Author Bradley Morgan, who wrote a spectacular book on U2’s Joshua Tree, which I previously reviewed here, brings us the book we needed about Frank Zappa, a man who wore his social conscience and well-earned disdain for systemic control over pure artistic expression on his sleeve. From the very first sounds emanating from Zappa’s legendary Mothers of Invention to the final missives of his solo career before his untimely death from cancer at age 52 in 1993, Morgan deconstructs and parses it all with equal measure celebration and deconstruction. Zappa was a complicated man and mercurial artist, and this book manages to capture his oeuvre completely and without compromise.

Broken into chapters that both work chronologically through Zappa’s career and catalog, but also dissects the serious subjects he composed compelling and challenging songs about and designed entire themed albums around – to name just a few; systemic racism, media propaganda, the religious right, the radical left, American hypocrisy, celebrity worship, sexual deviance of every kind, and definitions of what freedom means.

Much of Zappa’s material is as far afield of any semblance of political correctness or even societal norms, for his time, and certainly wildly out-of-step with today’s standards, however, Morgan, in the most detailed way you are likely to ever find again, frames the songwriter’s aims and methods that never wavered from intriguing. In fact, the book presents Zappa’s unblinking dedication to spreading his personal philosophy through satire as unmatched beyond any contemporary artist save for Randy Newman in blatant character-driven scenarios that cut bone deep.

Mostly, Frank Zappa’s America resonates as prominently today as ever. Many of the issues that plagued Zappa in his lifetime have raged to the fore today, making Morgan’s work here less history than portend.

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.

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. 

The best compliment you can give an author is when you are finished reading his insights, a subject you thought you knew is so thoroughly taken apart and built anew, you cannot view (or in this case hear) it the same way again. This is what I offer Alex Pappademas for his delightfully wicked stroll through the songs and themes of Steely Dan. And there are many and they are varied, but all are nefarious to horrid with nary an innocent to be found. Adorned with provocative illustrations from artist Joan Lemay, Donald Fagan and Walter Becker’s twisted tales of the demimonde from Manhattan Island to the shining avenues of Los Angeles, are deconstructed with the proper and warranted wit and vigor the songs reveal.

I specifically enjoyed how Pappademas found threads to the song themes throughout the Steely Dan catalog and pieced together a running narrative of the 1970s on both coasts and the revelations of the personal lives and travails of both Fagan and Becker brimming (if not sometimes cleverly hidden) in their songs. It also prompted me to appreciate their later 90s work that I had mostly ignored. Not only a fine compendium for lifelong fans of the band, Quantum Criminals is an excellent primer for those discovering their complicated and eminently entertaining oeuvre – both musically and lyrically.