a) 1971 - Never A Dull Moment: Rock's Golden Year, by David Hepworth
At this point most of the books I read are about music, and most of those are about particular pockets of 20th century music. And I'm really enjoying books that dig into a short period of time in as much detail as possible: there was Love Goes To Buildings On Fire, which surveyed everything that happened in New York in a 5-year span, and Never A Dull Moment narrows the timespan down to just one year while touching on virtually everything that happened in American and British popular music. But it's not just the concept I love but the execution; Never A Dull Moment is probably one of the best books about music I've ever read, Hepworth does an amazing job of threading the needle through 1971 and putting dozens of albums, concerts, and incidents in context (the Mick & Bianca Jagged wedding as a lens through which the Stones circa '71 are viewed), while offering interesting new insights on records that have already been written about too much like What's Going On, Tapestry, or Who's Next.

b) Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements, by Bob Mehr
I've read a number of books about self-destructive rock stars who had substance abuse problems and wrecked their hotel rooms, but the stories in Bob Mehr's Replacements bio rival the craziest anecdotes in books about Motley Crue or Guns N' Roses. And the 'Mats were not an outrageously successful band who could easily pay for the damage when they trashed their instruments or the inside of their touring vehicle -- there's stories of the tour manager handing them their daily touring per diem and sometimes they'd literally set the money on fire, just for a laugh. There's also a hilarious scene of them being at Bearsville Studios in '88 at the same time as Metallica, who were in the process of mixing the album where they famously muted the bass to haze their new bassist, and were taken aback by how dysfunctional the Replacements were. That said, this is a really wonderful, engrossing book about an amazing band, and Bob Mehr managed to really get what feels like a complete and empathetic portrait of everyone involved, even with Bob Stinson dead and Chris Mars declining to be interviewed.

c) Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, by Elvis Costello
I wasn't in any rush to check out Unfaithful Music when it came out, just because I've already read a couple books about Elvis Costello. But I happened upon an entertaining excerpt from the book a while back and suddenly realized it was kind of dumb that I hadn't read it, especially since I used to devour Costello's extensive liner notes for his reissued albums and knew that he's an excellent prose writer. It's not a straightforward memoir, he hops around chronologically, drawing parallels between different moments in different decades and talking about other people's records and concerts almost as much as his own. But it's a great read for music lovers, occasionally as with his albums Elvis gets too clever for his own good, but this big doorstop of a book I haven't finished yet is just overflowing with great stories and insights into a songwriter's process.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 02, 2020 at 11:03 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.