This is a big, heavy coffee-table book about the graphic design of the punk music scene. The author, an American, became obsessed with UK punk in 1977. (I did, too, so I can relate.) He found the graphic design of punk records, posters, buttons, and fliers fascinating, and he began collecting them. His collection grew to massive proportions. This book…
This book tells the story of Hendrix’s rise to fame as the best and most creative guitarist in rock, taking us through his childhood of poverty, hunger, and severe neglect, his enlisting in the army, his fascination with music, and his ultimate mastery of the instrument. The book goes into his troubled family life, the girlfriends and other women in…
Not surprisingly, I loved this book. I love photography, and I’ve been enthralled by the Haight-Ashbury era and the music coming out of that scene for years. Jim Marshall was a spectacular photographer who not only took iconic photos of musicians (he’s the guy responsible for the photo of Hendrix setting his guitar ablaze at Monterey Pop, Johnny Cash famously…
Mark Howard is a Canadian record producer who has worked with a lot of bands over the years. I was hoping for some cool stories about the artists he’s worked with, and the book has them, but not nearly enough pages are devoted to this. Instead, you get a lot of detailed jargon about recording equipment, as well as endless…
I’ve had this book on my shelf for a few years, knowing that tackling this would be a major undertaking. It’s taken me about two months, but I finally finished it. I’m a Beatles fan, and I’ve read a lot of books about them. Many books claim to be the “definitive” biography, but you’d be hard pressed to find a…
Jethro Tull were my favorite band in high school. I was kinda obsessed with them. Around 1980, either their music turned bad, or I outgrew it (both, I think), and I stopped closely following them. But during those early years, they produced some amazing music, much of which I still listen to frequently. There aren’t many books written about the…
I’ve been reading one Lou Reed biography a year since I retired. This one has its good points, and definitely has its bad points. The book addresses Lou’s college years really well, with a lot of detail and interesting facts that I haven’t seen covered in other bios. He doesn’t portray Lou as the mean, nasty guy that he was…
A really excellent memoir and coming of age story by a kid who immigrated to America in 1975 during the fall of Saigon, ending up in the small town of Carlisle, Pennsylvania. As he struggles to fit in, he finds comfort and identity in music (particularly punk rock) and in literature, allowing him to navigate the feelings of isolation, the…
The New York music scene in the late 70s and early 80s is a favorite topic of mine. CBGBs and Max’s were the primary music venues, but a number of smaller clubs that catered to the art scene as well as the music scene made their mark on New York, such as Club 57 and The Mudd Club. This book…
The author is a British screenwriter. He’s also a music fanatic, and has attended hundreds (possibly thousands) of concerts. In this unique memoir, he takes us through his life using concerts (15 in particular) that he’s attended. These concerts serve as touchstones in his life. He starts with a Cliff Richard concert that he attended at age 10, and stops…
I’m a Beatles fan and have read a number of books about them. At first glance this book looked pretty cheesy, and I thought to myself, does the world really need yet another Beatles book? Yes, it does. This book was a gold mine of fascinating stories, in little chapters that you can easily skip if you’ve heard the story…
I’ve been a Sex Pistols and a Public Image LTD fan from day one. I read Lydon’s first two books. This book is a limited edition (only 10,000 copies printed), autographed, individually numbered, in a clamshell box. The paper quality and graphic design are great. The content… that’s another story. The book is a random collection of Lydon’s thoughts and…
A long, very well-researched book that covers the band, from the early days in their respective former groups (Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, the Hollies) the group’s initial formation, the countless breakups and reformations, and their solo careers. The book gives great insight into the personal dynamics between the band members: the constant ego clashes (mostly due to Stills’s enormous ego),…
The 33 1/3 series of books are a collection of pocket-sized books that mostly provide a highly detailed analysis of one particular album by a group. Most of the books are short, around 150 pages or so. This book was quite a bit thicker than most, around 225 pages. I wish it was 500 pages, because I couldn’t get enough…
This year, I pretty much kept pace with last year in terms of reading. The pandemic increased my time spent indoors, and reading was my primary way of passing the time. I read 67 books in 2020. Although I love good fiction, I usually end up reading non-fiction. Last year, I tried to remedy that by making a deliberate effort…