Tales of an eminence grise. If you carry a torch for ’60s British folk rock, like I do, you probably already revere Joe Boyd as the one who brought us Fairport Convention, the Incredible String Band, John Martyn, Vashti Bunyan and Nick Drake, among others. An American expat, his UK-based Witchseason Productions (he named it after Donovan’s “Season of the Witch,” with that line, “beatniks out to make it rich!”) hardly made a fortune with these artists at the time, but they’ve proven to have longevity like nobody’s business.

Nick Drake, for one, may as well be approached as a present day artist, so all-pervasive is his influence. The embodiment of obscurity at the time of his death in 1974, his cult grew slowly and steadily until the late ’90s, when his aching and solitary music broke, in a typically polluted contemporary manner, via a VW ad. Fairport, of course, were cult sequoias by the early ’70s, while the ISB and Bunyan have been enjoying a recent spate of neo-folk adulation.

All of this recent interest likely prompted Boyd to write White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, and I’m glad he did. It’s got a similar vibe to the recent Dylan memoir in that it contains no re-imagined dialogue and takes us through a compressed tornado of names and vivid verbal snapshots. And you might not expect this, but it covers some of the same territory as Dylan’s. As a young Harvard enrollee with an obsession for vintage jazz and blues, he became intimately familiar with the early ’60s Village folk scene. And before setting up shop in the UK by mid-decade, he worked as a tour manager for (and protégé of) promoter George Wein.

This enabled Boyd to assemble European package tours including the likes of Muddy Waters, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Rev. Gary Davis, Coleman Hawkins, and Roland Kirk. The job also gave him backstage passes to the influential Newport festivals. These are especially disarming sections—his first-hand descriptions of the iconic folk and blues musicians he worked with will glue your eyeballs to the page (Davis was an “alarming looking man” who fellow musicians like Tharpe hadn’t seen the likes of—and would rather not have—for decades. Davis wins her over in the end).

And I’d go so far as to say that Boyd’s recounting of the famous electric Dylan incident at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival is the most poignant, heart-heavy account I’ve ever read. Here’s how he describes the backstage atmosphere post-Dylan: “The old guard hung their heads in defeat while the young, far from being triumphant, were chastened . . . The rebels were like children who had been looking for something to break and realized, as they looked at the pieces, what a beautiful thing it had been.” There was “no point wondering whether it was for the better,” writes Boyd, one of those rebels. “All we could do was to ride its ramifications into the future.”

For Boyd, the next phase of this future was the UFO club in psychedelic-era London, where he, as one of the co-owners, booked formative gigs for Pink Floyd as well as Tomorrow (“love at first sight between them and [the UFO] audience”), Denny Laine and the Electric String Quartet (Laine “never got the recognition he deserved”), and one of his favorites, the Move (“a phenomenon few Americans had the privilege of seeing”). Mick Farren’s Deviants, whose music Boyd hated, could only squeeze a single gig out of him as a token of thanks for their help around the club.

By the time he moved on to managing and producing British folk rock, the psychedelic connection proved to be a magic ingredient for him in a country that seemed to disdain its own folk music. The Incredible String Band, on the strength of their 5,000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion album, with its mind-swirling cover art and border-free approaches to acoustic music, became one of Boyd’s most reliable, top-drawing outfits. So entrenched in their times were the ISB, though, that they were doomed to being “terminally unhip” and remain an acquired taste.

But their influence has never really stopped simmering below the surface—those first four albums were just too adventurous and good. And for fans like me (I joined the cult after buying a cutout bin copy of Relics of the ISB at Musicland in the mid-’80s—never made any converts, alas), the opportunity to read extended inside info about them is a true pleasure. I know now that it was Scientology that killed the ISB. Boyd considers among his deepest regrets the fact that he’d left them at a restaurant with a friend of his who promptly converted them after Boyd left. I believe what he says, too, because their albums really did get dull (post-Wee Tam and the Big Huge) right about the time they started sipping the Hubbard hooch.

Boyd’s reminiscences of Nick Drake will also draw in more than a few readers, although most of these will be already familiar with the Fruit Tree liner notes, and the info he gives us in White Bicycles don’t add terribly much to those. It is a bit fascinating, though, to read his memories and musings on Drake at a time when he has effectively outsold all of the other Witchseason artists, and also to read his thoughts about the Drake-effect on indie folk: “I have listened to more than one man’s fair share of anglophone singer-songwriters … Few bear comparison to Nick’s form, much less his essence. The only ones who even slightly reminded me of Nick turned out to be unaware of him.”

Boyd’s 1960s end around the mid-’70s, when he’d relocated to LA to run the music depatment at Warner Bros Films and buried himself in making Jimi Hendrix, the first full-scale retrospective of the late guitar god’s life. By this time, at the end of White Bicycles, you do get the sense that Boyd’s got an extraordinary knack for foresight, even though his successes may not have followed any of the shorter-term courses he thought they might.

Be warned that the book can get pretty shop-talky and was probably intended for his music biz colleagues. This being the case, the names and business details and references whiz by pretty fast and may give you whiplash. But it’s very much worth it. Rumor has it that Boyd will be writing about the world music revolution next, and as the helmsman for Hannibal records throughout the ’80s, he’s the right man to tell that tale. Maybe by the time it’s out, Trio Bulgarka will have scored a VW ad of their own.

Dee Dee Phelps, one half of sixties pop duo Dick and Dee Dee, just put out this memoir, Vinyl Highway, and it’s a lot of fun, especially if you’re interested in those oddball post-Army Elvis/pre-Beatles years. (And the cover is pretty impossible to resist.) You can read my Pop Matters review of it here. Phelps got the book going through a series of writing workshops and I’m glad she did.

Here’s a little cross referencing fun I don’t include in my review: On pages 267-272, the chapter called “Band Attack,” she reports on an incident at the happening LA folk rock club The Trip in which loose cannon Dick St. John explodes at the hipster back up band just before going on stage with them, for not appearing to treat him with proper respect. The performance is awful – Dick and Dee Dee are singing off key and Dee Dee sees the guitarists snickering out of the corner of her eye. She realizes the group has probably retaliated by tuning up a half step, while Dick, after the set, blames it all on her.

Jump over to Love drummer Michael Stuart-Ware’s 2003 memoir Behind the Scenes on the Pegasus Carousel, on pages 24-25. He’s talking about a gig at the Cinnamon Cinder, where he’d been playing regularly with the Sons of Adam (featuring guitarist Randy Holden). Dick and Dee Dee arrive just before the gig, tension’s in the air, and all throughout the disastrous set, Dick says things to the audience like “Jeez, this band is crappy, isn’t it?” and how big stars like him sometimes have to put up with crap like that.

The back story to this gig, according to Stuart-Ware, was that Dick had previously attempted to groom the Sons of Adam in his image, recording some demos and adding his own unique voice into the mix. He was furious when they finally begged off, so when Dick and the band were unexpectedly reunited by a promoter, Dick got his revenge, Stuart-Ware implies, by berating the band on stage and trying to make them look like inexperienced schlubs. Dee Dee mentions in her book that Dick (strictly a business partner) was always up to music biz stuff she didn’t know about, so maybe this was yet another example of that. Was it the same gig? Although each of their anecdotes take place at different venues, my hunch still leans towards yes.

[Update: Thanks to Dee Dee for setting my idle speculation to rest (see comments) – sounds like these were different gigs altogether – and for giving us a heads up on Dick Peterson’s Kingsmen memoir, Louie Louie, which has another account of St. John’s adventures.]

For me, Joe Bonomo’s Sweat – an indepth history of the chronically underappreciated Fleshtones – was one of the happiest book events of ‘07 (it came out last September). You can read my extended rave about it over at Pop Matters.

Jim Fusilli, Pet Sounds (2005)

I’d love it even more if they’d do a book about the Osmonds (I actually sent in a proposal once) or Bay City Rollers, but Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of little books about influential albums has still been a lot of fun. Their Pet Sounds volume was written by novelist and Wall Street Journal arts columnist Jim Fusilli, and you’ve got to admire his willingness to take on a subject so many have already written about. He’s got a right to, and that’s pretty much the point of his book, that Pet Sounds is such a deeply personal expression that’s presented in such a universally appealing way that it still has the power, after all these years, to touch individual listeners deeply and make them feel as though it were written just for them. The Pet Sounds of Charles Granata, Kingsley Abbot, David Leaf and Brian Wilson himself is the same album with the same unchangeable history, but its contents are so rich and its influence so expansive that it gives Fusilli and you and me all kinds of room to call it our own and maybe even publish something about why.

The book is definitely a “think piece” – there are no clear reasons why Fusilli’s divided the chapters the way he has, so it ends up feeling like a little book of pocket Pet Sounds meditations that you’re more inclined to dip into rather than read cover to cover. I do wish that the “personal meaning” aspect of his book would have compelled Fusilli to interact with the album even more on a personal level than he does in the book. I really love his introduction, where he talks about growing up in Hoboken and illustrating just how lifeguard-like the Beach Boys were to him as a doggie-paddling 1960s adolescent. It gives the book a Boys of Summer aura, and I, for one, was disappointed that he opted not to continue in such an aggressively first-person fashion. The book really crackles at the all too infrequent points when he does, though. (I think this approach is harder to pull off than it seems, although Ron Schaumburg did an especially fine job with his Growing Up with the Beatles back in the seventies.)

posted by Kim Simpson

I think about this subject every year at this time and did so even before I had kids. Maybe it’s because books had so much do with how my fantasy impressions of Halloween, not to mention the entire autumn season, have taken shape. Anyway, here’s a spotlight on six of my favorites.

Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Arnold Lobel (1976):

Prelutsky seems to have written a children’s book a day for the last several decades, but this one really stays with you. It’s not just a collection of poems about monsters, but also the terrible things they do to their victims, who are almost always children. Lobel’s Edward Gorey-esque black and white sketches are masterful, the most frightening one being “The Ghoul,” which depicts a bald, pointy-eared creature perched atop a jungle gym, eyes fixed on a schoolhouse as children inside are getting ready to leave. (“He slices their stomachs and bites their hearts,” Prelutsky writes, “and tears their flesh to shreds.”)

How Spider Saved Halloween, by Robert Kraus (1973):

Kraus, like Prelutsky, is another writer who sneezes out kids books by the score. But his “Spider” books stand out because he does the rather crude crayon drawings himself, and they’re great. Most Americans my age and younger probably remember this one with great fondness and can recall the three challenges Spider overcomes: 1) Finding a convincing costume; 2) Scaring off two bug bullies who have been out smashing pumpkins and spraying trick or treaters with shaving cream; and 3) winning the full friendship of a petty character named Fly.

The Headless Horseman Rides Tonight, by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Arnold Lobel (1980):

Fun-loving duo Jack and Arnold’s sequel to Nightmares isn’t quite as bloodthirsty but just as creepy. The standout here is “The Darkling Elves,” depicting a quorum of twelve tiny apostles of evil gazing down from a tree at a sweet and unsuspecting little girl reading a book.

The Witch Who Went Out for a Walk, by Margaret Hillert, illustrated by Krystyna Stasiak (1981):

In this book, we follow the travels of a green witch and her black cat who, strangely enough, have never seen owls, bats, jack-o-lanterns, or trees with faces on them before. Finally the witch decides to call it a night when the sight of trick or treaters finally freaks her out. Stasiak’s rich and colorful illustrations pay tribute to Eastern European naive art and make this one a must.

Granny Greenteeth and the Noise in the Night, by Kenn and Joanne Compton (1993):

In this story, a witch can’t read her book at night because of a strange noise under her bed. After failing to get help from a resident cat, broomstick, ghost, troll, goblin, bats, and bugaboo, all of whom prove to be whiny, excuse-making bums, she lets out a scream which finally scares them into action. The illustrations are all bug-eyed and funny, providing a lasting image of the quintessential scaredy cat.

Very Scary, by Tony Johnston, illustrated by Douglas Florian (1995):

This is another one featuring unusually gorgeous water colors that seem to capture the very mood of Halloween. The simple story’s good too: A number of nuisances slowly invade a nighttime pumpkin patch – owls, cats, crickets, children, and a real life witch. The kids find an enormous pumpkin, carve a face on it, and when they finally stick the candle in, it shrieks out a “boo,” scaring the pants off every last creature (including the witch, whose hair stands on end) and sending them all scurrying home, thus reaffirming what we’ve all learned elsewhere: The Great Pumpkin always gets the last laugh.

Most of the concerts I remember best are ones that have a side story that’s ended up having more personal, symbolic meaning to me than the actual show. Like Cheap Trick in a tiny Salt Lake City club in ‘86 when a kleptomaniac friend of mine crept into the backstage area under the speakers to see what he could find. He ended up mangling up the electrical cords so badly on his way there that the entire stage blacked out in the middle of the group’s first encore and everyone had to go home disappointed. Or my 80-year-old grandmother sneaking me, her underage grandson, into the nightclub at a San Francisco Hotel in ‘87 so I could experience Bobby Bland. Or Jeff Buckley in a small Austin coffeehouse in ‘93. My wife and I had gotten in free because I’d given the clubowner a Tim Buckley mix tape sometime before the gig. But the Christ-child aura surrounding Tim’s son was so unbearably heavy for us – even back then – that four numbers into the show, a grizzled, old-timer friend of ours leaned over and said “let’s go to Denny’s” and we did. And Buckley ended up being a mere bit player (gasp!) in what nonetheless ended up as an entirely memorable evening.

I guess it’s no surprise, then, that most of my favorite pieces in The Show I’ll Never Forget, a collection of reminiscences of fifty (mostly fiction) writers, are ones where the pre- and post-show personal contexts are weightier than the shows themselves. Jerry Stahl can’t separate a David Bowie show from a kind gesture Bowie had given him earlier in an interview, both of which nonetheless pale in comparison to Stahl’s personal situation. David Ritz takes an unbelievable post-gig car ride with Jimmy Reed that’s got nothing, overtly, to do with music. Richard Burgin finds himself having a candid, private conversation with Bill Evans in which music plays second fiddle. Heidi Julavits’s encounter with Rush is a mere incidental in her relationship with a high school boyfriend and, on a larger scale, her hometown.

Because the number of contributors who are either regular music writers or actual musicians is in the single digits, the book benefits from so many fresh interpretations of musical experience (even while sagging from overloads of writerly wit). I especially like how this collection reveals how seasoned fiction writers can find themselves grasping for words in the face of a great pop music show (Diana Ossana, Samantha Hunt, John Haskell), and how seasoned music writers, on the other hand, can run the risk of squelching similar experiences with clomping boots of authoritative exposition (Gary Giddins, Harvey Pekar, Charles R. Cross). A small handful of pieces falls into the almost-too-slight-to-merit-inclusion category (Chuck Klosterman, Marc Bojanowski, Thurston Moore), and another falls into the too-recent-to-believe category (Alice Elliott Dark, and the closing piece by Daniel Handler and Andrew Sean Greer which is clever, but untrustworthy). Best of all are those pieces that are able to locate the concert experience as a memorable thread in a complex web and tell us how it fits. Yes – music listening and concert going are most satisfying when done for their own sake. Writing about them, though, happens to be a whole different story.

Here’s my list of ten pieces I’ll never forget from The Show I’ll Never Forget:

1-David Ritz on Jimmy Reed
2-Ron Carlson on the Steve Abbot Benefit Concert
3-Richard Burgin on Bill Evans
4-Paul Muldoon on Horslips (some serious word pleasure here)
5-Heidi Julavits on Rush (featuring Neil, the armless, blind, and toothless drummer)
6-Robert Polito on The Pogues
7-Carl Newman on Redd Kross
8-Rick Moody on The Lounge Lizards (featuring a “rebuttal” from John Lurie)
9-Jerry Stahl on David Bowie (you start this one cringing then end up glowing)
10-Max Allan Collins on Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin

posted by Kim Simpson

Charles L. Granata’s Wouldn’t It Be Nice is the first of three fairly recent books devoted to Pet Sounds, and if I were Granata, I admit I’d have shied away from the project after having read the very thorough David Leaf booklet that came with the 1997 Pet Sounds Sessions box set. But his book ends up being a worthwhile synthesis of the album’s back story and makes for a more than adequate accounting of the LP’s modern-day canonical status. The author clearly has a deep appreciation for songcraft (this is equally evident in his other writings about Frank Sinatra), and depending on the reader, Granata’s musical analysis – while never completely over the top – will either strengthen or bog down the reading experience. (Only after reading this book, by the way, did I ever see the very specific and now-so-seemingly-obvious influence of Pet Sounds on the Beatles’ “Here, There and Everywhere.”)

Other readers who may find this book a struggle will be folks like myself who endeavor to read every page ever written about the Beach Boys and who will undoubtedly snooze through some of the book’s oft-recycled quotes and anecdotes. My advice to those readers is to stick with it, because there are lots of hidden little gems that will inevitably manifest themselves due to the eyebrow-raising number of authoritative witnesses Granata interviewed. (I like the story of Brian coaxing guitarist Billy Strange, who didn’t own an electric 12-string, to bring along the young son he was babysitting into the studio with him so he could watch his dad lay down the intro to “Sloop John B” on gear that would be provided for him. After laying down the part, Brian sends Strange and Strange Jr. off into the night, saying “don’t forget your guitar and amplifier.”) Wouldn’t It Be Nice is especially recommended for folks who’ve never read anything substantial about the Beach Boys and have little patience for the in-crowd only approach that plenty of rock-crit writing is guilty of.

Sidebar: Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Granata wins a bonus mention and my deepest appreciation for being who I believe is the only Beach Boy author to fully acknowledge the masterful contribution Brian made to Linda Ronstadt’s Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind LP in 1989, the year after his solo debut. He did the vocal arrangement for Jimmy Webb’s “Adios,” which stands among the most beautiful and heartrending tracks he’s ever been associated with. Please indulge me as I revel in Granata’s attention to this criminally overlooked moment:

“Among Brian’s most notable work of the new decade was his 1990 [no, 1989, but you’re forgiven, my son] collaboration with Linda Ronstadt on Jimmy Webb’s ‘Adios.’ Webb marveled at how intact Wilson’s musical acumen was, given the difficulties he’d surmounted. ‘From what I was told, he went in to Skywalker Sound and put on a magic show,’ the songwriter says. ‘It was a real ‘This is how you do a head vocal arrangement‘ demonstration in which he created all of the parts on the spot, laying down one vocal after another. He was in complete control of the situation, and went right through the process from beginning to end. In my estimation, the results were pretty special. I was very happy, and very proud of that meeting, that chance for a brush with greatness. It was a wonderful thing for me and my song.” Well said, Mr. Webb, and well done, Mr. Granata.

posted by Kim Simpson

What you may not know about Joe Jackson’s A Cure for Gravity, in case you’ve thought about reading it, is that it only covers his formative years up to Look Sharp (1979), his first LP. Any insights we get into his later years as an established recording artist – of which there are generous helpings, actually – come only in support of this earlier part of his story.

This is fine because his book’s main idea is that his own self-discovery as a musician is just one phase, however significant, of an ongoing process, and you get the clear sense that Jackson hasn’t written the book so much to memorialize himself but to do something useful – even charitable – for his audience. Most of us are likely going through similar processes, he suspects, and his own experiences, however music-specific they may seem, are applicable to anyone who may be feeling the urge to reach a bit higher than usual or let loose some essential aspect of inner self.

He’s not ever saying he’s “made it” – just that he’s reached a level of satisfaction in his line of work that has mostly come through sticking to his guns. Certain drive-by critics have accused Jackson of elitism, acerbity and dilletantism (each of which he is quite aware of), but these are easy misinterpretations of idealism, intelligence, and curiosity; or, in one sweeping stroke, simple determination. It’s perhaps easy to forget, amid all of his own recorded sarcasm, how full his catalog is of positive messages (“Go For It” and “The Wild West” kept ringing in my head as I was reading). I guarantee that if you make it to the end of the book, where he declares himself an optimist, you’ll believe him.

Music journalist John Milward’s The Beach Boys: Silver Anniversary is a coffee table book full of glossy photos which outnumber the pages of large-font text. Notwithstanding this, or the fact that he offers up no new raw material, it’s in the upper echelon of Beach Boys books because he’s managed to string together all the familiar quotes and anecdotes from previous publications with artful, personally invested prose. The mid-80s were a significant checkpoint for the Beach Boys: they turned 25; they had a hit single (“Getcha Back”); they bounced back from Secretary of the Interior James Watts’s 1983 refusal to allow them to play a concert on the Washington DC Mall by returning triumphantly the following year with full support of both the public and the president (Watts ended up losing his job); and a couple of crucial books about the group saw publication – David Leaf’s heartfelt 1985 revision of his Beach Boys and the California Myth and Steven Gaines’s leering tell-all, Heroes and Villains. Milward’s book appropriately walks the middle ground between the two and the result is a highly accessible relic from this era, not only in terms of readability but also availability on library shelves.

This isn’t to say that Milward doesn’t let his own discomfort with elements of the Beach Boys’ then-current state of affairs show. This is evident in the book’s appendices, in which he insists on mapping out his discographical essays according to the jumbled availability of the group’s recordings circa 1985. Even less happily, Milward reveals himself as a Brian cultist who’s more or less given up hope. “The Beach Boys devotee is innocent by nature,” he writes, “and is glad to grab at straws while imagining the band’s return to full glory.” He passes my own personal Friends and Love You tests with flying colors simply because he gives them their due, but he does so in an unmistakably bummed out, straw-grabbing manner. Friends: “A wholly likable record that has aged remarkably well; the seed of its amiability, however, is that it had nothing to do with ambition.” Love You: “Fans of Brian heard their old friend, and if he wasn’t the aural sophisticate he once was, there was a chilling charm to these simple songs.” (Dare you to try playing any of these “simple songs” at the campfire, Mr. Milward.) And I do have to take issue with his understandably Brian-cultist decision to dismiss the Carl and the Passions and Holland albums altogether as “abysmal.” Perhaps most revealing of his discouraged outlook, though, is the picture he paints in the book’s final paragraph, an almost macabre fantasy scenario in which a creatively spent Brian reunites with dead father Murry among monuments to glorious musical achievements of his which, although never to be forgotten, have long since passed. Recommended all the same.

posted by Kim Simpson

Bruce Golden’s Southern California Pastoral, one of the earlier Beach Boys books (the version pictured is the 1991 update), is an artifact from an era when laid back English professors were the primary academic curators of pop music studies. (A favorite from that era is David Pichaske’s A Generation in Motion from 1979, a unique, “rock lyrics as poetry” social studies exercise on the sixties.) Golden, recently retired, worked the English beat at the University of California-San Bernardino, and his book was the first volume in a Borgo Press projected series of pop music analyses. (Vol. 2 was a 1997 treatment of Rush, so watch for vol. 3 in 2018 or so.)

Golden’s main purpose is to tie the BB’s into the ancient Greek pastoral poetic tradition in which simple methods of expression, prompted by longings for peace and tranquility, were frequently used to communicate a wide range of complex emotions. Fine with me, and frankly, so is his decision to skip too many details on the ancient side of things and to present us with a manageable 50 pages (fewer than the 54 pages of discography, notes, bibliography and index).

Some things to keep in mind: 1) Golden is writing to an audience that has perhaps heard of the Beach Boys but knows little about them; 2) this is not a biography so much as a rumination on their cultural significance, and may therefore be the only Beach Boys book not to mention Murry Wilson; 3) He sets a world record even in this small book for words written about the Still Cruisin’ album (but he skips altogether Carl and the Passions as well as everything between Holland and Still Cruisin’); 4) He utters, in the beginning, what may sound like sinister words to those who have always yearned for Brian to break down barriers and to never stop reaching for the heavens: “Learning to operate freely within one’s limits is the first sign of professionalism in the arts.” But don’t worry, that’s as sinister as it gets.

(Passage spotlight: “Perhaps the most interesting aspect of 1985’s Golden Harmonies compilation is the cover. Set in a golden frame, it shows a postcard-like picture of ‘today’s’ Beach Boys running along the shoreline. Most prominent is Brian, running in the middle of them all, his large, white, untanned stomach thrust forward and bearded head tilted back. He seems to be enjoying himself, as does the rest of the band.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen this album before, and the picture Golden paints in my mind is kind of hysterical. Does anyone have it?)