Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. (33 1/3, Bloomsbury)

Talk about a daunting project! First, there's the album itself, and its dense, arcane contents. How do you even write about that music? Second, many brave people have written about that music. The corpus of Miles Davis literature is not small. There's gonna be a movie too.  Is there anything new to say about Bitches Brew?

To his credit, Grella does an excellent job within the 33 1/3 format. It does what I want every book in the series to do: hit me with a barrage of heady ideas while wedging in some worthy musical analysis.

He discusses Miles Davis's place in jazz musically and critically (he gets some good jabs in at Stanley Crouch) and within the broader popular culture. The book traces Davis's journey from Birth of the Cool into the electric era. Remarkably, Grella is able to cover all this territory without being rushed or perfunctory. When we reach In a Silent Way, Grella pauses to examine its creation, noting that it's the point where the music enters "a new and previously unimagined dimension," with Teo Macero's razor blade restructuring of open-ended source material. The music became radical, and the studio became an instrument, just as it had for most of the experimental music and cutting-edge pop of the day. Grella funnels these topics towards the book's final third, which is a dissection of Bitches Brew's two LPs and the impact the music had in the years after its release.

He even wedges in just the right amount of personal narrative. I especially liked the book's opening, which describes the author's efforts to understand the music as a teenager: "…we listened, because the dark beauty of the music and the unlimited possibilities it promised were irresistible."

Low by Hugo Wilcken (33 1/3, continuum)

After the shock of his death subsided, Low was the only Bowie album I listened to. It felt like a good place to go—a mysterious, elusive album with no big hits on it. I didn't feel nostalgic about it. Emotional resonance was minimal. The whole album slips past you, surreal, the production and atmosphere taking you out of place and time. It's clearly brilliant, and invites repeat listens while still keeping you at a cool distance. It was recorded in France and Germany in 1976, but Bowie, still shaking off his role in The Man Who Fell to Earth, may as well have beamed it from a planet light years away.

This book does a good job getting into Bowie's headspace at the time, drawing from secondary sources to trace his post-Station to Station career in tandem with the origin and development of the music that became Low. It was indeed a low time for Bowie—addled by cocaine psychosis and occult obsessed, his marriage was dissolving and his ability to trust even his closest collaborators often faltered. Yet the work never stopped. With the help of Tony Visconti and Brian Eno, and keeping vampiric hours, he channelled bursts of inspiration to form Low's split personality—the alien pop songs on side one and the nearly all instrumental side two.

As Eno puts it: "He was pretty much living at the edge of his nervous system, very tense. But as often happens, that translated into a sense of complete abandon in the work. One of the things that happens when you're going through traumatic life situations is your work becomes one of the only places where you can escape and take control. I think it's in that sense that 'tortured' souls sometimes produce great work."

Wheels of Steel: The Explosive Early Years of the NWOBHM

Right when I think, "Somebody should write a book about x," Martin Popoff has gone and written it. My full review is at Hellbound.ca.

Marc Maron—Attempting Normal (2013)

I’ve been a WTF Podcast fan for just over a year now—Maron’s interview with Paul Thomas Anderson was the one that hooked me—so I already know a lot about the guy. His past life is a constant hum in the background of every episode. However, opening this book at a couple random pages presented things I wasn’t expecting to see.

Agh! Marc’s having weird sex! Genital constriction is happening! Agh!

Quickly flip to another page…

10-year-old Marc is getting a rectal exam! Jesus!

Run away! I didn’t sign up for this.

Anyway, the book is great, if unpleasant at many points. He does lay it all out there, which is to be expected if you’re familiar with Maron’s show. The expected straight-up autobiographical narrative never really takes hold; eventually I realized the book is a series of wryly comic essays. The chapter describing his deployment of hummingbird feeders at his house cracked me up in particular.

He can construct a fine phrase. "This is what your heroes do for you—lift you victoriously above the dirty work of life and conjure a different way of being," he says about the Velvet Underground. That's a good way to put it.

You’ll recognize bits that he’s woven into his TV series, and whatever you think of the guy already, I can’t see this book changing your mind. You’ll just know more—a  lot more—about him.

Tago Mago: Permission to Dream, by Alan Warner (33 1/3 Books)

One of the best things about Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series is how much leeway the writers have. They’re free to use autobiography or fiction, or concentrate exclusively on the minutiae of rock lit—music analysis, interviews, an artist’s history, release dates, critical reception, press clippings—to tell the story of the album in question. Alan Warner definitely mixes his modes in his volume on Can’s Tago Mago (1971). We learn about the author’s developing musical interests and record-buying habits as a teenager isolated in small-town Scotland during the late ’70s. Stepping away from his personal history, he also gets down to the nitty gritty of the double album itself; for example, detailing the tape edits on “Halleluwah” (side two of Tago Mago) and interviewing several Can members about their time recording the album. The interviews are also tinged with autobiography, because as Warner explains, he has befriended and even collaborated with the band in the years since he dedicated his debut novel Morvern Callar to Can bassist Holger Czukay.

The autobiographical sections are fascinating and hilarious. I’m predisposed to being interested, though, as I’ve been an Alan Warner fan ever since my wife-to-be gave me The Sopranos to read right before we started going out. His descriptions of his interior life as an “aloof, pretentious, eccentric” boy fumbling his way towards musical sophistication are priceless. Curious to push through the heavy metal vernacular of his peers (“Each one of my friends was emotionally sympathetic and spiritually aligned to the activities of Richie Blackmore’s Rainbow,” he says) he buys dodgy post-breakup Sex Pistols albums and a Weather Report LP with a compelling and mysterious cover, and finds much of interest, especially in the latter. The search for anything by Can, inspired by John Lydon referencing Can and their drummer’s “double beats” in one of the weekly music papers, leads him to the big city, Glasgow, and the Virgin Megastore where he eventually acquires the holy grail—Tago Mago.

Any serious music fan can relate to the impressions that Warner describes on his journey to Can—the unforgettable impact of an album’s arrival, and the profound meaning that an inanimate object can instantly possess: “I remember the euphoria of being on the train home, splitting the cellophane wrapping all the way around, to peel it completely free and open up the concealed centrefold sleeve…” Passages like that make me I think, Okay, Warner, can we have 200 more pages of that, please? Tell us about all your records, man!

However, it’s a 33 1/3 book, and the format won't allow for 200 more pages, so Warner uses the second half of the book to discuss the history and philosophy of analogue tape editing, the evolution of the band, and the genesis of, and curiosities to be found within, the tracks on Tago Mago. He includes snippets of conversations with Michael Karoli, Irmin Schmidt, and Jaki Liebezeit, purveyor of the double beats. For some, having only half a book devoted in-depth to Tago Mago might not be enough. There is plenty more Can documentation they can seek out. I was left happy, and curious to hear more of the Can discography, as well as hear many of the members’ solo releases, which Warner often references. I was inspired to get out the album and listen along as he detailed each track. And by the end of the book I was an even bigger fan of both the author and his subject.

Guided by Voices: A Brief History, by James Greer (Black Cat)

I’d always imagined that unravelling the story of Guided by Voices would be a difficult task. Back when I was a SPIN-reading youth, before I’d heard their music, GBV’s initial appeal lay in their obscurity and the romance of their unlikely rise from the basements of Dayton. How would you get access to that? It’d be a task akin to archaeology, digging through the mountains of 4-track tapes and Bud Light empties. However, because author Jim Greer actually once played bass in GBV, he’s the man for the job.

I got into Guided By Voices with Bee Thousand and bought each new release on sight (except for Mag Earwig!, which I caught up with during their TVT Records period). I enjoyed the music without giving much thought to what was going on behind the scenes. That's where Greer heads right from the opening chapter, set backstage at the final GBV gig. With the dozens of lineup changes and the band’s indie-to-major-back-to-indie trajectory, there’s a heap of stories and intrigue—divorces, feuds, fistfights and drugs aplenty. Greer’s pursuit of the methods behind Robert Pollard’s prolific genius also provides plenty of fodder for the book.

Fittingly, this is not a straight-up chronological bio. Greer takes a scattered approach, and includes contributions (not just quotes) from Pollard’s son Bryan, Dennis Cooper, rock critic Richard Meltzer, and fuckin’ Bun E. Carlos. There is a thread of standard album-by-album rock band narrative—I almost wish there was more discussion of the music and the songs. Greer does include a chapter devoted to Pollard’s explanations of selected songs, some of which are more illuminating than others. It’s kinda refreshing to find out that some of them are just random nonsense (many songs can be boiled down to “doesn’t really mean anything.”). The stories behind certain song titles are interesting, though.

To sweeten the deal, Greer includes a discography, which even in its “selected” form takes up the last third of the book.

(Greer describes the last three GBV albums for Matador Records as “quite likely the best records of the band’s career.” I couldn’t ignore this claim, and went back to listen to them.)

Universal Truths and Cycles (2002)—This is a good record, but it’s probably the weakest of the last three Matador albums. It’s short of hits and the band sounds tired on MOR numbers like “Pretty Bombs.” “Skin Parade” has some drive, as does “Christian Animation Torch Carriers.” “Storm Vibrations” is powerful but too long. To me, “Everywhere with Helicopter” is the classic kind of GBV bopper you expect to hear. “Eureka Signs” too, with its grit and muscle and slashing chords, really invites comparisons to The Who. Where previous albums delivered the experimental, less successful tracks in minute-long bursts, here they’re lengthy and in your face with good production, like the droney “Car Language” and “From a Voice Plantation.” The last third of the album loses me. Maybe after having blown the doors off with their last TVT release Isolation Drills (a personal favourite), they had nothing left to give, and this puzzling, low-key release was their way of easing back into the indie world.

Earthquake Glue (2003)—GBV sound like they’ve found their feet again. Pollard’s collage cover art puts us at ease right away. His songs induce the characteristic GBV ecstasy: “I’ll Replace You With Machines” and “She Goes Off at Night” off the top are both brilliant. “Useless Inventions” tops them all; its mad rush recalling Husker Du. The band goes wistful on "The Best of Jill Hives," and gets proggy on "Dead Cloud" and "Mix Up the Satellite." This album touches on a number of different styles and triumphs every time.


Half Smiles of the Decomposed (2004)—In many ways this is the most conventional Guided by Voices record. Pollard avoids the song fragments and noise, and focuses on nothing but substantive, flat-out excellent songs. “Window of My World” in particular is a song for the ages. The album it most reminds me of is Mag Earwig! Pollard, as I learned from the book, was divorced and in a happy new relationship (“Tour Guide at the Winston Churchill Memorial” is about his new lady Sarah), which accounts for the general vibe of contentment. Half Smiles... saw the band making an unexpectedly graceful but satisfying exit.

Precious Metal (Da Capo Press)

Precious Metal—Decibel Presents the Stories Behind 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces, Edited by Albert Mudrian
Decibel magazine has always blended snark with reverence. Columnists J. Bennett and John Darnielle poke fun at the self-seriousness of it all (they kid because they love), while the reviews often spend more time riffing on a band's name than analysing the actual music. The Decibel Hall of Fame feature provides some balance by honouring a legendary metal album (as selected by the editors) every month, dissecting its inner workings with the help of every band member who played on it. It's a brilliant hook that keeps you coming back to check out each new issue.

Precious Metal collects 25 Decibel Hall of Fame articles, arranged chronologically from Black Sabbath’s Heaven and Hell (1980) to Converge’s Jane Doe (2001). Each chapter expands a little bit on the text from the original magazine articles. I A-B'ed the Napalm Death pieces and identified 2/3 of a page of new material. The book also contains a valuable "bonus feature"—a chapter on Darkthrone’s Transilvanian Hunger, with Fenriz and Nocturno Culto holding court, snarkily. Unfortunately, the book omits the pictures of obscure, often hilarious album-related memorabilia that graced the original magazine layouts. These wouldn’t have reproduced well on the book's paper stock, and colour plates would probaby have been too expensive. All the more reason to buy the magazine every month.

The 25 albums cross all genres from sludge (Eyehategod) to grindcore (Napalm Death) to death (Morbid Angel) to black (Emperor) to post-everything hardcore (Botch). Sometimes Decibel's choices are ingenious—the story behind Sleep’s epic death knell Jerusalem, for example, makes for a fascinating read. Even if you are not a fan of a particular album, the stories surrounding them are entertaining enough to keep you reading. It’s a wonder a lot of these albums ever got completed, considering they were often helmed by impoverished, infighting, drug-addled fuckups. Sometimes the articles afford fascinating insight into band politics, such as when ex-members of bands are allowed to say their piece (Cannibal Corpse's Bob Rusay or Brant Bjork of Kyuss, for example).

The only chapter that lacks any intrigue is the one on Meshuggah’s Destroy Erase Improve. Influential the album might be, but the Swedes have little to say for themselves, repeatedly shooting down Kevin Stewart-Panko’s questions and offering scant insight themselves. I would have jettisoned it in favour of another tech-death landmark, Athiest’s Unquestionable Presence (published in the October 2005 issue), which has an infinitely more compelling story behind it.

Heavy metal is turning 40 right about now, and what I'd classify as "extreme" metal is turning 25. There's definitely a lot of history to explore. Now that that history is starting to recycle itself, Precious Metal provides a chance to delve into the music before it went retro, when bands were stumbling into something truly special, even if they were ignored or derided at the time. Time offers perspective, and this book takes full advantage of that.

Worlds Away: Voivod and the Art of Michel Langevin (Spider Publishing)

The fabled Michel “Away” Langevin art book has arrived. The iconic illustrator and Voivod drummer/conceptualist has long promised a collection of his visual work, but the delays in completing the project are completely understandable—Voivod’s career has been stranger than fiction these last five years. I'm happy to report that Spider Publishing and Martin Popoff have done an excellent job with this satisfying slab of a book.

“When I think of metal album covers I think of Voivod and Michel’s art,” says Dave Grohl. Dave and I have something in common. I've always considered heavy metal as music from another plane—a bleak, brutal alternate reality I like to visit, then clamber back to my comfortable, boring life. Langevin’s art (along with Giger, Dan Seagrave and perhaps a couple others) was a wormhole to lead you down into that dangerous, deafening dimension. I can honestly say I bought War and Pain on the strength of its cover art, though I'll admit that Voivod's status as one of Canada’s first thrash metal bands and their legendary bad review in Kerrang! also piqued my interest prior to the album showing up at A&B Sound. With its red-and-black palette, rough approximation of perspective, and visible canvas texture, War and Pain's album art exuded an otherness that was borne out by the crusty punk-metal lunacy of the music itself. Subsequent albums perfected the sound-vision symbiosis. The pulverizing momentum of RRRÖÖÖAAARRR was captured by the Voivod-as-Tarkus-tank cover image. The demented mutant Voivod in space depicted on Killing Technology represented the science-gone-mad theme of the album. Voivod were thrash metal’s premier conceptualists, a perception immensely bolstered by Langevin’s art.

The book traces Away’s style from his earliest Metal Hurlant-inspired alien doodles to his first real painting (a bleak landscape that could have worked as an early Ulver cover), through all his Voivod designs, to his more recent commissions (Probot, for example). Martin Popoff, a painter himself, devotes chapters to each Voivod album. As it turns out, Langevin's style and techniques expanded as he tackled each album cover—the oil and acrylic paintings of first three albums, the airbrushed Dimension Hatröss and the Amiga-powered computer art of Nothingface. The book features of hundreds of sketches, doodles and paintings, all lovingly reproduced. The album covers look particularly vibrant.

The book’s aesthetics would have benefitted from a more sympathetic typeface. Langevin isn't really a Times New Roman kinda guy. Mimicking the look of Langevin’s beloved OMNI magazine might have been a nice touch. The lack of captions (other than labelling certain illustrations by year) is sometimes irritating, especially when the text refers to a work that sends you rifling back through the pages in search of it. As well, Popoff lets his voice slip at points where Q & A sessions suddenly break out in the midst of a third-person narrative. As is common with rock books, a thorough copyedit would have caught a couple clangers.

However, it’s Popoff’s archive of interview tapes that makes Worlds Away much more than a catalogue of one man's drawings. This is no less than the definitive story of Voivod, told through Langevin’s art and his bandmates’ words. Snake, Piggy, Blacky, Eric Forrest and Jason Newsted are all accounted for, giving forth on Langevin’s talents as well as Voivod’s fluctuating fortunes over the past 25 years. If the narrative stumbles and digresses a little, at least I can’t dispute that I learned a lot about one of my favourite bands. It’s an inspiring story, and Popoff doesn’t blow his chance at telling it through the work and words of Langevin, an inspiring artist in his own right.

Although I can devour 33 1/3 books like so many Kit Kats, I’ll admit they’re not all created equal. I’ve preferred the nuts ‘n’ bolts “behind the scenes” volumes to the ones that attempt to capture an album’s appeal in fictional or personal essay form. The last two 33 1/3 books I’ve read have won me over to the latter approach, though.

First, there was Mountain Goats mainman and Decibel magazine columnist John Darnielle’s novella concerning Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality. Through his narrator, a troubled youth confined to a psych ward (and having had all his tapes confiscated, to boot), Darnielle manages to capture the appeal of Sabbath and their heaviest album, as well as depicting exactly how, for some of us, music functions as a stabilizing, essential constant in our lives. It’s a moving little book.

The last 33 1/3 I read was one I’ve picked up many times in stores, wondering exactly what its deal was. Author Carl Wilson’s choice of subject jumped out at me as surprising, if banal—Céline Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love. Was he kidding? This wasn't exactly up there with The Velvet Underground and Nico or Unknown Pleasures in terms of albums with rock crit credibility. The book’s subtitle helped to clarify the author’s intentions a little bit: “A journey to the end of taste.” Well, that was nearly enough to sell me on it.

Instead I checked it out of the library. It was better than I could have imagined. Wilson picks up and connects many threads in his very personal exploration of Céline Dion’s appeal—notions of kitsch, schmaltz, “lowbrow” art, Quebecois culture, the talent show as genre, and so on—but the question this book really seeks to answer is “Why do we like what we like?” And that’s a big question, comprising personal decisions and impulses both conscious and unconscious.

It’s a small thrill when a writer connects their subject matter to something I enjoy. Wilson, bless him, does it here:
“As her songs rocket to their predestined apexes, she does not resist, she goes along for the ride, leaning on the accelerator and seldom the brake, emphasizing intensity not difference. It reminds me of nothing so much as current ‘underground’ metal, which has thrown out the spare musical parts of past hard rock and pared down to loud guitars, drums and screaming. Today’s metal has no power ballads, no more Nazareth doing ‘Love Hurts,’ no more Kiss doing ‘Beth,’ no more Guns N’ Roses ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine.’ So Céline is singing them instead. It’s been said that ‘pro wrestling is soap opera on steroids,’ so maybe Céline Dion is metal on estrogen.”

To paraphrase the Dayglo Abortions, reading about Black Sabbath is lots of fun. Rat Salad: Black Sabbath—The Classic Years, 1969–1975 is a mad thing, that's for sure. I've devoured it like a handful of fig newtons. Wait, that doesn't sound very metal. Oh well, author Paul Wilkinson doesn't come across as all that diabolical himself. The book weaves together a few different threads. First, it's a dissection of Sabbath's catalogue, album by album, song by song...but only the first six albums. Wilkinson doesn't hold truck with anything post-Sabotage. I'd push for the remaining two Ozzy-era albums, but hey, it's Paul's book. Second, it's a Sabbath biography, pulling in material from a variety of secondary sources in time-honoured rock bio tradition. Wilkinson's innovation in this respect is setting Sabbath's career amidst the world events of the time—Vietnam, the oil crisis, Watergate, and so on. Finally, it's an autobiography. As the Sabs graduate from Hamburg's Star Club to the a-list touring circuit, our author savours his first kiss, cracks his head open and convalesces in hospital, experiences a death in the family (admittedly a very moving passage in the book), cops his first feel, and finally gets to see his heroes in concert (on the Never Say Die tour, where the PA packs it in after an hour).

The jacket blurb likens the book to Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head meets Spinal Tap, which is kind of a cheap shot. I'd drop the Spinal Tap reference, and leave intact the comparison to MacDonald. Wilkinson's musical analysis is extremely credible and thorough, and he doesn't skimp on the criticism. Underwritten songs, failed experiments, and bad lyrics are lamented almost as often as the classic songs come in for praise. While "Supertzar" "sits on Sabotage like a Sunday painter's worst watercolour in a room full of Vermeers," "Killing Yourself to Live" contains "a whole album's worth of music...that hangs together in a, quite literally, breathtaking manner."

Sometimes Wilkinson's footnote-heavy, chatty approach makes his book seem like it contains an entire lifetime's worth of writing, but really, I want to hand it to the guy for penning one of the most enjoyable and necessary rock books I've read in quite a while.

Today I finished Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. I bought it for my dad for Christmas, then my folks handed it off to me once they'd both read it. They promised me some laughs, and laugh I did. Unfortunately I read it on the bus and found it hard to maintain my commuter face during the funny bits. I ended up wheezing like a furtive pervert at certain episodes in the book, so apologies to my seatmates, whoever you were.

Creating laughter using just words on a page is a feat of utter magic to me, so I salute you, Mr. Bryson.

The book is billed as a memoir, but it avoids the simple pattern of "This one time I...and then this other time I..." Bryson makes it more of a memoir of American life in the '50s, with each chapter about some aspect of that era and its relation to his childhood. "The Age of Excitement" details the burgeoning technology of the '50s—convenience foods, television, cars with Strato-Flight Hydra-Matic transmissions, and The Bomb. "The Pursuit of Pleasure" rounds up the newfangled toys, candy, and comic book superheroes (including Bryson's beloved Asbestos Lady, with her "cannonball breasts and powerful loins"). He's put a fair bit of research into the book, discussing the crackdowns on comics and commies that blighted the decade, and examining the arms race, the space race, and race relations at various points.

Bryson ends the book with a lament for lost things, especially the family businesses in his hometown of Des Moines that have been bulldozed for chain stores and parking lots. "Imagine having all of public life—offices, stores, restaurants, entertainments—conveniently clustered in the heart of the city and experiencing fresh air and daylight each time you moved from one to aonther... Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had."

That last line reminds me of this fantastic thing, as can be seen at the Vancouver Art Gallery and in the new issue of subTerrain. I took it in last week and I'll probably go again very soon.

Fancylady picked up this book while in Edmonton for her TV thing on the Labour Day weekend. It's crazy compulsive reading; the kind of book that grabs you right away. For me "right away" meant page 4, where 13-year-old Liza Normal, our protagonist, says to her mother, "I ate a plate of dicks again, Mom," after failing an audition for a TV commercial. I want to call the book a picaresque, but I'm not sure it exactly fits that definition. The novel plots Liza's floundering course as she tries to become a star despite having no idea how to apply what little talent she has. Cintra Wilson is scary cool and scary smart, and clearly knows the seamy underbelly of showbiz and the souless people who dwell there. I got the sense that many names had been changed to protect the guilty.

When I finished it on the bus today, the last name in the acknowledgements brought me up short: "the late, great Kevin Gilbert." The Kevin Gilbert, the songwriting genius behind The Shaming of the True (which I had listed as one of the great post-1990 progressive rock albums)? I thought about it, and the connection made sense. Both Wilson and Gilbert's work paints broad strokes of cynicism and disgust mixed with humour and a good deal of joy...joy tempered with "what can I do; it's all I know" resignation about the milieu of money, fame, and massive, misguided talent that they've written about.

This is quite beautiful: Cintra Wilson remembers Kevin Gilbert.

I bought a copy of Rick Moody's last book,The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions, when I was in Toronto last August. It didn't get very enthusiastic reviews, but it was on the bargain table. What the hell; it's Rick Moody, it's cheap. Sold.

Early in the book, Having graduated from college with no job prospects, Moody and a friend drive to San Francisco in an unreliable VW Rabbit. To pass the time, Moody listens to King Crimson on headphones:

"The music of King Crimson, I recognize, is the kind of noodling, pretentious music that no one should admit listening to, even on headphones in the desert..."

I have to say I've found this book to be a disappointing effort.

I bought a couple of books from Continuum's 33 1/3 series on my last trip to Victoria. Number 3 in the series is about Neil Young's Harvest, and number 6 is everything you wanted to know about Piper at the Gates of Dawn. I thought they were both pretty useful. Sam Inglis's examination of Harvest not only lays out Young's early career succinctly (I've never had a good grasp of its chronology and the circumstances surrounding his involvement with CSNY), it includes an interesting discussion of the clash between popular success (represented by Harvest) and critical success (Tonight's the Night, for example). Plus it has lots of information about the recording sessions themselves—about non-guitarist Jack Nitzsche playing slide on "Are You Ready For the Country?" and forcing drummer Kenny Buttrey to play the title track with one hand, for example.

John Cavanagh's Pink Floyd book is more of a time capsule, concentrating on the extraordinary era that birthed the band. The historical material (a fair bit of it taken from a 1966/67 CBC Radio piece that I had a tape of for a while) is woven into a track-by-track dissection of Piper...—as with the Neil Young book, all the fine points of recording and songwriting are given plenty of attention. The discussion of The Floyd as musicians is quite funny and reassuring. Producer Norman Smith: "Nick Mason would be the first to admit that he was no kind of technical drummer. I remember recording a number—I can't now recall which one—and there had to be a drum roll, and he didn't have a clue what to do. So, I had to do that." Peter Jenner: "Nick, when all is said and done, was not a very good drummer, but he was a very good Pink Floyd drummer." Of course, a lot of words concern the short-lived genius of their guitarist and main songwriter, but the book avoids pandering to the cult of Barrett. If you want to know how to play "Astronomy Domine" and what the strange noises at the end of "Bike" are, put on your scarlet tunic and curl up with this.

I finished reading Lemmy’s autobiography White Line Fever (Simon & Schuster) a couple weeks ago. I enjoyed it very much. It’s not great literature by any definition (show don’t tell, Lemmy!), but it delivers the kind of behind-the-scenes dirt that you want from such a book. It’s like listening to the man hold court at the pub for several nights; a kind of booze-soaked lecture series on everything Motorhead-related.

As a fan of British show business, I especially appreciated the book. For a while there, Motorhead must have been a constant presence in the UK media. Lemmy, it seemed, never turned down a single offer to appear somewhere, no matter how ludicrous—kids TV, chat shows, The Young Ones, movies, the lot. (I don’t think he was ever on Coronation Street, although I vaguely remember Les Battersby pissing off all of Weatherfield with “Ace of Spades” once.) He glossed over the time he was on French and Saunders, which is too bad. That was a good one.

Once again I’m amazed at the standard of copyediting and fact-checking at major publishing houses. “Dee Schneider” of Twisted Sister, anyone?

The more I read of Sound of the Beast, the more I’m impressed by it. It’s almost desperate in its thoroughness, as if Ian Christe is scrambling to document an era that’s finished and destined to be forgotten. Perhaps the metal years are over and done with, and if this is the case, then Christe’s labours assume an air of nobility that other rock books can’t approach. It’s much more entertaining than the sociological studies of metal (by Donna Gaines, etc.) I’ve read, but it’s just as carefully documented.

Writing this book almost seems like an altruistic act, something for future generations to puzzle over and maybe learn from. That's a pretty naive thought on my part, though. Never mind the future—I wonder who the audience for this book is in the present day. I read books like this for the same reasons I enjoy hanging out and talking music with friends—to hear what someone else is into, and how they got into it and why, get recommendations, eyewitness accounts of gigs, etc. I often think these books preach to the converted or about-to-be-converted. I have difficulty imagining someone just casually picking it off the shelf and getting into it like I have.

Ultimately I don't care. He’s written the book for posterity, and that’s an admirable thing. I got it from the VPL, but I’ll probably buy a copy for my own library.

My only frustration is with the book’s American POV. The chapter on MTV don’t mean shit to me. Sure, I saw all those videos on MuchMusic, but that our video channel wasn’t nearly as omnipotent and censorious. There wasn’t as much of an “us vs. them” thing happening between the metal underground and mainstream music TV in Canada. I think the book could be improved with an addendum about the Power Hour and the cultural ripple effect of Celtic Frost’s “Circle of the Tyrants” video.

“Heyyyy!”

I’ve just started reading Sound of the Beast, Ian Christe’s new book on the history of heavy metal. The concept for such a book seems kind of facile, and in a lesser writer’s hands it might resort to a tedious band-to-band-to-band kind of structure. I don’t think this book will fall into that trap, however. The opening couple of chapters are mainly about Black Sabbath and their genre-defining Ozzy years. From there it’s zoomed through the seventies and into the NWOBHM without a letup in the narrative. At this pace I’d expect the book to be over in 30 more pages, but there’s about 350 left to go. I expect Christe will settle in and mine the eighties for all they’re worth.

It’s a pretty well-researched book. I can’t find much to question, except the contention that Sid Vicious died in jail. Can someone confirm that, please? Christe knows what he’s talking about, and he’s got quotes from people who’ll back him up. Tom Warrior’s on board, as is King Diamond, Jess Cox from Tygers of Pan Tang/Neat Records, and Brian Slagel of Metal Blade records.

In the chapter about the birth of Sabbath, Christe namechecks a raft of similarly heavy bands who were signed in '70-'71 and released a quickly deleted album or two. The trend for major labels back then was to create a subsidiary to release all their “heavy” albums on, in order to present a facade of underground counterculture and let the kids know that this wasn’t their dad’s stodgy old record company. Pye Records, for example, had Dawn (responsible for releasing First Utterance by Comus, one of the most flat-out insane albums I own), and EMI had their Harvest division (home of The Floyd and a ton of progressive folkies), and Philips had Vertigo, which released fine bands such as Cressida, Black Sabbath, and a band that Christe mentions alongside the Sabs, the “haunting” May Blitz.

(The Vertigo name survived well into the eighties. We all remember the $2.99 double LP Vertigo Sampler from 1985, a seminal release that introduced the Cult, Love and Rockets, Cocteau Twins, and many others to thousands of impressionable Canadians. Everyone I knew bought one of those. More recently, Mikael from Opeth can be spotted wearing a Vertigo shirt on the cover of the latest BW&BK.)

May Blitz were new to me, so I looked them up. Turns out they were a Hendrixian trio who released two albums in ’70 and ’71. I have no doubt that this is cool stuff, but what really intrigues me about them is that two of their members, James Black and Reid Hudson were Canadians—transplanted Victorians, in fact. Both of them apparently still live on the West Coast. I guess if I was Nardwuar, I’d begin stalking them now. But being me, I’d be happy just to hear one of the records.

The BC pulp and paper industry breathes a collective sigh of relief, one-industry towns rebound from years of recession, beleaguered workers vie for nightshift hours at the mill and start paying off their pickup trucks in droves. Our dour province brightens with the bracing economic domino effect.

Wha’ happen? Well, Martin Popoff has a new book out; another Farmer’s Almanac/Atlas Shrugged/Bible-sized treatise on heavy metal. Forests shudder in fear. The Top 500 Heavy Metal Songs of All Time is a workmanlike title for a workmanlike book, but Popoff’s knack for churning out the wordage has already blistered my fingertips from page flipping.

As the title says, this is a big MFing list of songs, each with a Popoff analysis and a quote by the artist in question from Martin’s archives. What really brings the book alive, though, is that this isn’t the author’s personal list. He has compiled (with some help from his dad) the top 500 from lists submitted by punters like you and me. I recall sending him my list—I can’t remember my final tally at all, but I’m positive it was a pretty hapless attempt to encapsulate everything metallically Mulish.

Luckily for the reader, Martin doesn’t necessarily approve of the results, and he expresses his dismay hilariously throughout (caveat: I’m only 1/3 of my way through the book, so maybe he calms down after a while…after all, it’s not really worth getting too worked up over #378). “Stairway to Heaven” (#35) “would have made a good b-side,” while (ugh) “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin'” (#29) is Judas Priest’s “Gene Simmons tribute, sweaty leathers, percussive retardation post-Peter Criss…” Heh-heh and amen.

Popoff punctuates the list at various points with top tens from musicians he’s talked to, which throw up the occasional surprise. Marty Friedman (ex-Megadeth) favours Cheap Trick, Mahogany Rush and The Donnas, while Paul Di’Anno gives credit to noted rivethead Gary Numan (“Cars”—didn’t Fear Factory cover this?) and Acmac’s former idoles Trust (“Antisocial”).

The quotes connected to the songs occasionally cough up some new behind-the-scenes info. I’d like to think Popoff has selected them with a keen sense of insight into exactly who his audience is. He knows we’ll get it when John Paul Jones says, “Robert, sometimes, just to get a song going, would use lyrics that he knew, and then he would change them; sometimes not.” He knows that we’ll roll our eyes at all the Metallica quotes, which seem to have been procured during the Load/Reload lean years, and which offer nothing but lame excuses as to why they’ll never pen anything as good as “Trapped Under Ice” ever again.

It’s adequately proofread—I’ve come across a few clunkers, and something goes very awry in the introduction. It’s one of Martin’s better-presented books once you get past the cover and dive into the guts of the thing.

Basically I’m having a riot reading it, and I have an overwhelming urge to get my records out and compile a 500-song CD-R of the tunes dissected within. If only I had some UFO albums, I’d be set.

If you'd like to know what number one is, you'd better buy the book.

Letting some web site autogenerate my blog entry was a resounding flop. Let’s see if I can do any better.

“Eighties music.” I bristle whenever I hear some ponytailed, puff-jacketed whelp use the phrase. “It’s got cheesy synthesizers, like eighties music.” The cadence of the phrase, with the accent on the first syllable—“EIGHTies music.” God, I want to start swinging a machete.

I’m a little disturbed by how intensely it grates me. I’m also perplexed. Because I know what music they’re referring to, and I don’t like it either. I didn’t like it when it was brand new, when I was the target audience. The synthesizers were cheesy, the production values grotesque, the hair styles…structurally unsound. Everything on the radio made me cranky. I latched onto anything I could find, from metal to the abortive progressive revival of '82–'83, to avoid it.

So why am I now stung when I hear kids implying that Glass Tiger, Kajagoogoo, et al are the quaintest thing ever? Why do I feel compelled to defend Platinum Blonde from the gentle mocking of Daryns and Vanessas? I guess it’s because I have a small slice of ownership in that decade by dint of alive and aware at the time. I don’t like it when people tar whole decades with the same brush. They always get it wrong.

I just finished a superb book about eighties music, Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life. The book profiles 13 influential bands from the eighties, from Black Flag to Beat Happening—the bands who basically did the grunt work that enabled Nirvana to break big in 1991.

The book doesn’t advertise this fact, but almost every band profile is accompanied by the story of a record label, a subplot that I found as appealing as the main narrative. Bands and labels helped strengthen each other’s identities, strained each other’s loyalties, bickered and became estranged from each other with the same regularity as the individuals within the bands themselves. The Black Flag story is also the story of SST Records, The Replacements had Twin Tone, Minor Threat and Fugazi were synonymous with Dischord, Big Black and the Butthole Surfers kept Touch & Go afloat. Nearly every chapter ends with the band’s defection to the majors and their “inevitable” artistic decline.

I laughed out loud through the entire thing. Azerrad gets some priceless stuff from his subjects. There’s debauchery: several eyewitnesses gleefully recall Gibby Haynes’ drunken, violent (and naked) rampage at a Dutch Festival. There’s introversion: the Dinosaur Jr chapter is a hilarious litany of passive aggression, pettiness and insecurity. Even Henry “Garfield” Rollins and Ian MacKaye raise an eyebrow with their confessions of an arena rockin’ youth—“We would read about the Nuge and the thing that really rubbed off on us was the fact that he didn’t drink or smoke or do drugs… We thought that was so impressive.”

I admit I wasn’t a fan of most of these bands when they were around. I now wish I had been one of the eight other people in the club during one of their early tours. Most of these bands played Vancouver regularly. I found out about them too late, when they had already finished, or were within an album or two of breaking up. Maybe I was too busy hating stuff in the eighties to find out anything good (and truly contemporary) for myself. Maybe I wasn’t cool enough.

It’s easy to decide how good something was after it’s run its course. It’s often harder to objectively assess something in the present, to take a stand and decide what you like, really like, now. I think that’s what bugs me about the kids and their “eighties music.” It takes very little effort to deride the past, just as it’s very easy for them to glibly accept what TV and radio spoonfeeds them in 2003. You own your present. I owned the eighties when I was teenaged, somewhat sentient, and looking for cultural sustenance, but I was too chickenshit to try to improve the situation. I just hated it. Those kids own today. They’re the audience, they’re as responsible for all the mainstream crap we have to endure as anyone else. If people used their imagination and looked at what they have today with the perspective they’ll have five years from now, I’d hope to see riots in the street. But that’s just misguided old me, expecting people to care.

Career Day
On the crawl up Burnaby Mountain this morning, I listened to this kid riff on and on and on about how to get recruited by the right accounting firm. He sure had his shit together—did his research, attended “CA Night,” got his face known by people. I wonder what it’s like to be 21 and have it all figured out? When you’re a budding Patrick Bateman like this kid was, it must feel wonderful.

I was a standee through all this, so I couldn’t pull out my book and try to ignore the young number cruncher. I’m reading another hockey book, a novel from the belter’s shelf. Salvage King, Ya! by Mark Anthony Jarman (Anvil Press—plug, plug) follows an aging hockey player as he bounces between the minors and the majors, from hicksville to the city, between his Intended and a certain Waitress X. It’s so beautifully written that I’ve debated whether I should continue reading it. It’s like listening to a virtuoso guitarist solo for three hours. Sooner or later I want to scream, “Hey, Yngwie, trying playing the damn song!” Jarman never lets up. It’s written in first person, and our narrator has to be the most urbane, erudite, literate hockey chump of all time. Compared to this guy, Ken Dryden has the mental capacity of a fruit fly. The narrator drops references to Keats, TS Eliot, stage directions from The Winter’s Tale; he listens to X, Tom Waits, makes tapes from ancient blues 78s. Everyone knows that hockey players only like Our Lady Peace and The Hip. So my sense of credibility is strained, and not just by lines like “Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unrung,” and “And new lambs from the hills, ravens, her navel like a dark bullet hole, a tongue remembered, a cough held and waiting like fleece in amber cathedrals of winter light.” Crikey. As my dad would say, “Just shoot the puck!”

The writing is damn impressive, though. The book is subtitled “A Herky-Jerky Picaresque,” so perhaps I’m not interpreting the narrator’s voice in the spirit the writer intended.

The book also namechecks Harold Snepsts, which made me smile. It was spelled “Snepts.” Jenni, tell Kaufman that Willingdon Black and I will proofread for beer.