Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector – Mick Brown (2008)

If you’ve heard the rumors about Phil Spector that range from unhinged, narcissistic controlling master artist to drug-addled, wild-eyed half-mad gun-toting murderer, then it’s time to get the stories, good or ill, from Mick Brown’s translucent Tearing Down the Wall of Sound.

This was such a fun read, made possible by my friend, singer-songwriter Eric Hutchinson, whom I have written about in this paper since 2006, and gave me his copy. He is not only a wonderful human being, but another complete music geek and a sucker for early 1960s pop music. Love him or hate him, all of that all starts with Phil Spector, musician, songwriter, producer, and inventor of a style of music that bridged the incredible history of rock and roll from its infancy into the early to mid 1950s to the arrival of the culture-altering Beatles. And this book covers it all, with an unblinking objectivity.

The author begins the book with an interview he conducted at Spector’s Californian mansion, just months before the alleged murder of a woman in the same room. What Spector tells him will be unfurled with each chapter, giving you direct access to the reasons for his bizarre behavior, his mind-games, his obsession with violence, and the gnawing paranoia that comes from being a relentless perfectionist.

Man, the stories in here are epic and told with such detail, adding the anecdotes and memories by those who sat beside Spector at the control board or during meetings in the halls of the biggest record companies in the world. Spector is everywhere, through the seminal moments of rock music’s infancy, and Brown takes you on that journey. The humor, madness, travails, and triumphs of a complicated character is given its due in Tearing Down the Wall of Sound.

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Hard Rain: A Bob Dylan Commentary – Tim Riley (1993)

What a wonderful read. Author Tim Riley, Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director at Emerson College, who has written extensively about the Beatles and other music from the period, takes a welcomed unique slant on the Bob Dylan story in Hard Rain: A Bob Dylan Commentary. It is indeed a “commentary” from the first paragraph, methodically taking apart the accepted narrative of this mysterious icon to concentrate on what made Dylan a musical force across generations. 

Riley begins with Dylan’s genuflecting to the blues more than folk, which makes sense with the budding songsmith’s teen obsessions with Little Richard and Elvis Presley and later with his dramatic move to an electric sound. Yet this creative foundation is wholly ignored in many depictions of Dylan’s initial absorption of Woody Guthrie and his later tap into the early 1960s Greenwich Village folk movement. It is also a solid footing for how the author follows the celebrated singer-songwriter’s zigzag artistic sojourn, always on the move, always challenging both his own talents and the expectations of his audience.

It was especially intriguing to read something this close to the bone before the later waves of Dylan comebacks over the past decades – some hit or miss. I agree with almost all of Riley’s assessments of Dylan’s eighties into nineties works and performances. I endured one of those erratic shows at Radio City Hall that was just awful. I brought a young friend whom I was tutoring in the Dylan canon and found myself apologizing for it throughout. 

Also, it is ironic that right before I read this (thanks to the author for gifting me a copy, and his inclusion as a voice in my next book) when I was finishing up Sinéad O’Connor’s memoir. In the book’s epilogue, Riley rightly takes to task Dylan’s silence in the wake of a New York City crowd booing O’Connor after her infamous Saturday Night Live performance in which she ripped up a picture of the pope. The hypocritical tone-deaf idea that during a Bob Dylan tribute show, which Dylan attended, the celebration would ignore his own bravery to shake the foundations of power and take on the status quo, is articulately deconstructed.

Hard Rain: A Bob Dylan Commentary is a must read for any Dylan fan not mired in rock star worship, something the artist would likely abhor.

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The White Label Promo Preservation Society: 100 Flop Albums You Ought to Know – Sal Maída, Mitchell Cohen & Friends (2021)

Full disclosure: I was gifted this book whilst in Austin, Texas in late summer by one of its contributors, Mr. David Immerglück, a multi-instrumentalist for Counting Crows, the Monks of Doom, and other musical projects. A fellow lunatic music geek, it makes sense that the man we all affectionately call Immer would be included here with his essay about the obscurity of what he dubs “Welsh hippy rockers,” MAN, and their 1974 musical manifesto, Rhinos, Winos & Lunatics. But Immer is but one voice, and the MAN record, which I was gladly introduced to in this volume, is only the tip of the geek-dom iceberg. After just a few of these entrees, you will become a full-fledged member of The White Label Promo Preservation Society.

For newbies to this affliction, a “white label promo” is the vinyl hound’s most cherished find. Back in the day, these were unreleased-to-the-wider-public versions of records that would be shared only with reviewers and radio stations. I have more than a few in my humble collection, but it is only a wink and a nod to the converted, because this compendium casts a wider net. We are introduced by decades to dozens of hidden gems, lost classics, and otherwise bizarre oddities – all of which deserve the attention paid here. Thanks to the efforts of Sal Maída and Mitchell Cohen, who curated the book – as well as added their own essays – there is a place for forgotten worthiness to shine.

It is not just selections from fringe artists like Ars Nova, Zal Yanosky, Bunky & Jake, The Remains, and Milk ‘N’ Cookies, but significant names that released dismissed or plain missed classics; T Rex, The Drifters, Todd Rundgren, The Kinks, Fairport Convention, and much more. The care, excitement, and incredible research done on each and every album is beyond impressive. And now with streaming services and YouTube, readers can quickly try out these records and then join the fray in tracking them down on their original labels. The White Label Promo Preservation Society: 100 Flop Albums You Ought to Know is a record-lovers paradise, but also a lost period of pop music during its heyday that needs to be revisited and enjoyed by those who were not around to hear these “flops.”

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Shades of Springsteen: Politics, Love, Sports, and Masculinity – John Massaro (2021)

John Massaro is not a contemporary of Bruce Springsteen, nor one of those starry-eyed true believers that oft times slather on the worship sauce normally associated with the famed singer-songwriter’s career and exploits. In fact, although a fan and one that sees a reflection of his own biography in Springsteen, the octogenarian author of Shades of Springsteen, a professor at SUNY Potsdam College in New York, was only introduced to his Jersey brethren’s work in the mid-1980s, when the Boss was already seated atop the music world. Recovering from clinical depression, as is Springsteen, the author was whisked away on The Boss’ musical tales of escape, evolution, and redemption. This book is a tribute to all of that. 

Massaro’s thesis of connective tissue in the themes of the book’s subtitle Politics, Love, Sports and Masculinity that he artfully argues drive Springsteen’s canon and best explains the songwriter’s ability to overcome his own issues of depression, is solid. He digs deep, but with an entertaining flair, explaining how all of these themes comes through in nearly every stanza of Springsteen’s songs.

There is a fine needle Massaro threads here, but he does it with great care through stories of his own experiences in many of the places around New Jersey, specifically the Shore, of which Springsteen built into iconic symbols of the region. Despite being a generation removed from the songwriter, Massaro explored many of the same archetypes, long held by those from N.J. that Springsteen mined decades later. 

Although, I do enjoy most of Springsteen’s music and have different periods and songs I cherish more than others, it is my experience growing up in Freehold, New Jersey during the early to late 1970s in the shadow of his immense influence of our burgeoning culture that resonates with me. I am further along the line of generations to Massaro, but feel, as he does through Springsteen’s lyrics, that the connective tissue of lasting art is what makes us want to listen to these songs over and over and take the time to read about them too.  

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Rememberings – Sinéad O’Connor (2021)

This could have gone badly. As much as I adore and respect Sinéad O’Connor for her music, her socio-political stands, her commitment to her art and her causes, both real and imagined, she has been anything but a focused voice on any of them. Having battled mental and emotional illness most of her life while also displaying in her public persona a head-spinning level of mercurial behavior, when I heard she was penning a memoir I was as dubious as when Bob Dylan released what turned out to be a mostly fantasy-addled effort. However, my trepidations were happily proved unfounded. Unlike Dylan’s 2004 uneven Chronicles Vol 1, Rememberings is a brutally honest, and most importantly, consistent work. It reads like the imprint of a cruel world on the soul of a sensitive artist with just enough self-examination and personal epiphanies to induce awe.

Firstly, O’Connor is no writer, per sé. (To be fair, many of these rock and roll memoirs are hardly nods to literary devotion.) Still, there is a writer’s alacrity in the way O’Connor tells her story, bridging the gap between having spent decades burying the horrors of her childhood and her exploitation as a young singer-songwriter, and later MTV superstar in an age of shifting genres and interests, and her artistic integrity. All this transpired in a male-dominated industry that kicked her around for nothing more than its own willful ignorance and insecure self-preservation. O’Connor faces her demons and bravely shares the experience.

Parts of Rememberings is as poetic as its un-grammatical title. O’Connor uses her words and phrases to dig deeper into her psyche, allowing the reader a ringside seat. This is a frightening but rewarding endeavor that helps us understand that a portrait of a true artist is no walk in the park. Much of the myths and well-worn stories of her time under the looming control of her mentally ill mother or the nunnery for which she learned to use music to connect spiritually and psychologically with the world all the way to her weirdly framed wars with the Catholic Church, the U.S. government, and the music business are busted wide open.

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Total F*cking Godhead: The Biography of Chris Cornell – Corbin Reiff (2020)

Guest Review by Chris Barrera

The death by suicide of grunge icon and long-time Soundgarden vocal dynamo Chris Cornell at age 52 caught the world by surprise in 2017. Unlike the brooding self-destructive contemporary Kurt Cobain, who famously took his own life decades before, Cornell was thought to be a rock and roll survivor who had successfully navigated the tides of fame and the music business to achieve a hard-earned place of respect with many years left to thrive.

It is to the credit of author Corbin Reiff that the death of Cornell does not hang over this account as any kind of grim foreshadow, and the evolution of the artist and man are given the proper retelling through the remembrances and quotes of not only many who shared his adventures but also Cornell himself. It is an engaging read that also entices one to explore some of the lesser-known material of Cornell and his various musical collaborations.

The rise of Soundgarden and the Seattle scene of the early nineties is recounted in all its rain-soaked glory, with Cornell’s talents as a singer, songwriter, and frontman given a full examination. The success of the band is portrayed well as a culmination of years of toil and dedication, and fans of the era and its bands like Mudhoney, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains will enjoy the trip down memory lane.

The Audioslave years, the solo releases, and television appearances – the Soundgarden reunion after more than a decade apart – all are presented with detail, as is the ultimate suicide by Cornell in a hotel room by hanging.  The question of why a man so gifted and loved would take his own life may forever remain a mystery, and the author correctly does not try to answer that question, but instead conveys the love and appreciation felt by Chris Cornell’s family, friends, and fans for all the years of entertainment provided by the man. 

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Jesusmania!: The Bootleg Superstar of Gettysburg College – Devin McKinney (2016)

I absolutely adored this book. Doubtless, my obsession with the musical subject and a preteen fascination with Jesus Christ Superstar has quite a bit to do with it, but as author Devin McKinney states in his introduction, loving or even knowing the famed rock opera is not an important ingredient to enjoying this story. Everyone knows someone who has had college or just plain institutional experiences like the one McKinney covers here, right? A bunch of forward-thinking and determined faculty members teaming up with enthusiastic young students to change the course of a school and a town’s fortunes. Okay, maybe not. But I think we all wish we did.

Jesusmania! reveals everything that is great about the spirit of a generation willing to dream and achieve a goal that begins with passion and ends in triumph. The hometown cooking McKinney brings with true pride to the Gettysburg, Pennsylvania milieu is part of the book’s charm, and his finding the voices of all those who participated in one of the first and only organic productions of the famed rock opera, before it became a Broadway hit and a theatrical institution, is paramount. These are mostly amateurs, barely familiar with the material they must conquer under a crushing deadline, dealing with church and school parameters, record label legal shenanigans and each other. McKinney takes us there every step of the way – the inspiration, hurdles, rehearsals, staging, musicians, and performers, all swept up in this one-time moment of creative achievement.  

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Anthem: Rush in the 70s / Limelight: Rush in The 80s – Martin Popoff (2020)

Part of a “Rush Through the Decades” series by author Martin Popoff, Anthem and Limelight comprises the most comprehensive journey into a successful rock band as can be consumed. Straight from all the sources that matter – parents, friends, roadies, manager, record agent, producer – including all three band members, bassist, and lead vocalist, Geddy Lee, guitarist, Alex Lifeson, and drummer/lyricist Neil Peart, the book reads as an oral biography. Swaths of paragraphs are conversational and anecdotal, putting you in the room, on the stage, and in the mindset of unfolding events. Rush’s story is one to admire as it is an inspirational tale of three uniquely talented Canadian lads finding their way to a boldly original sound, embracing it, then changing it again and again; all the while fighting to maintain truth in their art. What’s not to love? Whether you’re a fan or not.

When he does chime in, author Popoff does so with great care and some objectivity (he’s obviously a fan) in breaking down all the songs in the band’s early – and some argue golden era – career. Driven: Rush in the 90s is the next in the series and will no doubt provide the same archival dedication to the band’s arc that would come to an end with Peart’s death in early 2020.  

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Hold On World – The Lasting Impact of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band, Fifty Years On – John Kruth (2021)

There was a spate of John Lennon anniversaries in 2020 – he would have turned 80 in October, 40 years since his death in December, and 50 years since the release of the most dramatic, explosive, raw, and confessional of all pop/rock music albums: Plastic Ono Band. In 1970, during the demise of the Beatles and a series of public (and private) ups and downs, Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, were joined by ex-Beatles drummer Ringo Starr, old friend from the Hamburg club days, Klaus Voormann, and infamous producer, Phil Spector, to record the fallout. Lennon fans know all about the couple’s dalliance with Primal Scream Therapy and its effects on him, particularly the reliving of his childhood traumas and the angst he suddenly felt for his former band, which he duly unleashed on the world in a two-part Rolling Stone interview “Lennon Remembers.” This all feeds into the musical narrative of the album.

Author John Kruth covers the incidents and inspirations that led to Plastic Ono Band, as well as putting us in the studio and in the mindset of the participants. But what makes this a critical historical document of the sessions, is the attention paid to Ono’s mostly overlooked contribution. Many people are unaware that there were two Plastic Ono Band records with similar covers and photos of John and Yoko as children on the back. Using the same line-up as John’s stirringly stark renditions of his emotional songs, Ono essentially reinvents rock and jazz music, which later worked as a creative guidepost for the coming decade and beyond, especially with the advent of Kraut rock and punk. 

Plastic Ono Band is my favorite ex-Beatle solo album; the context of its messages from the end of the 1960s dream to dealing with past tragedies, mining the deepest depths and heights of love and loss, and sharing the troubled mind of one of the greatest voices in the history of the genre. In its care for detail and sidelight, Hold On World delivers a similar telling and is more than worthy of its subject matter.

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Prince and the Parade and Sign “O” the Times Studio Sessions 1985 to 1986 – Duane Tudahl (2021)

In another Herculean achievement, (I reviewed his 2018 Prince and the Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions: 1983 and 1984 here) author Duane Tudahl does masterful research and a compilation job trying desperately to keep up with Prince Rogers Nelson’s creative peak; his post-Purple Rain explosion of output for himself and a host of artists across the musical spectrum.

Tudahl’s work has now become must-reads for Prince aficionados much like Mark Lewisohn’s brilliant work chronicling the Beatles impressive nine-year output. The thing is that the Beatles were loungers compared to Prince from the early eighties to well after 1990, with the bulk of this spectacular run covered in Parade and Sign “O” the Times Studio Sessions.

In my tribute to Prince upon his death in 2016 in this magazine, I wrote about his tireless dedication to music – literally living in the studio, playing after-show concerts until the wee hours of the morning, running his bands ragged with rehearsals and soundcheck jams, then expanding his songwriting and producing to include his own stable of bands and straying outside the Minneapolis cocoon to offer his talents across the globe. This is the central force of this book: Prince working with dozens of protégés and then Miles Davis, the Bangles, Sheila E., Sheena Easton, sending songs to Bonnie Raitt, Patti LaBelle, and Kenny Rogers after rolling off week-long jazz fusion sessions called The Flesh. Then releasing Madhouse project albums, too.

In the twenty-four month period covered by Tudahl, Prince would tour Purple Rain, while composing, producing, and recording Sheila E.’s Romance 1600 – on stages after the shows – direct Under a Cherry Moon in Paris, disband the mighty Revolution and begin to gather a new band, while recording five albums (Parade included) worth of material, much of it appearing on his epic double-album Sign “O” the Times released in 1987 and later The Black Album, Lovesexy and Graffiti Bridge (Dream Factory, Crystal Ball, Camille). All of this was along with a host of B-Sides and all of it became top-notch, experimental, funky, rocking, and melodic gems.

Prince may be the most important musical artist of the latter half of the twentieth century and this book underlines this with zero fanfare. Just read the magic, as it rolls from day to day. Amazing stuff.

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