Full disclosure: I met the author, veteran singer-songwriter, Stephen Kellogg when he was conjuring this project. The first thing he asked me; “How do you write a book?” The query wasn’t from the usual place of intrigue writers get from young would-be authors or even a rhetorical jab at the craft from someone who cannot fathom such an arduous waste of time. Kellogg was genuinely curious. He’s a great songwriter. He’d led a fairly successful band called The Sixers in the early aughts and when we first spoke he was well into a solo career. There would soon be a film produced on his maddening touring schedule mixed with the time he makes for his family – wife and four girls – that you can catch on Amazon streaming. I was charmed enough by Stephen’s story to pen two features on him in this paper. I should also point out a blurb I sent Stephen upon perusing the manuscript prior to publishing appears on its back cover.

Nevertheless, I read about forty of these music books a year and only a dozen make it into Rock Reads in the late-spring and the holiday season, so I shan’t waste your time or mine on a book I don’t think is truly a great read and adds to the pantheon of so many wonderful tomes on the subject of music and musicians.

Kellogg doesn’t just fill the pages with tour and studio stories, although they’re here, but instead offers rare and vulnerable insights into what it means to be a young man, husband, father, and citizen of the world in the dawning decades of the twenty-first century, while also making music. These observations, which are weaved into much of his songs and broached on stage – Stephen is an engaging aural storyteller – make this one of the most unique portraits of an artist out there.  

Objects in the Mirror, like its musical counterpart, is emotionally wrought and intensely relatable. You’ll laugh and cry and learn something about the human experience. Pretty good for someone who was clearly unaware when he started how to write a book. He did. And it’s really good

Although it pulls no punches, Sandra Tooze’s Levon is a love letter to one of the signature drummers and dynamic vocalists in rock history. Levon Helm is every bit the southern gentleman, hospitable down-to-earth non-nonsense professional as much as he is the emotionally neglecting, grudge-holding, ill-tempered, recalcitrant substance abuser. Tooze’s Helm, though, is not the mercurial sort – from his barely teen years playing the southern blues circuit, first on guitar and mandolin and then his most well-known instrument, the drums, and later as one of the most recognizable voices of an era – he remains oddly, even enviably, unchanged by any circumstance, from tragedy to fame.

Helm’s life unfolds in heroic fashion; traveling North America and then the world, first in Ronnie Hawkins’ Hawks, which would, like almost all of his musical enterprises, become his own, and eventually, historically, blessedly The Band. Having reviewed fellow founder, Robbie Robinson’s memoir, Testimony here in 2016, but thus far not Helm’s 1993 version of the story, This Wheel’s on Fire, it was interesting to learn the well-known disputes – mostly coming from Helm – on songwriting and publishing rights. Helm would never forgive Robertson for, as he sees it, ripping him and the other members of The Band off and for calling it quits in 1978 for all of them. 

Surprisingly, perhaps my favorite parts of the book delve into Helm’s post-Band years, especially the second iteration of the famed quintet, now a quartet with several guitarists, that would continue on until some members became casualties of the road, its excesses and isolations. 

Not forgetting what is important, Tooze fills the book with observations and firsthand accounts of what made Helm worth writing and reading about, pointedly his preternatural musical talents that he never abandoned and continued to celebrate until his last breath.      

When one of the most successful producers and executives in the seminal years of the rock generation writes a memoir, you read it. Ted Templeman delivers the goods with A Platinum Producer’s Life in Music, a no-nonsense sprint through the labyrinth of a music business discovering itself.  Finally, here is a book that covers the process of the artist. Templeman takes you into the studio, behind the scenes; working with seminal artists such as Van Morrison, Van Halen, Eric Clapton the Doobie Bros., Aerosmith, Nicolette Larson, Carly Simon and more. We’re privy to their methods, idiosyncrasies, unique talents, fears and aspirations. The producer’s many tasks – father confessor, ship’s captain, musical interpreter, sonic guidepost, and sometimes fellow partier – are unfurled in a very entertaining read. 

Templeman was also a major executive during his decades working at Warner Bros. during the company’s, and especially the label’s halcyon days. The stories of working within the studio system in the wild and crazy 1970s through the eighties into the nineties is covered with a keen eye. There are so many great stories and so much to learn on how the business thrived and imploded, the hits and the misses, the parties, the awards shows, the inner fighting, et al. We get to the bottom of the battles within the Doobies and Van Halen from Templeman’s perspective. which I found here to always be fair and measured.

I was also jazzed to learn that the author was a member of the sixties pop group, Harper’s Bizarre, another angle on the music business that helps frame an extremely fascinating life in the business of music.  

While on the subject of the aforementioned 33 1/3 Series, one of the finest ones, which I’d just read when readying this edition of Rock Reads, is Gina Arnold’s deconstruction of Liz Phair’s monumental Exile in Guyville. Arnold, one of the finest historians on the indie movement of the late Eighties to early Nineties, puts the 1993 release into pinpoint perspective while getting inside many of its myths, geographical touchstones and feminine evocations.

Much of Phair’s persona and this record in particular took on a wider interpretation at the time of its release. There was a sense that the album’s raw expression on sexuality, personal angst, a lashing out on external demons and the dying of a musical street movement in Chicago was somehow a referendum on the artist and not the art made delving into this book a treat for me, and the author did not disappoint. This is as much a record of its times and beyond it, and Arnold leaves no subject ignored. 

Of course, the one thing that intrigued me from the moment the album was released – beyond its DIY mastery of tape demos being put out as statement a la Daniel Johnston and Michelle Shocked and later Beck, all of whom perked my ears in a time when rock and roll had become a bit stale again – is its immediate reference to my favorite Rolling Stones album Exile on Main St. By name-checking arguably one of the two or three finest rock records of all time, Phair goes into sacred territory on her own terms. Many, including your truly, dismissed the originally stated idea by Phair that Guyville is a track-by-track answer to the Stones, specifically the macho messaging by Mick Jagger. You would have to be someone looking for such things to consider it as a serious exercise, but Arnold does it! And does it with the kind of intense music writing that makes doing what I do as a music journalist and essayist worth noting.

As stated, this series is worth exploring in general, but if you need to start somewhere, Gina Arnold provides a template to why these books work so well in making listening to these works subsequently appealing.  

Speaking of music journalists, the highly recommended 33 1/3 series out of London, of which I have enjoyed more than a dozen of their over two-hundred volumes based on seminal records of the rock era, has just released a very interesting compendium penned by many of the same authors to dig deep into their secret loves of overlooked classics (hence B-Sides) – some by wildly successful artists and others almost completely ignored. It is a revisit to records that for reasons broached in each essay need to be reconsidered. It’s a fantastic idea and a great read.

There is so much care and passion by the authors on each selection, it is hard to cite the most compelling. I was, of course, jazzed by selections I too think are easily dismissed as lesser works by significant artists, The Rolling Stones’ It’s Only Rock and Roll (written by David Masciotra), The Cars’ Candy O (Susan Fast) and still others that I believe are masterpieces in their own right as in Sinead O’Connor’s brilliant, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got (Tara Murtha) Jane’s Addiction’s Nothing’s Shocking (Rolf Potts) and Songs of Love and Hate by the always evocative Leonard Cohen (Drew Daniel).

Full disclosure, back when the series was published by Continuum Publishing, also out of London, I was working with an editor there to write a volume about the 1976 KISS album Destroyer, a record (in the spirit of B-Sides) I have long argued has been discounted in the pantheon of great 1970s hard rock releases, mostly due to critical prejudice of the band’s cartoonish persona. After extensive interviews and mounds of research bloated the project that would eventually be titled Shout it Out Loud – The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon  I was to take it to my current publisher Backbeat Books for a 2015 release.

Nevertheless, the very concept of trying to reimagine its impact was an inspiration.

For someone who has spent many years writing about music and compiling quite a list of heroes along the way, a collection of the best music journalists and essayists is a true gift. And Shake It Up delivers. Having read many of these articles and essays before, it is nice to have these seminal pieces available in a single volume. There isn’t one key music writer form the past half century missing. Editors Johnathan Lethem and Keven Dettmar uncover some real gems too. The main voices from gender to race from hip hop to rockabilly are featured.

Reading some of my favorites, Paul Nelson, Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, and the self-proclaimed dean of all rock writers, Robert Christgau is quite illuminating when they are all there back to back to back. The way the book is arranged, it provides a wonderful chronological sense of where the rock world began all the way to today through the voices of those who lived it, expressed it, turned it from a teenage fad into a serious consideration as a legitimate artform.

Stand-outs include “The Memphis Soul Sound” by Stanley Booth – I loved his book on the Stones 1969 tour and his observations on Altamont, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones that I may or may not have reviewed here –an excerpt from acclaimed poet, Amiri Baraka’s The Changing Same (R & B and New Black Music), which I plan on reviewing here in the near future, “The Cars’ Power Steering”, chronicling the formation and incredible success of The Cars in the late-seventies by NY Times entertainment critic, Jon Pareles, a piece that I read mere days before their founder and main songwriter, Ric Ocasek died, and John Jeremiah Sullivan’s in-depth reporting on the weirdly wonderful and equally repellent lead singer of Guns N’ Roses, “The Final Comeback of Axl Rose”.

Volumes such as these are important guides to our understanding of how the music was digested during its times and how they altered the landscape of the future. These are the voices who were there to describe the view and put it into perspective.  

The final days of the Beatles. Has there ever been a more overly detailed account of a breakup in the annals of print? Yet, Kennth Womak has written a wonderful new book, Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles, which comes on the fiftieth anniversary of the classic album’s release. Womak uses the backdrop of the Beatles final musical statement to provide new insight into the events surrounding the disintegration of the world’s most popular rock and roll band and its refusal to go away quietly.

What makes Solid State stand out from previous “end of the Beatles sagas” is as the title hints, it concentrates on perhaps the most crucial instrument on Abbey Road, the then brand-new solid state mixing board introduced to the studio whose name the record bares as its title. Abbey Road was indeed recorded in the place where nearly all the band’s legendary music was realized, but in the winter of 1969 there was one major difference: The studio moved away from its trusty BTR four-track machine for a new solid state board and an eight track deck, something the Beatles and many of its contemporaries clamored for since its introduction a year earlier. The very sound of the band was altered, the smoother and deeper Paul McCartney bass runs, the crunchier John Lennon rhythm guitar riffs, the sweetly resonant slide guitar of George Harrison, and the silky groove of Ringo Starr’s drum rolls. It is as if the band of the Sixties was heralding the Seventies. This, among other pressing issues within and without is what captivated the Beatles enough to rekindle previous magic with producer George Martin to make one final brilliantly sonic profession of their mystical talents.

If you are a studio nerd or a Beatles aficionado you will love this book, but for the mildly curious, or those learning about this seminal period in the final days of an historic run of musical success, there is plenty to cull here. For me, perhaps the coolest nugget is the transcript of a meeting between three of the Beatles (taped because Ringo was absent due to tests for stomach pain) that starkly reveals the problems each of them were harboring with the music – beyond the lawsuits and backbiting, drug issues and other nagging elements that finished them off. Their personalities, the years of crushing fame and stellar artistic output coming tumbling forth to expose their truest personalities beyond the Fab Four that were soon to be no more.  

Mere months before he was found dead in an elevator in his home/studio complex, Paisley Park in April of 2016, Prince Rogers Nelson, one of the most talented, celebrated and enigmatically reclusive rock stars of all time put out word with little to no fanfare around the publishing world that he was ready to write his memoir. Shockwaves and rumors and several aborted attempts to pin Prince down – a seemingly impossible task since his emergence on the music scene as a nineteen year-old phenom that convinced Warner Bros to give him complete creative control over his work. Enter writer/editor, Dan Piepenbring, who was both an advisory editor at the Paris Review and a rabid Prince fan. The story of his enchanting but furiously quick time in Prince’s presence working through pages of scribbled screed from the man himself about his childhood makes up a third of The Beautiful Ones. The other two-thirds of the book is just as intriguing.

The second part features Piepenbring’s yeoman’s work making heads or tails of Prince’s cadence, his use of weird symbols that replace words like “two” and “four” with their subsequent numerals and “I” with a drawing of an eyeball, and many other eccentricities into a readable text that is the most revealing of Prince’s private thoughts, fears and dreams. The passages about his parents and his awakening as a musician and eventually one of the great artists of the latter half of the previous century and the first sixteen years of this one is well worth the effort.

The third part is a treasure-trove of extremely rare photographs, notes, and mementos from Prince’s rise to fame all the way through the triumph of his groundbreaking smash hit Purple Rain album, film and tour. There is original artwork and designs for album covers, tour outfits, staging and insights into the magical world that Prince had figured in his head and set about infusing into the music and eventually those who helped make it a reality.

And while it is a bittersweet document of what could have been had Prince not accidentally overdosed on prescribed opioids at age fifty-seven, we nonetheless have a better grasp on the mysteries surrounding the blossoming of a superstar in his own words and with images from deep inside his life.

In the wake of this summer’s blockbuster biopic, Rocket Man reminding everyone how preternaturally brilliant, insanely famous and spectacularly screwed-up Elton John was in the 1970s and 80s, here comes his far more detailed memoir, Me. The author proves one thing straight away, the playful drama of the film doesn’t include his incredible self-awareness of his proclivities, talents and addictions, and that by imparting it in this most intimate way, he is damned funny. It is through his self-deprecating humor that Elton John becomes less cartoon superstar, something he readily admits he knew compromised his musical integrity as a part of one the great songwriting duos of the rock and roll era, and brings us closer to the man behind it all. It is in those intrepid insights into his myopic thrill-ride of a life and career where Me truly comes alive.

My complaint, as it was with Keith Richards and Pete Townshend’s memoirs, is that there just isn’t enough info into Elton’s two main contributions to the genre; his aforementioned composing with Bernie Taupin, and his instinctual ability to awe audiences from the very beginning. For the decade of the seventies when Elton John was the biggest rock star on the planet he released thirteen albums in nine years, some two or three in a single year, many of them some of the decade’s finest, and played the world over. His 1982 MSG show is still the best concert I have ever seen. So, count me as biased here, but it is clear Elton is far more interested in sharing a retrospective of having written “Your Song” in twelve minutes or the utter terror he felt starting at his idol, Leon Russell from the Troubadour stage when he blew Hollywood away and literally became an overnight sensation in the U.S. than he is with explaining how he did it.

One thing Elton does reveal much of is his truly incredible drug abuse, his search for love in almost all the wrong places, and his constant battles to expunge the sins of his parents, especially a love-hate cycle for decades with his mother. Of course, most people perusing fame with as raid ambition have some part of their past in which they are first motivated and then mortified by the results, but Elton’s is a heartfelt and triumphant journey from child abuse to a loving father and humanitarian who has conquered his demons. Me is a brave telling and in a voice that is, well, damn hilarious and brutally honest. Kind of like sitting for tea with Sir Elton.