Over the years I've kind of drifted into these two opposite tendencies: most of the TV and film that I want to watch is scripted drama, not documentaries, and most of the books I want to read are non-fiction, not novels. At one point I started to feel guilty about how little fiction I'd read, and about 8 years ago, I asked for novel recommendations on Twitter, and put a bunch of titles on my Christmas wish list, The Flamethrowers being one suggested by Jess Harvell. I got about 50 pages into it a few years ago, and was intrigued, but I just kinda lost momentum and went back to reading non-fiction books, and this year I started over and finally finished it, great stuff. The narrative stretches from World War I to 1977, jumping between the New York art scene, speed trials at the Utah salt flats, and Red Brigades uprisings in Italy while still having a really clear emotional throughline centering on a couple of characters. I loved the way the history and fictionalized elements mingled together and Kushner jumped between perspectives and chronology a little bit without doing too much to lose the impact of the main narrator's story. 

Over the summer, we visited my family in Wisconsin, and on the drive back we stayed one night in Cleveland, and I went and spent a couple hours in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. There were a lot of good music books in the gift shop so I wound up with Ted Templeman's book, which I'd been curious to read. Templeman's biggest success stories as a producer and Warner Bros. A&R man were Van Halen and The Doobie Brothers, both bands notable for changing frontmen with continued success, and he gives a fascinating window into both those stories. Templeman also signed and produced Montrose in their Sammy Hagar era, and one of his first thoughts when he signed Van Halen was that David Lee Roth might not be a good enough singer and could be replaced by Hagar. But eventually he came around to be a big supporter of DLR and produced Dave's solo records, and was opposed to Van Halen splitting with DLR and signing Hagar by the time it actually happened. But I love that Templeman takes the time to talk about his entire career, including how his brief stardom with Harpers Bizarre led to his production career. He even devotes a lot of attention to his less commercially successful work, including one of my all-time favorite albums, Little Feat's Sailing Shoes, as well as Aerosmith's Done With Mirrors and Captain Beefheart's Clear Spot. 

I wandered into a book store in Georgetown a while back that had a pretty nice selection of music books. Greil Marcus is one of the big canonical early rock critics who I'd always wanted to read more of, so I picked one of his books sort of at random. And I have to admit that this probably wasn't the best choice, I should've gotten an anthology of his longer pieces or something. But this book, which collects a column he wrote for the Village Voice in the '80s, and then for a procession of other publications for the next couple decades, is still a fun read. Each column is a top 10 list that includes new records, old records, books, films, radio shows, flyers, anything that catches his attention. In one column, the #1 entry is an Art Bears that Marcus accidentally played at 33rpm when it was meant to be played at 45rpm. The #10 entry is the same album again, which he likes less at the proper intended speed. I sometimes forget that this kind of thing thrived in alt-weekly columns before it became the content that writers of my generation put on personal blogs like this one. And the early Real Life Rock columns provide a great snapshot of things that were going on in the late '80s as it was happening, weird little footnotes and obscurities, I'm constantly googling about records or books he wrote about and making notes to check them out sometime. 

Back in June when I took an assignment to write two pieces about Baz Luhrmann's Elvis, I decided I to get a book about Presley to use as pne of my fact-checking sources. This one seemed like one of the more densely researched books about Presley out there, so one day when my wife was going to a book store, I tagged along, and she got this for me along with the books she was buying. And it definitely served me well as my starting point for research, this is such a great granular collection of first-person accounts of Presley's early life and career, in some ways it covers all the stuff I was curious about that the movie didn't touch. 

Here's my wife wound up buying two books about Elvis Presley for me -- a couple months later, she went to Memphis for a conference for work, and while she was there she hit some of the big tourist attractions, including Graceland. She asked me if I wanted any souvenirs, and I said I'd be up for another book, so she got this one. Jerry Schilling was 13 when he met Elvis Presley at a pick-up football game in the park, just after Presley got his first song on the radio in Memphis, and the games became a weekly ritual until Presley got too famous to keep them up, at which point Schilling became one of the youngest members of Presley's entourage. Schilling and his co-writer really did a great job of turning one friend's perspective on the Elvis phenomenon into a compelling narrative, it feels downright cinematic and really creates a full portrait of growing up in Memphis in the '50s. 

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