Reading Diary
Tom Breihan and I both got started as music writers at Baltimore City Paper around the same time in the mid-2000s, and when he still lived in Maryland I'd hang with him and his brother Jim. So I was really happy for Tom when he published his first book a few months ago, he's genuinely maybe the nicest person I know in this business and a great writer. And his Number Ones column for Stereogum is something I always look forward to reading three times a week, I will admit that I wasn't sure if someone who loves Rancid and Three 6 Mafia as much as Tom would take easily to the task of explaining the differences between, say, Mariah Carey's 19 #1 hits, but the column has just gotten better and better as it's gone on. I told him once I hoped every column would be collected in a book, but that would be a pretty massive tome. So understandably, this book is a bit more condensed, with chapters about 20 songs that sort of trace the story of the Hot 100 and American pop over the last 65 years, like the first Beatles #1 or "Crank That Soulja Boy." That format works pretty well, he's able to bridge the narrative of all the minor hits that led to a #1 and all the later #1s it paved the way for. I particularly like the early chapters like the Beach Boys one because there's a more pronounced difference from the earlier, shorter Stereogum columns. Tom put the acknowledgments at the end, so I was happily surprised to see that I got a shout out in the book after I had just finished reading it.
Susan Rogers was Prince's recording engineer from 1983 to 1987, and since Prince self-produced his albums and often played every instrument, that means Rogers was the only other person in the room when Prince made a lot of his greatest music -- the envy of every Prince fan, I think. And though Rogers has shared some great stories and insights about Prince in interviews, and there are a few sprinkled through this book, she's also a professor of cognitive neuroscience, and the book is a more ambitious thing about the how the human mind responds to music. I was a little disappointed to find that it wasn't 200 pages of Prince stories, but it's a really interesting book that it explores the topic from a number of different angles, I feel like it could be a good companion to Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks if one was teaching a course about the intersection of psychology and music or trying to learn a lot about that area. And the book opens with a really moving story about Rogers going to see Led Zeppelin at the L.A. Forum as a young woman, having to leave the show early because she was married to a controlling husband, and vowing she would be back someday doing live sound at the Forum, and years later she had divorced and achieved the career in music she dreamed of, and was back there engineering a live recording for Prince.
I grew up on Mel Brooks movies and really feel like he's one of the most significant figures who shaped my sense of humor and my family's sense of humor, so I picked this up one day just looking around a book store, and it's a good read. After a few introductory chapters about growing up during the depression and being drafted in WWII, most of the book is about his career, and there are great stories about pretty much every movie and major project (including producing things like The Elephant Man). Sometimes it feels like Brooks takes up too much of the book just describing scenes from his movies, but he really gets deep into how they were made, what his philosophies about comedy and filmmaking are, and fascinating stories. For instance -- John Wayne loved the Blazing Saddles script but didn't think it would fit his wholesome image to play The Waco Kid in the movie, and the actor initially cast for the role was an alcoholic who showed up unable to work on the first day of filming, so Gene Wilder flew out and started filming three days later and just immediately nailed the role. There's an awkward moment where Brooks details the entire beginning of his writing career with Sid Caesar in the '40 and '50s, and then sort of casually mentions that he'd been married for a decade and had three children, but was at that point about to get divorced (and then writes in great detail about meeting and marrying Anne Bancroft). Reminded me a little of how Elvis Costello's book barely mentions his first marriage.
I found a couple of old Amazon gift cards in my wallet recently, so I went on there and made some purchases, new drumsticks and a couple books to help with research on an article I was working on about The Dark Side Of The Moon. I've seen these big books that exhaustively detail the discography of a given classic rock act and always figured I'd like to have a Beatles book but it was kind of fun to get one for a band I know less about like Pink Floyd and dig in, it's a really huge beautiful book full of photographs and tons of information, I mostly read through the Dark Side stuff but have been jumping into other parts, it seems easier to jump around than read it front to back.
This is the other article I got while working on my piece, it's obviously focused on just the one album and is shorter and less fancy, there's some pesky typos here and there. But Southall has interviewed members of Pink Floyd and other people who were involved in the band and/or the album and he brings some great insight on the subject. I've always been fascinated by how this band kind of went from sort of a cult thing in America to just massive very quickly with this album, which is obviously great but very artsy and immersive. And it was cool to get a better understanding of how the stars aligned, how the band played Dark Side live a lot before recording it (and it was bootlegged and sold well), and tried to get out of their U.S. contract with Capitol and basically made the label pledge a lot of resources for promotion and wound up with a phenomenon, even before "Money" was released as a single.
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