The Very Best of KPLU's "All Blues"

I promised y'all this list MONTHS ago. Here's 170 really great blues, soul and R&B songs I would NEVER have heard without KPLU-FM's "All Blues" show, airing every Saturday and Sunday from 6 p.m. to midnight Pacific Time, streaming worldwide at kplu.org.
All these songs are recommended and well worth your trouble to track down -- or just visit kplu.org and listen for awhile. You might discover even more stuff you'll like. (I may have missed a couple of greats, but this is the best I can do right now.)
By the way, KPLU's trying to raise $7 million by June 30 so they can stay a locally-programmed blues, jazz and news station. So if you've got a couple million dollars available to donate, it would go to a good cause. (Maybe they'd start running "All Blues" every night and make my work week a little easier....)
Here's the list, in no particular order:
Sonny Landreth -- Howlin' Moon, Walkin' Blues, Congo Square, The High Side, Zydeco Shuffle, Illinois Blues.
Eric Bibb -- Drinking Gourd.
Sue Foley -- Howlin' for My Darlin'.
Danielle Nicole -- Breaking Up Somebody's Home, You Only Need Me When You're Down.
Trampled Underfoot -- Bad Bad Feeling.
Lloyd Jones -- Trouble Monkey.
Aron Jones and The Way -- My Love Remains.
Kim Wilson -- Gotta Get Out.
James Cotton -- Cut You Loose.
Gene Taylor -- Mississippi Heavy Water Blues.
Screamin' Jay Hawkins -- I Put a Spell on You.
James Harmon -- If the Shoe Fits Wear It.
Professor Longhair -- Big Chief.
Tracy Nelson -- Down So Low.
Junior Wells -- Messin' With the Kid.
Otis Redding -- Shake (live), Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out, Hard to Handle.
Staples Singers -- You've Got to Earn It.
Ry Cooder -- Crow Black Chicken, The 13-Question Method, Fool for a Cigarette/Feeling Good.
Tangle Eye -- Oh Death, Work Song.
John Mooney -- Sacred Ground.
Cassandra Wilson and Wynton Marsalis -- Rosewood.
Paul Reddick -- One Way Trip.
Dave and Phil Alvin -- Mr. Kicks.
Tedeschi Trucks Band -- Anyhow, Made Up Mind, The Storm, Come See About Me.
Derek Trucks Band -- Wade in the Water, Down in the Flood, Crow Jane.
Joe Bonnamassa and Beth Hart -- I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know, Sinner's Prayer (live).
Joe Bonnamassa -- Drive, Jelly Roll Baker, Dust Bowl.
Aretha Franklin -- I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, Dr. Feelgood, The Night Life, Try Matty's, Trouble in Mind, Rock Steady, The House That Jack Built, As Good to Me as I Am to You.
Dr. John -- Why Come it is?
Lowell George -- Two Trains.
Little Feat -- Candyman Blues, Fat Man in the Bathtub, Dixie Chicken.
Howlin' Wolf -- Sittin' on Top of the World, 300 Pounds of Joy.
B.B. King -- You Might Have Made Your Move Too Soon, Why I Sing the Blues, Understand, Days of Old (with Eric Clapton).
Slim Harpo -- Tina-Nina-Nu.
Joan Osborne -- Shake Your Hips.
Janis Joplin -- Kosmic Blues, Turtle Blues.
Heritage Blues Orchestra -- Sealine Woman.
Delbert McClinton -- B-Movie Boxcar Blues, One of the Fortunate Few, Better Off With the Blues.
Imelda May -- Johnny Got a Boom-Boom.
Etta James -- Losers Weepers, The Jealous Kind, Shaky Ground.
Earl King -- Trick Bag.
Elmore James -- Madison Blues, Stranger Blues.
Shamekia Copeland -- Lemon Pie, Devil's Hand, Never Goin' Back (KPLU live studio session available at kplu.org), I Can't Let Go, Isn't That So?
Otis Grand -- Ham.
Ray Charles -- Mess Around, Lonely Avenue.
Ronnie Earl -- Ernie's Gospel Groove.
Boz Scaggs -- Cadillac Walk, Sick and Tired.
Marvin Gaye -- Can I Get a Witness?
Kari Lee -- Voodoo Woman.
Eric Clapton -- Tore Down.
Delta Deep -- Bang the Lid.
Susan Tedeschi -- You Got the Silver.
Ian Segal -- Now I Am the Blues, Swagger, The Revelator.
John Hammond -- Black Maria.
Euphoria -- Back Against the Wall.
Grady Champion -- On the South Side.
Johnny Winter -- Medicine Man.
Johnny "Guitar" Watson -- Gangster of Love.
Jimmy Thackery -- Mercury Blues.
Shaun Costello -- Don't Pass Me By.
Johnny A. -- Wichita Lineman, I Had to Laugh, Hip-Bone, Oh Yeah.
J.J. Cale -- Lies, Call Me the Breeze, Don't Wait.
John Mayall -- Room to Move.
Bob Dylan -- Maggie's Farm.
Ann Peebles -- Read Me My Rights.
Bo Diddley -- Mona, Can't Judge a Book by its Cover.
Irma Thomas -- The River is Waiting, I Think it's Going to Rain Today.
Irma Thomas, Tracy Nelson and Marcia Ball -- Sing It.
Marcia Ball -- That's Enough of That Stuff.
Geneva Magness -- You Were Never Mine, Bad Blood.
Duke Robillard -- Alimony Blues.
Tom Waits -- Emotional Weather Forecast, The Heart of Saturday Night.
Leo Kottke -- Busted Bicycle.
Buddy Guy -- Meet Me in Chicago.
Taj Mahal -- Fishin' Blues, Swat That Rabbit, Good Morning Miss Brown (live).
Keb' Mo' -- Suitcase.
Neville Brothers -- Hey Pocky Way, Bird on a Wire.
Bonnie Raitt -- Gypsy in Me, Two Lights in the Nighttime, Angel from Montgomery, Guilty, Hell to Pay (with Boz Scaggs).
Wild Magnolias -- Coochie Molly, Pocket Change, Party.
John Hiatt -- Riding With the King.
Alabama Shakes -- You Ain't Alone, Gimme All Your Love.
Coco Montoya -- Casting My Spell, Tumbleweed.
Lyle Lovett -- She's No Lady, My Baby Don't Tolerate.
O.V. Wright -- I'd Rather be Blind Crippled and Crazy.
Jimi Hendrix -- Little Wing, Midnight Lightning.
Stevie Ray Vaughn -- Little Wing.
John Cleary -- Viva La Money, Boneyard.
Nina Simone -- Funkier Than a Mosquita's Tweeter, Do I Move You? (live).
Daveena and the Vagabonds -- I Try to be Good.
Joe Tex -- The Love You Save, Show Me, I Want to do Everything for You.
ZZ Top -- Jesus Just Left Chicago.
Los Lobos -- That Train Don't Stop Here Anymore, I Walk Alone.
Allman Brothers -- Come and Go Blues, Southbound, You Don't Love Me, One Way Out, Don't Keep Me Wondering (live).
Walter "Wolfman" Washington -- Mary Ann.
The Five Blazes -- Mary Jo.
Rory Block -- Rock Island Line.
Lou Rawls -- All Around the World, Your Good Thing's About to End.
Little Willie John -- I'm Shakin'.
Lazy Lester -- I'm a Lover Not a Fighter.
Roy Rogers -- Slide of Hand.

Grab bag

Here's some quick reviews of what I've been reading over the last week or so....

Peter Greenberg: DON'T GO THERE! (2009) -- Greenberg is the Travel Editor for NBC's TODAY SHOW. His book was filed in the Humor section of my favorite local used book store, so I thought it might be funny. It wasn't. Basically, Greenberg spends 250 pages warning you about lots of places NOT to visit in your travels, all of which illustrate Karl Malden's First Rule Of Travel: Don't Leave Home. I can see where Greenberg might be funny on TV, but after the first couple chapters warning you away from Chernobyl, Bhopal and Love Canal, it all gets kind of dull.
I was also shocked that none of the places I've lived made any of Greenberg's "Must Avoid" lists. Ankara, Turkey didn't make it into the Top 10 for Worst Air. Worland, Wyoming didn't come anywhere near Most Boring. And Washington didn't break into the Top 10 Suicide States -- though Wyoming did....

Richard Burton: DIARIES (2012) -- A former big-time actor, Rich had all the same problems as the rest of us lower-earners: Hating his job, being bored, not wanting to be around most people, and whether he should buy ANOTHER million-dollar diamond ring for his wife. His diaries are surprisingly readable, very good waking-up reading. I was reminded in places of another actor's diaries published a decade or two back, Charlton Heston's AN ACTOR'S LIFE. But Burton goes into more depth -- when he's in the mood, and not drinking heavily. And it's interesting how much stuff he pours out onto the page when he's happy with his wife Liz. When she's not around, he pretty much clams up. Parts of the book are laugh-out-loud funny, but there's 650 pages of it.

Alice Sebold: LUCKY (1999) -- It takes me awhile to Get things, sometimes: The Cars, Madonna, Prince. Sebold was quite a publishing sensation a decade or so back when she published the Number 1 bestselling novel THE LOVELY BONES. This memoir came first: It tells how Sebold was beaten and raped while a student at Syracuse University. It is brutal, shocking, and absolutely riveting to read. You THINK the toughest, hardest-to-read part of the story is right up front. And it IS tough. But more shocking stuff follows. There are signs that Sebold maybe didn't know where to END her memoir, but it was worth the trip. She was lucky that she was a strong and quirky person, and she's doubly lucky that her family was a bunch of fruit loops who stood behind her and helped her hold her life together.

Pat O'Day and Jim Ojala: IT WAS ALL JUST ROCK AND ROLL (second edition, 2003) -- O'Day was a disc jockey and station manager for Seattle's KJR AM in the '60s, back in the days when that station was one of the premiere AM stations in the country. His descriptions of what it was like to work in radio back in those days are unique, solid and enjoyable, and when he talks theory about what he -- as a manager -- thought made for an enjoyable AM station and talented AM DJ's, he's on solid ground. I still think there's a great book waiting to be written about working in AM radio in the '50s and '60s, and O'Day has a good start on it here.
But this isn't the book. Much of O'Day's rock-'n'-roll history-writing is from the first-the-earth-cooled-then-the-dinosaurs-came school, and his stories about hanging out with rock stars (Jimi Hendrix, The Beach Boys, Three Dog Night, more) aren't funny or revealing (even the story about Hendrix returning to his alma mater, Seattle's Garfield High School), they're just kind of sad.
O'Day writes ONE PAGE about his alcohol problem -- the cure for which he's been doing radio and TV commercials about in the Seattle area for a decade. There was maybe the basis for another book there -- but O'Day says he was a happy drunk, and that all his friends and co-workers agreed with him....
There are other problems. Glen Campbell and Ahmet Ertegun are among the well-known names who get their names misspelled more than once. Pat sometimes writes women (plural) when he means woman (singular) -- this also happens more than once.
This is the updated second edition of Pat's book. It looks great, and there are some nice black-and-white photos of Hendrix, Elvis, The Rolling Stones, Paul Revere and the Raiders, The Mamas and Papas, The Lovin' Spoonful, and other stars who played in Seattle. But did anyone proofread the book?

Grumpy old men

I first heard about Manny Farber while reading David Thomson's excellent NEW BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF FILM (see review under "Movie-ing 2," below). Thomson described Farber as a longtime movie critic who never liked anything much, and was well known for his crankiness.
Hey, a grumpy old guy who spent years finding faults in lots of classic old movies? Sounded like this was right up my street. I wondered why I'd never heard of Farber before.
Now I know why. Because I grabbed FARBER ON FILM (2009/2016), a complete collection of Farber's movie reviews from the early '40s through the late '70s.
Man, was he grumpy.
Farber started writing movie reviews for magazines like THE NATION and THE NEW REPUBLIC, then moved to CAVALIER in the mid-'60s, and later wrote for FILM COMMENT and ARTFORUM. And though he occasionally admits to liking or admiring some aspect of a movie, most of the time he picks stuff apart, or gives one paragraph of attention to movies you've actually heard of.
I didn't realize there was going to be 800 pages of this. But I got through a huge book of Graham Greene's writing on movies awhile back, so I figured I could handle this, too. And I thought seeing lots of old movies through the eyes of an old grump might be amusing.
And I was wrong. I got about 150 pages in before I started skimming, then skipping around. There may be some hidden gems in there somewhere, but I doubt it. Farber hits a real low point in the late '60s -- hey, it was a bad time for movies -- but he comes back to life briefly in the mid-'70s, just in time for a whole new generation of filmmakers. Most of whom he doesn't like. Also just in time to retire to become a teacher (on film studies) and a painter. He died in 2008.
Farber wrote like a college professor. He knew a lot, but it's often really technical, or it's really dry.
He seemed to get very little joy out of his work. Even when Pauline Kael was reviewing a really bad movie, at least she got something out of it so you could sympathize with her suffering. Manny just grinds it out, like he started out tired.
He didn't like CASABLANCA, for instance. He called it hokum. It was -- a big dish of wartime feel-good hokum. But how sour would you have to be not to enjoy it? Not to enjoy Bogart saying almost everything you ever wanted to hear him say in a movie? Or Claude Rains when he says "I'm shocked -- SHOCKED, I tell you -- that there's GAMBLING going on in this establishment!" What kind of clod couldn't enjoy that?
Farber hardly ever cracks a joke, unless it's to make fun of someone's name -- pretty much the lowest of the low when it comes to humor. He doesn't ever seem to be enjoying himself much -- though he DID seem to like putting together lists of REALLY BAD movies. Maybe he just SAW too many REALLY BAD movies.
Even in the late '60s and early '70s, he was still complaining. He grudgingly admits to admiring some parts of EASY RIDER and THE WILD BUNCH. He enjoys Marty Scorsese's work, first MEAN STREETS, then he goes on for pages about TAXI DRIVER. (Is this why there's a laudatory quote from Scorsese on the back of the book?) But by late 1975 he's already got a grudge against Steven Spielberg.
For years I've wanted to see a book called something like THE COMMON MAN'S GUIDE TO MOVIES -- what an educated non-film-expert thinks of a batch of movies, without getting into all the critical theories and biases that even Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert got sucked into.
This is not that book. And unless you like hearing someone complain for hours on end, it ain't worth $30.

Sell, sell, sell!

Money got tight, so on Monday I took four boxes of books and music to Half-Price Books in Tacoma. They took half the stuff I'd packed up and gave me $100, which I thought was pretty fair. I've got a little breathing room in my checking account now.
It's hard to predict what they will and won't take. I swore before I made the trip that I wouldn't sell anything I had an emotional attachment to -- no music that I'd miss later because it wouldn't be around to remind me of old friends, old times, good times.
After all that soul-searching, Half Price only took a little bit of the vinyl. I'm stumped on why they took ELO but left ELP, took a Can best-of (which you'd think would have fairly limited appeal, nothing personal) but left English-import albums by Caravan, Camel and Gentle Giant. They took The Headboys, but left Squeeze and The Jam. They took Heart, but left CCR and John Fogerty. They took the Dixie Dregs, but left a King Crimson best-of. They took almost all the travel-writing I couldn't get into last fall, but left short-story collections by Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg
They took almost all the CD's. They took ALL the rockstar memoirs I've given bad reviews to over the last month.
Not that I'm complaining. A year ago they paid me $160 for a pile of what I thought was mostly pretty dire stuff. So it all balances out.
Naturally, I didn't come home empty-handed. I grabbed a new edition of THE PENGUIN GUIDE TO JAZZ, which I first fell in love with when I grabbed a previous edition at Half-Price back in 2008. This new version is -- good God! -- TWICE as big as the old edition. And I'm sure there's more great criticism and more hilarious jokes.
I grabbed science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick's EXEGESIS and have already started it. It's a monster. On Page 21, he takes a pretty good shot at describing what happened to him back in early 1974, when he started seeing funny colored lights and started dreaming in Greek. At first he thinks it's some ancient Greek trying to communicate with him. Then he thinks it's his late friend Episcopal Bishop Jim Pike trying to communicate from The Other Side. Then Dick thinks he might have been contacted by some Vast Autonomous Living Intelligence System transmitting from space. And all through it, he's cracking jokes.
God knows if I'll finish it. I've already started skimming and skipping things. But what a story.
I hit the Clearance section and brought home Joe Queenan's CONFESSIONS OF A CINEPLEX HECKLER (2000), a couple dozen articles about movies, only $2. Queenan writes for MOVIELINE magazine.
These aren't really movie reviews -- well, a couple are, and one's a brief book review of a Hollywood producer's memoir. The rest are silly articles about films and some of the BS around them -- how Hollywood presents views of life that have nothing to do with reality; how many ears have been severed in a decade of Hollywood films; how many Merchant-Ivory movies can Queenan watch before his brain turns to Swiss cheese, etc.
In two pieces entitled "Don't Try This at Home," Queenan proves some things done in movies simply can't be done in reality. He dunks himself in cold Atlantic waters to prove Leonardo DiCaprio couldn't have done a five-minute monologue near the end of TITANIC -- he would've been dead in two minutes. (Queenan lasts less than 30 seconds.)
But Queenan IS able to walk through busy Manhattan traffic while wearing dark glasses and pretending to be blind, like Al Pacino did in SCENT OF A WOMAN. Taxis don't run over Queenan -- possibly a first for NYC.
I don't recommend reading this book in one sitting, like I basically did. Though it's funny, the humor tends to wear out. Queenan tends to pick on the same movies over and over, and his stories tend to repeat themselves in structure and punch lines. So read one essay a day for the next few weeks and you'll be happier than I was. I wish the book had been funnier.
But for $2, I'm not complaining.

Something Good

At last, something good to talk about. Let's start with the FAQs.
PINK FLOYD FAQS (by Stuart Shea, 2009) and THE WHO FAQS (by Mike Segretto, 2014) are two in a series of 30+ 300-to-350-page books published by Backbeat Books/Hal Leonard, in which writers try to tell you more about your faves than a mildly interested fan would already know.
If you're a rabid fan, you might not find all that much new here. So the secret then is to do the job with a little style and a sense of humor. Shea and Segretto have both.
Shea does a great, detailed job -- in part because he admits up-front that he's not the world's biggest Pink Floyd fan. He thinks their post-Roger Waters studio albums are no big deal, and their albums before DARK SIDE OF THE MOON are criminally overlooked by most so-called fans. I'm OK with that.
Shea also has little use for Floyd tracks like "The Great Gig in the Sky," "The Final Cut," "One of My Turns" and "The Trial" -- some of my favorite Floyd songs ever. I'm OK with that, too.
Because one of the ways Shea Does The Job is to point out the overlooked stuff -- in fact he has several lists of great overlooked tracks that a sometime-fan like me should look into -- all from Floyd albums before DARK SIDE.
Shea thinks there's a ton of great stuff hidden away on the Floyd's early movie soundtracks. He also thinks there's a fair share of hideous garbage on MEDDLE and ATOM HEART MOTHER and UMMAGUMMA. Pointing those awful tracks out makes for good comedy.
Segretto points out lots of great lost Who songs, too -- it was especially nice seeing "Zelda" and "Melancholia" mentioned. You can hear excellent demos of those songs on Pete Townshend's SCOOP.
And I am loving the long lists of great forgotten gems from the '60s and '70s, best Who solo albums, etc.
Overall, both books are good solid value for the money, if you're a fan of either band.
ROCK CHRONICLES (Second Edition, 2015, general editor David Roberts) is a sort of triumph of design and layout, in which a couple dozen contributors give you short histories of 250 top rock acts -- accompanied by beautifully-reproduced photos, band-membership timelines, mugshot photos of the most important members, etc. You probably don't want to see pictures of some of these folks -- look anyway. Rock and roll is a hard road.
This is definitely a ROCK encyclopedia -- it starts with AC/DC. Abba ain't in here. Which makes it a mystery when A-Ha turns up a few pages later. I assume Elton John and Paul McCartney were too big to ignore. So why no Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Madonna, Janet Jackson? If this isn't a "pop" encyclo, fine, but they should have said so. I don't get what their dividing-line is.
I could bitch a lot about who they left out, so let me bitch some more: Soft Machine, Can, Magma and Popol Vuh are all in here. So why not Gong? Or Amon Duul II? Richard Pinhas? There are also Japanese and Chinese bands here I'll bet no one in the States has ever heard of.
To get a little more obvious -- why isn't Joan Jett in here? Also not included: John Mellencamp, Bonnie Raitt, The Rascals, Janis Joplin, Rod Stewart (he was a rocker for awhile, here only mentioned while he was with Faces), Sly and the Family Stone.... You see what I mean about not knowing where their cut-off is?  
Iron Butterfly hasn't released an album since 1976, so why are they in here? Why Moby Grape and not It's a Beautiful Day?
There are sometimes TOO MANY photos of the bands performing or backstage -- do we really need double-page spreads on Kiss, Alice Cooper, AC/DC, Guns 'n' Roses, Black Sabbath, Scorpions, etc., when the editors could have fit in more band bios?
I don't know if I learned much new, but the book looks very good and it reads smoothly. The band histories -- though brief -- are detailed and accurate. This is a pretty good place to start, if you want to learn more about any of these folks.
There are occasional typos here and there. The only "major" error I found was the mugshot photos were shuffled-up in the entry on Men at Work.

Two more misses

Ray Davies' AMERICANA (2013) is a disappointment, thin and surfacey.
It does in its haphazard way recount The Kinks' adventures touring throughout the States from the days of the British Invasion, through their "re-conquering" of the colonies around the time of "Lola," to their apparent peak in popularity in the late '70s and early '80s, on into the '90s, and even into the 2000's -- when Ray has his Ultimate American Experience: He gets shot during a robbery.
But Ray jumps all over the place, some of his stories are rushed, others get more detail than they deserve, and Ray can't always tell you why he did some things. Davies has been acclaimed in the past for his powers of observation, shown in places like the details in the lyrics of his mid-'60s British hit "Waterloo Sunset." But by the end of this book you don't feel like you've met Ray, and he seems almost like a mystery to himself. He has no insight into the things he did or why some things happened, or really why he's had this long love affair with the U.S., beyond some American songs he heard in his childhood.
There are good things in the book: One chapter is a diary Ray kept during the SLEEPWALKER tour of the U.S. in 1977, and it's worth reading. The band's whole period with Arista Records is pretty well described by Ray, as is their late-'60s experience with Reprise, and their early-'70s "rock-opera" period with RCA.
But when Ray explains how his band fell out with Arista and ended up with MCA, I'm not sure I believe him. Ray just sounds too clueless. He's at a complete loss about how things happened.
Though getting shot in New Orleans is sort of the framework that the book is built around, it takes awhile to learn what happened, we get the details in bits and pieces -- and it's like Ray does his best to take most of the drama out of it.
There are parts of the book that are written with real affection -- usually about former road managers and advance-publicity-team members and "minders" who have died along the road. Ray's first wife, Rasa, who provided nice vocal harmonies on some Kinks hits up through the late '60s, is mentioned by name exactly once -- the rest of the time she's referred to as "the ex-wife." Chrissie Hynde is mentioned a couple times, only once by her full name.
Maybe I expected too much. I like The Kinks. VILLAGE GREEN PRESERVATION SOCIETY is a charming album in its acoustic, low-key way. LOW BUDGET is a solid, no-frills rock and roll album with sometimes hilarious lyrics. There's half a dozen great tracks on ONE FOR THE ROAD -- I prefer those live versions of "Victoria," "David Watts," "Misfits" and "Celluloid Heroes" to the studio originals. There's half a dozen great should-have-been hits on THE KINKS KRONIKLES.
But some people maybe shouldn't write books. Or they should get some help. I wonder if anybody read this before it was printed -- I kind of doubt it, because the sentence structure isn't always solid, some words are dropped here and there, and bassist Andy Pyle's last name keeps getting spelled two different ways.
Am I an idiot to expect emotional depth from rock and roll songwriters when they write books? Ray's personality seems paper-thin and distant here, not at all the warm, eccentric feeling you get from Kinks albums.

Wendy Leigh's BOWIE (2014) attempts to cover David Bowie's life in 275 rather-large-print pages, and doesn't do the man justice. The book is mostly about Bowie's sexual adventures -- about how many people he took to bed, how few people could resist him, how well-endowed he was, how many drugs he took. The music is distinctly secondary.
The book reads like it was cranked out in a couple of weeks. It's thin and surfacey, lighter than a PEOPLE magazine profile, and reading it didn't make me like Bowie any more or make me want to investigate his music any further.
There is a LONG list of people Leigh interviewed to write her book -- Bowie apparently wasn't one of them. There is a LONG list of magazine and English-music-weekly articles Leigh relied on for background. There is a pathetic attempt at a discography that is merely a two-page list of album titles. Would it have been so hard to include the titles of the songs that were ON those albums?
I was interested in learning more about Bowie's Berlin period and what was going through his mind during LET'S DANCE, not to mention what he'd been doing for the last 25 years -- but the book was so numbing that I gave up by then.Was it just that Bowie was willing to do anything, try anything, say anything, to be famous? Leigh doesn't even note that it took Bowie two years of work and a change of record companies before "Space Oddity" finally broke through to be a hit in the States.
I know there have been a lot of Bowie bios that tell only parts of his story. I haven't read any of them. I picked this one up because he'd died and I wondered if I'd missed anything important. This book doesn't make me want to find out.

Movie-ing 2

That Bowie bio and that Ray Davies memoir are gonna have to wait, because I've found something better....
David Thomson's NEW BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF FILM (Sixth Edition, 2015) is 1,150 pages of film biographies, accomplishments, opinions and trivia, and it is the best reference book I've read since Richard Cook and Brian Morton's great PENGUIN GUIDE TO JAZZ (1992).
Back in the day, English film critic Leslie Halliwell used to come out every year or two with an updated HALLIWELL'S FILMGOERS' COMPANION, a huge book full of lists of movies alphabetized by actor, director, writer, etc. -- a constantly updated look at what was happening in movies and who did it. Halliwell died in the 80's or 90's, and it looks like Thomson took over for him.
But Halliwell used to just list movies a person helped with, then add a brief description of their career, maybe a quote or a funny story or great lines from their films. Thomson does all that and more, including an ongoing narrative complete with completed films and dates of release, plus opinions about the person's work, details about their background, and a critical overview.
And Thomson ain't shy about expressing his opinions.
And it's clearly Thomson's book and no one else's -- he includes entries on overlooked figures, people who helped him gain a growing appreciation of films, folks I guarantee you've never heard of, people probably nobody but their FAMILY has ever heard of.
And he makes it all informative, funny, charming, sometimes moving.
Thomson has little use for most of the films released in the last decade or so. And I'm OK with that.
He may be a little too convinced of the greatness in films of the past. I'm OK with that, too.
He adores actors and actresses -- the longest entry I've found so far is on Cary Grant. The entry on James Stewart's pretty lengthy, too. And Thomson goes on for a couple pages on novelist, screenwriter and critic Graham Green. Critic Pauline Kael gets a nice write-up.
Thomson can be brutal on directors. Nobody's more to blame if a movie goes bad than the director, right? So Thomson can go on for pages about Howard Hawks, John Ford, Frank Capra, Sam Peckinpah (both positive and negative). But when he comes to a current director like Richard Donner (SUPERMAN, the LETHAL WEAPON movies), it only takes him three sentences to sum-up Donner's work.
If you're a movie fan, this is great stuff. You're sure to learn a lot, and look at some actors and films in a new way. And Thomson isn't afraid of the dark stuff -- like, for instance, how Jean Harlow died. Or Joan Crawford's later years. Or Orson Welles's career. And there are others that are just as tragic, that seem just as large a waste of talent.
Not everybody in current films is bio'd in here, not every actor or director mentioned gets a write-up. That would need a book twice as big. But it'll keep you busy for awhile if you're a movie fan.
And the unique, personal way Thomson's written it is a good model for me as I work on my strange-music review book (up past 32,000 words now).
If you're a movie fan, check this one out. You'll hardly ever hear me say this: This book is WORTH $30.
And by the way, apparently Thomson has been doing these dictionaries and updates since 1976....
Rock and roll could use an encyclopedia as detailed, well-written, and open as this one is.

Write on....

That book about Strange Music that I've wanted to write since age 22 might actually get done within my lifetime. I've made more progress on it in the last two weeks than I have in five years. I'm somewhere past 27,000 words written, now. Maybe a third to halfway finished.
If all goes as planned, I expect LISTEN TO THIS! will review progressive-rock albums I loved (or hated) back in the day, some very off-the-wall noise I've reviewed here (Cromagnon's CAVE ROCK, Borbetomagus, etc.), and that batch of prog I went through a few years back only to be disappointed when I discovered that a lot of it ... kind of sucked.
Even though I've got some big blank spots, I've heard a lot over the years and I haven't given up yet, so I ought to put all that listening-time and money-spent to good use.
My biggest problem was I couldn't seem to organize what I knew into a format that I could work with, that would allow me to write what I wanted, so the book would sound like me and not just like any other record-review book out there.
A couple weeks ago, I figured out a format that would work, and I've been working with it ever since. For me, a lot of these albums are tied up with memories, old friendships, and good and bad times, so you can trust a lot of that will get into the book.
So far, I have over 300 albums either reviewed, mentioned or at least listed -- everything from DARK SIDE OF THE MOON to ZERO TOLERANCE FOR SILENCE (don't know that one? Good luck....). Hopefully I'll be able to add more as I continue writing. Plus I've got stuff at home that I still haven't given a fair listening to yet....
I'll keep you posted as this project continues. Mentioning it here is part of my plan to force myself to keep working on it. I've seriously wanted to do this at least since I started reviewing off-the-wall music for newspapers, so....

If I slack off on the Strange Music book, I have other projects to keep me writing.
I've been working since September on a second GAS NAZI book. I'm about 25,000 words in. Things have changed a bit at my job in the past couple of years, and hilarious and outrageous new atrocities happen there every week, so as soon as I have enough to fill up another Kindle e-book, I'll let you know.
While I was on vacation from the blog, I was still writing. Last spring I wrote a LONG sort-of "family history" for an old friend back home in Idaho, and from that I hope to do a growing-up memoir called WHEN YOU WAKE UP that traces my growing up from age 11 on -- back to the days when I discovered music and books and that I could maybe write a little. Everything seemed much more magical then. And I can remember 45 years ago better than I can remember last week. So. I'm about 20,000 words into that one.
I hope these books aren't just an attempt to write I-I-I -- I like to think there's more to them. If there wasn't, I wouldn't write them. These e-books aren't making me rich (yet), but at least I feel like I'm accomplishing something, not wasting my life and my talent. If I'm full of shit, nobody's told me so yet. (Here's your chance, Crabby....)
I'll keep you posted on all this stuff, and definitely let you know when the books are done and available for sale. I'd still love to "retire" and write for a living....

COMING SOON: I've bagged another batch of books, including a Bowie biography and a memoir by Ray Davies of the Kinks. I'll report on these soonest....

Movie-ing

I read a lot during the six months I was away from the blog, and when I couldn't find any promising books on rock&roll, I read a lot about movies.
I started with movie reviews written by Pauline Kael, who covered movies for THE NEW YORKER from the mid-'60s to the early '90s. I'd recommend all of her books, each of which features hundreds of in-depth reviews. Which one you should start with depends on what period you're interested in.
DEEPER INTO MOVIES, REELING, WHEN THE LIGHTS GO DOWN and TAKING IT ALL IN cover movies from the early '70s to the early '80s. HOOKED and STATE OF THE ART cover the mid-'80s, when there wasn't much exciting going on. MOVIE LOVE covers the early '90s as Kael's career wound down. 5,001 NIGHTS AT THE MOVIES has thousands of capsule-reviews of older films. And Kael wrote half a dozen more books I haven't gotten to yet.
If you've ever wondered how a particular effect worked on the screen, or how some movies worked and others definitely didn't, or if you're just a big movie fan, Pauline Kael's your critic. She'll tell you How and Why, as well as How Good -- and she even has a great time writing-up some truly awful turkeys.
Nobody ever wrote in as much depth and detail about movies as Kael. Only Roger Ebert came close.
It's too bad she's not around today. I bet she'd be stunned at how much MORE money is wasted on movies now -- and how sometimes even big-budget movies only play in theaters for a week or two before they vanish in the blink of an eye and then they're out two or three months later on Cable and Dish and DVD and Blu-ray.
She probably wouldn't be surprised at the amount of weak, lame trash that's out there. Or at how most movies these days seem to be sci-fi action-hero fantasies and zombie invasions and stupid comedies. There were plenty of bad movies back in her day, too.

Rock&roll could use a history like Peter Biskind's EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS: HOW THE SEX, DRUGS AND ROCK AND ROLL GENERATION SAVED HOLLYWOOD (1998). This long, densely detailed book follows the movie careers of the wave of young writer-directors who hit Hollywood in the late '60s and did their best work into the early '80s -- guys like Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, William Friedkin, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Towne and Paul Schrader.
These are the guys who put together movies like THE GODFATHER, JAWS, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, STAR WARS, THE EXORCIST, THE FRENCH CONNECTION, TAXI DRIVER, NASHVILLE, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, AMERICAN GRAFFITI, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, APOCALYPSE NOW, E.T. -- films that made it interesting to go to the movies for about a decade.  
Brian DePalma appears several times in this book, but I think he gets kind of short-changed. He was a big mover and shaker in this period, and he's not followed in as much detail as the others. There's rather too much about Schrader, I thought -- and I could have lived without all the detail on the careers of Dennis Hopper and Bob Rafelson, but they helped get the ball rolling. There is also a lot of material on Warren Beatty, who was a big deal at the time.
But here's the thing all of them had in common: Nearly every single one of them had a personal-life that was a train wreck. There's some truly appalling behavior outlined in this book, and I'm not even talking about the heavy drinking and drug abuse and infidelity. Friedkin, Bogdanovich, Hopper and Coppola especially treated their Significant Others like shit. Friedkin apparently treated everyone badly. Much of the book reads like a relationship nightmare. Was it worth it, just to get a few good movies made?
Some of these guys are still at it. Scorsese is still crankin' out good stuff, after a few tough years here and there in the '80s and '90s. Spielberg is still doing Academy-Award-nominated films, but even he had his flops and setbacks along the way.
But some of them sank -- Friedkin and Bogdanovich were basically done by the early '80s. Hal Ashby (SHAMPOO, COMING HOME) lost his grip, dropped out, got cancer and died. Lucas's marriage fell apart. Spielberg got divorced then re-married.
I wish this book had followed these guys on through the '80s, because it ends at a real down point for most of them. Some of them survived to do more solid work, like Scorsese's GOOD FELLAS, Spielberg's THE COLOR PURPLE and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, Lucas with the Star Wars sequels and the Indiana Jones movies (with Spielberg). Maybe they were never quite as great again, but they're hangin' in there, most of 'em.
God knows I'm no expert on movies, especially CURRENT movies -- I think the last movie I saw in a theater was TITANIC -- but you could learn a lot about how movies and movie people work from this book and any of Pauline Kael's.
Reporting as solid, detailed and open as Biskind's could do "rock journalism" a lot of good. Not to mention rock and roll memoirs....

What I meant to say was....

Here's the thing about rock-star memoirs: You may get a Here's What Happened, but you might not get a Here's What It Felt Like. I'm not sure why that is, though I think the truth might be in a twist on something Greil Marcus once wrote about Van Morrison:
If he could explain his songs, he wouldn't have had to write and sing them.
Rock fans reading a rock-star memoir already have a pretty good idea of what happened. What they want to know is what it felt like. And sometimes the rock stars can't tell you. Not in any depth, anyway.
For me, the best rock-star memoir is still Keith Richards' LIFE -- not because it was such a great book, but because by reading it you can pick up some of the feeling of what it's like to play guitar for the Rolling Stones. Keith lets you in on what it's like to create great songs like "Jumping Jack Flash." He puts you inside Nellcote in France while the Stones are recording EXILE ON MAIN STREET. He gives you some of the rush of writing and recording basic tracks for "Happy" in just three hours.
Those were the best parts of the book, for me. That's what I was reading it for.
Now I read that Keith had a ghost-writer, and I think that helped him -- how else is Keith supposed to remember what happened back in the '70s, eh?
John Fogerty had a co-writer to help pull together his FORTUNATE SON, and so you get a little feel for what it was like to record "Proud Mary" and those early Creedence Clearwater Revival albums.
Again, that's the best part of the book -- not the endless lawsuits or John's '70s depression, or how true love saved him. Though those details make his story an inspiring one.
The weakest rock-star memoir I've read is Eric Clapton's CLAPTON. His life story has all the ingredients for a GREAT memoir -- but Eric didn't get much of it down in his book. By the end of the '70s, it's like he was bored. And Eric would be the first to tell you that he ain't that exciting a guy.
Pete Townshend's WHO I AM isn't much better. Again, lots of great material here -- but Pete ended up skimming over a lot of it, even though it's a huge book. Elvis Costello had some of the same problems in his UNFAITHFUL MUSIC AND DISAPPEARING INK. I kept thinking he tried to cover too much.
I'm not a big enough Tom Petty fan to try reading his memoir. I'm not interested enough.
I would have liked to see someone try to dig more out of Chrissie Hynde than we got in her RECKLESS: MY LIFE AS A PRETENDER. I was at least expecting more bare, passionate emotion about some of the things she went through.
But if Chrissie could have written a book that summed up her thoughts and feelings back in the day, she probably never would have had to form the Pretenders, and we never would have heard all their great songs. You make what art you can create. Hynde is a singer-songwriter-guitarist. It was silly for me to expect that her book would be as emotionally affecting as her best music.
I think rock-star memoirs are great. I also think most of them aren't worth the $30 bookstores and publishers are charging for them these days.

I hesitate to call music by artists I enjoy "average." I think you should hear the Tedeschi Trucks Band even if I think their new album LET ME GET BY only has one knockout song on it, and only one other that will grow on you. The rest I think are OK, maybe better if you're a fan -- but nothing that will change your life. And it's hard for me to say that.
I spent $18 I couldn't really afford on their CD -- the vinyl album was $35! I wonder how much of that cash they'll get. I'm keeping the CD, though I don't think it was worth $18. That's just too much. What's the solution to this? Download the best stuff and let the others go...?

Good news for any creatives out there: Check out Austin Kleon's STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST (2012), a short pep-talk of a book for writers, musicians, painters, bloggers, photographers -- anybody who tries to create something new and different. I can't see why it wouldn't work as an inspiration in almost any job.
The book lays out in about 100 pages 10 simple pieces of advice for creatives, along with a lot of other practical, down-to-earth, common-sense tips that maybe you never thought about. If you've got a huge project of any sort staring you in the face -- whether it's for your paying job or your own satisfaction -- you need to read this book.
It's short, personal, punchy, perfect. Some parts are so inspiring that you'll laugh with joy. One graphic outlines the seven steps any major project goes through -- and it's so truthful and so funny that I laughed 'til I cried.
You can read it in an hour or less, and it will make you look at any new project in a whole different way. Get it.

I'm 20 pages into Paul Theroux's DEEP SOUTH (2015), and I already think he's the best travel writer in the world -- and God knows I've tried to read a bunch of others. Nobody else has Theroux's sense of humor, his clear eye for description and detail, his sense of storytelling. He is the best. Only John McPhee can match him for putting scenes and scenery in your head. Only Tim Cahill comes close in the real-life comedy department.
I've tried many other travel writers -- Redmond O'Hanlon, Colin Thubron, Bruce Chatwin all have their fans, and I'm sure they're good, but I can't get into them. J. Maarten Troost has some great jokes, but it's sort of a good thing his books are short.
Theroux is the man. Wonder if he'd consider co-writing an autobiography with some rock star? David Bowie would have been a good subject....

WHY WE WRITE ABOUT OURSELVES, edited by Meredith Maran, rounds up 20 memoirists like Pat Conroy, Anne Lamott, A.M. Homes and others, and has them talk about writing memoirs -- why they do it, what they get out of it, the rewards of it and the prices they pay.
Conroy says writing about his family (in books like THE PRINCE OF TIDES and THE GREAT SANTINI) has almost destroyed it -- but it was a train wreck to begin with. Conroy says anything that has ever happened to you is your property -- and you should use it. Homes talks about learning she was adopted and about when her biological parents came looking for her -- the whole experience ended up in a memoir. Lamott tries to be nice to everyone she writes about, and has gone as far as changing names and incidents to keep people she knows from getting upset. Sometimes that wasn't far enough.
If you write memoirs or are addicted to them, this is also an inspiring book, and I might have a longer review of it later.

Possible upcoming topics:
* Is Obamacare working for anyone?
* How living in the U.S. now is almost like living in Russia.
* And more reviews, of course.