Category Archives: Book

Record Store Days – The Book

Posted on by Musicofourheart

Record Store Day 2013 is two weeks from today, Saturday April 20th. I still haven’t figured out where I will be shopping on that day. But I’m working on it ;)

Record Store Days jacket

I purchased the book, Record Store Days, written by Gary Calamar and Phil Gallo to celebrate the upcoming semi-annual treasure hunt. The book underlines a major passion of mine, it’s written by record collector enthusiasts for vinyl lovers everywhere. The book tells the story of the development of record stores which has become a threatened species.

Peter Buck of R.E.M. fame wrote the foreword where he shares with us his history of working at record stores. He met Michael Stipe while working at Wuxtry Records in Athen, Georgia and they each discovered they were looking to form a band.  His favorite record stores are in Seattle, Washington, most notably Easy Street Records which I have yet to frequent but plan to next time we visit Seattle. May that be soon :)

The book is a delightful read. We learn about the origin of record stores and the brave owners who built them. Its well illustrated with 150 photographs of record stores, owners, consumers, and artists.

There is text dedicated to Russ Solomon and Tower Records. I made a special point of visiting Tower Records on Sunset Strip, Hollywood, California in 1978. I was managing the record department at Caldors a discount department store chain in Stamford, Ct. in those days.

Ameoba Music is also featured in the book. I went to Ameoba Music in Hollywood on my birthday a couple of years back .It’s the world’s largest independent music store I found it a cavernous store with a sea of product to choose from and I loved being overwhelmed like that as a music collector.

There is a chapter dedicated to in-store appearances which I get to on occasion. I saw Los Lobos perform an in-store at Tower Records in the Village when The Ride was released in 2004. They performed on the street level of the store that day and then did a signing on the second floor walk up. I always find Los Lobos to be very accommodating to their fans.

All in all this is a cool, fun book that I plan to finish before Record Store Day 2013 ;)

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The Rewarding Influence of Richard Hell

Posted on by Musicofourheart

Last month I wrote an extensive A-Z music journalist series. The tree of music journalism I planted continues to harvest fruit.

I commenced InterWeb reading this morning with Robert Christgau’s Barnes and Noble Review column Rock & Roll &. I was rewarded with a thought-provoking essay about Richard Hell’s new book, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp.

The more I dug into Richard Hell, Television, his (s)exploits and writing prowess the more intrigued I became.

I have tried to find  copy of the book at my local Barnes & Noble Stores so I can give you a closer perspective but no luck thus far.

I add this book to my ever-increasing music book reading list.

There is a tie-in event with Richard Hell, Fashion and Punk that I also want to share with you. The exhibit takes place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art May 9-August 14, 2013.

PUNK: Chaos to Couture will examine punk’s impact on high fashion from the movement’s birth in the early 1970s through its continuing influence today. Featuring approximately one hundred designs for men and women, the exhibition will include original punk garments and recent, directional fashion to illustrate how haute couture and ready-to-wear borrow punk’s visual symbols.

Focusing on the relationship between the punk concept of “do-it-yourself” and the couture concept of “made-to-measure,” the seven galleries will be organized around the materials, techniques, and embellishments associated with the anti-establishment style. Themes will include New York and London, which will tell punk’s origin story as a tale of two cities, followed by Clothes for Heroes and four manifestations of the D.I.Y. aesthetic—Hardware, Bricolage, Graffiti and Agitprop, and Destroy.

Presented as an immersive multimedia, multisensory experience, the clothes will be animated with period music videos and soundscaping audio techniques. - Description Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art 2013

A book, Punk: Chaos to Couture, by Andrew Bolton, with an introduction by Jon Savage, and prefaces by Richard Hell and John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols), will accompany the exhibition. This publication will be illustrated with photographs of vintage punks and high fashion. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the $45 catalogue (hard cover only) will be distributed worldwide by Yale University Press.

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John Densmore, The Doors: Unhinged and Record Store Day 2013

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I was looking on The Record Store Day Website for The List 2013 when I found something much more valuable.  John Densmore, drummer for The Doors has written and self-published a new book, The Doors: Unhinged, available on April 17, 2013 (CreateSpace and Kindle Direct). There will be a special hardcover edition available  exclusively for sale at independent Record Store Day retailers, April 20, 2013.  John Densmore is conducting a book tour to be held at various record stores across the United States.

The book was self-published with Amazon’s CreateSpace an on-demand publishing platform. I am vehement about this distribution method of distribution. My plan is to self-publish a book this way in the future.

The premise of John Densmore’s book is the “greed gene”, and how that part of the human psyche propels us toward the accumulation of more and more wealth, even at the expense of our principles and friendships and the well-being of society. In effect no amount of money seems to be enough for even the wealthiest people.

This is an important societal characteristic to check. It’s at the heart of the Occupy movement which denotes the classic struggle between the haves and have-nots.

photo

I recall when John Densmore sued The Doors of the 21st Century. I was upset for the rift amongst The Doors. I had seen Ray Manzarek and Robbie Krieger twice live as that namesake band. I liked the moniker and how it felt to see them perform with Ian Astbury on vocals and Ty Dennis on drums. I originally sided with Ray and Robbie in the matter. But after closer examination of the issue and the understanding of honoring Jim Morrison’s wishes, I realized friendship and integrity trump greed.

I’ll am eager to read John Densmore’s interpretation of the lawsuit to get a better understanding about his sentiments and belief. The music press served as a “filter” for what transpired and I feel its best to read this from John’s point of view. I am hoping I can meet John Densmore at one of the record store tour events and get a signed copy of the hardcover edition.

The Record Store Day Official List was published on Wednesday March 20. You can find it here.

The Doors will once again have a Record Store Day Release Exclusive. A special 7″ release in the Warner “Side By Side” series. Side A is The Doors’ “Soul Kitchen” and Side B includes X’s cover of the song, produced by Ray Manzarek. This one is on milky clear colored vinyl and limited to 3000 copies,

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Greg Lake, Autobiography:Lucky Man & CD:Songs of a Lifetime

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Greg Lake has a wonderful voice with memorable inflection and hauntingly wonderful tonality. He is a vital vocal energy in the music of our heart.

Lucky Man – Autobiography

I keep discovering audio books to listen to which help pass time illuminated by the spoken word. Greg Lake is the midst of writing his autobiography ‘Lucky Man’ which is projected to be completed by the end of this year. As good fortune would have it you can buy Volume 1 of his book now as a USB guitar collectible (Click the image for ordering information). Greg Lake is our reader which adds a special intimacy to the listening/fan experience.

The daybreak is your midnight; the colors have all died. 
Disturbing the waters of our lives, of our lives, of our lives, lives, 
Lives, lives… 
Of our lives. – Greg Lake, “Take A Pebble“

Songs of a Lifetime

Greg Lake has released a live recording of his 2012 Songs of a Lifetime Tour. He is a sheer delight to witness in concert. You will be amazed when you hear him sing how you drift back to the time when King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer graced your stereo system. He typifies the feeling that you share with him in a concert hall in the quote below. We saw him a few years back with Keith Emerson at the Ridgefield Playhouse. It was a marvelous show and C’est La Vie was our highlight that evening.

The idea for the tour came about as Lake was writing his autobiography ‘Lucky Man,’ which is due toward the end of 2013. “Behind these songs there were often stories to be told and it occurred to me that the same must be true for the audience as well,” he says in a press release. “It was then that I thought of the idea of doing a series of very small intimate concerts where I could perform these songs and exchange stories with the audience, in a way reliving the time when the music we shared together really became part of our identity and in a way became the backdrop to our lives.”

View this tasty sample of one of Greg Lake’s “Songs of a Lifetime” tour concerts in this short video, filmed and edited by noted Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Archivist and Curator Tony Ortiz.

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Music Journalism A-Z – Scott Yanow

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Scott Yanow

Photo: Here's a picture of my sweetie Scott Yanow that I took today. This picture will be on the back cover of his new book, The Great Jazz Guitarists that will be coming out this spring! It's his 11th book.Scott Yanow is a prolific American jazz historian and journalist. He is known for his many contributions to the Allmusic Website (See Scott’s Biography and Desert Island selections). He has written ten books on jazz and produced extensive library of jazz recording reviews for over 30 years. He has also created over 600 liner notes for various record labels.

His CD reviews are found at LA Scene a monthly West Coast jazz paper.

Books

  • Jazz On Film
  • Duke Ellington
  • Swing
  • Bebop
  • Afro-Cuban Jazz, ISBN 0-87930-619-X (2000)
  • Trumpet Kings
  • Classic Jazz
  • Jazz: A Regional Exploration
  • Jazz On Record 1917-76

The talented Dutch photographer Jaap van de Klomp traveled the world taking beautiful photos of the graves of scores of jazz immortals. The pictures along with 180 jazz musician biographies became the book,  Jazz Lives – Till We Shall Meet And Never Part.

Charlie Parker

Scott’s 11th book, The Great Jazz Guitarists Publisher: Backbeat Books will be coming out very soon! Scheduled Release Date: 4/2/2013

The Great Jazz Guitarists

Music Journalism A-Z – Additional Authors

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I have looked high and low for a music journalist whose last name begins with X. I could not find anyone.

David Byrne speaking at the 2006 Future of Mus...

David Byrne speaking at the 2006 Future of Music Policy Summit hosted by the McGill University Schulich School of Music in Montreal, Canada (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So I decided to take this opportunity and go back through the alphabet of music journalists that I didn’t get to write about first time. I had some tough choices to make for the Music Journalism A-Z series when I decided I would only feature one music journalist by first letter of their last name.

There are many other music journalists that deserve major recognition for their accomplishments and invaluable insights.

The first music journalist I want to mention  is David Byrne. Most people freely associate him as a musician, songwriter, or as a visual artist. He writes a regular journal that I subscribe to,  David Byrne’s Journal. David Byrne is a technology leader who assuaged our collective consciousness. He articulates a much-needed voice  of expression for artistic intelligentsia. He has authored nine books to date.

  • True Stories (1986)
  • Strange Ritual, Chronicle Books (1995)
  • Your Action World (1999)
  • The New Sins (Los Nuevos Pecados) (2001)
  • David Byrne Asks You: What Is It? Smart Art Press (2002)
  • Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information with DVD (2003)
  • Arboretum, (2006)
  • Bicycle Diaries (2009)
  • How Music Works (2012)

The letter C proved challenging as there were two other music journalists of renown I wanted to write about, Robert Christgau and Nate Chinen.

Christgau is the cornerstone of music criticism and his Consumer Guide has helped me purchase  fantastic recordings over the decades.

Nate Chinen constantly turns me on to new jazz sources via his blog and music reviews in the New York Times.

English: on the

English: on the “Music in the ’00s” panel, 2010 Pop Conference, EMPSFM, Seattle, Washington. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The next music journalist I wanted to circle back to is David Fricke, Senior Editor at Rolling Stone. He authors the “Fricke’s Picks” column in the Rolling Stone record review section.

He is responsible for the 100 Greatest Guitarists Of All Time special edition issue and column that gets a lot of views on my music blog post as a two-part series that I wrote about last year.

The letter G had several music journalists I could have also written about and that have my undying respect. Those journalists include Gary Giddins, Mikal Gilmore, Ralph J. Gleason and Peter Guralnick. I had just written about Peter Guralnick in January so I faded on him for this month.

Gary Giddins has been a long-time columnist for the Village Voice and unarguably the world’s preeminent jazz critic who has won an unparalleled six ASCAP–Deems Taylor Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Peabody Award in Broadcasting, as well as a lifetime achievement award from the Jazz Journalists Association. He’s also received the Raiph J. Gleason Music Book Award.

Mikal Gilmore is a friend on Facebook. I enjoy his posts and love the articles he writes for Rolling Stone Magazine. He has two interviews with Bob Dylan that are must reads in the latest Rolling Stone Special Issue.

Ralph J. Gleason had a powerful influence on me as a music author of depth and substance. He contributed for many years to the San Francisco Chronicle, was a founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine, and was co-founder of the Monterey Jazz Festival. He represented both pop and jazz music with equal intensity. I especially love his liner notes for the pivotal jazz recording Bitches Brew by Miles Davis.

I debated for too long about featuring Nat Hentoff for the letter H. I struggled to do him justice in my draft blog post. I thoroughly enjoy his music sociopolitical bent. He is a jazz subject matter authority and my kinda liberal ;)

Richard Meltzer wrote one of my all time favorite rock music epics, The Aesthetics of Rock. I’m on my second copy now ;)

It was a total toss of the coin between Robert Palmer and Jon Pareles of the New York Times. I can’t get enough of Mr. Pareles writing. I’m drawn to his prose like a moth to a flame.

Jon Pareles Writer Jon Pareles (L) interviews singer/musician Chris Cornell at the New York Times TimesTalk during the 2012 NY Times Arts & Leisure weekend>> at The Times Center on January 7, 2012 in New York City.

I still feel like I could write about 25 more music journalists in this post. What a great well of knowledge to draw upon.

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Music Journalism – A-Z – Nick Tosches

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Nick Tosches

Writing in a lineage that includes Dante, William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Hubert Selby, Jr., and Hunter S. Thompson, Nick Tosches may be America’s last real literary outlaw. 

nick tosches

Nick Tosches is an American journalist, novelist, biographer, and poet. Tosches began his writing with poetry and rock-’n'-roll magazines. He wrote for CREEM, Fusion, and Rolling Stone. Like many of the music journalists featured in this series he started on very common publication grounds.

Books

Nick Tosches first book was released in 1977 under the title Country: The Biggest Music in America.  The book is arranged like a fan’s scrapbook, leaping across time and subject

Nick Tosches’s next book, Hellfire a biography about Jerry Lee Lewis considered by many his music book masterpiece.

‘

The number one greatest music book ever ‘Observer’

Quite simply the best rock and roll biography ever written ‘Rolling Stone’

A collection drawn from 30 years of his writings, The Nick Tosches Reader, published in 2000 by Da Capo Press.

Nick Tosches joined Vanity Fair as a contributing editor in 1996.

Nick Tosches

Music Journalism A-Z – Lillian Roxon

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Lillian Roxon

In 1959 at the age of 27 Lillian moved to New York starting off as a freelancer for ‘Weekend’ and moving on to become the first Australian journalist to gain a high-profile in the States. In 1962 they offered her  the New York correspondent’s position for The Sydney Morning Herald, a job she kept for the next ten years.

Her organic writing style flowed into print form in an easy to follow way. She was a sharp critic with a keen ear that discerned well for the large metropolitan audience who read her weekly writings.

I religiously read Lillian Roxon’s music column in the New York Daily News. This was before I graduated to reading the New York Times later in college.

She held court in the late sixties/early 70s  in the infamous back room of Max’s Kansas City. She fit in well among the celebrities of the era.

Lillian Roxon wrote the first definitive rock encyclopedia, Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia.  The New York Times described it as ‘the most complete book on rock music and rock culture ever written’ and it effectively became the template for many of the music books that followed. I owned and loved that book, I dog earred the pages I read and referred to it so often. It served as a major reference for me in programming the FM radio shows I did in the 70s.

Lillian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia

Tributes

Lillian Roxon, The Mother of Rock Journalism Web Article

http://www.voicesofeastanglia.com/2012/01/lillian-roxon-the-mother-of-rock-journalism.html

In 2002 Robert Milliken’s book ‘Mother of Rock: The Lillian Roxon Story’ was published.

Book Cover: Mother of Rock: The Lillian Roxon Story

In 2010 Paul Clarke’s documentary ‘Mother of Rock’ premiered at the Melbourne Film Festival. It seems a feature film is also now in development as a lasting tribute to a woman who broke down many barriers and was a pioneer in her own unique way.

‘This book is dedicated to Lillian, who lives with nobody but a colony of New York roaches, whose energy has never failed despite her anxieties and her asthma and her overweight, who is always interested in everybody, often angry, sometimes bitchy, but always involved …’—Germaine Greer,The Female Eunuch

Music Journalism A-Z – Alan Light

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Alan Light

I chose Alan Light as the letter L music journalist because the last several PBS fund drive music specials have featured him as “the” music commentator during the pledge breaks. This prompted me to research who is Alan Light? I’m happy to share I was knocked out to discover his competent depth of contribution to our American music legacy.

Alan Light got his start as a fact checker at Rolling Stone. He soon became Senior Editor.  He next became founding music editor and editor-in-chief of Vibe.  He went on from there to become editor-in-chief of Spin Magazine. He has been a contributor for The New Yorker, GQ, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Mother Jones, and the Oxford American.

Radio and Television Credentials

Alan Light once had a spot as music reviewer on radio station WFUV-FM, He presently serves as music correspondent on the NPR show Weekend America.

Alan Light is the director of programming for the public television series “Live From the Artists Den.”

Books

Alan Light is quite prolific. He has (co)written five books to date.

The Holy or the Broken

  1. Tupac Amaru Shakur: 1971-1996 (with Quincy Jones), 1998
  2. “Vibe” History of Hip Hop, 1999
  3. The Skills to Pay the Bills: The Story of the Beastie Boys, 2006
  4. My Cross To Bear (by Gregg Allman, with Alan Light), 2012
  5. The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of “Hallelujah”, 2012

My Cross to Bear

Music Journalism A-Z – Lenny Kaye

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Lenny-KayeLenny Kaye

Many people know Lenny Kaye as a guitarist and composer with the Patti Smith Group.  I have seen him play with Patti Smith four or five times in the past few years. I love his style and his gentle enthusiasm.

Lenny Kaye is lesser known but greatly respected as a music journalist. He has a powerful writing command  that makes him one of America’s leading music analysts and interpreters.

Lenny began by writing reviews for Jazz and Pop magazine. He later branched out to foundation rock magazines like Fusion, Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone. He next became the music editor for Cavalier, a gentlemen’s magazine.where he authored a monthly column until 1975.

He then decided to become a free-lance writer where he would a wrote for hire with a range of publications that included Melody Maker and CREEM. Again he served in an editor role for music monthly magazines like Rock Scene and Hit Parader through the seventies.

Lenny Kaye is the co-author of  the autobiography, Waylon, The Life Story of Waylon Jennings written with the late Waylon Jennings.

Lenny Kaye has written with an authoritative sense about several defining periods in the history of music.

One literature work that represents his history/analysis writing skills is You Call It Madness: The Sensuous Song of the Croon. This book  highlights the age of crooning in early 1930s New York City. The book centers on Russ Columbo, known as Bing Crosby’s rival. Lenny Kaye as a Columbo enthusiast offers the reader a scrapbook research title accompanied by many rare photographs and memorabilia from his own collection.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Nuggets about the first psychedelic era which celebrated its 40th anniversary last year. Lenny Kaye wrote the liner notes and helped assemble the collection with Jac Holzman of Elektra Records fame. I purchased that edition for Lenny Kaye to autograph for me someday in the future ;)

Nuggets

You can find monthly writing contributions from Lenny Kaye at e-Music where he writes for them today. Here are some of his 2012 writing efforts.

Delve into the catalog of Jamie Records and their associated labels, covering everything from Duane Eddy to the Fantastic Johnny C.
Visit Nico at her resting place and think of how she remains with us still and evermore.
Celebrate Johnny Cash and his walk o’ the line.
Muse on the life and art of Chet Baker, he of the mournful trumpet and romantic song.