81. NME Guide to Rock Cinema (Fred Dellar)
82. The Encyclopedia of Rock 3 (edited by Phil Hardy and Dave Laing)
83. Bob Dylan, Don’t Look Back (”A Film and Book by D. A. Pennebaker”)
84. Bob Dylan (Daniel Kramer)
85. The Q/Omnibus Press Rock ‘n’ Roll Reader (edited by Danny Kelly)
86. Babel (Patti Smith)
87. Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga (Stephen Davis)
88. Disco Fever: The Beat, People, Places, Styles, Deejays, Groups (Kitty Hanson)
89. The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (Stanley Booth)

A stack of paperbacks, from a wall shelf above the brown leather sofa in our living room…

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Post-spring cleaning edition

Still a lot more shelves to cover, but I wanted to track this particular batch of titles now as they are being readied for the storage area. Shelf space is at a real premium these days, and though I wouldn’t even consider unloading any of the following titles, they are — for the most part — things I just can’t imagine needing within arms reach anytime too soon. A decision I’ll no doubt regret as soon as they are placed under lock and key.

59. Bob Dylan and the Beatles (Vol. 1 of the best of the Blacklisted Journalist) (Al Aronowitz) - Sprawling, some would say indulgent, memoir/compilation from a guy who I think can lay legitimate claim to being the first reputable rock journalist (his lengthy 1964 profile of the fab four from The Saturday Evening Post is a centerpiece here). Also known as the man who introduced Dylan to the Beatles and the Beatles to weed, an anecdote you are reminded of frequently. If it was me I’d repeat that tale endlessly also.

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58. Top Pop Singles, 1955-2006 (Joel Whitburn/Billboard) - Back in an earlier entry of the bookshelf I called the 1992 edition of The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits (Whitburn) my “most consulted book of all-time.” Pretty sure I wasn’t exaggerating, but this latest Whitburn opus, just received through the mail, is bound to replace it. In truth, it’s the Billboard book I’ve long craved: artist and song listings of every Top 100 chart entry, 1,176 pages of sheer geek-overload useless-data freakout.

Stupid fact of the day I’ve already learned: Between 1955 and 2006, there have been eight charted songs with “number one” in the title: “#1″ (Nelly); “Number One” (Pharrell w/Kanye West); “Number One” (Eloise Laws); “#1 Crush” (Garbage); “#1 Deejay” (Goody Goody); “Number One Man” (Bruce Channel); “Number One Spot” (Ludacris); “Number One Street” (Bob Corley). Of these, only one (Nelly) has actually made it to #1. Also, did you know that John Lennon’s “#9 Dream” made it as high as — duh — number nine?

See what I mean?

57. Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (John Gennari) - Just a lone title this time around, as it’s still fairly fresh in the brain. An exhaustive (at least as far as I can tell — someone more knowledgeable on the subject might say otherwise) history of jazz criticism featuring richly drawn portraits of the leading jazz critics of the last 80 years or so, including Leonard Feather, Nat Hentoff, Stanley Crouch, Gary Giddins, Amiri Baraka, Martin Williams, Greg Tate, and several others. It’s more than that, however. The material is pretty evenly divided between stories about the critics themselves and what I would call (in very general terms) the jazz conversation: i.e., the competing schools of thought, the generational shifts in style (and inevitable gaps in acceptance), the sometimes raging arguments over the history, authenticity, and value of various jazz icons and sub-genres, and — perhaps most deeply — the unavoidably thorny racial dynamic between a music that is (primarily) black and critics of said music who have been (primarily) white. As someone only vaguely familiar with a few of the critics profiled (Crouch, Giddins, Hentoff) and not at all familiar with the vast majority of the others, I definitely appreciated the author’s non-judgmental tone. Not that I’d by any means call Gennari a passive observer — he’s got a keen bullshit detector for political posturing, and reponds to various displays of authenticity-mongering with a slight wince — but he clearly respects the overlapping and oft-competing dialogues, and crucially, he lets the sayers have their say and he never steps in too soon to quash an entertaining dust-up (the book strikes me as scrupulously fair-minded, though again, I’m not exactly the best person to judge that). Like a lot of great music books, this one sent me on a search mission for various recordings; just as important, it convinced me to order up a number of titles from the library, so anxious was I afterwards to read more by Martin Williams (The Jazz Tradition), A.B. Spellman (Four Lives in the Bebop Business), Jones/Baraka (Black Music), Giddins, Hentoff, et al. More books than ever to read, less time than ever to absorb them all.

The more the merrier, I say. (C’mon, folks, get out your digital cameras now…)

49. & 50. The Age of Rock: Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution & The Age of Rock 2: Sights and Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution (both edited by Jonathan Eisen) - Probably the first semi-reputable greatest hits collections of (mostly but not exclusively American) rock criticism, published in ‘69 and ‘70 respectively. While both have their share of uninteresting (occasionally unreadable) blather, there’s enough of interest in each volume to make these keepers: Meltzer (who is “interviewed by” A. Warhol in one great piece), Jon Landau, Stanley Booth, Toms Wolfe and Smucker, Lenny Kaye, and a few others. Make no mistake, the blather here outweighs the interesting by a wide margin — just as it does in most rock criticism from this era (if you want to talk about a “golden age” I think you need to leap a decade or so ahead) — but I nonetheless find the slightly schizo tone of these tomes kind of fascinating in their over-reach and haphazardness, the markings of a genuinely brave spirit at least in their (I suppose in Jonathan Eisen’s) willingness to allow in the front door all sorts of fucking around with form and ideas. Never mind that such “bravery” may simply have been an acid-besotted inability to separate the readable from the utter dreck… oh well. The pictures do suck, however.

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43. The Liberation of Sound: An Introduction to Electronic Music (Herbert Russcol) - Paid a dollar for this 1972 hardcover at a library blowout sale, back when I was buying any and every music book that held even a modicum of interest. In fact, it’s a pretty great find. Have mostly just skimmed it, but from what I can tell it’s a fairly comprehensive history, published at a time when “electronic music” was largely just shorthand for musical eggheads messing around with tape recorders and scales, when “futuristic” meant not Emerson, Wakeman, and Schneider but Varese, Cage, Stockhausen, et al. (the only pop act I see listed in the index is — big surprise — the Beatles). Comes with listening recommendations, a glossary, timelines, some great photos, etc… quite pleased to own this… Etcetera: The Amazon page for this title has one lonely but positive customer review.

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Trudging along with this feature, ever so slowly…

36. Songs They Never Play on the Radio: Nico, the Last Bohemian (James Young) - Another one in the haven’t-read-it-but-would-like-to pile. From what I gather it’s a tour diary (written by the guy who played keyboards with Nico throughout the ’80s) with many episodes of wanton drug use. Truthfully, not really my idea of a good time. And yet… every review I’ve read suggests that it’s much more intelligent than my no doubt reductive encapsulation suggests.

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30. Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana (Gina Arnold) - The gap between my enjoyment of Nirvana’s music and my disinterest in reading about them is more pronounced than it is with just about any other major pop/rock artist I can think of. I can’t really explain this gap aside from admitting I’m just being an unreasonable, stubborn bastard on the matter. I do have a vague sense that, back when they stalked the earth, there was an awful lot of nonsense written about them, and that the nonsense increased exponentially after April 1994. Can I point to anything specific to prove my case? Not really — like I say, it’s just a vague sense. I think part of it stems from the fact that the whole Seattle moment was one of the few genuine pop explosions of my lifetime that I not only didn’t feel part of, but in fact felt a little alienated by (though not alienated enough to prevent me from hearing the music). I wouldn’t say I felt any particular animus towards it — well, maybe a little bit towards goatees - I just never felt like this scene was mine, nor did I want it to be mine. If I was left out, that was fine; I didn’t really want “in.”

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25. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock ‘n’ Roll (Simon Frith) - Aka The Sociology of Rock. One of the first books of rock criticism I tried to read, ”tried” being the operative word in this case. Frith’s prose just never grabbed me here, never led me into thinking (or caring) about his ideas . That said, I’m uncomfortable with the assumption in Christgau’s headline for his review of this book: ”It’s Barely Rock and Roll, But I Like It.” Uncomfortable, that is, with the idea that a book about rock and roll has to read like rock and roll, uncomfortable with the underlying assumptions about what such a formulation even means (it must be loud? forceful? in-your-face?). Weird thought coming from Christgau, given that he probably has a wider definition of “rock and roll” than just about anyone. (He nails my disinterest with the book much better when he says it “isn’t romantic enough.” Maybe that’s what his headline means??) As I mentioned in a previous entry, I do like Performing Rites quite a bit, and I’m guessing that stylistically the books aren’t really that different.  Maybe the slyness –the Drifters, if not the Stooges — in Frith’s voice just comes  through a little better in the later book?

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