The Monkees, Head and The Sixties by Peter Mills. Definitely makes a convincing argument about the value of the Monkeys, both as a musical and media entity. It may be buried somewhere in the earlier sections, but I would recommend The Armageddon Rag by George R.R. Martin. Writen years before the start of the Game of Thrones saga, it is both my favorite Martin novel and rock fiction. A horror novel with an ending that even today brings tears to my eyes. AS Jo Bob Briggs would say...check it out.
Reading “Unstrung” by Marc Ribot. Not a memoir but rather a bunch of short writings — mostly creative, often tangentially music related — some quite funny.
Can - All Gates Open Great bio of a great band. A must for fans, although the last one-third or so consists of direct diary-like snippets from Irmin Schmidt that can be hard to digest.
I’ve just finished Francis Rossi’s autobiography. I really enjoyed it. I’m still not sure whether I like Francis but I think I understand him a lot more. Some very entertaining stories and some quite searing honesty
I saw SVZ few interviews on his New Book in recent weeks including on Bill Mahar’s HBO Show(entire show each week gets uploaded on YouTube for at least 1-2 days, but segments are usually still available there long term). I only recently started to listen to Springsteen, but had watched The Sopranos and interesting that Chase originally wanted SVZ to play the role of Tony Soprano. Based on the interviews, SVZ seems like my kind of dude on his views at least on social issues, if not musically(although certainly some overlap, since he likes a variety of music). I plan to buy this book in the next month.
Just finished reading " You Are beautiful And You Are Alone Nico Biography " by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike. What a sad lifeshe led. Sang with " the Velvet Underground" used & manipulated by Andy Warhol.
I have to give a thumbs up to this one as well. Also finished Please Please Tell Me Know by Stephen Davis of Hammer Of The Gods fame. I also like his Rolling Stones book " Old Gods Almost Dead ". This is about Duran Duran, and as always for Davis gossipy , but a enjoyable read. Learned a lot about John and Andy Taylor I didn't know. The last 30 years are really condensed though
I caught a book launch from I think City Lights by him It may be up on youtube still. Was very interesting anyway. Zoom meeting from like 4 months ago
It is indeed on line , here in conversation with another avant garde guitarist Elliot Sharp. Though oddly it looks like it was added 3 days ago . I assumed it would have gone up right around the time
Robby was on the The Vinyl Guide podcast this past week discussing the book, so I decided to get it. Look forward to listening to it on audible whiling running this week.
I'm reading Deep Blues by Robert Palmer. Great book. But I know I'm going to end up spending way too much money on blues records....
I just recently reread this. It’s such a classic and, 30 years later, holds up really, really well IMNSHO.
Just got this last week. It’s really good, particularly the insights from the Fillmore East crew (I find the musician commentary less compelling). And the photos are fantastic. Fillmore East: The Venue That Changed Rock Music Forever
I've just finished two: The Wrecking Crew by Kent Hartman. I actually saw this one get a couple of mentions over on the "Worst Music Book?" thread, but I wouldn't rate it that badly. The author uses a very informal, dramatised storytelling style which perhaps goes a little over the top at times and I can see how it might not be to every reader's taste, though it didn't bother me too much. This is a subject that I had only vague knowledge of beforehand so I found the book interesting and informative, but it's definitely more anecdotal than analytical, and had I been a knowledgeable fan already I probably would have wished it went deeper. I read a borrowed copy and I don't feel a strong need to buy/read again. It's About Time: Jeff Porcaro, The Man and His Music by Robyn Flans. Now this *is* a topic I'm much more familiar with, being a deep-diving Toto fan and also a keen follower of that generation of the L.A. session scene. So I was pleasantly surprised to find that this book could still tell me plenty of things I didn't know, helped by the fact that it's based around extensive interviews of every possible associate of Jeff's since birth. Robyn Flans is known as a longtime Porcaro fanatic, but (to her credit) she mostly avoids fawning and makes no effort at all to sugarcoat her subject, which is also a relief given how Jeff's personality cult can tend to make his enthusiasts gush... Instead she lets her sources pay the compliments in their own words. In fact the whole book draws so heavily on interview quotes that Flans' own writing sometimes seems little more than glue holding them together, and this is to me the book's weakness as well as its strength. Many of the quotes are over-long and seem to be reproduced verbatim, without any "tidying up" of the spoken wording. Tighter editing of these, and fixing a light scattering of typos, would have made for a slicker end product. More actual writing and analysis giving structure to the narrative would have made for a book that reads more like a book and less like a 200-page magazine article. I enjoyed it and will read again, but part of me wishes Jeff had gotten a biography that would appeal to a broader base of music readers, rather than one targeted squarely at "inner circle" fans with some assumed prior knowledge and interest. The irony is that the next-most recent music-related book I had read before these two was Phil Collins' very engaging autobiography, and in my opinion he's actually the best writer of the three (unless he had it ghosted - which I haven't heard), and/or certainly had the best editor.