Via the Music Press Report, Mark Rotella at Publisher’s Weekly provides an excellent rundown of a number of music books hitting stores soon, with the emphasis on biographies and personal memoir type of reads (the latter following somewhat in the vein of recent books by Klosterman, Hornby, Sheffield, et al.). Not a lot of actual music criticism that I can detect, but an almost staggering list of titles regardless, some intriguing, some too frightening to ponder (Gene Simmons… shudder). (Note to Rotella, though: Grandmaster Flash wasn’t in Run-D.M.C.; nor for that matter is he a “rapper.”)
RockCritics.com 
Rotella’s title, “Music As Memoir,” is somewhat misleading. A lot of the titles he brings up are just straight bios (e.g. the Willie Nelson book, which by the way is phenomenal). And in the case of the Stones tribute band book “Like A Rolling Stone,” while author Kurutz does discuss his feelings towards these poor chumps and has a few tangents where he goes off on his own to see actual Stones concerts, it’s basically an expanded reporting job and in no sense a genuine memoir (BTW, I enjoyed that book despite getting a nagging creepy feeling at times… tribute bands in general give me the creeps.)
Tell ya what, though — if you want to read a REAL FUGGIN ROCK MEMOIR, as opposed to some dumbass guitarist’s half-remembered yarns of snorting coke from between stripper’s tits, check out Mike Edison’s new “I Have Fun Everywhere I Go: Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World.” It puts the “g” back in “gonzo” (not to mention “G.G. Allin,” for whom Edison, of Sharky’s Machine and Edison Rocket Train fame, toured with some). Hand’s down the best book I’ve read all year.
Here’s the Amazon link: