other person on the planet, even Emerick had his favorite Beatle.  Emerick reinforces previous stereotypes of Paul as the nice one, John as the artiste, George as the brooder and Ringo as the clown.  Emerick spends as much time picking on George as he does lauding Paul, and that’s a relatively different approach.  Emerick reveals that apparently George was sullen, mean and a hack guitar player.  And of course Emerick hates Yoko and has a lot of respect for George Martin.  Meh.

I was really hoping to learn more about how Emerick recorded The Beatles.  You get a very little bit of it early on in the book, but nearly as much as what can be gleened between the lines of The Complete Beatles Abbey Road Studio Logs.

Tony Bramwell grew up with The Beatles in Liverpool and was friendly with them before they even became a band.  Tony’s memoir of his time with them pre-Beatles, working for Beatles manager Brian Epstein and Apple, and as an independent record promoter in the ’70s and ’80s, reads with fond memories, regrets and an insight on the inside of The Beatles machine that I’ve not read elsewhere. 

Tony’s written voice is jovial, intelligent and wickedly humorous.  You get the feeling of what it was like to hang out at that period, the unreal nature of superstardom and how it all went wrong.  You learn more about The Beatles’ private lives, the stuff that went on behind the scenes, the girlfriends, the wives, etc.  What I found most valuable about this book is Tony’s birdseye view of the process of John Lennon shedding one wife (Cynthia, the mother of Julian) for another (Yoko, the mother of Sean).  Most Beatles coverage glosses over John’s first marriage, and his first wife has never really gone public with her side of things.  Tony tells a lot of the tale for her, and it is one that I had not really heard before.

Cynthia and John Lennon married because he knocked her up with Julian.  Because the band were on the verge of breaking big (this was 1963) manager Brian Epstein buried the news of the nuptials and attempted to keep it hidden.  Lennon didn’t want to be married really anyways, so he spends four years avoiding his wife, leaving her in cramped hovels while he lived high on the hog, sleeping with groupies and generally having a good time while Cynthia was at home with Julian.  We also learn a different side of Yoko Ono.  Sure, she might be the world’s most reviled woman (after Eve) but I had never heard that Ono carefully stalked John Lennon for years before the two became an item.  Stalking meaning even breaking into his home, sending Cynthia strange threatening letters and packages, and generally freaking John Lennon out, who at first was annoyed by Yoko Ono and avoided her at all costs.  Eventually he wore down and became interested in Yoko and we know the rest of that story.  It was the origins of that relationship and the history and break-up of the previous marriage that was truly eye-opening.

Of course, Bramwell goes a little overboard at times slagging Yoko.  He doesn’t really get what’s artistic about her and spends many words ripping her art apart.  I don’t really understand what was so special about her brand of avant garde art either but I respect it.  Bramwell does not.

Liek Emerick, Bramwell’s favorite Beatle is Paul but he apparently got on with them all and was especially close early on with John and George.  John in particular was Bramwell’s best drinking buddy in the swinging London days of Beatlemania before Yoko came along.  Bramwell doesn’t understand the irony of lamenting how Lennon treated his first wife while bragging about drinking London dry at night with Lennon while his wife is left at home.

His other stories about Vangelis, Phil Spector, the many beautiful women he shagged, etc. is also of interest too and are occasionally humorus.  Some of his stories about Keith Moon are laugh-out-loud funny.  This was definitely the most pleasurable of the three to read.

Then you get Memories of John Lennon, a collection of celebrity remembrances of John Lennon, edited by Yoko Ono.  You get a lot of material from photographers and handlers from the early days of The Beatles and Astrid Kircher, then you jump to folks that either lived at The Dakota with John and Yoko or assisted them or protested with them and a few contemporary artists talking about the music.  And nothing in-between.  I’m assuming anything that would possibly be critical of Yoko would’ve been edited out by Yoko herself.  You do get a lot about the undying love between John and Yoko, a surprising amount of crossover material from The U.S. Vs. John Lennon detailing some of the CIA’s investigation into Lennon’s doings during the Nixon presidency.  

Some of the memories, like those of Alicia Keys and her mom (who knew the Lennons socially) were kinda useless.  Jello Biafra’s surprisingly tender entry was the highlight of this otherwise kinda boring wasteful read. 

Still, it was really interesting to read these three books back-to-back to see a story that has been drilled into me since birth pretty much.  It’s like anything else in history.  What you read about it really depends on who wrote the history.

Once again, while trolling the clearance rack at Half Price Books, I stumbled upon a fascinating read, courtesy of former Vanity Fair writer Fredric Dannen.  The book is entitled Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business and, although the book was first published nearly 20 years ago, I found it oddly resonant to the contemporary music business.

First off, a little background about yer humble reviewer.  Since 1991 I have been either an employee of or a volunteer at some manner of radio station.  From 1997 – 2006 it was a professional avocation.  I discovered upfront that payola still exists and to what extent the spurious relationship between record labels, record promoters and radio station program directors can be hidden behind giveaway promotions and the like.  As an assistant music director at a top market Hot AC station I saw those promotions firsthand.  “Look, we know this new R.E.M. record is a stiff but we really need to get some adds.  Oh yeah, and we’ve got that dozen all expense paid trips to Cozumel for ya too.”  No direct money these days is exchanged between record people and DJ’s, mainly because it would be wasted.  Commercial DJ’s cannot play what they want (well, only if they disguise it as a request).  The PD and MD have all the power.  In most smaller market stations the same person usually does both jobs.

What is so compelling about Hit Men is that the story of radio promotion is chronicled in-depth.  Some of the independent record promoters I met in Seattle, the ones who had been in the game for 20+ years, were indirectly written about in this book.  Stories of mob involvement, spurious investments, questionable ethics, etc.  We’ve known for years the music biz was/is crooked, and Dannen proves it.  Dannen starts with the wild ’50s and tells the tale of Alan Freed and Dick Clark, among others (I had no idea American Bandstand grandstander Clark was just as crooked as Freed but his clean image enabled him to wiggle out).  Dannen tells the story of how the major label conglomerates were built in the ’70s, the rise/fall/rise of Clive Davis, David Geffen, Mo Ostin, Irv Azoff and other industry players. 

Mostly, Dannen uses the metaphor of independent record promotion as the overall corrupting factor in the music business.  Record labels would be these contractors millions of dollars to “work” records to radio station PD’s.  The quote (I’m paraphrasing) is that the “indies” could not guarantee you a hit, but if you didn’t use them then they could guarantee a flop.  Basically legalized extortion.  Although the larger promoters were either brought down by the Feds (not on payola charges but racketeering or tax evasion) independent record promotion continues to this day, though the current financial state of the record industry and the waning of radio has decreased the expenditures.

It really was an eye-opening read.  I thought I knew all about the extent of criminality and unethical business practices of the record biz.  What with the RIAA suing grandmas over downloading and such.  Hit Men helped to give it all an historical context.  A must-read for anyone remotely interested in the music business.