Books!

[pocaloc]

I highly recommend Nabil Ayers' My Life in the Sunshine. A thought-provoking memoir about family, identity, and music. He was in bands, founded one of my favorite records stores (Sonic Boom), and is now the head of Beggars.
A kind and enjoyable book.

He used my cymbals, snare and bass drum pedal for a show he travelled to in Pullman, WA. He used the bars drum kit. It was a college reunion type thing that a friend of mine went to. He asked to borrow my stuff because Nabil thought the bars stuff would suck I think.

[cpeck]

Thurston Moore’s new book landed on my doorstep yesterday. Hefty! It’s going to jump the line in my read next pile.

[cestlamort]

Random non-recommendation:
The Daisy Jones and the Six book, despite the interesting concept (fictional oral history of fictional 70s band) and hit tv show (I haven't watched, but Elvis' granddaughter is the lead), the book was basically an intolerable read, with some of the worst music writing I've ever encountered.

I enjoy pretty much anything dealing with bands, origin stories, recording, etc, but the author apparently has zero idea about music, musicians, songwriting, recording studios, record labels (especially in the 70s), music economics, etc. etc, beyond listening to Rumors a bunch of times.

I got it on sale for Kindle for $3 and I only finished it out of spite.

Random quotes:

Billy: I was writing about love. I was singing with a little bit of a growl. We were rockin’ hard on the guitars with some real blues bass lines. (p. 55)

Eddie: It just got worse from there. He changed the tuning on “Please.” Completely changed it and rerecorded it. As if I wasn’t going to notice he’d shifted to Nashville tuning. Like I’m not going to notice that the song has to be played on a different goddamn guitar. And everybody else, they saw it! They could see what he’d done. But no one was going to speak up, you know what I’m saying? Because Teddy and Runner were so happy with the record that they were talking about booking stadiums and pressing over a hundred masters and all this shit. They’re saying they want to release “Turn It Off” as soon as possible and they think it can hit number one. So everybody had dollar signs in their eyes and nobody said much of anything to Billy. Or Teddy.
(p. 239).

Artie Snyder: When we cut together the version with Daisy, it was so compelling—their voices together—that Teddy wanted to strip almost everything else away. He had me soften the drums a bit, amp up the keys, cut out some of Graham’s more distracting flourishes. What we were left with was this sprawling acoustic guitar and percussive piano. Most of the attention went to the vocals. The song became, entirely, about the relationship of the voices. I mean…it moved—it was still up-tempo, it still had a rhythm—but it was eclipsed by the vocal. You were hypnotized by Billy and Daisy. (pp. 92-93).

Their self-titled debut was a respectable entrance into the rock scene. It was straitlaced and economical, sort of a no-frills blues-rock album from a band that knew how to write a decent love song and had really perfected the art of the drug innuendo. A little bit folky, very catchy, lots of swagger, big riffs, hard drums, and that great Billy Dunne smooth growl. (p. 58)

Billy: I took a little bit of time off but then I went back in the studio with Teddy and we went through that album second by second, track by track, and we remixed and remixed and remixed until it was perfect. Teddy, Artie, and I were in the control room for what felt like twenty hours a day for three weeks or something. (p. 231)

SevenEightNine was a good album, in some ways a great album. It was more explicitly romantic than their debut—fewer allusions to sex or drugs. It still rocked, though. It had that driving rhythm section, those piercing riffs. (p. 98)

Pete: “While this is all out on the table, I’m taking full control over my own bass lines from here on out.”

Billy: I told Pete I was fine with him writing his bass lines. He’d been writing most of his bass lines for a while.

Karen: I said, “I’d like to step it up a bit. I think we can use me more often to round out songs. Maybe even do a song just keys and vocals.”

Eddie: I wanted a say in what I was playing. Everyone’s chiming in like Billy’s trying to control them—and he did. But he was really controlling me. I said, “I write my own riffs from here on out.” (pp. 148-149).

(Reid, Taylor Jenkins. Daisy Jones & The Six: A Novel. Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

(And, since I'm having too much fun with the Kindle app on the computer)
the following terms did not appear in the book:
- royalty/royalties
- advance
- recoup
- percentage
- points
- loose
- (in the) pocket
- jam (maybe a good thing, actually)
- improvise
- Fender
- Gibson (it does appear once as a type of boat)
- hammond
- rhodes (there's a "keyboardist")
- strings
- tube/valve
- compression
- take(s)
- track/multitrack
- (mixing) board/desk
- stereo/mono
etc.

[marqueemoon]

^It’s truly shocking to me how little some people who really should know actually know about how music is recorded.

For a while I was pretty into stereo gear and there is no group of people more clueless about how the sausage is made than audiophiles.

I think I’m getting the Rick Rubin book for Xmas.

[cestlamort]

I think I’m getting the Rick Rubin book for Xmas.

I just sent his book on creativity* to my little sister for xmas (hope you're not reading, Molly!). (* = "The Creative Act: A Way of Being")
I've admittedly only flipped through it (we got it as a gift from artist/painter friends/mentors) but it's been thought provoking throughout.

I'm also returning to a "everyone is getting books as presents" phase. I figure that if the books profoundly affected me, others may enjoy as well. Or at least give it a shot at some point.
Gifts this year include Susan Rogers "This is what it sounds like" (for everyone who likes music), Hernan Diaz "Trust" (which is maybe a better novel than story... it does some really good things that only novels can do), Andrea Wulf "Alexander von Humboldt and the Invention of Nature" (I'm finding thought at the cusp of Enlightenment so fascinating as I get older and boring-er... Stephen Greenblatt's "The Swerve" scratches the same itch, but for a previous age), Nabil Ayers' memoir, Daniel Immerwahr "How to Hide an Empire: History of the Greater United States." "Field guide to dumb birds of North America" is also a laugh.

[Firecat]

Thurston Moore’s new book landed on my doorstep yesterday. Hefty! It’s going to jump the line in my read next pile.

I'm about halfway in it. It's A LOT of namedropping, but I'm enjoying it quite a bit

[jthomas]

"Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America." by Brendan Ballou

Worth reading if you want to feel a little economic disparity outrage.

[budda12ax7]

His beginnings are interesting.....the book does not go into a ton of detail about RUSH....it does, but in a summary type way...he does talk about doing coke and weed....so far 3 stars...

He spends more time on post 2000 recordings , lots of views of how the band worked together during this time period...seems like a decent chap...

[budda12ax7]

Good....really good....he goes deep and doesn't hold a lot back....love the intro chapters of him going to CBGB's for gigs...

Wow..lots and lots and lots of name dropping....OK...we get it...you were part of the CBGB’s scene and all the art stuff....

[budda12ax7]

The Andy Summers book...the last train...is really good....

Interestingly he knew sting would break up the band and go solo during their second album...he predicted it. A great read...

[bipedal2]

I re-read Our Band Could Be Your Life about once every 3-4 years. Love that book.

I'm just a couple of essays into Marc Ribot's Unstrung: Rants and Stories of a Noise Guitarist and am enjoying so far. I understand some of the writing later in the book varies from pure guitar and music talk, but the opening essay "Lies and Distortion" alone was a pretty fantastic meditation on electric guitar.

How Music Works by David Byrne

[cestlamort]

I really enjoyed the Thurston Moore book … until I didn’t. First 2/3 or so were pretty great, then it somehow foreshortened and skipped over things (like: how about mentioning a signature guitar?!) and turned into lists of bands. In other words: first part = “I really want to listen to Sonic Youth!”; last part = “it’ll be a while before I want to listen to Sonic Youth, maybe I should re-read Kim’s book instead of this”.