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Time once again to catch up on our rock 'n' roll reading. Here is a
look at some of the most noteworthy music books released in recent
months.
Get your Floyd fix here
Ardent Pink Floyd fans whose appetites were only whetted by the
recent David Gilmour and Roger Waters tours can get two more fixes
in the form of a couple of valuable additions to the book shelf.
The Dark Side of the Moon: The Making of the Pink Floyd Masterpiece
by British music journalist John Harris (Da Capo Press, $15.95) is
part of the publisher's occasional series diving deep into the
creation of rock classics, and the author draws on new and original
interviews with the band members and key players behind the scenes
to tell the story. The anecdotes are fascinating, and all the more
so because no one had any inkling that the disc would become one of
the most popular in rock history, with total sales now topping 30
million.
"They told me what the album was about: birth, and death, and
everything in between. I thought it was rather pretentious, to be
honest," session vocalist Clare Torry tells Harris. The band played
her the track they wanted her to sing on. "I said, 'What do you
want?' They said, 'We don't know!'" So Torry delivered the wordless
orgasmic moaning that millions would come to know as "The Great Gig
in the Sky."
Less music journalism and more super-fan obsession (and I mean
that in the best way) is Comfortably Numb: A History of "The
Wall," Pink Floyd 1978-1981 (PFA Publishing, $39.95) by Vernon
Fitch and Richard Mahon. This lavish, full-color, hardcover tome is
a complete geek treat, thanks to its beyond in-depth and
encyclopedic compendium of just about everything you ever needed to
know about the band's last great album. You want extensive
interviews with the creators, rare photos, studio logs cataloging
the time spent and equipment used on each track, and examinations
(complete with transcribed stage patter) of every live "Wall"
performance? It's all here. And if you've ever wondered how Toni
Tennille (minus the Captain) came to sing backing vocals on the
album, or what the symbolic significance of those marching hammers
was, well ... the answers to those and every other question you
could pose are here as well.
Superfans get in on the action
Another fan book that rises above the genre is Mark Wilkerson's
Amazing Journey: The Life of Pete Townshend (Lulu Press,
$34.95), a whopping, 641-page tome that follows the Who's founder
from birth in Chiswick, London, in the spring of 1945 through the
summer of 2005. "The book began as a hobby in 1997," Wilkerson says,
and he spent eight years researching it. It suffers some from the
lack of original interviews with its subject, and for relying a bit
too much on long quotes from published materials, but it is nothing
if not exhaustive and thorough, and though the author is clearly a
devoted acolyte, he doesn't shy away from thorny episodes in
Townshend's life, such as his arrest for pornographic images found
on his computer. Because of its straightforward, just-the-facts (and
I mean all of them) approach, Amazing Journey will be
the ideal companion and balance to the rock legend's long-promised
autobiography, if he ever actually delivers it.Great
Pretenders: My Strange Love Affair with '50s Pop Music by Karen
Schoemer (Simon & Schuster, $25) is a fan book, too, but one of a
different sort. A Gen X'er who rose from writing for photo-copied
fanzines to penning "serious" music criticism for Newsweek and the
New York Times, Schoemer held the modern rock fan's typical disdain
for the lush '50s pop music that predominated in the days before
Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry exploded onto the scene. Then one day,
a Connie Francis box set landed on her desk, and she found herself
strangely drawn into the music and a re-examination of sounds and
artists (Francis, Fabian, Pat Boone, Patti Page) who'd provided the
soundtrack for her parents' early love affair. The result ultimately
was a book that is part memoir, part journalistic history, and some
music lovers have faulted it for blurring the lines. Its real
strength, though -- beyond Schoemer's conversational and often funny
writing -- is in exploring a way to listen to music that you may
think has nothing to do with the genres you love, or the present
music scene.
"Subterranean wishes and dreams rose right to the surface, and
the stickiness and complexity of sex sank without a trace," Schoemer
concludes about the music she came to love. "Betrothal solved
everything. Love would endure forever, unchanging, unimpeded, a
Platonic ideal, an impervious force. These singers sounded so sure
of themselves. I envy that conviction -- it's what we've lost."
And then there were ...
Finally, we have two other books chronicling unsung heroes of the
past. Acappella Street Corner Vocal Groups: A Brief History and
Discography of 1960s Singing Groups by Abraham J. Santiago and
Steven J. Dunham (Mellow Sound Press, $22.95) provides biographies
and discographies of vocal combos that made their mark after the
heyday of doo-wop, at a point when the British Invasion was
overshadowing these sounds, and it serves as a handy reference for
collectors interested in digging deeper. Then, it's time to give the
drummer some with Bob Cianci's The Great Rock Drummers of the
Sixties (Hal Leonard, $19.95), a collection of illuminating
profiles of greats such as Ringo Starr, Charlie Watts, Mitch
Mitchell, Keith Moon and Ginger Baker, as well as lesser heralded
players such as solo surf drum king Sandy Nelson and Mick Avory of
the Kinks.
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