R.I.P.: David Foster Wallace

For while there I had this weird thing with writers and death. Like I would read one of their books and they would die. The only one I can remember offhand right now is Burroughs. I read Queer or Junky, I can't remember which, and he died a couple weeks later. I can't remember any of the others right now, but i know it happened about three times in one year and I definitely noticed the pattern. And I know it's just coincidence, I'm absolutely certain of it, but it was eerie nonetheless.

Up until a week ago I hadn't read a novel in about ten years. It's crazy to think about this, but it's true. Well, maybe eight years. But still, a long time. Friends and family would sometimes recommend stuff to me, but I wouldn't bother. I just wasn't into fiction.

I talked to J— at work about this and he gave me a weird theory that made me think for a minute. He said you can't trust non-fiction because the writer invariably tells the story through his own perspective. Like, objectivity is impossible, therefore all non-fiction is inherently bullshit. With fiction, on the other hand, you always know where you stand: the writer made it up, no grey area about it. I don't necessarily agree with this, but it's worth contemplating. J—'s a lot smarter than he thinks he is.

Anyway, I used to read fiction and really enjoy some of it. I actually read Infinite Jest, all 1,000 pages of it, footnotes and all, and loved it. I've tried to read Pynchon but, other then Lot 49, found his work impenetrable. Infinite Jest was clearly in the same category of works like Gravity's Rainbow but was, as I've told countless people to whom I've recommended it, surprisingly accessible. It had just as many big, complicated ideas as the work of plenty of other postmodernists, but the prose, on a sentence by sentence basis, could actually be understood by the average reader. As an average reader myself, maybe that's why I liked it so much.

I loved Wallace's non-fiction work as well, just as much, maybe more. OK, not more, but just as much. I got Consider the Lobster about a year ago and loved it, except for the fact that I had already read a few of the pieces. You see, I was so into Wallace's work that when I found out he had a new one out I would make an effort to find it and read it. I can still remember when I found out about that piece he write pseudonymously for Premiere about the porn awards. I was so excited I called K— in Atlanta and told him to go buy it, pronto, don't miss it, don't be fooled by the name, etc. He was living with E— at the time and she's a big fan, so I know she read it too. I bought the e-book of Up, Simba, printed it out at work, and gave a nice bound copy to G— so he could read it too. He was a fan like me. And when you were a fan of Wallace, you couldn't wait to share his latest missive with other fans. He was that captivating.

So when people like the wife or my mother would recommend novels to me, my stock response for a while was that I would read fiction again when Wallace released another novel. I didn't care for fiction, but if there was ever a follow-up to Infinite Jest I'd be first in line. I said it like I was half-joking, but I really wasn't joking at all. I don't give a shit about fiction (right now), but I'll read absolutely anything that comes out under Wallace's byline, fiction or non-.

So a couple weeks ago I got to talking to the aforementioned J— at work and mentioned that I had moved Paul Schrader's Mishima to the top of my Netflix list, based primarily on the recommendation of the Norwegian guy that directed Reprise, in a Times profile. J— was familiar with Mishima's work (I had never heard of him), and offered to loan me one of his books. I hemmed, hawed and replied whatever, and the following Tuesday night J— handed me his copy of The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea.

So I read it. After multiple years of saying I wouldn't read another novel until Wallace wrote one, I read it. It was OK. Not great, but pretty good. It was good but at the same time reminded me why I don't read fiction. A lot of delicate, austere prose without a lot of information. I like absorbing information. I guess that's why I prefer non-fiction.

A week later Wallace fucking killed himself. Less than a week. Less than a week after I finished the fucking book.

I finally read a novel and now the guy I was holding out for is gone. Who knows why? I'll bet when they go through his stuff they'll find a 5,000-page, woefully directionless, unfinished mess. And man, I'd love to read it.

I know it's just a coincidence, I know this has nothing to do with me, but I can't help thinking way in the back of my mind that he gave up because I quit holding out for him. I know it's bullshit, but it's my bullshit. I hadn't read a novel in years, I always said I was holding out for Wallace, then I finally read one and less that a week later he fucking killed himself. Let me wallow in my arrogant, self-centered misery a little, will you?

Life is shit. Enjoy it while you can.

Book review: Goodbye 20th Century

I finished David Browne's new Sonic Youth bio a few weeks ago and tried to write up a quick review of it, but got blocked up for want of an angle. Two things jogged me today: first, the review of David Lebedoff's The Same Man in tomorrow's Times Book Review contained a single quote from George Orwell that crystallised what it is I liked most about Browne's book: "good prose is like a window pane".

What Browne does best is tell the band's story simply and directly, using language in a way that can best be described as transparent. Too many music writers nowadays (especially on the Internet, where editorial oversight is at a minimum at best; case in point: the run-on parenthetical you find yourself slogging through at this very moment) "learned" their trade worshiping at the twin altars of the inimitable Lester Bangs and the various apprentices of Robert Christgau's Village Voice music section, all of whom seem fascinated by their own ability to turn obscure cultural references into elaborate puns. Some of the latter are quite good at what they do, but their Pitchfork progeny are, to be blunt, not.

It occurred to me to contrast Browne's book with one of the most egregious examples of this tendency toward self-satisfied logorrhea writ large in book form: Jim Greer's unfortunate Guided By Voices biography. Whether his closeness to his subject doomed the book from the start isn't the point: his love of his own prose sinks the book before the end of the first chapter.

And the second thing that jogged me: as I was about to start writing, B— called to say he was at a bookstore in Boston where he had scored a cheap copy of Browne's book. He had also found a copy of Greer's Voices book and was asking whether it was worth picking up. Shit you not.

I think the biggest obstacle I had in coming up with something to say about the book was that Sonic Youth's story is... well, not boring, but hardly salacious. They're just not decadent rock stars, and never were. No one in either the band or its immediate circle of associates wound up strung out on drugs. Their are no illegitimate sonic youths of disputed parentage strewn across the tour map. The closest the band has come to a tragic death in the family was the murder of Black Flag roadie Joe Cole. Sure, he inspired a couple of songs on Dirty, but as far as the band's bio goes he's a marginal figure at best.

In fact, Sonic Youth may be the only band in rock history whose story is interesting solely for the enormous shadow they cast over basically all guitar-based music that developed in their wake. For any left-of-the-mainstream rock music from the early nineties onward, the band's influence is immeasurable. Guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo essentially dismantled rock guitar and built an entirely new vocabulary of playing and composing from the ground up. They are one of the only bands who ever truly started over from scratch. Which is not to say they didn't have influences, just that, from about their first full-length onward, they never sounded derivative of them. We may one day be saying the same thing about Radiohead in terms of compositional development, but I don't think their influence will be nearly as inescapable.

Browne doesn't really get into a technical or aesthetic analysis of the band's musical innovations, which is in some ways unfortunate because someone really needs to. It's an incredibly rich body of work that remains largely unexamined. Matthew Stearns similarly declined to attempt any sort of musical exposition in his 33¹/₃ volume on Daydream Nation. There's a great multi-volume dissertation out there waiting to be written, if anyone's up to it, something on the order of Tim Riley's peerless Beatles book or Ben Watson's exhaustive Zappa treatise.

What he does do is tell their story, plain and simple and with little flourish, in a way it deserves to be told. He does a terrific job of painting the scene of New York's overlapping downtown music and art scenes in the early eighties, when the ashes of punk gave way to the far more nihilistic sounds of the so-called "no wave" movement. Having lived in New York throughout the economic boom of the go-go nineties, it's hard for someone like myself to picture just how dangerous day-to-day living was in the East Village at the time, and how much this informed the sounds and styles of the time. In one particularly telling (and chilling) quote, artist Dan Graham notes of the androgynous fashions favoured by the scene's female contingent, "all the women back then were afraid of rape. These were sexually oriented women trying to look unsexual."

Browne also shines in detailing the band's often contentious relationship with Geffen Records after signing with the major label at the end of the eighties, just in time for the "alternative" music boom that followed. While the label tried mightily to break the band to wider audience through the first half of the decade, they remained (and still remain), for the most part, a cult band. Browne includes a few surprisingly dissatisfied quotes from Moore, who seems frustrated to this day at the band's failure to become bigger stars.

Nevertheless, the band re-upped their deal with Geffen in 1994, when their management team managed to score them a signing bonus well above that which their sales alone might have merited, based on the fact that the band had been a major factor in the decisions of cash cows Nirvana and Beck to sign with the label. So in a way, being the coolest kids in school did pay off to some extent.

The book comes to a close following the release of 2006's Rather Ripped, the final record in their renegotiated Geffen obligation, a turning point which leaves the band's future in question. Browne hints that it may be their final album, but that's probably wishful thinking on his part, hoping that his book will wind up being the band's complete story. As it happens, the band have announced plans to release a new album next spring on an as-yet-unnamed independent label.

And so the pattern into which they've settled in the last several years continues: new album every other spring or so, then touring in the summer, when the band members' kids are out of school. Hard to believe it's been over ten years now since the band's longevity and cult-hero status first began garnering them comparisons to the Grateful Dead.

Book review: Willie Nelson: An Epic Life

Nobody's got a bad word to say about Willie Nelson. Not one of his numerous ex-wives, all of whom he has cheated on extensively. Not even the first couple, who knew him before he got really into smoking grass, back when he was a mean-ass drunk. That image you have of Willie as the nicest, coolest dude in the world? All true. Pretty much.

You'd think a guy that nice would make for a boring biographical subject, but Willie's been through a lot. Whereas most popular musicians are on the downside creatively when they pass thirty, Nelson achieved hardly any success before forty. The first few decades were filled with struggles to pay rent, struggles to hold his family together, struggles to sell songs, struggles to stay on the road. All of which makes the first half of Joe Nick Patoski's book a pretty strong read.

As for the second half? Depends on how much time you want to spend reading about a millionaire who just hangs out on his own private golf courses getting stoned all day. Nelson, who became renowned as a songwriter long before attaining any sort of recognition as a performer, has hardly written any songs in the past thirty years or so. Without any hardship, he says, he has little to write about.

Since signing with Columbia in 1975 and releasing the career-making Red-Headed Stranger album, he's recorded mostly other people's songs and reworked his own older material. Which is fine, because he's a terrific singer and brilliant performer with impeccable taste in material. He's also nothing if not prolific; in an appendix to the book, Patoski narrows down all his favourite Willie albums to a list of only the forty most essential.

It's also worth noting that, even in his heyday, Nelson did not write some of his best-known songs, including "Whiskey River", "If You've Got the Money, I've Got the Time" and "Poncho and Lefty". On the other hand, some of his best-known compositions were made famous by other performers, like "Crazy" and "Hello Walls". So he writes some, he sings some, they overlap here and there, and it's all part of the Willie canon.

The book's most irritating flaws are all a result of what feels like sloppy editing. There are factual errors minor (referring to rapper Ludacris as a "New York hip-hopper") and major (casually mentioning that 1985's Live Aid concerts benefitted AIDS research), none of which is particularly ruinous on its own, but which add up over the course of the book. Characters are often introduced, then introduced again, as if for the first time, just a few pages later. More frustrating still are inexplicable oversights that actually hinder the reader's understanding of the story. For example, Patoski spends a full page detailing how Nelson commissioned a song from songwriter Beth Neilsen Chapman, recorded it as a duet with her and scored his biggest hit in years, all while neglecting to mention the name of the song.

There also appear to be pieces of the story missing. The photo insert in the middle includes a picture of Willie and three others posing on what appears to be an airplane boarding staircase. According to the caption, it's Nelson's band the Offenders headed for England in 1968. But within the text of the book, the name the Offenders is mentioned only once in a single paragraph which notes that the name was briefly used by the band but didn't last; it doesn't even make the index. And there's nothing about Nelson travelling overseas in 1968 for what would have been, if I remember correctly (and, granted, I might not), his first ever European shows.

Having never written or edited a 500-page biography myself, I reserve judgment and don't wish to assign blame. But these flaws have the cumulative effect of distracting the reader from what Patoski does so well, which is to paint vivid portraits of Nelson and the major characters in his life. After finishing the book, I felt as though I had known for years not only Willie, but also sister Bobbie, drummer and best friend Paul English (as in "Me and...", for those of you who know the song), third wife Connie, and daughters Lana and Susie as well. These are what make the book worth reading, at least for the first 300 pages or so. If you lose interest after that, don't worry, you won't miss much.

His notorious run-in with the IRS is the last major incident of Nelson's career. Patoski covers this in a well-researched, journalistic style, then just sort of rambles. He spends the last seventy pages or so just describing Nelson's activities of the past ten years with little or no apparent organising principle; it's certainly far from chronological. He closes on a scene of Nelson re-opening a church in his hometown he has just purchased to save from bankruptcy. Nelson spends time with the adoring crowd then moves on to the next show. I guess it's hard to come up with an ending when you write a biography of a guy that's still alive.

Book review: Vinyl Junkies

I recently did a quick, cursory estimate (counted the records in one of the cubicles pictured here, multiplied by blahblahblah) and figured that I own just over 1,000 vinyl LPs. I don't consider myself a hardcore collector (a river in Egypt?), but I'll admit that's probably significantly more than most people own. Does this make me a... vinyl junkie?

According to Brett Milano's book, not even close. For one thing, the average subject Milano profiles has over 10,000. For another, I've never really cared about first pressings vs. cheap-o reissues, one of the most common obsessions of even the average collector. So I guess I'm just a guy with a lot of records. Right?

Sort of. One of the main questions this book made me consider about my own collection is the total duration of music I own. If I round down to 1,000 (and believe me, it may be close but it's definitely more) and assume an average of 30 minutes per (a highly conservative estimate), that puts me at 500 hours of vinyl music. If I offset the rounding down by assuming 20 hours in a day, that's about 25 days of music. Milano met with collectors who own over 100,000 records, which comes out to about seven years of constant listening without sleep. These guys know they will never listen to all of their records. Although who knows, ten years with sleep breaks... ?

It's hard to figure out whom Milano imagined as the audience for his book, other than minor league collectors like myself. Is there a general audience for books about lunatics of all stripes? Perhaps. How many other people would have the same reaction upon first picking up the book that I did? The cover photo is a close-up of a bunch of record spines; naturally I immediately began checking out the guy's (or gal's; more on that) collection. The first Suede album! On vinyl! Next to the Byrne/Eno record? Poorly alphabetised.

The book is divided in to chapters about various aspects of collecting, all of which are given a once-over. There's a chapter on people who collect truly weird records (including the guy who used to be the force behind Letterman's "Dave's Record Collection" segments). There's a section on the lack of female record collectors, as well as the lack of girlfriends amongst collectors. There are several stories of collectors paying exorbitant four-figure sums for records they already own as CD or cassette dubs. And there are numerous profiles of celebrity musician collectors (Thurston Moore, Peter Buck, Mark Arm).

All of them are interesting, but none of them are particularly in-depth. On the other hand, what more can be said about these guys? Milano makes a valiant attempt to offer a psychological explanation for the collecting urge (seratonin deficiency), but for the most part the book is just a bunch of amusing anecdotes.

I was initially going to cite this as a major flaw in the book when I started writing this piece. But the more I think about it, I'm not sure what else I would have wanted from the book. Milano lives in Boston and is something of a fixture on the city's music scene. Many of his interview subjects are based in Boston, which initially made me think the book's scope was a bit narrow, but really, how many other collectors around the country would be so different from the subjects profiled here? My guess is not many.

The book is basically a quick read with a bunch of amusing stories and not much else, and maybe that's all an outsider can really appreciate about collecting. It won't change the world, but neither will its subjects. It's an ultimately meaningless little subculture, but aren't they all?

One more positive note: the book's design, featuring old records with the chapter titles Photoshopped in over vintage record labels at the start of each chapter, is terrific.

Book review: Double Nickels On the Dime (331/3)

To me, the primary appeal of the Minutemen has always been their friendly, unassuming vibe. I love the high energy, the instrumental chops and the angry-young-prole-with-a-library-card lyrics. But it's the fact that they always come off like dudes hanging out and jamming, regardless of what they're singing about, that's always kept me coming back.

Double Nickels, as it turns out, is ideal fodder for the 33¹/₃ series. It's brimming with material, there's interesting stories behind many of the songs, the lyrics bear close listening, and it's the product of collaboration that includes contributions from more than just the band's principal members. Many of those involved were quite willing to talk, and Michael T. Fournier (who, by the way, teaches a class in the history of punk rock at Tufts; are you kidding me?) does a fine job of whittling those stories down to a concise and well-organised summary of the album's stories and meanings.

Fournier opens the book with a brief history of the band, follows with a brief history of the album, takes a quick detour to recount his own experiences listening to it as a teenager, and gets down to a track-by-track breakdown in less than twenty pages. He seems to feel that the point of the book is the music, so why waste time on the other stuff? I couldn't agree more.

One of the things I liked most about the book was that I learned things about Double Nickels I didn't know before. For instance, there are a few tracks I've never even heard; they were left off the CD in order to fit it on one disc. One of them is a Van Halen cover! Rest assured, this situation will soon be rectified; the vinyl is en route in the mail as I type.

I also didn't know that the running order was determined in a manner similar to a fantasy sports draft (Fournier's analogy): each member had one side, and they took turns picking songs for it. Anything unselected went on side four. I also didn't realise how many of the songs had lyrics written by some of the band's friends, including Black Flag's Chuck Dukowski and Henry Rollins. The idea was apparently, to keep the music fresh by incorporating outside ideas. The album never gets boring over the course of four sides and more than forty songs, so that seems to have worked out.

What works best of all here is Fournier's writing. Like the Minutemen's music, it's breezy and casual. Rather than coming off like the dry observations of a college professor (which...), Fournier's prose reads like the musings of your buddy who's really into this album, knows a bunch of neat stuff about it, and can't wait to tell you. Asides, interjections and unnecessary exclamation points abound, all of them adding up the a 100 page speil that perfectly fits its subject. Double Nickels greatest triumph may be that it is simultaneously dense and highly accessible. By packing his book with facts and insights while keeping it simple and readable, Fournier has followed the band's example and done the album proud.

Book review: OK Computer (331/3)

How long does an album have to be around before it becomes "timeless"? As Dai Griffiths points out in his 33¹/₃ entry on Radiohead's OK Computer, the Beatles' music has lasted 50 years to Beethoven's 200, but the gap narrows proportionally as each year passes.

OK was probably admitted to the echelon of all-time-greats faster than any album I can remember, and it's still easy to see why. The performances are clearly those of a band at the peak of their creative powers. The lyrics are clear enough to convey an overarching theme, but still vague enough to allow for individual interpretation. The music is ambitious and complex, yet the band's reach never exceeds their grasp. There are no embarrassingly self-indulgent passages of prog pretentions; not a single note is wasted. The album is suffused with ideas and invention but, more than anything else, the band sounds confident. It sounds as though they knew they were crafting one for the canon even before they began recording.

This immediately-bestowed classic status is one of the primary themes of Griffiths's study of OK. The book was published in 2004, just seven years after the album's release; he probably wrote it in 2003. And yet its place in the pantheon was already firmly established, and hasn't evolved since. So what kind of classic album is it exactly?

Griffiths sets up this question, then tackles it by discussing different categories of classic albums (concept albums, double albums). He introduces the possibility of a CD album to be judged on its own merits, in terms of running time and continuity, in the post-vinyl era. He then discusses the ways in which long songs are used to pad out the times of CD albums, and lists the different categories of long songs (really slow songs, songs with a lot of verses). He concludes that OK is a great CD album, and that its songs have extended intros and outros in the fashion of the CD era. This is all the first chapter.

Look, Griffiths is my kind of guy. Anybody who mentions Dire Straits, Tori Amos, Pixies, Oasis, De La Soul, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Webb and disc 2 of British Bird Sounds on CD all in the space of a few pages, just to make a point about Radiohead, is weird enough for me. But too much of this book is just talking in circles. His grand point about OK being a CD album is undercut quite obviously by the placement of "Fitter, Happier" right in the middle, a track on which, by the way, Griffiths focuses as the album's key thematic song.

He spends the second third of the book breaking down each song by key(s), beats per minute, lengths of verses and choruses and other minutiae without ever really making much of a point. What makes this especially frustrating is that I've been saying for years that this is exactly what rock criticism needs.

Too many rock critics don't know an augmented seventh chord from a locrian scale, which is what separates their work from serious writing about jazz and classical. To write about non-pop genres, a writer is expected to understand at least the basics of music theory, and to recognise certain aspects of it in the music. This is why so much rock criticism focuses excessively on the lyrics, even when they're not especially important. And of course we have the great Lester Bangs to thank for the occasionally inspired, often insufferable school of rock critics who attempt to creatively reproduce the excitement of the performance itself, usually through onomatopoeia, run-on sentences and too many capital letters.

This is not to say that this sort of writing doesn't have it's place; some of it is terrific. But there remains a critical void awaiting someone to step in and fill it with technical, theory-based criticism of popular music. After all, if you think the musicians don't know this stuff you're kidding yourself.

And if any band's music cries out for this sort of analysis, it's Radiohead's. Their use of non-traditional modal structures and time signatures (even more so on the two albums that followed OK) makes their music ripe for fine-toothed dissection. Griffiths breaks down each song into obsessive charts showing lengths of intros, outros and instrumental breaks, and even maps out the key and tempo changes in "Paranoid Android", but fails to follow through with any substantive analysis. What could be a breakthrough study of an already much-pondered album instead collapses under the weight of its own unexamined raw data.

This makes the book all the more infuriating after one slogs through pages of fairly opaque, directionless ramblings only to find no real conclusion. Griffiths spends the third and final section speculating on OK's place in future history, its staying power, if you will. It's a decent enough read, but at this point I was exhausted. It's hard to imagine I would ever have said this about one of these little 100+ page tomelettes, but this one is actually too long.

Book review: All Over But the Shouting

I always thought the Replacements would make a great biopic. Dead-end kids, hearts on their sleeves, fists fulla beer, death in the family. A hopelessly romantic and uniquely American tragedy.

But there's been no movie, no documentary and, until now, no book. Before this new tome, I'm pretty sure Replacements literature went no further than a chapter in Azerrad's indie rock book and Colin Meloy's 33¹/₃ book. Jim Walsh feels that he's just the guy to rectify this gap in the canon, and he's probably right. As a longtime friend of the band members, Walsh's credentials are impeccable: he claims to have attended their first ever show. He was also the eulogist at lead guitarist Bob Stinson's funeral. So far, so good

Walsh chooses to go the oral history route here, meaning that, apart from the introduction and a few other pages, the text in composed entirely of quotes from people who were there. I rather like this style of biography when it's done right. Clinton Heylin is a master of the form, but he uses the quotes to augment his own prose, rather than letting them carry the narrative alone. The latter form can be tricky, as certain threads of the story can become disjointed and key details can be omitted.

But I'll get to that in a minute. Walsh's first problem comes early on, when he tries to describe how great the Replacements were live. Not possible. He describes shows during which the band were too drunk to remember their own songs, so they played a bunch of covers but kept quitting them all after the first chorus, as life-affirming, classic performances. I don't doubt they were fun shows, particularly if you were as drunk as the band, but you probably had to be there. Walsh is so effusive about the band's greatness that skepticism and weariness have set in by the time the oral history part begins a few pages in.

Now for the real problem. Say you were writing an oral history of a band. Who would you interview? Who might be at the top of your list? If you were writing a book about, for instance, the Replacements, do you think you'd interview, say... frontman Paul f—king Westerberg?!? Well, Westerberg didn't want to be interviewed for the book, so Walsh figured he'd just go ahead without him. Ditto bassist Tommy Stinson. And drummer Chris Mars, who was polite enough to email Walsh a single paragraph for inclusion in the epilogue. And with Bob Stinson having settled in on a great barstool in the sky, that leaves exactly zero original members of the band who agreed to be interviewed. Zero.

Walsh gamely tries to include their voices by including quotes from old magazine articles and such (which makes the verb tenses shift awkwardly from quote to quote), but at this point the project is pretty much over before it starts. This leads to another problem: about a third of the text in the whole book is from old magazine articles, making me think Walsh didn't get nearly enough material even from the people whom he did manage to interview. This is borne out by the way certain oft-told tales about the band are skimmed over with frustratingly sparse detail. There are a few conflicting mentions of the time Westerberg allegedly told newly clean-and-sober Bob to drink or get off the stage, but no indication as to what Walsh knows (or whether he believes it). Given that Bob fell off the wagon soon after and eventually died of drug-related causes, it's kind of an important detail. The story of the band stealing their master tapes from the label's office and throwing them in the Mississippi River is barely mentioned; even if it's just a myth, it's well-known enough that it needs to be examined in some detail.

My theory as to what went wrong goes like this: Walsh is a fanatical believer who's been dying to write this book for years. He gets the go-ahead (and probably an advance) from a publisher before ensuring the band's cooperation. When they decline to participate he decides to go ahead with it anyway. The result is flimsy and half-assed; the large typeface and copious pictures don't help its credibility much.

Walsh is obviously passionate and, lack of journalistic objectivity aside, probably more qualified than anyone to write this book. It's a shame the band wouldn't help him out. The Replacements' story remains one of the great sagas in American rock n' roll and, unfortunately, has yet to be properly told.

Book review: Loveless (331/3)

My Bloody Valentine's Loveless is one of rock's most frustratingly elusive records. The more one learns about it: the creative inspirations, the engineering processes, the lyrics, the secrets; the less, paradoxically, one understands it. This is largely because the biggest secret one might discover about it is that there really are no secrets. Unlike, say, the backward noises on "Tomorrow Never Knows" or the snare sounds on Low, the band employed few if any radical recording or mixing techniques. The guitar tracks, for the most part, don't really have any effects on them. There aren't even that many layers. The inscrutably complex whole is comprised of remarkably simple parts. Which makes it that much more intriguing.

So from that standpoint, there's not much for Mike McGonigal to reveal in his entry in the 33¹/₃ series. There are a few interesting tidbits, like the bit about guitarist Kevin Shields playing a guitar through two amps at once with independent tremolo effects running at slightly different rates with their speakers facing each other with a single mic in between. Cool. But most of the technical details (the tremolo effects are almost all done by hand; the drum tracks are mostly programmed from samples because drummer Colm O'Ciosoig was too sick to play; there's a lot of vocal tracks) are old news. If you've read anything else about Loveless, you know all this stuff.

So McGonigal goes for something of a grab-bag of 33¹/₃ styles. He begins with a bit of personal history (thankfully not dwelling on his briefly-mentioned youthful drug habit; yawn), throws in a bit of track-by-track commentary, then settles into a comprehensive making-of history assembled with the help of a bunch of new interviews with the principal players. It's this last element, the meat of the book, that make it worthwhile.

The recording of Loveless really was quite an ordeal. The band bounced from cheap studio to cheaper studio as their label's budget allowed putting in a few days at a time before moving on again. This meant a never-ending series of arguments with in-house engineers who just didn't get it, many of whom, claims Shields, were excluded from their own studios, strictly ordered not to do anything, and received a credit in the liner notes for their troubles. Details like this make it worth it.

The book itself, from what I've heard, went through a birthing nearly as arduous as that of Loveless itself. Apparently Shields agreed to the interviews, spoke quite openly, then changed his mind and refused to sign off on any quotes in the book. That's what I was told by a notoriously unreliable source, anyway. I guess he came around eventually, though, because the book's full of Shields speaking quite freely about what really happened and who's full of shit.

Still, the back story explains the somewhat haphazard narrative toward the books end, where the text is interrupted by asides along the lines of "When Kevin read the first draft, he said..." or "My editor asks me to change...". McGonigal was apparently asked to tack on a sort of epilogue to the story, and he chooses to describe another album by some other artist who was apparently a big My Bloody Valentine fan. Relevant? Not really. Interesting? Sure. At the very least it makes me want to hear this guy's album, and for me that's the universal measuring stick for any book about music: if it makes me excited to hear something new, thumbs up.

Book review: The Greatest Music Never Sold

There are people who believe that, had Brian Wilson managed to complete the Beach Boys' SMiLE album back in 1967, it would have supplanted Sgt. Pepper's as the default Greatest Album Of All Time. Its re-recording and eventual release in 2004 could have been seen as fuel for these arguments, but instead it just laid them to rest once and for all. Absent the context of the 1960s, the album functions as something of an odd time capsule rather than an earth-shattering masterpiece. But more importantly, now that the album can actually be heard, Wilson's more devoted supporters are no longer free to imagine just how wonderful it might have been. With the veil of mystery lifted, most of its lustre is inevitably lost. No matter how good it is, it's a little bit disappointing simply by dint of being mere music.

Dan Leroy's book is a much a cooler idea than finished product. He's pieced together the complete behind-the-scenes stories of nine albums that were supposedly completed but never released. And, in a way, the list is a little disappointing. How many people are really clamouring for a chance to hear the thwarted magnum opi of, say, Chicago, or Adam Ant? Or that great lost Mick Jagger solo album from the 90s?

Having said that, some of the stories themselves are admittedly quite interesting, more so than the prospect of the actual album in question, which makes for a decent read. The Jagger chapter, for instance, is a trip. Leroy focuses on the history of an obscure LA bar band known as the Red Devils, who were called one day out of the blue to come into the studio and record with Jagger and producer Rick Rubin. Rubin's concept was that the band would have no advance knowledge of the session, come in and learn a bunch of old blues tunes from scratch, then record the whole thing in the same day. Apparently they pulled it off, but it's never been released.

Leroy's biggest shortcoming is that he constantly falls into the Smile trap of describing each album as the artist's best work ever or, in the case of older artists like Chicago, in many years. In the case of Juliana Hatfield's God's Foot, he goes so far as to speculate that it would have been considered one of the finest albums of the decade. But if all these albums are so good, wouldn't at least a few of them have eventually seen release? And are all lost albums good? Aren't there a few long-lost clunkers out there too?

Apparently not, or at the very least the book would have been longer. Which brings us to Leroy's other problem: there's really not a lot of material here. He stretches it past 300 pages, but that's with wide margins and a big fat font size. It seems as though, with most of the albums in question, the principal players in the drama at hand didn't really have a great deal to say about it. There are a few tasty bits of he-said-she-said, as in the tug of war between the writer and director of the Ray Davies musical that got lost on the way to Broadway, but not nearly enough. Most of the artists either refused to talk about their album or had come to accept that it was a lost cause, and expressed disappointingly little residual bitterness.

Leroy also explains right off the bat why he hasn't chosen to write about a few of the most famous lost albums in pop music history. Smile and The Black Album got released; Chinese Democracy is still not officially abandoned; and no one from Neil Young's camp would discuss Homegrown. All valid reasons, but they seem to leave the remaining selections wanting. Of the nine albums to get a full overview, Crazy Wisdom Masters was the only one I had ever heard of (or that I'm dying to hear). These albums may be lost, but they're hardly legendary.

In the final chapter Leroy gives a few pages each to several lost albums that, for whatever reason, warrant a mention but not a full chapter. Some never really existed (Kraftwerk's Techno Pop), or there's scant evidence that much recording ever actually took place (Buckethead Plays Disney). Or in the case of the Bubbleheads, an alleged rap-rock supergroup including Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel, Afrika Bambaataa, Ice-T, Vernon Reid, Flea, Doug Wimbish, Bernie Worrell and several others, scant evidence that the actual band ever really existed. In that case, why not include the Masked Marauders?

But these tidbits, along with Leroy's statement in the book's introduction that he hopes to write a sequel, give the book something of an unfinished feel. Why not collect some more stories and flesh them all out, strive for something more definitive? Juliana Hatfield's A&R rep kept sending her back to the studio to come up with one more song, one more song. Perhaps Leroy's publisher should have done the same.

Book review: Use Your Illusion I and II (331/3)

I've read a bunch of those 33¹/₃ books, but haven't got around to writing any up yet, so hopefully this'll get me in the habit. I suppose I really ought to respond to all of them. I just read Eric Weisbard's (No homepage, dude? No blog?) study of Guns N' Roses Use Your Illusion albums and found it occasionally frustrating, but ultimately worth the read.

Weisbard starts out by offering up the album's historical moment as the twilight of the blockbuster "event" album release, one followed by an inevitable two years of stadium tours and expensive videos, an era ended more by the fragmenting of public tastes than the so-called "alternative rock" revolution. Using the trajectory of the Musicland chain as a paradigm, he shows the rise and fall of the dominance of a small group of individual artists (Springsteen, Madonna, Zeppelin, etc.) within the music industry as a whole. UYI, as he awkwardly abbreviates the twin behemoths, were the grand finale.

As an incurable Hegelian who loves revisionist narratives, I found this to be thrilling stuff. The first two dozen pages of the book are stuffed with ideas, examples, connections, allusions and compelling arguments. The rest of the book is decent, but none of it holds up to the opening. Not because it's bad, mind you, just because the first bit is really good. Weisbard talks about his own music writing career, and which artists loomed large at each stop. Fine, interesting stuff, he's certainly been around enough. Then he recounts the oft-told history of the Guns in their heyday, followed by Axl's tortuous vanishing act. The history is well-written and interspersed with in-depth musical analysis, though mostly of non-UYI tracks. Still, Weisbard's thoughts on "Sweet Child O' Mine" and "One in a Million" are interesting enough that I didn't mind if he wandered off from the point.

I enjoyed the book thoroughly until the last chapter, when he finally addresses the albums track-by-track. Earlier in the book, he made a point of explaining that he hadn't heard the album in years, was relying strictly on (remarkably vivid and quite believable) memories to write most of the book, and would listen to it once again at the end. The last chapter consists of a sketchy and unsatisfying paragraph or two about each song, which Weisbard brags was largely unedited. Cute idea, but a little lazy. There are a few terrific insights scattered throughout: he dismisses the first two tracks on UYI I as filler with the zinger, "Two throwaways in a row. In the notorious tradition of GN'R live, are they now even showing up late for their own album?" But there just isn't enough of this, and I can't help but thinking that a few more hours of work could have made an enormous difference in the content (to say nothing of the grammar).

Part of the problem may have been that I found myself disagreeing with many of his assessments, and surely this coloured my overall view of the chapter. Weisbard is clearly obsessed with Axl Rose, and views GN'R as Axl's band, UYI as his flawed masterpiece, and other band members' contributions as lesser tracks. Izzy Stradlin's songwriting contributions are dismissed as half-written Stones knockoffs (sort of true, but that doesn't make all of them bad), while Slash's guitar work is heard as an annoyance to be sat through while waiting for the auteur to sing again. Hasn't he noticed that the band is (literally, to judge by their studio output) nothing without those guys? That Axl is completely lost on his own, reduced to an infrequently touring nostalgia act? That "Bad Obsession" rocks, but "The Garden" is corny-ass bullshit? Well, everyone's got their own favourites, I suppose. Plenty of room for that when you've got two and a half hours to sift through.

Book review: Money For Nothing

Twenty years ago people watched music videos on television. The majority of MTV's schedule was filled out by music video programming, as was VH1's. Since then, the two have all but stopped showing videos altogether, MTV in favour of inane reality shows, VH1 to wallow in instant nostalgia.

The video has been driven to the Internet, where it is available on-demand, any time. But quality, of both sound and picture, is the price of accessibility. In the past few years, televisions have become exponentially larger and broadcasts clearer. Videos, conversely, have become smaller and blurrier.

Given the medium's decreased visibility and influence as a promotional tool, it seems fair to say that its peak era has ended. Which means the time is ripe for a history. I've written previously that it's too early to assess any all-time great videos as they continue to evolve technically and aesthetically. But I've read biographies of people in their twenties, so there's always room for a story-so-far.

Saul Austerlitz's Money For Nothing looked like just the book for the job but fell well short of my expectations. The subtitle is a bit of a misnomer: "A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes." History? Not quite.

The first chapter contains a brief overview of the medium's antecedents (the work of Oskar Fischinger and George Snader, Scopitones, Walt Disney's Fantasia) and pre-MTV development (A Hard Day's Night, "Subterranean Homesick Blues", the Residents). It's slight, but informative and interesting. So far so good.

The coverage of thirty years of music video as we now understand it, however, is limited strictly to Austerlitz's musings on meaning and symbolism. There are no interviews and seemingly very little research, just page after page of one- or two-paragraph synopses and analyses of every video that happened to catch Austerlitz's eye.

Which is not to say his observations aren't interesting; he seems like he'd be a fun guy with whom to sit around, watching videos and arguing about them. But for a book purporting to be a history of the medium, a few interviews could have gone a long way. Did Austerlitz even try to set up a session with, say, Mike Nesmith? Dave Kendall? Kevin Godley and/or Lol Creme? David Mallet? Tim Pope? Matt Pinfield? Fab 5 Freddy? I have a hard time believing that none of these people would have been willing to be interviewed for the book, and all of them have important stories to tell.

So instead of asking Sam Bayer how the video for Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" came about and what the ideas were behind it, Austerlitz simply explains that it "maintains the structure of existing institutions in order to twist them, pretzel-like, into a new, more accomodating shape." Anyone who's listened to the commentaries on Mark Romanek's Director's Label DVD knows he has plenty of insightful things to say about his own work. But when discussing Romanek's video for Johnny Cash's "Hurt", Austerlitz takes it upon himself to explain that "Cash's face is a punctuation mark to this series of images, its time-ravaged quality a synecdoche for the pocket career summary that follows."

Again, it's not that I find Austerlitz's observations especially lacking. Sure, the book drags a little in this format, but most of his commentary is interesting enough. It's just that without a single primary source, this isn't a history; it's a term paper.

Book review: Next Man Up

Finally finished slogging my way through John Feinstein's latest opus and man, what a grind. Anyone who's ever thought it might be fun to play in the NFL ought to read this in order to disabuse themselves of that woefully misguided notion. In addition, anyone who thinks sports books are are lightweight beach-reading should read this to see just how even a sports book can be made to seem like a dreadful, interminable reading assignment for some required course you can't stand. More accurately, no one should read this.

I always find books about life in the NFL fascinating because it seems like such an unfathomably foreign world, even more so than other sports. No matter how much I read about it, I know that there are things about it I'll never grasp, things that can only be experienced first hand. Feinstein attempts to paint a vivid and detailed landscape of that world, but it winds up coming off as an exhaustive catalogue of individual observations. It's as though he were unable to tease out a real story from his time spent with the team (a full season of unlimited access, apparently), so he just dumps all his notes onto the page and lets the reader sort it out. Every step of the season, from training camp to the start of the off-season, is carefully explained. Every game, from preparation to aftermath, is described, none given any greater importance or extensive coverage than another. By the end of its nearly 500-page length (making it easily the longest sports book I've ever read) I was glad it was over.

What does come across through pages and pages of aimless observation is that life in the NFL is tedious, painful, tenuous and just as brutally taxing mentally and emotionally as it is physically. Players can be cut in training camp or at any time throughout the season. Other than a few established stars, no one's future is secure. Money drives a lot of the misery; pro football is a business, and no one seems able to forget this for a minute. Young or marginal players yearn for a long-term contract; when one player is rewarded, it immediately creates tension and even resentment that poisons friendships with teammates nervously awaiting their own payday. Everything is about money. Imagine working in an environment in which your company has a clearly defined limit for employee compensation (the salary cap), and in which your and all all of your co-worker's salaries are published in the local paper.

Feinstien is an experienced and respected sports writer with a few established classics to his credit in the area of college hoops as well as countless tomes on other subjects. I've never read any of his prior work, but this book certainly won't steer me away from it. To his credit, he presents plenty of fascinating detail in perfectly readable prose, he just never seems to build a bigger picture throughout the book as a whole. Want a good picture of life in the NFL? Go back to when it was still fun. Go read Paper Lion. Nobody tells it like dear old George.

Book review: Body Piercing Saved My Life

Just finished Andrew Beaujon's Body Piercing Saved My Life¹, a book about Christian rock. A quick, solid read, nothing too heavy but just substantial enough to keep it interesting. Beaujon writes for SPIN, and it shows; Body Piercing reads less like a book than an extended SPIN article, with all the good and bad that implies. On one hand, there's a breezy, conversational tone on the surface, as well as plenty of witty digressions and a sharp eye for ironic observations. On the other hand, way too much personal stuff about the author's own "journey" in gathering material for the book and developing an understanding of his subject,² and both the theses and conclusions are pretty indistinct.

Still, while those may seem like tough criticisms, they're really just minor quibbles. The main thing I came away with, and this is the highest praise I can offer up to any book about music, was an eagerness to listen to several of the bands described therein. MuteMath³ and mewithoutYou seem like the most obviously enticing candidates, both of which Beaujon describes as mildly art-damaged indie rock with only vaguely Christian-themed lyrics. But he even manages to make the David Crowder Band, described as one of the better examples of an altogether odious strain of Christian music ("worship music"), sound intriguing. I've never cared for Christian rock, mostly because what little has crossed over to the "general market" (DC Talk, Creed, Evanescence⁴, etc.) has been universally rubbish. But there's obviously quite a lot of it out there (it's the only segment of the music industry currently experiencing growth in CD sales), and Beaujon is happy to report plenty of worthy acts to be heard.

After laying out the history of the genre in one early chapter, Beaujon tries to cover all aspects of the business and culture surrounding the music, from meeting with an indie label impresario and several different artists to attending a conference, and awards show and an outdoor festival. For the most part he finds people eager to show him around and help him out⁵ and is almost never hassled about getting saved (he's an athiest, though he hardly goes around announcing this). This makes the chapter in which he describes hanging out with some pro-life activists on the protest scene in Washington stick out like a sore thumb for two reasons: one, it has little, if anything, to do with music and two, try as he may, Beaujon is unable to conceal his dislike for the views of his subjects, never a problem elsewhere in the book. And every few chapters he transcribes an interview with what he calls a "Christian Rock Lifer," (musicians, magazine editors) and each of them is engaging and passionate.

I think the most important thing I got out of this book is the idea that you don't have to be Christian to dig some of this music. Plenty of Sufjan Stevens fans already realise that (or don't, and that's the point). Remember when Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was all the rage with the kids? How many of his American fans were Muslim?

Tangents & Clarifications
1. I was amazed at how many people didn't get the joke in the title, which appears on the cover below a cartoony doodle of two hands with holes poked through the palms. People would ask me what I was reading, look at the cover and say "What does that mean?" Seems pretty obvious to me, and I'm hardly an evangelical. [Return]
2. Stuff like "When I got back to my hotel that night I thought about..." and "I was starting to realise that this might not be what I was really looking for..." These aren't quotes, by the way, just generalisations off the top of my head. But you know what I mean. I guess you could take the whole thing as a metaphor for a spiritual journey to parallel those experienced by many of his subjects, but if that's his intent it doesn't quite work. [Return]
3. The clip on their homepage, by the way, is worth watching strictly for the fact that the lead singer is playing a key-tar. [Return]
4. Whom, by the way, I never even knew were Christian until I read this book. There were a few others like that in there as well. [Return]
5. Curious exception: label publicists, who seem inexplicably reluctant to allow their artists to be interviewed. [Return]