We say it every year: There are way too many music books for any human to keep track of, let alone read. Yet this year has seen a backbreaking pile of welcome additions to the boundless stacks, just a few of which we delve into here (we’re still dying to read the Cher book). Without further ado, in no particular order, dig in, and find that special someone a holiday gift …
“Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk” Kathleen Hanna — This memoir from Hanna, the cofounder and frontperson of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre and one of the most influential feminists in the music world, is equal parts triumph and trauma. It can be a harrowing read at times, due almost entirely to the horrific behavior of so many of the men who have passed through her life. While it includes everything a fan of Hanna’s music could want from a memoir — her experiences in the indie-rock milieu from the late ‘80s to the ‘00s (and the sexual politics that accompanied them), how her groups formed and her songs were written, her friendships with Kurt Cobain and other luminaries of the time, and finally her marriage to Beastie Boy and seemingly perfect husband Adam Horovitz — the characters who resound most are the sexually abusive father, the stalkers, the rapists (including one who had been her best friend), the casual molesters, and the seemingly countless men who, like countless other men with countless other women, aggressively imposed themselves on a woman who was just trying to go about her life. There’s also her nearly lifelong struggle with Lyme disease (which was undiagnosed for decades), the hate mail and random abuse her ideas and stances have earned, and, of course, being physically attacked by Courtney Love at Lollapalooza in 1995. While the happy-ish ending doesn’t arrive until the very end of the book, it’s a great one: Raising her and Horovitz’s son, singing onstage with both of her reunited bands before thousands of people, and a photo that is somehow just as encouraging and empowering as those events, with a caption that reads: “Jumping rope onstage at age fifty four.”
“Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell” Ann Powers — Writing and publishing a biography on the great Joni Mitchell — who has recently revived her music career after a long absence — in 2024 would seem to be a no-brainer. However, that’s been done multiple time, which is why Ann Powers doesn’t. Instead, the virtuoso music writer returns to obsession, confession and the memoir vibe of her “Weird Like Us” from 2000 for “Traveling.” Forever “heading toward the ringing of her voice,” Powers hitches her own narrative’s rollercoaster ride of being a woman, being a muse and being a master of letters to that of Mitchell. ]The intimate, coy conversations that Powers has with Mitchell’s collaborators, friends and lovers read like phone calls that the author might have had with her own high school buds. By the end of “Travelling,” you’re not even sure at times who Powers is talking about — Mitchell or herself — save for the tower of song and words in their wake. — A. D. Amorosi
The Rolling Stones: Rare and Unseen: Photographs by Gered Mankowitz — The music world of the 1960s was filled with fashion icons, from the Beatles to the Ronettes, from Jimi Hendrix to the Supremes, from Motown to Haight-Ashbury. But for some of us, the mid-1960s Rolling Stones were as cool as it gets. Their look defined Swinging London: the turtlenecks, the suede, the sunglasses, the corduroys, the Cuban heels, the checkered jackets and pants, all hanging perfectly on those skinny, vitamin-deprived postwar-British frames. Brian Jones’ iconic fringe haircut flew thousands of miles to California, where his and the band’s look quickly alighted on the Byrds, Love and the Jefferson Airplane. The Stones were considered shockingly scruffy by “The Establishment” but they had style, especially Jones and Keith Richards (who wrote the foreward for this book). Arguably more than any other, photographer Gered Mankowitz captured that look between 1965 and 1967, and it’s vividly captured in this book. Liberated from the slim suits of their early years, the group’s fashion grew from hip casual to psychedelic splendor in just 24 months. Some of the photos are familiar — he photographed several of the Stones’ album and single covers — but many are not and are published here for the first time. You truly feel the insane pace of life as a Stone, because Mankowitz was with them in the studio, in planes, in hotels, onstage and backstage, in photo sessions and even in the rare times they were home.
“A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman” Robert Hilburn — For the last 55 years or so, you’ve had a friend in Randy Newman, if you have a thing for songs that offer eviscerating, uncompromising, even devastating dissections of the human condition and the American experiment. Or, sure, kids’ tunes, or laugh-out-loud funny ones, or memorable film-score cues — all of those things, too. But the case for Newman as popular music’s greatest social commentators is the one being pressed most of all by former L.A. Times rock critic Hilburn in his latest biography (following his excellent Paul Simon tome). Hilburn gets into the impact of growing up under the shadow of three famous film-composer uncles (Alfred, Lionel and Emil), being steered away from classical and driven into pop music by his childhood friend Lenny Waronker (who went on to guide his career at Reprise Records), and how a turn into film scoring fulfilled his family destiny. But as strong as the film composing stuff is, the even more crucial aspect for many of us will be how the seemingly mild-mannered Newman found his way to a half-century of raging against the machine in a succession of semi-satirical, often dead-serious albums that are among the most celebrated in the singer-songwriter canon and still seem underrated. Through interviews with Newman’s friends and family as well as the man, Hilburn gets at all the psychology we need while respecting that genius is sometimes its own motivation. —Chris Willman
“Prince’s Purple Rain: 40 Years” Andrea Swensson — While Swensson is one of the world’s foremost Prince historians and experts, this lavish, purple-felt-bound tome is almost more of a photo book as it moves from Prince’s early career straight into the “Purple Rain” era, with loads of vibrant photos as well as record covers, advertisements and other ephemera from the era. Interviews with bandmembers and (rare) quotes from the man himself are sprinkled throughout the book, along with a discography of the period and other details, but most of all, “40 Years” is a feast for the eyes.
“From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir” Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough — However sad you are expecting “From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir” will be, take heed: it’s sadder than that. This new volume, started by Lisa Marie Presley before her 2022 death and completed recently by daughter Riley Keough, falls squarely into the realm of autobio-tragedy — bracingly looking at how depression and addiction issues repeat themselves generationally, with almost none of the sentimentalized overlay you might expect a book of this kind to impose. “I wondered how many times a heart can break,” Keough writes near the end. As a reader, you may have already been keeping some kind of mental score. It’s a lot. But it’s not a slog: “From Here to the Great Unknown” is engrossing from start to finish. The shifts between Presley’s dictation and Keough’s follow-up writing are marked by changes in typeface, and the transitions are fairly clear — and bouncing a bit between perspectives gives the writing some stylistic and emotional dynamics we couldn’t expect out of a typical autobiography. The book benefits from delivering the goods on a myriad of subjects any reader with a modicum of interest in celebrity has naturally wanted to know more about, from Elvis’ temperament to how Lisa Marie got along with Priscilla Presley (spoiler: rarely well) to her marriage to Michael Jackson, which merits a book unto itself. Lisa Marie may rarely have felt satisfied in her life, but as a last act, she satisfies our curiosity, in a torrent of unexpected candor. Here’s to Keough addressing some of these generational issues further when she pens her own memoir, decades down the line, perhaps — one that holds strong odds of being a much happier one. —Chris Willman
“The Story of the Bee Gees: Children of the World” Bob Stanley — While a biopic of this long-running sibling group’s history — from teen wonders to pop stars to disco titans and the ensuing fallout from all of it — is said to be in the works, all we can say is good luck: The sprawling history of the three brothers is so vast that Stanley, an ace music journalist and cofounder of the group St. Etienne, had to race through several eras just to keep this tome under 350 pages. Not that the relative brevity is unwelcome. He focuses on the music and moments that are most fertile, highlighting their series of sparkling ‘60s hits, the brief breakup and confusing of the early ‘70s that ultimately led to their unexpected disco dominance — and the subsequent backlash that was so intense the group barely worked under their own name for many years. Through it all, there’s the complications of siblings working together, the marriages and divorces, and Stanley’s sharp prose and strong perspective. To wit: “The lyrics on [the Bee Gees 1971 album] ‘Trafalgar’ showcased the Gibbs at their most peculiar, as violators of the English language who still somehow found a hard-to-pinpoint truth in their lyrical obscurity.”
“Me and Mr Jones: My Life With David Bowie and the Spiders From Mars” Suzi Ronson / “Guitar: Playing with David Bowie, John Lennon and Rock-and-Roll’s Greatest Heroes” Earl Slick — Considering the vast number of books published every year about David Bowie — or, for that matter, the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Prince — a new one had better have either fresh info or fresh insights. Thankfully, both of these memoirs deliver on both sounds. Suzi Ronson is the wife of the late Mick Ronson, Bowie’s lead guitarist and primarily musical collaborator from the “Ziggy Stardust” years, whose work is prominent on the singer’s albums from the era, as well as ones by Lou Reed, Mott the Hoople and others. She spent just a year in Bowie’s orbit, but it was close and intense: She became friends with Bowie’s wife at the time, Angie, while working in a hairdresser’s and eventually was asked to accompany the fast-rising star on tour as his wardrobe and hair specialist. She was swept up into that whirlwind quickly, initially joining for British dates, then a long American tour and then, over just the first half of 1973, another American tour, two weeks in Japan, and two more British tours. Through it all, Suzi Ronson not only spent many hours with Bowie, she had a front-row seat to the drama of his rise and its impact on him and everyone around him. Most fascinatingly, she experienced the fluctuations in his behavior, common to so many superstars: the way he could shift from cold and distant to intensely attentive from one day to the next.
It’s a similar story from Slick, who actually replaced Ronson as Bowie’s guitarist and worked with him on and off until the early 2010s; he also played on John Lennon’s “Double Fantasy” album and worked with the former Beatle in the last year of his life. While Slick’s memory is hazy on some details, he provides a vivid insider’s view of fascinating eras in Bowie’s career, including the “Diamond Dogs,” “Young Americans,” “Station to Station” and “Serious Moonlight” eras, as well as several later tours. Likewise, his depictions of working with Lennon, who was trying to get back into a game he’d completely abandoned five years earlier, are warm and endearing.
“Indie/Seen: The Indie Rock Photography of Piper Ferguson” — FOMO is such a strong human emotion that it defies logic, especially when looking at photos or video from Studio 54 or a Beatles concert or Truman Capote’s Black-and-White Ball… or, as “Indie/Seen,” veteran photographer Piper Ferguson’s new photo book demonstrates, the indie-rock scene of the early ‘00s. It’s a time capsule of the era dominated by the Strokes, the Killers, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the White Stripes, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, the Rapture and many now-obscure acts from that scene, and even though the photos were taken 20-odd years ago, the artists are presented so vividly that it’s hard not to wish you were there. In Los Angeles, New York, Coachella and at Austin’s South by Southwest confab, we’re seeing them young, (often) inebriated, and thinking they’re the coolest people in the world, as only those who are too young and inebriated to know better can do. There are also classic shots of artists from beyond the scene and/or era, like Beck, Bjork, Underworld, St. Vincent, Amy Winehouse and others. Yet what sets Ferguson’s book apart is her talent and skill as a photographer: Not only is she an ace at capturing onstage moments as they happen — there are several shots of performers swinging from pipes above the stage or some other telling onstage moment — she also knows how to make ordinary-looking bands look interesting without resorting to exotic locations, whether it’s the Shins in bed (in superhero costumes, natch) or Radio 4 standing in front of the Unisphere holding snowballs.
“Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital” David Browne — The young Bob Dylan and the early 1960s Greenwich Village of yore have been the subject of so many histories, memoirs, documentaries and more that finding a fresh angle was a challenge, but Browne has risen to the occasion with this far-reaching history. While it focuses on that era and there’s more than enough Dylan to keep fans happy, he moves from the neighborhood’s Bohemian origins in the early 20 th century and its era as a jazz hotspot in the 1950s before landing solidly in the classic era, freshening the take by speaking with many lesser-known habitues and staples of the time. He follows as the Village becomes a rock hotbed, with acts like the Lovin’ Spoonful and Blues Project, and continues into the 1980s with the Roches and Suzanne Vega. While his tight focus on the geographic boundaries of the West Village largely precluded neighboring phenomena like glam and punk rock (after all, the East Village could easily hold its own book of a similar length), and there’s more history on important but relatively peripheral figures than more-casual readers might need, it’s a strong and welcome addition to the canon.
“Hollywood Dream, the Thunderclap Newman Story: Pete Townshend, a Band of Outsiders, and the Birth of British Indie Music” Mark Ian Wilkerson —Thunderclap Newman were a trio of three far-flung musicians pulled into a group in 1969 by the Who’s Pete Townshend, who produced and played bass on their debut single, “Something in the Air,” which shot to the top of the British charts and since has become a generational anthem (you probably know it even if you think you don’t: “We have got to get it togeth-er”). While an excellent Townshend-produced debut album emerged a year later, the group’s moment had long since passed and they split up. How could such a short-lived endeavor warrant a 400-plus page book? Because Wilkinson has exhaustively researched and interviewed the people around the band (all three members have long since passed away) as well as Townshend, who recently told Variety that the group is “one of the best pieces of work that I’ve ever been involved in,” creating a vivid history not just of the group, but Townshend, the era and a moment in British rock history when anything seemed possible.
“Down On The Corner: Adventures in Busking and Street Music” Cary Baker — Baker has written one of those “how has no one ever published a book — or a definitive book — on this subject before?”-type volumes. He and his subjects make the case that, in a commoditized world, there may be no purer form of music than street singing… which obviously has its own transactional elements, but there’s nothing like an open guitar case on the sidewalk as a great economic equalizer. While Baker of course gets into the history of busking, a large part of this rich and rewarding volume allows cult figures or names as well-known as Lucinda Williams and Glen Hansard to get their own chapters talking about their early experiences singing for random passers-by (as well as an entertaining one recounting how Elvis Costello got signed due at least partly to a street performance that got him arrested). Busking can come out of economic necessity but also the joy of spontaneity or guerrilla theater — and a form of performance as historically basic to human experience as campfire singing finally gets the due it’s deserved. —Chris WIllman
“American Standard: Cheap Trick From the Bars to the Budokan and Beyond” Ross Warner — They might be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but Cheap Trick are one of the most underrated bands in rock history. Sure, they had hits and headlined arenas, have been a band for 50 years (guitarist Rick Nielsen and bassist Tom Petersson have been together for nearly 60 years) and continue to tour today, but they never quite became the world-shaking icons that many fans feel they should have been. There are plenty of reasons for that — they’re a strange band to be sure, with two heartthrobs and two oddballs; they rarely seemed to be paired with the right producer at the right time; and arguably some of the best songs from their early years weren’t officially released until decades later. Warner provides a fan-pleasing history of the group here, wisely focusing on their early years and heyday — going deep on their rise in the mid-‘70s, there long years working clubs and getting a big break on a summer tour with Kiss, leading to their “Heaven Tonight” / “Budokan” / “Dream Police” peak — and fast-forwarding through the post-‘80s decades. Through it all, the reader sees where things maybe could have been different, but also sees that despite the great songs, charisma and the fact that for years they were one of the most explosive live rock bands on the planet, it probably would have ended up the way it did anyway.
“Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Sharable” Rob Drew — There is something nobly romantic about how Saginaw Valley State U. communications professor Rob Drew rolls out the history and mystery behind the cassette, the forerunner of the playlist and the source of the term “mixtape.” If you were a rapper, punk, metalhead or DJ spinning hip hop or house music sets before Bandcamp, Soundcloud and YouTube, you put your jams on cassette and handed them to friends, or duped the master and sold the tapes at your next gigs – all without gatekeepers or execs to hold you back. If you were a shy boy or girl who could never speak to the objects of your affection directly, you said everything that you had to say on Maxell like Cyrano speaking for Christian de Neuvillette. Your great taste in music and your perceptive way with poetry (i.e. someone else’s lyrics) graced each taped loved letter or poison pen missive, and your flair for sonic drama became the stuff of local legend — and surely you scribbled hand-drawn art across the tape case, drew or photocopied covers onto the “J-cards” (covers). Drew’s captures all of it in this love letter to a format that unexplicably survives, if only as a memory or souvenir. — A. D. Amorosi
“Zip It Up: The Best of Trouser Press Magazine 1974-1984” Edited by Ira Robbins — Despite and also because of its puzzling inside-joke name, Trouser Press was one of the greatest music magazines in history. It existed for just a decade — from 1974 through 1984 — but in the process, it nurtured the careers of thousands of musicians and exponentially more fans, future musicians, writers and executives. Unlike nearly every major music publication, it had no anthology or collection of its greatest work until this sprawling 440-page 50th anniversary collection of its greatest articles that is practically a real-time history of some of the best rock music of that era, from the Who, the Rolling Stones and David Bowie to the Sex Pistols and the Clash to U2 and the Cure, and dozens more. Yet unlike other “new wave” publications of the era like the NME, Melody Maker, New York Rocker and Zig Zag, Trouser Press covered both worlds: The Stones and Bruce Springsteen were as likely to be on the cover as the Clash, Elvis Costello and the Pretenders, but the articles on classic rockers were more likely to be filled with little-known historical anecdotes and details about rare B-sides and bootlegs that would send readers scampering on treasure hunts to find them. Its writers asked intelligent and informed music questions at a time when that was not the norm, and wrote with attitude and humor but not condescension — where some of the above publications might have made you feel embarrassed for still being a Led Zeppelin fan, Trouser Press featured an expansive three-part 1977 interview with a clearly drug-addled but mostly coherent Jimmy Page that covered his entire career (and featured the guitarist raving enthusiastically about then-new punk rock). The fact that one of the world’s biggest rock stars devoted so much time to it shows not only the respect the magazine commanded but also how engaged he was with the conversation, and that’s true of most of the interviews published in this collection.
“The Chronicles of DOOM: Unraveling Rap’s Masked Iconoclast” S.H. Fernando Jr. — Fernando’ previous books — 1994’s “The New Beats: Exploring the Music, Culture & Attitudes of Hip-Hop” and “The Streets of Shaolin: The Wu-Tang Saga” are far-reaching tomes, and trying to focus on the tale of the eccentric, enigmatic and anonymous rapper-producer Dumile Daniel Thompson — a.k.a. DOOM — must have been akin to pinning down mercury. With the exception of his collaborations with Madlib, Dilla and Ghostface Killah, DOOM largely flew under the radar, but his influence and the interest in his work is vast. Long before Comic Cons and fan boys broke down the minutiae of the MCU (long before the acronym existed, even) DOOM’s husky baritone weirdly connected the dots between the super heroes and scary monsters of his lyrics and the philosophical and spiritual realms they inhabited. Plus, DOOM did this all while masked, splicing his steely, jazzy music with samples of his favorite films. Fernando goes a long way in presenting the man behind the mask (who died in 2020) without revealing all of his spaced-out secrets that made him special. — A. D. Amorosi
“Under a Rock: A Memoir” Chris Stein — Blondie’s co-founder, guitarist and chief songwriter with Deborah Harry, Chris Stein experienced much of what three decades of rock and pop music had to offer. As a teenager from Brooklyn, he frequently forayed into Greenwich Village in the 1960s, moving on the fringes of the folk and rock scenes of the city in those years. As a musician, he came up during the glam era of the New York Dolls in the early ‘70s, and was both deep in and at a slight remove from the punk and new wave movements that Blondie — a pop group at heart that was musically far from punk and new wave — rode to superstardom. Yet heroin insinuated the lives of Stein and Harry at the peak of their success in the early 1980s, and the group’s fortunes faded as the addiction worsened. Both survived, although Stein remained ill for many years, and Blondie reformed in the late 1990s and continue to tour and release albums to this day. It’s all in this memoir, but Stein — an excellent photographer who published a book of that work in 2018 — oddly vacillates between riveting memories involving the New York Dolls, the New York punk scene, touring with Iggy Pop and David Bowie and socializing with Andy Warhol and Jean Michel Basquiat, and surprisingly mundane details; you’ll be ready to skim a section when, hey, there’s David Bowie again! It makes for a bit of a stop-start experience, but fans will find what they’re seeking here.
