Full disclosure: My 2018 book, Accidentally Like a Martyr – the Tortured Art of Warren Zevon is quoted several times in this volume, which brought me to it. I was conflicted on whether I could honestly review Warren Zevon and Philosophy objectively, but after reading it, and enjoying it completely, I was moved to include it here. It is a brilliantly devised and probing overview into the oft demented but always instinctive themes in Warren Zevon’s songs. Essays from professors and professionals mine the deepest recesses of Zevon’s canon, pouring over and concentrating on his many infamous phobias and paranoias that I uncovered in my book with equal fervor and analytical heft that I admire greatly.
One of the most enigmatic and conflicted figures in the history of rock, Zevon, who was recently inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, is given no quarter here – he is celebrated, yes, but also “explained” as a difficult personality defined by his music and in many ways overshadowed by it.
Sometimes hilarious, other times traumatic, this was a fun read and a yeoman’s job by editor and sometimes author, John E. MacKinnon for whom I am eternally grateful for including my insights but also giving me the head’s up that I ended up being a small part of this delightful collection.
Author, David Leaf has been a Beach Boys lifer. He penned the first truly exhaustive history of the band in the late 1970s and would later befriend Brian Wilson, who was responsible for composing and producing the sounds that defined the band and moved a generation west to the sun-kissed California shores. During that time, Leaf was privy to rumor and innuendo surrounding Wilson’s long-lost masterwork, Smile, the follow-up to the Beach Boys groundbreaking, Pet Sounds. The word through the mill was Wilson, who passed away shortly after this book’s release and while I was finishing it, originally abandoned the 1967 project due to drug abuse and his inability to endure his lifelong battle with mental illness, leading to breakdown and an abandonment of his dream to compete what he called “a teenager’s letter to God.”
With his new aural history, Smile, Leaf provides a comprehensive overview of the album’s initial demise and an essential deep dive of the process that brought a bunch of unknown musicians and a master songwriter together to complete the circle that brought to life this mythical work. Along the way provides alternative reasons for the shuttling of Smile, mostly due to the Beach Boys recalcitrance with the intricate music and quizzical lyrics by Van Dyke Parks (the concerns primarily from cousin, lead singer and usual lyricist, Mike Love) and blowback from a worried Capitol Records to what they deemed strange and unmarketable music.
But where Smile takes off is the slowly painful reimagining of the project that culminates in the famous London debut concerts of 2004 that forever changed the music world’s perception and wild acceptance of Wilson’s incredibly inventive music.
Author Jonathan Gould, who has expertly written about the Beatles and Otis Redding turns his attention to a transformative time in music that transpired across the boroughs of New York City in the early to mid-seventies through the lens and history of one of its most enigmatic and popular bands, Talking Heads. Burning Down the House is Gould’s storytelling and insights at its best, framing the context and purpose of the music and environment, the people making it, and its eventual and lasting influence.
Burning Down the House frames Talking Heads in the confluence of the downtown punk movement of CBGB’s wherein the band, like so many new acts at the time, Patti Smith, the Ramones, Television, Blondie, etc, had launched careers, but rightly concentrates on how they were distinct in their conservative dress and the tensed demeanor of lead singer and songwriter, David Byrne’s insular affectations. This is something Gould also delves into with great care and research, which he eventually interprets as Aspergers, which not only informs Talking Heads music but their strained if not productive camaraderie.
Gould also superbly separates the band from their contemporaries as a less white, 70s punk/new wave outfit and more in the lineage of the Black Stax/R&B sounds as funneled through their upper-middle-class Caucasian prism. The ensuing evolution of Byrne’s compositions within the band and without (most prevalent with producer and composer, Brian Eno) came to first separate Talking Heads further from any band of its time but carved out a place for them to become a major if not unlikely force in popular music – much of it thanks to MTV showcasing the primacy of the band as a visual as well as sonic excursion.
However this book came to be – the enigmatic lunatic that is Ozzy Osbourne speaking it to an interviewer or spewing random thoughts and memories into a recorder – matters little, as the voice and cadence, humor and pathos of Ozzy is all over this posthumously released final memoir by the Prince of Darkness. Last Rites is every bit of what you think of Ozzy – irreverent, blunt, hilarious, mournful and contrite – as well as boldly defiant to his plights and heights. To say the least, I had great fun while reading this, along with being utterly mortified. A grand balance for any book.
Last Rites follows the final years of Ozzy’s life replete with truly awful physical pain and life-threatening operations, which he describes in agonizing detail, dovetailing away from the drama to recall great stories of times with Black Sabbath, his solo excursions, including the life and death of his first great, guitarist, Randy Rhodes, in which he finally comes clean on the details of the terrible airplane accident of 1983, and stories of a bevy of epic rock stars. My favorite is Ozzy’s interactions with Lemmy from Motörhead, whose biting rhetoric and soaring intellect, along with Herculean drinking and speed consumption, is the book’s highlight. It was great getting these respites from the harrowing medical conditions poor Ozzy endured for the years covered here.
Osbourne’s candid mea culpa on his wild and dangerous ride through the 70s and 80s rock world and the collateral damage it caused to family, friends and colleagues is touching stuff, as there is very little punches pulled. This is especially heartwarming considering Ozzy’s passing before this book was released, Last Rites ends fittingly with Ozzy’s triumphant final concert in his hometown of Birmingham and his coming to grips with the darkness and light of his compelling life that leaves readers satisfied for him and his legacy.
Another friend and fellow author, Alan Light, who has penned insightfully entertaining books on Prince’s Purple Rain and Leonard Cohen’s Halleluiah, (both of which have been reviewed here) has done it again with Don’t Stop: Why We (Still) Love Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. What? Another book about a massively popular over-hyped album? Why? Forget what you know about these types of stories, Light blows your expectations away. This is a book worth reading for the past, the present and the future of pop culture, musical evolution, and the human emotions that create it.
What Don’t Stop does that is different from the focus-on-one-album projects (something I did over ten years ago) is its concentration on the effects of the music, the lore, and the people who made it: How these converging aspects all work to keep Rumours alive and well in the public consciousness through social media, film, television, and influences on current artists, etc.
Much of what Light uncovers about this album and Fleetwood Mac, a band made up of couples breaking up, writing scathing songs about each other and getting together to record them, is mind-boggling. Somehow, beyond other classic albums from the 1970s classic-album-era, Rumours has transcended mere popularity and has embedded its purpose and longing, pain and redemption into people’s lives and philosophies, engendering a place of pure expression that oddly out-distances the most powerful music from any time.
Adding Millennial and Gen Z voices to incredible real-life stories of how Rumours continues to pop up in the strangest places to reemerge in the zeitgeist, Light frames it all with a humor and respect, assisting readers in understanding the power and promise of music.
A fellow author who has assisted in contributing to my recent work, Take a Sad Song, Peter Ames Carlin, best known for his biographies on Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson and Bruce Springsteen, has created the ultimate look into the chaos, pressure and eventual brilliance during the making of Bruce Springsteen’s 1975 epic album, Born to Run. The narrative in Tonight in Jungleland reads as a page-turning novel full of key figures who push and pull their way in and out of Springsteen’s’ creative bubble, the slow formation of what would come to define his oeuvre and place the record into the pantheon of his growing legend.
Using previous and new interviews with Springsteen and a bevy of voices present for Born To Run’s composing and production, Carlin brings to life the lore of its long, arduous road to fruition. Faced with being dropped from his label, Columbia from the middling sales of his previous two albums and embroiled in management issues, as well as welcoming in crucial members of his E Street Band – Gary Tallent on piano and drummer, Max Weinberg – Springsteen transforms from a Dylan-cloned folk-soul balladeer into the living embodiment of the Boss. Plenty of sideroads are visited along the way, as any story of this magnitude must, and Carlin delivers both the harrowing and heartwarming with equal measure.
Placed in the context of Springsteen’s long and celebrated career, Born to Run was a turning point and Tonight in Jungleland drops us in the middle of the songwriting, rehearsing and final recordings of a classic American musical statement. It is joyous tale of rock and roll primacy presented in an entertaining way that leaves readers with a new and essential understanding of not only the artist but his art.
Ozzy Osbourne died less than a week after the music world paid tribute to his career in a multi-million-dollar charity concert reuniting him with his legendary band, Black Sabbath. What a marvelous way to go out. We all should exit the mortal coil with people appreciating our work and influence and celebrating the whole thing in one giant blowout – even if it isn’t in front of thousands of screaming fans. The fact that this was afforded to someone who had consistently cheated death since his teenage years is nothing short of miraculous and the epitome of the charmed life lived by John Michael “Ozzy” Osbourne, a darkly morose figure born in atonal thunderous metal music; this broken and lonely kid from a dismal outpost of London, England, who endeared himself to millions. This was the secret sauce of Ozzy, a man completely devoid of artifice, despite the Dark Lord posturing, doom-struck lyrics, and madman antics. He lived in public as he did in private, as an immense fuck-this id, which, in the end, was a charm all its own.
I am sure by now every breathing music nerd has waxed poetic about Black Sabbath “inventing” heavy metal or Ozzy’s incredibly distinct whine of a voice that sent chills through most of the early 1970s into the 80s hard rock pantheon, and how his wildly successful solo career was resurrected by his wife, manager, and inimitable shrill loon, Sharon, the incredible corporate-sized majesty of the annual Ozzfests, and, of course, the reality show that transformed the bane of the moral majority into a lovably doting and babbling comedic figure. I shall not do that. I wish instead to concentrate on Ozzy’s uniqueness in rock music: his outlandish character set against his quaint personality, a childlike combination of perpetual confusion and joyful self-destruction forged in misery and the plight of youth.
Osbourne was a working-class kid. And became a working-class man, as much as any British rocker that preceded him. A bleak existence for anyone, especially someone with crippling dyslexia who suffered sexual and physical abuse at the hands of a parade of bullies since the tender age of eleven. Suicide attempts and deep undiagnosed depression led to the altar of rock and roll. Something Ozzy always embraced as a heroic rescue mission written in the stars. Playing the reluctant hero and aww-shucks maniac that gorged on life and the occasional bat overwhelmed his contribution to the evolution of rock music, including his stint as lead singer, front man, melodicist, and lyricist for Black Sabbath and as a solo artist, his stellar work with guitarist and co-songwriter, Randy Rhodes who died tragically at 25. Ozzy never took his ascent from stumblebum nobody to the heights of rock stardom for granted. He was beloved for always being that cheeky kid from Birmingham that wasn’t the way he was because of rock and roll but because he could be no other way in no other lifestyle than rock and roll.
This is how we balanced the very real damaging issues of booze, drugs, mayhem, and mythicizing that hounded Osbourne for most of his adult life with his innocent wonder in which he saw the world, reflected in his lyrics that continued to mine the human experience from pain, loss, war, paranoia, depression, and confusion, as well as an appreciation for the life of the spiritual. Black Sabbath may have played on the dark arts for image, but their songs, Ozzy’s songs, explored the depths of social and personal woes with a glimmer of guileless hope. He found that hope in song and stage. There was a perpetual look of distinct awe on Ozzy’s face that bespoke this loudly. He could sneer and shout and pose like evil incarnate but also smile the smile of someone who understood that his art sprung from a deep well. His laugh was knowing. It was charming.
There is this short video of him meeting with Paul McCartney backstage during one of Sir Paul’s many tours the past forty or so years. Dressed in his signature menacing black, a long mane of ebony hair streaked with blood red, Ozzy is in a childlike trance. Facing the celebrated ex-Beatle with his back to the camera, he gushes, “It’s so great to meet you, man.” As Paul, facing the camera, is seemingly uncomfortable and a bit flummoxed by Osbourne’s almost unintelligible genuflection, the once imposing Ozzy figure’s genuine admiration is endearing and true. “You guys made me start music,” he whispers. Paul, used to the celebrity mish-mosh, says something quaint and dismisses Ozzy as if a slobbering fan. But the key to the exchange is how much Ozzy appreciated being awakened by the Beatles to a new world order in his head, something he made sure enlivened his music and lyrics time and again.
In the end, Ozzy Osbourne’s contribution to the annals of rock is that if he didn’t invent something – heavy metal, dangerous front man, substance abusing crazy man – he embodied those traits, for good or ill, better than anyone; wholly, with no gray areas permitted. There was no “sort of” Ozzy. He was always a creature of force and will and humor and pathos that didn’t invent anything, really, because all of it came naturally. The world is filled with phonies and posers, but once in a great while you get a true instinctual being in an artform, and Ozzy Osborne was that. Ozzy was more Elvis Presley than the Beatles, really – that early 1955 Elvis that seemed to be running on a feral heartbeat of pure adrenaline and sexual abandon. Elvis, I have argued and still do, may have been the first shock rocker, a distinction Ozzy comfortably embraced. Eventually, Elvis lost his way. Ozzy never did. He only ever was that working-class kid from Birmingham.
And it is right he was sent off in a tribute to that purity. This idea that someone only needs to be who you are and not what the world wishes you to be is a comforting concept. Specifically, these days wherein everyone has a social media and online image to uphold. There is a liberation lesson in Ozzy for us all. Oscar Wilde famously said, “Be yourself, everyone else is taken.” Yeah, that was Ozzy Osbourne.
With the recent passing of Brian Wilson at age 82, I return to my lifelong dispute on the erroneously accepted narrative of popular music during the early 60s before the Beatles showed up as a malaise of disposable treacle and teen schmaltz. In his honor, I present three very powerful refutes to this – the singles produced by Phil Spector, the rise of the magnificent Motown, and the Beach Boys. And in all three, Brian Wilson is the indelible connective tissue, and in so being, the singer/songwriter/musician/ arranger/producer would become the bridge that leads, especially in America, to the next phase of the most potent generation in rock and roll. This, in turn, triggers everything that follows. And thus, you could make a very cogent argument that Brian Wilson is the most significant figure of his or any era of pop music.
The legend of Brian Wilson is as vast as his miraculous catalog of stunningly beautiful songs and dynamic recordings. His is a story of triumph over tragedy. His is the story of America blossomed from the glory coast of California and its mythical dream of youth heading west to the sea. And as I have written many times over the years, Wilson single-handedly created “sun-drenched hymns to hedonism” in two-minute pop ditties sung by his brothers, a cousin, and a kid from the neighborhood that called themselves the Beach Boys.
Having duly invented the modern myths of California, Brian then did what all true artists and (ahem) geniuses must, he blew all that up and dove headlong into sonic challenges the likes of which the pop world had yet to hear. Those paying attention had to go elsewhere for comparisons. His was the lineage of Bach and Mozart and even Coltrane and Monk, and later Lennon/McCartney, the special ones that imagine the implausible and will it into being.
It begins with Brian as a child prodigy on piano with an unerring ear for pitch and melody, despite being born virtually deaf in one ear. He could play entire pieces – classical or traditional – from start to finish only having heard them once. In his teen years, he took apart the recordings of the Four Freshman, his guiding musical light, and broke down their lush harmonies to rebuild entirely original ones he then taught to his little brothers, Carl and Dennis. Music, as it would be all his life, was his solace, as he by his own admission was crippled by shyness and the fear of a horrible beast of a father, whose broken dreams of stardom was heaped upon his eldest son as a curse. The shouting, belittling, then hiring private detectives to tail him and bug his phone, and the final indignation of selling off the publishing of his son’s music for a pittance furthers the legend of Brian Wilson as a tortured soul – prolific, driven, manic, vulnerable.
Take any act in entertainment history, and chances are it had some measure of gestation. But because Brian was a fully formed musical force at 19, the Beach Boys were discovered and signed and on the radio in mere months with delightfully ambitious five-part harmony-laden songs torn from the echoed chimes of Phil Spector’s best Wall of Sound with the right Motown-level beats-per-minute. This powerful triumvirate kicked off the 1960s, pre-Beatles, pre-psychedelia and Boomer touchstones of free love and dropping out and tuning in beneath the sudden dayglow paisley of Swinging London. The Beach Boys, driven primarily by Brian’s musical innovations, manic ambitions, and soaring harmonies were the thread of late 1950s joyous odes to teenage living at the sock hop, the greasy hair and hot rods that inevitably morphed into the intricate modes of 1960s rock and its counterculture explosions. His, even in warmly vulnerable ballads, were the songs of foundational resonance, our beachside fantasies of sun, fun, bikinis and surfing (the beseeching lilt of “Surfer Girl”), and then yearning and loneliness (the iridescently touching, “In My Room.”)
Surfing was not something anyone in Wisconsin or Brooklyn or Chi-town gave a shit about, not until Brian Wilson made it the font of spiritual, sexual, and irresistible ecstasy. This was his magic, to turn life’s simple joys into transcendental odes. One of the most underrated songs of the period, “Sufin’ USA” – a glorious piece of pop ephemera reflecting the Beach Blanket Bingo set of Caucasian overbite dancing and shaggy-haired, glisten-tanned gumbo – transformed a little-known activity into the essence of America. When you consider “California Girls” to be an international call and response of female worship that celebrated sun-kissed beauty over the grim realities of the Cold War and the ugliness of the Civil Rights battles, it is easy to grasp Wilson’s embrace of enchantment.
That song, however, was kept from Billboard’s top spot on the singles charts by the Beatles’ “Help” and Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” two missives of desperation penned by the Beach Boys greatest rivals. It was then Brian fully realized, with the discovery of hallucinogens, that a gauntlet had been thrown down, and to not take it up and reach for higher aspirations to express the soul was anathema to his incessant longing to create music far beyond what his band could fathom and, in some cases, perform. Soon he surrounded himself with the best lyricists (Tony Asher, Van Dyke Parks) and musicians (the famed Wrecking Crew, who played on all of Phil Spector’s biggest hits) and tapped into that energy with Pet Sounds, his triumph. Perhaps the first emo album, the emotional depths and musical leaps on it were unprecedented in the pop world. “Those songs were the feminine side of me,” he told me when we spoke for a cover piece in this paper in 2015. Listening to the expressively resonant “God Only Knows” today holds just as powerful an existential punch as it did nearly six decades ago. Speaking of the song nearly a half-century later, Brian said it came quickly. I mused, “I bet it’s one of those incidents when you think, ‘Where the hell does this come from?’ Brian laughed and intoned, “Right. I said, ‘What the fuck?’”
This was when Brian Wilson considered himself a vessel for music unimaged, his halcyon period, a great awakening and the enlightenment of the pop music stratosphere, wherein he blew all the minds, specifically those pesky Beatles, who upon hearing the harmonic/melodic brilliance of Pet Sounds rushed to make their signature records, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, as did Bob Dylan, who tossed the remanence of his Wild Mercury Sound on Blonde on Blonde to rediscover the raw humanity of his folk roots again with John Wesley Harding.
Wilson’s spectacularly prolific period from late 1965 through 1966 culminates in “Good Vibrations,” arguably the greatest pop single of the latter half of the 20th century, a recording and arrangement Wilson told me in 2015 was only the second time (the first time was “California Girls”) it sounded exactly how he heard it in his head. An aural bonanza of voice and instrumentation conjuring cinematic illuminations that unfurls in three minutes and thirty-five seconds; its breadth, width and brevity mocks the very notion of explanation in mere words. It celebrates the gift of hearing itself. This was the tippy top of Brian’s impossible climb. Use your Greek mythical characters to explain the fallout, but by the time he was nearly done with what would be the ambitious but shelved Smile project, which may have been the first prog-rock/concept album had he finished it, it became his tragedy.
Undiagnosed and mostly ignored mental illness mixed with heavy doses of LSD, cocaine, speed, and marijuana broke him. Some argue it was the apathy of Capitol Records and the disdain from the Beach Boys for what he dared to explore aurally that sent the fragile and dismayed composer careening into an abyss he would not come out of for nearly two decades.
Those years between the late 1960s and the late 80s in when he emerged fragile and dazed to release his first proper solo album, Brian Wilson – a damn fine effort despite still battling demons and over-medication – were a blur for Brian and us. While he still wrote and occasionally recorded, showing glimpses of his previous mastery, or appeared at shows barely coherent and clearly sad, his influence and powers had faded with the defeat of the record that haunted him.
That is until 2003, when he was convinced by fans, friends, and fellow musicians to revisit the monstrosity he’d wrought and frightened him so deeply. The circle was completed withBrian Wilson Presents Smile, a revelation and a celebration of his foresight and ingenuity (a word he liked to use). Brian was able to unfurl his lost masterpiece and live out his remaining years in an eternal exhale he deserved.
Looking at the whole of Brian Wilson’s and the Beach Boys’ career arc, one can see the evolution of American music and culture at its most exalted and disposable. His connection to the zeitgeist while transcending it to create new avenues for future composers to travel, put him squarely in the center of pop music’s lineage. And while he incessantly played the Ronette’s “Be My Baby” over and over in 1963 to comprehend Phil Spector’s mad production genius, he far exceeded him and recalled the joy and purpose of Motown’s most prolific chart toppers while always remaining true to his musical nature and instincts that were unequaled in the annals of our popular consciousness.
Ironically titled after the Bangles biggest hit, Eternal Flame is the story of a wildly popular group always teetering on implosion. Composed of disparate personalities with varying agendas, they nevertheless managed to make-up arguably the best all-female band ever. From the band’s inception through its tumultuously erratic rise to fame and eventual (and it seems from the start, inevitable) break up, there is never a moment of respite. Perhaps author Jennfer Otter Bickerdike surmises that is what drove them.
Filled with direct quotes and memories of the members of the Bangles and a plethora of those close to them, from songwriting contributors, and former bandmates (and there are more than a few) to management, agents, and producers, all in their way added to the chaotic if not brilliant nature of their story.
From a woman’s perspective, Bickerdike does a masterful job illustrating the misogyny and constant haranguing the Bangles had to endure being an all-female band – including the incessant comparisons to their L.A. sisters in the Go-Gos, which, again, added even more pressure. This was further exacerbated by the focus of the press and management on guitarist Susana Hoffs – her looks, her moxie and her spotlight. Eternal Flame reminded me why I loved the Bangles back in the eighties and still find their music as electric and fun as it was then.
A thorough and entertaining academic breakdown of one of the most debated and controversial subjects of pop music for nearly a century, the white appropriation of Black music and its positive and negative societal and artistic ramifications, Just Around Midnight is also a balanced narrative to the evolution of popular music culled from the melting pot of America.
Author Jack Hamilton does a magnificent job presenting all sides of the issue with copious research and wonderful juxtapositions of key figures, formative moments, and a series of the most important and groundbreaking music that defines it.
Using key participants in the flow of cross-pollinating artists from Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, to Motown and the British invasion and how all of these musical giants influenced, borrowed, stole, shared, and in many ways, unwittingly connected their work, the book is a whirlwind of newly figured theories and historical revelations that assist our understanding of how music can be organically infused into society inside or beyond racial boundaries.
Just Around Midnight is an important contribution to understanding the scope of music’s journey through the decades and those who write, perform and add to its legacy and a seminal voice for future discussions on its lasting impact on us all.
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