Roy Peak--Books About Rock 'n' Roll

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture"
Nick Lowe

I bought the Sex Pistols one and only real album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, less than a week before the band imploded at their last show in San Francisco, purely on the advice of my eighth grade school friend, Sleepy: "They vomit on stage, man!"

That and the fact that I found the album in the cut-out bin for 99 cents. The best 99 cents I ever spent.
Other than Sleepy's well meant, if inaccurate, description I was mostly left to my own to find music that I liked when I was growing up. There weren't any magazines that I knew about (or could afford) that gave me any sort of musical guideline. My friends weren't any help, either. They all listened to crap like REO Speedwagon, Styx, Journey, Boston, Toto, and Billy Squier. You know, the crap they try to push now as to what the seventies were really about.

And I tried, I really did, to be like my friends and like their music. I'd listen along at parties or while cruising in cars to Rush, ZZ Top, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer but as soon as I got home I'd slap on the Pistols or the Ramones and attempt to blast everything else away. For Christmas my grandparents got me a Foreigner record because that's what was big that year. For my birthday my parents gave me Led Zeppelin's ZOSO album. As a good kid I'd play them over and over until I was sick to my stomach, trying to like them, hoping that one day I would "get it" and fit in. Never happened.

I felt as if I was in a giant bubble. Completely isolated, stuck listening to what with everyone else liked, never being able to express myself. There was no one to even hold a conversation with about music, even. (Sleepy disappeared, never did find out what happened to him.)

I had no way of learning anything about new music or what to search for in the record bins. I was on my own, all alone, in the strange and mystifying world of rock 'n' roll.

Occasionally something would breakthrough. I would be lucky enough top stumble along something new and real, exciting and full of energy, giving me hope. I found the Velvet Underground's White Light, White Heat in my friend's brother's record collection. Upon just listening to the first cut I was hooked. I snuck it home and played it over and over, swaying with the headphones on, getting lost in the swirling distortion and hypnotic beats.

Sometimes the slowly changing state of radio would be helpful. I heard Tom Petty's "Refugee" for the first time on the radio. Blondie was a radio favorite as was the Cars. I was driving around town late night once and heard a song that moved me immensely. I called up the radio station but the DJ had no idea what I was talking about and couldn't tell me who the artist was. I stayed up for days, suffering through all sorts of shit: bad boogie tunes, power ballads, an entire album side by the band Yes -- hoping to hear that one song again, but never did. Years later I heard it at a friend's house--it was the Talking Heads version of Al Green's "Take Me to the River" and I was elated. It was like being reunited with a long lost beloved family member after many years. Armed with the knowledge I went and bought my own copy the next day.

The TV was of help occasionally: I saw a really bizarre interview with the members of Devo on late night television, but couldn't find any of their records anywhere. I saw the Rolling Stones on Saturday Night Live promoting their Some Girls album and as soon as I heard Bill Wyman playing bass and saw Mick Jagger kissing Keith Richards on the mouth I knew I had to have that record. Listening to that one made me buy the collection of their early singles which I soon fell in love with.

It wasn't until I was nearly twenty years old and had moved to another state before things began to change. I got a job downtown and would hang out at the library during my lunch breaks. Browsing the music section I came across Mystery Train by Greil Marcus. It wasn't a book about any of the bands I liked or had even heard of at the time (Elvis was that old fat guy my Mom listened to occasionally; the guy that the old woman down the street cried about for a month when he died. I recalled Newman's "Short People" being a hit, but never gave the guy who wrote it another thought.) but with what Greil wrote I could tell he also had been searching all his life for music with emotion, substance, meaning.

And truth.

I felt the bubble lifting as I found more books about rock music: Stranded, edited by Marcus, with contributions by many writers, whose books I quickly searched out; a bio about Bob Dylan; magazines with articles by Lester Bangs, Caroline Coon, and Dave Marsh.

Anything about punk rock that I could get my hands on.

It felt good to be validated; to feel not alone in the world. If I didn't know these people, and most likely never get a chance to meet them, then at least it was good knowing there were intelligent people out there who felt passionately as I did about rock 'n' roll. People for whom rock 'n' roll was more significant than just background music at a party, or the band at the club that plays nothing but what you already hear on the radio (those were usually the most annoying). People who weren't fooled by the radio as being their only choices out there. There were (and are still) more bands in the world than would ever be able to be played on the radio or on MTV and the like.

You just have to find them.

These books helped me when I was feeling my way blindly through the world. I didn't always agree with all they said -- sometimes I'd get downright upset or angry at them -- but they were signposts in the right direction; bread crumbs dropped on the trail in the hopes that others would dare to follow.

So now I've got this wealth of knowledge (and opinions), but what do I do with it all? How about if I pass it along? Interested in a good book about Patti Smith, or which British magazine writers to bother with? Then here's the good, the bad, the "why are they being so ugly?"

I'll keep 'em as short as I can. (Yeah right, the impatient reader grumbles to himself, one-thousand words into the introduction...) and if you agree\disagree I'd love to hear from you. If you've got a review or comment on a book I haven't gotten around to yet, then send that to me and I'll post the best schtuff I get.

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
by Lester Bangs

This book collects the best bits from rock criticism's best writer so far, from his early proto-writings about Question Mark and the Mysterians and the Stooges, to his later short story fantasy about a Rod Stewart single. In the late sixties and early seventies Bangs was writing about punk as if he was foretelling the future; wishing for bands that he thought never would happen. He was one of the few critics to be completely honest and vocal about his likes and dislikes, going against the norm: He despised critic darlings such as Frank Zappa and Led Zeppelin; loved gutter rock like the Stooges, the Troggs, the Count Five.

He wrote as if he was in the room with you, relentlessly pacing, swilling cough syrup as if it were fine liquor, smoking haystack cigars, and gesturing wildly all the way. Reading, you become his trapped prisoner, the sympathetic kidnap victim, his willing accomplice.

He wrote about rock music as if he was performing a song live in front of an audience. If he sensed he was about to lose you he'd take a quick side-trip and hope for the best. Never boring, even in his more longwinded moments, and always straight on target.

Brilliant, staggering, insightful, to the throat, mocking, impassioned, honest, blood dripping, rude, from the hip, acid-barbed prose. Buy this book and pore over its every detail written by someone who was rock 'n' roll.

Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs
by John Lydon

A (mostly) tell-all memoir by ex-Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten. From the early days when being a punk didn't mean anything as superficial as having a mohawk and wearing a leather jacket. Rotten's anecdotes reveal much, not just about himself, but about the English social and music scene in London in the early- to mid- seventies. He gives credit where its due (Even to Malcolm McLaren!) but still doesn't hesitate to take the piss out of someone who annoyed him. (Also Malcolm McLaren.)

Ken and Kent Zimmerman, who co-authored the book with Rotten, do an admirable job of making the book read like Rotten's speaking voice (You can hear the venom while it still drips from his fangs...) while not letting it ramble on. Peppered with snippets of interviews with people who knew him both personally and professionally, some who don't have all good things to say about Rotten, this book is a good read about an important man, a great band, a culturally significant place in time.

My only regret was more could have been said about the PIL years.

Babes In Toyland
by Neal Karlen

Neal Karlen has written a wonder of a book that should be read by anyone in a band. This chronicle of the all-female grunge band, Babes In Toyland, covers everything from the band's fetal beginnings with Courtney Love, to their original bassist quitting, the internal problems resulting from slacker boyfriends, non-supportive family members, over-eager managers, constant touring, the headache that is producing an album or filming a video, and greedy record companies. The good and the bad all play a role in shaping a band's future and Karlen doesn't pull any punches. The book reads more like a novel than the history of a real band, giving it a "can't put it down for what might happen next" quality.

Any band would be proud to have a book this detailed, honest, full of praise and well meant criticism written about them.

England's Dreaming
by Jon Savage

An extensive, sprawling, detailed history and analysis of the British punk scene in the seventies. Savage leaves very little out, backs up some of what Johnny Rotten laid forth in his bio, and sheds light on a lot that Lydon left out.

Savage's closeness to the scene (He's collaborated with Jamie Reid, punk proto-artist, and others in the past.) probably helped him to convince some of the personalities in this book to sit down for some candid interviews and tell what was really going on in the back rooms, on the street, backstage, and in their heads.

Very tight writing, very clear, and Savage doesn't try to mythologize punk, just tells it like it was. One of the best books out there on the scene.

Savage does, though, make the same mistake as Clinton Heylin in his book From the Velvets to the Voidoids, his history of the American punk scene, in that each side claims that their people "invented" punk rock all on their own with no outside influences, when the inescapable truth is that punk pretty much invented itself, all on its own, on both sides of the Atlantic, at nearly the same time, with each group going about it in slightly differing ways. And each side was quite aware of the other, if only like someone glancing warily over their shoulder at the person tailing them in order to gain clues on how to leave them in the dust. Its as if they're saying "I may walk in your footsteps, but I'll wear my own shoes."

From the Velvets To the Voidoids:
A Pre-Punk History for a Post-Punk World
by Clinton Heylin

Clinton Heylin's done his homework, no doubt about that. And where Jon Savage in his book, England's Dreaming, concentrated on punk as a British phenomenon, Heylin goes the American route, mostly telling about those great American cities New York, Detroit, and...Cleveland?

Although he's correct in asserting the importance of late sixties and early seventies punk pioneers as the Stooges, The New York Dolls, and the Velvet Underground -- as well as shedding much needed light on smaller, but still important, bands like Devo, Pere Ubu, and Suicide -- he tends to go out of his way at times in an attempt to mythologize them; but since his writing isn't as passionately cerebral as Greil Marcus, nor as eloquently enthusiastic as Gina Arnold, he occasionally falls a little flat. Sometimes just the straight facts are enough.

The book is very detailed and informative, though, and he's done countless interviews with his subjects in order to chase down the facts.
As a history of its subjects, it does work.

The Boy Looked At Johnny
by Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons

Named after a line from a Patti Smith song, this book was first released in 1978 when punk was still forming its ideas and thoughts, before it had begun to mythologize itself. Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons were writers for some of England's premiere rock magazines at the time, both young and with enough enthusiasm to look at the happening punk scene with fresh eyes and cool wit.

Yeah, right.

What could have been a fascinating read about punk's humble beginnings, starts out with a limp pop and quickly spirals down to a waste of a read. Billed as "the obituary of rock 'n' roll" they take themselves way too seriously and think themselves as important as the bands they criticize. One wonders about their honesty and agendas. This was obviously written for the quick cash it generated them at the time and why Lenny Kaye ever wrote a positively charged introduction (getting my hopes up...) to this useless slim tome of misinformation and caustic opinions, I'll never know.

Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons obviously have no passion for their subject and seem to grudgingly acknowledge the Sex Pistols as the only thing worth writing about throughout most of the book. (They're too "hip" to admit liking the Ramones, calling them "heavy metal retards pretending to be punks by wearing leather jackets.")

The opening chapter reads as if they hope the reader knows nothing at all about the sixties music scene while they slag important bands such as the Stooges, the New York Dolls, and the Velvet Underground ("unrepentant poseurs, " "boors," and "amateur-hour wimp bands.") This is more than a matter of opinion. They get dates wrong, downplay important acts (The Ramones, Velvets, Iggy, Bowie...to name a few.) and print their opinions as facts. (They claim that Devo was a hippie band, jumping on the punk bandwagon when actually they started out in the early seventies, before the original Pistols lineup even formed without Johnny Rotten. Devo was gigging as early as 1973!) They use a Patti Smith lyric for the title of their book, but refer to her as "a silly old bippy" throughout.

At the end of the book they make the statement that the Tom Robinson Band would be the only punk group to survive the seventies, not because of their musicality, but their politics. The Tom Robinson Band was a fine band, but one of the reasons they didn't last was because of their politics. You can't use politics as a novelty act and make it last.

And what bands do they say will be forgotten twenty years hence? The list is long: Elvis Costello, Blondie, Joan Jett, Iggy, the Ramones, the Velvet Underground, the Clash, Jonathan Richman, Patti Smith, Devo, Lou Reed, and on and on...

That Duran Duran is one of Burchill's favorite groups says a lot to me about her choices.

The magazine High Times has a quote on the back of the book : "What the Sex Pistols did for rock 'n' roll, this book does for rock 'n' roll journalism." makes me curious. Do the editors of High Times (all hippies, just like the ones the writers of this book hate and ridicule throughout... ) even know what the Pistols did for rock 'n' roll? Do they care? If this book is what they think of punk rock then they remain immensely clueless!

If you see this book for sale somewhere, take it up to the counter and request the owner send it back to the publisher. Criticism in its true-est form.

Route 666: The Road To Nirvana
by Gina Arnold

Gina Arnold grabs your interest right from the opening sentence: "I grew up thinking that everything had already happened." A line so true it hurts; something I believe most people growing up in the seventies felt. Her crisp, refreshing prose matched with stark honesty ("I was... watching it and imaging it from all alone in my room.") serves her well in creating "a mythic, rather than specific" look at modern alt-rock's beginnings in college towns across America.

The stories she tells, mostly through snippets of interviews with people who were there, about towns such as Seattle, Boston, and Athens could easily have been about Orlando, Poughkeepsie, or Salt Lake City as punk music D.Y.I. caught up with pop and began to make a bigger noise. The bands that were lucky enough to make it big, the ones doomed to eternal failure, the fanzines reporting on the scene, the rise of the indie labels across the country all get their say in this great history of modern American rock 'n' roll.

Occasionally you get the feeling that she's perhaps a mite too close to her subject to be completely objective but with lines like "In America, there should be more synonyms for violence, including one that does not imply either injury or rage," I can forgive her.

Kiss This: Punk In the Present Tense
by Gina Arnold

Billed as the sequel to Arnold's book Route 666. But where Route 666 hops, skips, and jumps across America telling the story of the alternative music uprising of the nineties and the bands that made it happen; this book concentrates mostly on the West Coast scene, especially 924 Gilman Street, the all-ages, all-volunteer punk club collective in Berkely, California and the bands that played there: Operation Ivy, Green Day, Rancid, and the Offspring. Reporting on what happens during the turf war when a Seattle brewery decides to open up across the street from the club, Arnold lets both sides tell their story candidly and still manages to be honest with her own opinions, not always siding with the punks.

The best part of the book, though, is Arnold's essay on where punk failed and rap music succeeded, picking up the pieces; and her interviews with rappers Knowledge and Ish from the band Digable Planets and solo artist Ice T.

She finishes off the book with an entire chapter plugging her favorite band, the Fastbacks, and detailng their European tour opening up for Pearl Jam.

Sometimes Arnold is more the gushing fan than the critic but her observations are still keen and pointed. I can appreciate her account of going into a music store to buy a Fugazi CD and the pimply-faced clerk exclaiming "Oh, are you getting this for your son?" because this too has happened to me.

Old age and a love for punk rock are a strange conundrum, one I hope to someday solve. Hopefully the next Gina Arnold book will arrive in the nick of time.

Pursuit of the Millennium
by Norman Cohn

This is the book they wouldn't let you read in your high school history class. Detailing the twisted version of the crusades, the real anti-christ (Alive and well in medieval Europe), religious zealots, and orders who fear (love, want, hope, wish for, run from... ) the end of the world. Full of murder, pain, vengeance, the Devil let loose upon the world, crazed madmen, cannibalism, witchcraft, and religious fervor.

And all true.

A fun read.

The Last Rock Star Book -- Liz Phair: A Rant
by Camden Joy

Not about Liz Phair the singer-songwriter, but about Liz Phair, the imagined singer-songwriter that exists in the fictional Camden Joy's head as he's assigned to write a sort of quickie "Where is she now?" book for an unscrupulous publisher. Camden's mentally unstable, (Again, it seems... ) hiding from his landlord, been dumped by his live in girlfriend of the past few years, and spends most of the book telling us about his traumatic childhood, with a subplot concerning Brian Jones illegitimate daughter.

The book gets interesting when Camden starts to become obsessed with his subject matter and plays with stalking as a cultural pastime. It starts to fall apart when Camden makes you think he's that he may be ready to pull a Mark Chapman, but he pulls it back just in time.

Also of note is Camden's observations on Liz's songs, misheard lyrics and all. Very interesting.

The King Is Dead: Tales of Elvis Postmortem
Edited by Paul M. Sammon

Short stories about Elvis. Not Elvis when he was alive and well and the undisputed king of rock 'n' roll; but tales of Elvis dead and gone. Elvis the zombie. Elvis the forgotten, left to die in a rest home. Elvis as hamburger meat. Elvis' dead brother Jesse. Elvis as saint.

A great and entertaining collection featuring some of the best writers out there. This book is funny, depressing, truthful, spooky, ribald, scary, right on target, and a hell of a thrill.

This is also where I first read the story Bubba Ho-Tep which became a cult film years later.

Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr
by Rudolph Grey

Cobbled together with interviews from anyone whoever worked with the world's worst film director and containing lots of great pictures, this book was the inspiration for the fantastic Tim Burton movie, Ed Wood staring a flawless Johnny Depp as the man, Ed Wood, Jr. himself. (Who woulda thunk it: A movie about Ed Wood, done up like an Ed Wood movie!)

This book is, though, is much darker than the movie, (Which is uplifting throughout, even with Lugosi's spiraling out of control addiction and the final sad footnote to Wood's end before the final fade. I still think that every person who considers themselves an artist, in whatever medium, needs to see this movie again and again.) giving much the same feeling as Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy, getting darker and more depressing every minute until you're slumped, lifeless and helpless in a hell to real, too scary, to even think about escaping. How Ed Wood remained so optimistic with his life and art crumbling around him, mostly to his own ineptitude and grand schemes, is something I find impossible to imagine.

The last half of the book is an extensive bibliography of everything ever done by Wood: All the films, scripts, commercials, government films, teaching (!) films, and even his porn books!