Rolling Stone record guides. Anyone else get irritated???

I've owned all of these at one time or another, with the exception of the most recent one. I don't remember being too impressed with the 90's edition but I'd love to revisit it now.

 

Rolling Stone has never reviewed albums by the Man band. Doesn't surprise me.

 

Too bad. I like them

 

Yeah, an album like "Maximum Darkness" (live with John Cippolina) is just outstanding.

 

Far prefer All Music & Penguin

 

Also missing:The Jazz Album Guide(yellow cover) and the 1999 revised Jazz & Blues Album Guide,both edited by John Swenson. Both are sorely lacking,but they fit in the Album Guide grouping.
And,as noted in a few posts,the mass market paperbacks of Record Review Vol. 1 and II are not guides in the strictest sense,but a rehash of reviews from the magazine. Interesting but different.

 

I could take the exact same picture in my house, but my 1979 and 1983 editions (the top two books in your shot), are not in as good a condition as yours. I have read mine a lot (over many years), and occasionally have fallen asleep with them, so my covers have gotten some creases as a result.

As a quick recap, I feel the last two books are a little more even-handed in their reviews than the first two books. My general frustration with these books led me to get the All-Music Guides which I find much more useful, if only for the fact that they contain a lot more information about each release it includes.

The older books do contain entries for older groups that aren't in the newer ones -- a good example of an older group being The Joy of Cooking.

The newest release I have of either RS Record Guide or All Music Guide is no later than about 2005, so for me they are dated too (as I still keep an eye on current releases).

 

not sarcastic, I was just surprised they gave them 5 stars, jt for sweet baby james and Ronstadt for heart like a wheel (both deservedly imo) I seem to recall them being less generous for soft-rock-ish but they did like a lot of singer-songwriters warren zevon, jackson browne etc...

 

Certainly that could be the case but, given that any one of these are hardly the pinnacle or even five star albums (as all three have filler), I find it suspiciously strange especially given the relationship and/or worship that two of the three artists here had at RS (and friendship with JW).

 

Captain Beefheart is absent from the 1983 New Rolling Stone Record Guide.

 

Rolling Stone was for people who liked mainstream music, so the low star rating for the kind of music the OP mentions was correct for their audience's needs.

I would have used a low star rating as the first indicator that such music might have been worth following up.

 

The short answer is that the book in question is worthless. Throw it away. Find something better.

 

When I was growing up during the 60s & 70s Rolling Stone was on the cutting edge of not only music but every news worthy topic available ie., Kent State, Watergate, Ali & Patty Hearst but as the 1970s change into the 1980s they lost focus & direction...

My last Rolling Stone purchase was the James Brown memorial issue & before that after the mid 80s I kicked them to the curb...

As far as their guides go the very 1st paperback from early 1970s & the red guide are keepers but even then to the discerning listener must be viewed as strictly a reference...

Although Peter Townsend critiquing his bands work "MBB&B" & "Who's Next" during early 70s remains definitive Who literature, anyway you slice it...

The only opinion that really matters is from the individual involved in the listening...

Therefore the cliche "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is quite relevant here

 

Not

 

How about The Who's It's Hard and Jagger's Goddess in the Doorway - five stars. A hoot in both cases.

 

Interst8ng when I read all these comments, especially the negative ones.

Back when these books came out there was no internet, no streaming, no downloads etc.

How did we find out about different music? Radio AM/Fm? Depended where you lived. The midwest for me, was a wasteland. The very occasion review in the local paper, not very helpfull.

I used to buy Stereo Review for the Steve Simels eviews. Saved me from buying bum records I thought I might like. Steered me to a lot of records, I would have never found by myself. For me as a kid, records were expensive. No Goodwill for used records or dollar CDs. The reviews would give some context, especially lf it talked about some simiular records.

My sister got Teen magazine, they had short record record reviews, not too insiteful, but gave me a idea of what was out their.

The only place ai could buy records back then 2as K-Mart and some old furniture store, whose tadte ran to my parents generation.

While in College a friend had Rock Encyclopedia by Lillian Roxon. I was in p8g heaven a great book for a newbie back then.

Remember there were no band discographies out there. Atlantic Records had great record liners with lots of record jackets on them for records I never knew exisited.

Which brings me to Rolling Stone Mqgazine, unless you lived close to a "Head Shop" good luck finding a copy.

When rhe Blue Book came out it was great. Tons of record revies in one place. One stop shoping. It even had different sections for differnent genres. Where the record reviews perfect? NO. Are your friends or wife's favotite records the same as yours? NO. But the reviews gave some context to the different ones.
Afte4 a while yoi could tell what reviews matched your own. Also if they had a group of say Kinks Records, you had an idea what to search for.

The Red Book seemed to be more streamlined. Not as passionate reviews, but had more of an discography for each band. No Jazz reviews, they went to the Yellow Book (much harder to find).
As flawed as some of the reviews might have been, back when the books were publishrd, they gave me context for the records.

As an Old Fart, it was fun when you first met someone to preuse their record collection, to see what they had, some times you would pull out a record and you would put it on. Some times you would talk about it. The Rolling Stones Books gave me more knowledge about records, I never saw or want to buy,

Now days you can go to Wikipedia and see a bands whole output by date, a resource we nevehad back then.

Mine are all dog eared. I have my own notes in them. Some are detailed, some say great or sucks.

They were of their time, nowdays on Forums like this you can ask about The Kinks Discography or individual record like The Kinks Something Else, and get a blow by blow rundown on each detail of the record: pressing, song by song, recording personnel etc.

 

Loaned the red one to a friend of a friend some years ago and haven't seen either since. Have the blue edition but it annoys me, often rubbishing fave artists and albums, notably my main man McCartney.

 

It would take two of me to care less about some dopey magazine's opinion on albums. My opinion, to me, is the only one that matters on the music I listen to. I'm sure Flotsam and Jetsam would appreciate more that I bought their last CD (and vinyl) and a ticket to their last show than any opinion RS has about their music.

 

RS Guide was an essential resource for me prior to the internet, even thought I strongly disagree with many of their ratings. It certainly brought many great bands to my attention, that I never would have known about otherwise.

It's all subjective to taste. Allmusic ratings generally seem to skew higher than RS, and I don't see eye-to-eye with many of their ratings. On Amazon, seemingly every release gets a 4.5 out of 5 rating, making their rating system completely worthless.

 

How was the show? I was going to try to catch them this tour but my schedule didn't agree...

 

Yeah, the RS Guides were really important to the development of my musical tastes as I was going through adolescence, for better or for worse. Let's be generous: because of those guides, I certainly encountered a lot of good music that wasn't getting played on my Oklahoma radio station when I was growing up. Thanks, RS Guides!!
These days, I can hardly find a single thing worthwhile in their pages. Splitsville! It's like falling decisively out of love: one is amazed that one could ever have loved the other person!

Part of it may indeed be the stupidity of those guides and their general orientation toward judgment, rather than toward a more thoughtful mode of writing.
But I suspect the bigger part of it is just the development of music criticism in the decades since and the easy availability of better informed writing on music in the age of the internet.
And, yeah, of course, I've also changed a lot in my musical and critical tastes since the 1980s. Heh.
It doesn't bother me anymore if a writer arrives at a judgment I can't get along with, so long as they offer something thoughtful along the way. This happens all the time with Pitchfork: they are compelled to put a rating on things (hey, readers demand it!), but the writing is so often so good and so generally thoughtful that the review itself is worth reading. Of course they have more word-length space to stretch out with than those guides ever had. It's like Robert Christgau's malign influence (and the occasional diktat from Jan Wenner) stunted music criticism from the 1970s to the late-1990s. Anyway, the RS Guides suffer because they are all judgment and no real thought... which makes them sort of useless, so far as my present self is concerned.

I notice these days that Stephen Erlewhine, or whatever his name is, who was (is?) the main editor over at allmusic, now sometimes writes longer reviews on established artists for Pitchfork (he still has pedestrian tastes! but he's certainly well informed). I wonder whether allmusic feels it has been boxed into a fading review format -- the 100-word album review, which in the early 2000s seemed like such an improvement over Christgau's 30-word reviews, but they really pale next to the 400-word reviews over at Pitchfork.

YMMV, of course. Even less than 2 cents today, RH

 

There's also the yellow JAZZ RECORD GUIDE (1985) and the much larger follow-up, JAZZ & BLUES ALBUM GUIDE (1999).

 

The record guide was separate from the magazine. Reviews were completely different and, as many members have said, the guide served as a discography.

 

I keep my books in pristine condition...normally. But, yeah, my red guide was dog-eared and included my notes. I wrote this way earlier in this (now revived) thread but I added stars, crossed out stars and added new albums (as they came out). Yep, that was a well used book.

In the pre-internet days, where else were you going to find such a thorough rock discography?

 

This thread about the Record Guides constantly mixed up with the magazine. Also each guide has a preface explaining what they set out to do and offer thumbnail sketches of the contributors,so after a bit one can separate the wheat from the chaff. Factoid-the 1992 edition had four-count 'em-four reviewers and three editors. Folks forget the importance of an editor for all published works.