NEWS FLASH! For those who might be paying attention, my reading previously announced for Friday, March 27, has been postponed a week to Friday, April 3. Location remains Dynamite Records, 33 Main St., Northampton. Start time: meet and greet begins at 6:30, reading starts at 7 pm. I'll be reading a few choice excerpts from the book and also probably playing some musical selections.

Meanwhile, here's my favorite music quote that I've run across of late, from the January issue of The Wire. Briefly praising the most recent album by Athens, GA heavy rockers Harvey Milk (which I just bought today, haven't yet listened to), the writer Joseph Stannard calls the record "a persuasive restatement of the idea that, while the riff belongs to everyone, it's perhaps safest in the hands of disheveled, hirsute males in plaid shirts."

I suddenly feel so validated.

This past Saturday I gave the keynote talk at a graduate student music conference at McGill University in Montreal. I was speaking on material from This Ain't the Summer of Love, and even though my talk wasn't until the afternoon, I dutifully showed up at the conference at 9:30 am to catch the first session of the day.

When I arrived, one of the conference organizers told me that she wasn't sure if I knew, but that Sandy Pearlman was a visiting professor at McGill, and he was really looking forward to my talk.

Holy crap!

For those who don't know, Sandy Pearlman is one of the great, largely unsung figures in 1970s rock. He was mainly a behind-the-scenes guy, but as behind-the-scenes guys go he was in the middle of some pretty great stuff. A full list of his credits would go way beyond the scope of this modest little blog, but some highlights should put things in perspective:

Pearlman was one of the first generation of bona fide rock critics, a regular contributor to Crawdaddy, and friend/partner in crime with the more celebrated Richard Meltzer.

Along with Murray Krugman, Pearlman managed and produced pretty much everything released by Blue Öyster Cult until 1978's Some Enchanted Evening and continued to work with the band in later years. He also co-wrote a number of their best songs, including such awesome tracks as "The Red and the Black" and "Dominance and Submission."

Still partnering with Krugman, Pearlman also produced all three studio albums that the Dictators made in their 1970s prime.

In 1978 Pearlman produced the second Clash album, Give 'Em Enough Rope, which is usually not considered at the top of Clash albums but was nonetheless pretty great.

In 1980, Pearlman produced a great lost classic by the weirdo French hard rock band Shakin' Street, for which he recruited Dictators guitarist Ross the Boss.

Add it up. My book is titled after a Blue Öyster Cult song, and it devotes the better part of a long chapter to the Dictators. Needless to say, I was psyched that Pearlman was going to be at my talk, and a little intimidated.

I should add as a side note, that I've never made a habit of getting to know the people that I write about. I don't do oral history or ethnography, so I don't have much cause to do interviews, and quite frankly, I've always been kinda shy about meeting people whose work I admire (this mainly applies to musicians; I have no trouble meeting academic folks whose work I admire). So the rare occasions when I happen to meet or otherwise talk with someone whose work I've pored over are fairly few and far between.

That said, I wasn't going to let the opportunity slip by. I didn't have a great idea of what Pearlman looked like, but I spotted him as soon as he came into the room where I was speaking, and I didn't hesitate to go over and introduce myself. He was very cool, gracious even, when I briefly told him about my book and how much I admired his work with the Dictators. "Second best album I ever worked on," he said of the awesome first Dics' album, Go Girl Crazy! Later he said the best was BOC's Tyranny and Mutation. I'd have to agree on both counts.

I have a book reading coming up on March 27, at Dynamite Records here in Northampton. It's the first one I've done in a long time, and may be the only one I'll be doing for the new book - it's not like university presses have lots of money to throw around for publicity, after all. Anyone reading this who's in or near the Northampton area, please come down.

Last week I went to a very cool book event at the APE gallery in downtown Northampton. It was supposed to be Thurston Moore and Byron Coley talking about their recent book on the New York No Wave scene of the late 1970s-early 1980s. I have the book, haven't yet had time to really sit down with it, so I thought it would be cool to hear the authors give their version of how it came about.

(A sidenote: yes, Thurston Moore is a local resident, as any good indie rock acolyte should know. I've not had the chance to strike up a real connection with him but chances to see him around the area are not rare.)

Unfortunately, Thurston was apparently laid up with the early stages of the flu, and so the evening was left to Byron alone to hold the floor. Of course, Byron had to joke that Thurston was feigning illness to save face because he'd just played a pretty mediocre show at the Bookmill, a used bookstore in nearby Montague that hosts the occasional adventurous music show. Jokes aside, though, Byron alone was enough to hold the attention of anyone with an interest in that musical moment in time.

What followed was a brief reading from the introduction to the book, and then Byron offering his own first person narrative of what it was like to be in NYC in the late 70s and early 80s. As he said at one point (and I paraphrase): "If there's anything worth being nostalgic for, it's how cheap the rents were in New York at that time." And cheap rents in damaged but stimulating neighborhoods, of course, are a godsend to the creation of interesting art.

What I most enjoyed hearing Byron talk about was the incredible amount of cross-pollination that existed in the New York art and music world of that time. Visual artists were also musicians, filmmakers were also musicians or were having their films screened between sets at some of the main music venues. Of course this could give rise to a certain overbearing pretentiousness, or a sense of carefully guarded exclusivity, and from Byron's account it did, fed in part by some of the fucked up but powerful egos that inhabited the scene of the time. But it also was the mark of a scene in which experimentation was taken for granted, where musical genres were things to be deconstructed and reassembled at will, where audiences were to be provoked and prodded, not just pleased. I've always found the recorded output of no wave bands like DNA and the Contortions to be more interesting in theory than as things to listen to (although I think Teenage Jesus and the Jerks are pretty great on record). But I'm sure I would have loved seeing these bands play live, soaking up the scuzzy atmosphere and not knowing quite what to expect.

For the curious:

www.hnabooks.com/product/show/31109

In my last post I put forward my list for the best books ever published about rock music. Since a list only says so much, I'm going write at greater length about some of the titles on the list in this and upcoming posts.

To start, some thoughts about Charles Shaar Murray's great book on Jimi Hendrix, Crosstown Traffic. This one's a logical place to start, since I just got through teaching it in my rock history course at Smith. It also holds a special place in my own intellectual development, for reasons I'll explain below. I don't know if it's my absolute favorite rock book of all time but it's certain up there in the top 5.

For those who don't know, Murray is a British critic who has been publishing since the 1960s. When he first came on the scene as a journalist he was something of a boy wonder, still a teenager but with a lot of musical knowledge and an especial interest in varieties of black music. As far as I know, he got his start with Oz magazine, a great oddball publication that also featured a lot of early writing by Germaine Greer, but really rose to prominence when he joined the staff of New Musical Express in the early 1970s, where he wrote some great articles on Bowie, Alice Cooper and a host of other rock luminaries of the time.

I didn't know all of this when I first read Crosstown Traffic. At that time, I was in my first or second year of graduate school at University of North Carolina, Chapel (somewhere around 1990 or '91; the book was published in '89), was working on a master's thesis on - get this - representations of masculinity in 1970s pornographic film. Nice work if you can get it, huh? But doing research on porn was getting tiresome – after watching something like forty films in the span of a month or two I couldn’t see pursuing this much further – and I was looking for a different topic to write about for my dissertation.

Music had long been my abiding passion at that point, and I’d done some music research as an undergrad, having written an honor’s thesis on Ornette Coleman, pioneer of free jazz. I was reading around, brainstorming, trying to grasp onto a topic that I thought could hold my interest for the next several years.

Somewhere amidst all this, I picked up a copy of Crosstown Traffic at the campus bookstore. I’d read books on Hendrix before – most notably David Henderson’s great bio, ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky – but even just looking at Murray’s book in the bookstore it seemed different. This was clearly not just a bio. It was more an attempt to interpret Hendrix and his place in the cultural history of the 1960s. I was hooked.

Murray’s book is so good because it’s one of the few books out there that successfully takes a single figure and uses him to recast the whole history of twentieth century popular music. Through Murray’s eyes and ears, Hendrix becomes a key figure in sorting through a wide range of compelling issues: the lingering significance of the 1960s and battles over the meaning of that decade in the years that followed; the difference between expressions of masculinity among black bluesmen and white rockers; the overarching importance of race in the history of rock and popular music; and the importance of the electric guitar as perhaps the major musical instrument of the twentieth century.

Murray also writes about Hendrix’s music really well, making a powerful case in the book’s final three chapters for the ways in which Hendrix is tied to the three major strains of black music running through the 1960s – blues, soul, and jazz. In Crosstown Traffic Hendrix comes across as not just a great innovator but a great musical synthesist, who assembled a complex hybrid African American identity through a roving musical imagination.

When I read Crosstown Traffic, it opened the way for me to think about the music I loved in a new light. Murray invested Hendrix with the larger cultural significance I knew he had but had not yet developed the vocabulary for expressing. From there, it was just a few steps further before I decided to embark on my dissertation on the history of the electric guitar, which later became my first book, Instruments of Desire.

When I thought about starting a blog, one of the things I always imagined doing was offering my thoughts about books on the subject of popular music. I'm a popular music scholar, after all, and as such I almost certainly read more about the subject than 98% of all humans, maybe even 99%. For instance, I'm sitting in my home office, which has three bookshelves in it, probably about 300 books in the room with me as I speak, almost all of which are books about music. And of this mass of books there are maybe 10 that I haven't read at least parts of, lest you think these are merely books for show. And that's just in one room of my house.

(The weirdly compulsive part of me is tempted to list every book on the shelves I just mentioned, but that would be ridiculous...or would it? Maybe another time.)

To jump start the process, I've spent part of the day assembling a list of what I think are the best books that have been written on the subject of rock. I'm not usually that much of a list maker, but it seemed like a good way to start a chain of conversation, if only with myself, about what makes for a good book about music. The list is based on a fairly narrow definition of rock - no books about jazz, country, hip hop, or disco, for instance, all subjects about which books have been written that I think are top notch. I'll probably assemble a separate list some time of my top music books, regardless of genre or style, but for now it's all about the rock.

The one area on which I bent my rule of genre specificity is blues, since there are a couple blues books that I think are foundational to the subject of rock. You'll know what they are if you read the list.

There are a lot of notable omissions from this list, too many to bother naming. I could probably come up with an honorable mention list almost as long as this one without losing too much in quality. And, in some cases I haven't included work by authors who are great essay writers, but who to my mind don't have that one book that absolutely captures them at their best (this especially applies to Robert Christgau).

Without further ado, here it is, my picks for the best rock books ever written (listed alphabetically):

Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
Amiri Baraka, Blues People
Chuck Berry, The Autobiography
Robert Duncan, The Noise
Chuck Eddy, Stairway to Hell
Jonathan Eisen (ed.), The Age of Rock and The Age of Rock 2
Mick Farren, Give the Anarchist a Cigarette
Simon Frith, Performing Rites
Donna Gaines, Teenage Wasteland
Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club
Bill Graham with Robert Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents
Greil Marcus, Mystery Train
Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me
Richard Meltzer, The Aesthetics of Rock
James Miller (ed.), The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll
Motley Crue with Neil Strauss, The Dirt
Charles Shaar Murray, Crosstown Traffic
Ann Powers and Evelyn McDonnell (eds.), Rock She Wrote
Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming
Robert Walser, Running with the Devil

File this under: here's why I like to read through old rock magazines. Or, further proof that Grand Funk Railroad was one of the most important bands of the 1970s.

I've never heard of The Deele, but apparently they were a Cincinnati-based R&B group of the 1980s that was the first big step up the ladder of fame by noted producers L.A. Reid and Babyface Edmonds. In an old issue of Record magazine - a short-lived offshoot of Rolling Stone - The Deele is briefly profiled (by Anthony DeCurtis, no less), and Reid offers the following comment about his influences:

"I remember seeing Grand Funk Railroad do an outdoor stadium show in Cincinnati. They just blowed me away ... It was rainin' and they didn't stop. I said, 'I wanna do that!'"

Check chapter one of This Ain't the Summer of Love for more on Grand Funk. They deserve a longer entry on this blog, but I just don't have the energy at the moment.

To be continued.

It's finally happened. Reunited at last. For the first time in my adult life, all my records are living in the same house.

It's been a long time coming. Ever since I moved away from California in the fall of 1990, off to grad school in North Carolina and never to look back, I had left a good chunk of my record collection at my parents' house. I didn't have room to store them or to cart them all around with me, especially since I spent the '90s moving about a lot and living in small apartments when I was settled. From a trailer (yes a trailer) in Chapel Hill to a small studio in Minneapolis to another small studio in Nashville to a decent sized room, but still just one room, in a big musty Victorian in Somerville to my own little two-bedroom rental house in Oxford, Ohio (but only for a year) - that was my 1990s, and packing up as often as I did I didn't want all my records to have to come along for the ride every time.

Many of the records I kept at my parents' house were records I could easily live without, although I'd never consider selling them. For me, my record collection is an archive of my shifting taste, mistakes and all. King Kobra, Rough Cutt, Sammy Hagar's crappy right wing VOA album - these are some of the dregs of my collection, but they remind me that my taste isn't inviolable, which is a good thing for a hipster snob like me to remember from time to time.

Then again, a lot of the records that shared my parents' home were pretty great records that I just never saw fit to transport back to wherever I was living. Much of my jazz collection was there, including lots of Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, etc. I've missed these albums, but as long as I had a working stereo where my parents lived it was one of the things I looked forward to when going back to visit (see my last post for some of my feelings about my home town of Simi Valley; not my favorite place on earth).

A lot of my rock collection was there too, and I've missed many of these albums as well. I'm not embarassed to say it, but I think it's revealing of myself that when all my old albums arrived from California to my home in Massachusetts, the first one I listened to was...get ready...Ted Nugent's Free for All. "Dog Eat Dog" is one raging m-f-er of a rock and roll song, and the guitar solo is spot-on, and what's even better is that I can play it damn near note-for-note. And the song that follows it, "Writing on the Wall," is just as badass, one of Ted's hidden gems, an album track that never got much play but has walls of killer guitar. Ted's politics suck, no doubt about it, but the dude made some of the best straight-up kickass guitar saturated rock music of the 1970s, and fuck you if you disagree.

Why did I finally shift all my albums to my Massachusetts home, you might ask? Because my parents, at long last, are getting ready to move out of their home of 43 years and into a retirement community - and they're moving to Massachusetts to boot. Of course, all their friends think they're crazy for leaving that lovely warm weather, but hey, I'm here, and they want to spend their remaining years closer than 3000 miles away from their only child. So my records are here, and soon my parents will be near, which will be a reunion of a whole different kind.