Reading Diary
SST Records released an astonishing amount of the greatest independent rock albums of the 1980s. And while Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life (which profiled 13 bands, 5 of which recorded for SST) will probably always be the definitive tome of '80s punk and indie, I really loved this book, and granular and unflinching look at the SST story. Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn is both the hero and the villain of the book, the guy who pushed SST up the hill, building his band and his label into a juggernaut that changed the underground, and also the guy whose grudges, bad ideas, and sketchy business practices turned SST into a shadow of its former self in the '90s. Ginn, perhaps understandably, doesn't seem to have participated in the book, but Jim Ruland talked to many other musicians and label employees and created a really complete year-by-year portrait of how the label picked up bands, helped them record, and curated a pretty interesting and diverse idea of what punk rock could be. And man, I wanted to cry when the book got to D. Boon's death.
I was intrigued by the idea that Bob Dylan had written essays about 66 songs that he considers exemplary songwriting. And it's a lot of fun to kind of kind of wander through his brain and get so many stray observations about music and the world from a guy who's rarely spoken straight to the public about things he loves. I particularly like the "Ball of Confusion" and "On the Street Where You Live" essays where he gets a little into the nuts and bolts of songwriting, rhyming and syllables, or praising Elvis Costello's "Pump It Up" while acknowledging its debt to his own "Subterranean Homesick Blues." And when he pontificates about what made The Grateful Dead or Johnnie And Jack unique, he's really insightful. Sometimes, though, it just feels like he's just riffing and free associating on the topic of a song's lyrics, and those essays vary from tedious to vivid and beautifully written.
Neal Karlen is a Minneapolis native who interviewed Prince for three Rolling Stone cover stories from 1985 to 1990 and became a friend would Prince would periodically call in the middle of the night and shoot the shit with. And This Thing Called Life is, I think, a really essential Prince book -- it's not a definitive biography, so if you only read one book about Prince, it probably shouldn't be this, but if you read two or more, this should be one of them. Karlen is not a scholar or starstruck admirer but a guy who knew Prince, understood his sense of humor and how Muhammed Ali and his favorite basketball players influenced him as much as any musician. Karlen also spends a lot of the book untangling all the lies Prince told him and other journalists, explaining who Prince's mother and father really were, how much Prince and Mayte's son dying really changed him, how he was dealing with chronic pain and getting hooked on painkillers as early as the mid-'90s. Karlen spends a lot of the book just kind of working out his anger about his friend's preventable death, and he talks in circles a lot, making the same points or telling the same stories over and over in different chapters as if multiple drafts were slapped together. But again, it's a fascinating Prince book that cuts through a lot of the mythology that other writers have just uncritically regurgitated.
Planes, Trains and Automobiles is a favorite comedy of mine and of many members of my family, so I was very amused to receive this book as a Christmas gift last year, which has the same title and cover as the erotic paperback that John Candy's character Del Griffith is seen reading early in the movie. And there are some fun revelations in this book, including scenes and subplots in drafts of the screenplay that didn't make the final cut, and the fact that The Canadian Mounted was not a prop book but a real book published in 1981. But it's ultimately a pretty slight little book, I feel like I learned almost as much about the movie from Vanity Fair's recent oral history.
I read to my 8-year-old every night, and we've been gradually making that transition from stuff Dr. Seuss and Mo Willems to books without pictures. And since he loves playing Minecraft, we tried out this book that was actually written by a bestselling novelist, World War Z author Max Brooks (son of Mel), and it turned out to be something my kid loves and that I found a pretty solid read as well. It's just a first person narrative of someone waking up in a Minecraft-style world made of cubes, completely alone on an island, trying to survive as you would in the game, but it's genuinely gripping and introspective and funny.
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