Looking for a celebration of music in words to stuff the stockings of the rock fan in your life?
A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman – Robert Hilburn (2024)
Randy Newman may be my favorite songwriter. Note for note and lyric for lyric, he has astounded, confounded, inspired, and moved me more than most (as nearly all my other favorite songwriters tend to concur). He is the master emotional manipulator, a spinner of sordid tales told by nefarious narrators and broken spirits that burrow deeply into subjects we avoid like racism, misogyny, jingoism, violence, and death. Subsequently, Robert Hilburn is a hero to those of us in the music journalism biz, having toiled at the highest levels for the L.A Times for 35 years and authored several seminal books, including biographies of Paul Simon (reviewed previously here) and Johnny Cash. Throughout, he captured almost all of Newman’s career in real time and has gathered a wealth of experiences in his delightfully crafted A Few Words in Defense of Our Country.
Hilburn’s Newman biography is a comprehensive endeavor, meticulously researched and filled with analytical charm, covering the young professional songsmith on his circuitous journey from a working songsmith into his guise as a distinctive singer-songwriter and finally the composer of an astounding number of the best movie soundtracks of the past half-century. Having previously reviewed two compelling books on Newman in this space – both worthy of exploring – this is the one I would recommend reading first. His life, his triumphs and failures, his loves and losses, his family’s joys and strife, along with his anxious artistic travails, are set against the grimly glorious collection of songs that continue to challenge us.
I Don’t Want to Go Home: The Oral History of the Stone Pony – Nick Corasaniti (2024)
Jersey boy Nick Corasanti has put together the most complete narrative telling of a legendary rock club that you’ll hope to find. I Don’t Want to Go Home: The Oral History of the Stone Pony grabs you from the jump as firsthand accounts of its origins, its rise to national prominence due to, of course, Bruce Springsteen, Southside Johnny, and many other New Jersey stalwarts leap from its pages. More pointedly, it is a fitting tribute for those of us who understand the import and legacy of the Pony that it so richly deserves.
In this rich oral biography, Corasaniti allows the voices of musicians, owners, bartenders, bouncers, politicians, and fans to exclaim the virtues of the music landmark as the proving ground for not only the “Jersey Sound” but of young pop artists (Jonas Brothers), grunge (Courtney Love, Pearl Jam), and turn-of-the-century post-punk and emo (Green Day, My Chemical Romance).
A place close to my heart (I played in a battle of the bands there and met Springsteen by the back bar in the early eighties), the Stone Pony is celebrated as not merely a historical paean but as a celebration of its continued existence. The club is a significant constancy in the ever-evolving good and bad times of Asbury Park, a beloved but oft economically and socially troubled shore town that owes much of its survival to those who toiled to make it a room for the ages.
Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital – David Browne (2024)
David Browne has written a book for me, and I thank him for it. Well, not officially, but, ya know, Greenwich Village is a place that rests deep inside my soul for its bohemian reflection of all forms of art, literature, social and political protest, burgeoning subculture, and, of course, music. Many volumes have been written on all those subjects, but very few on the music specifically, at least not this wide-ranging and with such reverence and care.
Talkin’ Greenwich Village handles every genre to come out of those serpentine streets and dark clubs and its magnificent centerpiece, Washington Square Park, and then some, but it is the people, the musicians, and club/cafe owners, the wanderers and street toughs, and the outcast weird, queer, courageous voices from generations past that reverberate in its pages. A true tour de force in tale and task, Browne has indeed written a book I needed to read and am so very glad I did.
Browne frames his tale beginning in 1957 with the birth of be-bop and the later 1950s into sixties folk explosion all the way to the early aughts and the knock-down and rebuild of the spirit of the neighborhood in all its inglorious gentrification. Using the imposing figure of Dave Van Ronk, the unofficial mayor of Greenwich Village, as a bookend to this astonishing expedition, Browne leaves no artist uncovered or geographical location ignored along the way, using vivid and haunting verbal images as sacred ground for the center of America’s hidden but precious psyche.
Raise Your Glasses: A Celebration of 50 Years of KISS Songs by Celebrities, Musicians and Fans – Tom Gigliotti, George (Zeus) Plandes and Joey Cassata (2024)
Full disclosure: I contributed around 20 short takes on my favorite KISS songs for this volume, but that’s not why I’m reviewing it and recommending it highly: Raise Your Glasses is a damn fun read. Its reverence for the band everyone seems to enjoy kicking around is laudable if not relentlessly entertaining. The voices of a myriad of known and unknowns waxing poetic on KISS songs turns out to be a winning formula and a unique way to discover, and for some, rediscover the band’s exaltations and idiocies.
This literary fun fest is the brainchild of the co-hosts of the hilariously irreverent and always informative Shout It Out Loudcast, which has been one of my favorite weekly listens since I appeared on the show back in early 2022. Acting as pied pipers for all the voices in Raise Your Glasses, Tom Gigliotti and George (Zeus) Plandes (along with esteemed drummer, Joey Cassata), are true believers that also use an argumentative critical eye towards the band they love to deconstruct with glee, and all of it comes through in this book. It is ultimately the care for “the KISS fan” that supersedes the band they shout about depicted in the dozens of photos displayed throughout that underlines the power and promise of the KISS cult, which remains strong and uncompromising.
Deeper Blues: The Life, Songs, and Salvation of Cornbread Harris – Andrea Swensson (2024)
I met author and music journalist Andrea Swensson whilst researching my upcoming book, Revolution – Prince, the Band, the Era (due the spring of 2025 from Bloomsbury Books – shameless plug) in the summer of 2023 and reviewed her illuminating Gotta Be Something Here last winter. Andrea is one of the sweetest, most genuine authors I have met in my many years of writing, and no one – I mean no one – honors the musical legacy of her town of Minneapolis more. She brims with pride and endless curiosity about its origins, influences, and impact on the wider culture. And all of that comes shining through in this glorious tribute to a relatively unknown but revered 96-year-old pianist/composer/performer James “Cornbread” Lewis and his inspiring reconciliation with estranged son, and half of one of the most decorated and respected musician/producers (with Terry Lewis) of the past 40 years, Jimmy Jam.
Deeper Blues: The Life, Songs, and Salvation of Cornbread Harris is more than a biography; it is the framework of the American musical and cultural experience as told through the memories of a man who has toiled at its most visceral level for decades. It is also a story of searching, hoping, and finding the core of family, as we’re there for the long overdue reconciliation of father and son through music, and the legacy of genius and kinship between a relentless archivist and her subject. Swensson illustrates once again her enviable knack at balancing craft with a measure of empathy and coercion in her subjects.
The highest compliment I can pay Deeper Blues is that Swensson takes you inside the mind and emotions of a father and son and the music that inexorably binds them when the world, circumstance and misunderstanding strive to tear them asunder. It unfurls as if a tribute to the mystery of the art-form and to those who ply to keep it alive and well.
Under a Rock – Chris Stein (2024)
Chris Stein, co-founder of the wildly successful new wave pop band of the 1970s and 1980s, Blondie, has brought readers into his chaotic, but nonetheless strangely focused, view of events surrounding his music. Along with former lover and songwriting partner, Debbie Harry, this lifelong New Yorker – with all the sarcasm and detached wit that comes with it – uses a stream-of-consciousness narrative in Under a Rock that never lets up. Stories of his peripatetic youth into the art underground of seedier Manhattan abound, as characters from Andy Warhol’s Factory to the burgeoning punk movement of Television, the Ramones, and the New York Dolls come alive.
Under a Rock is as close to reflecting the soul of a creative spirit as I have reviewed here – save maybe Patti Smith’s brilliant 2010 memoir, Just Kids – that puts as much onus on geography as personality. This is a New York perspective, even when Stein takes us on the meteoric international rise of Blondie. Although he does bring readers into the personality dynamics of a band – and Blondie was a contentious lot – from dingy clubs to packed arenas there is an unfortunate paucity of songwriting insights. It is as if many of the most beloved Blondie hits like “Heart of Glass,” “Call Me,” and “Rapture” just appeared from pure inspiration and flowing libation.
And speaking of the latter, Stein is unapologetically open about his years of drug abuse, parsing everything from weed to acid to cocaine, and eventually heroin and methadone, as his fuel of creativity to his physical and mental demise.
