Books that Rock

Books That Rock: “Precious and Few–Pop Music in the Early ’70s” (1996)

It’s been said that your musical identifications and tastes are cemented at a very early age, maybe as young as fourteen. That doesn’t mean you can’t expand your sonic palette later on—I didn’t get into jazz, reggae or classical until my mid-20s or so. But in the pop music universe, the “14 Rule” hold true.

One of my lasting musical fixations is Top 40 radio in the early Seventies, from about when I was 13 to 17 years old. So imagine my delight when I came across this tome at a retro store in Portland, Maine—a little shop stuffed with old albums, cassettes, VHS tapes, comic books and pop culture knick-knacks. I took one look at the cover and said to myself, “These guys get me.”

The guys in question are brothers Don and Jeff Breithaupt. They hail from Toronto, Don is singer in the band Monkey House and Jeff is an arts-fundraiser. In the mid-80s they began to wonder what became of the 45s they collected in the previous decade and found out from Mom that they were up in the attic crawlspace, still in their original faux-denim case.

The book’s “title track.” Go ahead and sing along, you know you want to.

So began their deep-dive journey through a large swatch of Billboard-charting singles dating from 1971-75. They starting with a survey of early 45s by the ex-Beatles and end at the Dawn of Disco. Early in their introduction, the Breithaupts make clear that they won’t abide by any lazy notion of this era being an inferior zeitgeist. Sure, there were questionable fashions and silly fads (with some novelty records to match), but they contend (rightly) that it was also a time of a vital incorporation of the strengths of venerated Sixties. “The rock press has a good ear for innovation,” they write, “but has shown little patience with the slower process of consolidation.”

The early 70s would be the last period of the Big House notion of commercial Top 40 radio. The authors note that the continuation and expansion of the earlier Boomer rock era: this was the end days of when R&B artists, singer-songwriters, hard rockers, foreign pop bands and teenybop idols would all share space on the Billboard charts. This rich audio-cultural diversity, delivered with none of today’s virtue signaling, would soon give way to specialized radio formats, a separation process that would eventually be reflected in America’s culture wars and divisive politics.

A decade-defining case in point. The sublime “Everybody Plays the Fool,” by the Harlem-based trio The Main Ingredient, was a huge hit in 1972 and of the last of the great “advice songs” (see also Petula Clark’s “Downtown” or the Beatles “She Loves You”). From its droll spoken intro to its last buoyant chorus, this was a stone-cold classic. But it was kept from the No. 1 spot by Chuck Berry’s infantile “My Ding-a-Ling.” Such was the Seventies.

The brothers collect these disparate musical trends into a colorful collection of concise chapters, preceded by a list of ten songs which best exemplify them. For instance:

“Revoluncheon: The Sixties Continued” Includes posthumous hits by Jim (“Riders on the Storm”) and Janis (“Me and Bobby McGee”) and post-mortem anthems like “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

The authors note that some Sixties-identified artists like the Who, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon and even the Rolling Stones put out much of their best work in the early Seventies, this continuation couldn’t last forever. “The relatively unified front of the Beatles, Stones and Motown,” they note, referring to the musical Sixties, “shattered into a million Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynoldses.”

“Dancing in the Moonlight: Seventies Pop.” Featuring Carole King’s “It’s Too Late,” Seals and Croft’s “Summer Breeze,” Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May” and Jackson Browne’s “Doctor My Eyes.” Sure it wasn’t as transformative as Monterey Pop, but only a snobby leading-edge Baby Boomer could resist the unabashed good vibes of “Dancing in the Moonlight” or this 3 Dog Night gem:

“The Sound of Philadelphia” Motown began to lose its way a little after moving from Detroit to L.A. in 1972—despite some great records by Stevie, the post-Diana Supremes and Marvin Gaye in his “What’s Going On” era. But in its place came the rise of the Philly Soul sound, led by the songwriting/producing team of Leon Huff and Kenneth Gamble. This is one of the book’s best chapters. Get ready to fall in love all over again with the Spinners, the Stylistics, the O’Jays and Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes. And let’s not forget this timeless adultery anthem by Billy Paul.

“Richard Nixon’s Greatest Hits” The era’s social protest songs were a mixed bag, but I am ready to defend the honor of the 5 Man Electrical Band’s “Signs” despite its many detractors (“the sign says you gotta have a membership card to get inside, ugh!”).

Also getting a going-over in this chapter are the likes of “Bring the Boys Home” (Freda Payne), “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” (Wings), “Fight the Power” (Isley Brothers), and the Raider’s white-guilt classic “Indian Reservation.” Sometimes the execution would get muddled and sentiments would veer more into apathy than action, despite good intentions. Ten Years After frontman Alvin Lee would “Love to Change the World” but didn’t know how so he just decided “to leave it up to you.” The authors also drill down on Chicago’s rather confounding minor hit “Dialogue (Parts 1 and 2).” Here, guitarist Terry Kath, playing a “well-informed progressive,” grills a “spoiled college kid” (sung by Peter Cetera) about his views on the world. The kid is so callow that when asked if he’s angry about the way the disastrous Vietnam War is dragging on, he plainly states that he “Hopes the president (Nixon) knows what he’s into.” And yet he somehow wins the argument by inexplicably convincing the Kath character (without providing evidence) that “everything is fine.” Wow.

By way of comparison, the Breithaupts contend that the “feminist pop” of the era was a lot more effective. Of course, Helen Reddy’s “I am Woman” gets a mention, but they are not too impressed with her “tame delivery.” Instead they rightly rave about the female singers (mostly African-American) who boldly turned the tables on the philandering macho men of the time. The politics here are mostly sexual, spawning a number of memorable, whip-smart singles like “Mr. Big Stuff” (Jean Knight), “Clean-Up Woman” (Betty Wright), “Women’s Love Rights” (Laura Lee) and my favorite, “Want Ads” by Honey Cone. In this infectious soul-groove workout, lead singer Edna Wright serves notice on her cheating-ass (ex) boyfriend by advertising for a new main squeeze in the Personals section of her local newspaper, noting that “experience in love preferred, but we’ll accept the young trainees.” Hell, yeah!

“Want Ads” was #1 on both the pop and soul charts in the spring of 1971. Here is the extra-funky extended version.

There are many other categories covered here, too many to review. Some of them are: Jazz Pop, Religious Pop, Progressive Rock, Hard Rock, Instrumentals, Story Songs (that chapter is named “Harry, Keep the Change” lol) and even “Self-Pity Pop”. This section features the lachrymose likes of “At Seventeen” (Janis Ian), “All By Myself” (Eric Carmen), “Seasons in the Sun” (Terry Jacks) and “Alone Again Naturally,” the suicide-ideation hoot by the regrettable Gilbert O’Sullivan.

But good, bad, or ugly, this music from the last great period of open-format radio do have a lasting virtue. That’s because most of the hits we were digging on back then were marked by a dogged sincerity. This can be hard to reckon with in our own ironic age. When this book came out in the mid-90s, the Seventies were enjoying a moment, but not for all the right reasons. “Generation Xers find it easy to laugh at everything,” the brothers wrote in ‘96, “they aren’t used to pop culture that wants to be taken at face value.”

This recalls a couple of big-charting songs of the time. First is “Brandy,” the only hit by the Jersey Shore band Looking Glass. The story of a lovelorn barmaid in a harborside tavern, this tune is sung in complete earnestness and was listened to in the same spirit as it headed to #1 in June 1972. But upon closer inspection, if was Brandy was such “a fine girl” and desired by all, couldn’t she just dump this sailor guy who has clearly stated “My love and my lady is the sea” (I mean, really). Or conversely, the sailor could finally give up on his stinky old boat, put a ring on it and, I don’t know, open a bait-and-tackle shop?

The other is the inimitable “Sweet City Woman” by the Calgary-based trio, the Stampeders. In this winsome, banjo-driven ditty, the singer hops a train heading out of the boonies to hook up with his lady friend living in town. He even mentions his banjo twice in the song and his anticipation is heightened not just by his girlfriend’s good loving but also her macaroons. Like I said, such was the Seventies. So the next time either song comes over the radio, we late baby boomers will be singing along with affection not irony. But I’m posting “Sweet City Woman” because at least the guy in that song knew when he had a good thing going!

—Rick Ouellette

Books That Rock: “Popcorn: Fifty Years of Rock ‘n’ Roll Movies”

I hadn’t heard of the 2010 book “Popcorn: 50 Years of Rock ‘n’ Roll Movies” until I recently scored a copy for $2 at a library book sale. Penned by British music scribe Garry Mulholland, it was advertised as “The first and last word on the rock movie” six years before I self-published my tome “Rock Docs: A 50-year Cinematic Journey.”

So though I’d beg to differ with that blurb, I also know when to tip my cap to a pro. “Popcorn” is a wildly entertaining and rigorous look at both rockumentaries and music-themed feature films for the half-century starting in the mid-Fifties (my timeline is Beatlemania to 2014). Mulholland is a writer full of original thinking: astute, passionate, contrarian, righteous, risqué and often laugh-out-loud funny. You can’t wait to read the next review and find out what he’ll say about all these major music movies, even when you can tell by the star-rating that you’ll disagree with him.

That Thing You Do!: “Sixties rock according to Forrest Gump.”

This is a guy who likes “Help!” and “Yellow Submarine” better than “Hard Day’s Night,” prefers the Bob Dylan obscurity “Masked and Anonymous” over the iconic “Don’t Look Back,” and is as willing to praise John Waters’ “Hairspray” to the high heavens as he is to take the Rutles down a notch or two. But he will champion worthy obscurities like “Slade in Flame” with logic and love and assure us with 5-star ratings for “This is Spinal Tap,” “Quadrophenia,” “Gimme Shelter,” “Performance” and “The Filth and the Fury.”

 The Kids are Alright: “Unique, thrilling, and a great reminder of when snotty bands smashing up stuff was still shocking, big and clever”

The films earning one or two stars usually get a (often much-needed) hatchet job. Check out these “plot line” blurbs that appear under the rating.

The Doors: “Twat stops shaving and dies.”

Purple Rain: “A $6 million tribute to Small Man Syndrome.”

The Monkeys’ ‘Head’: “Boy band force fed drugs and abused by hippie fuckwits.”

Pink Floyd’s The Wall: “Walls are bad. But women are worse.”

Control: “The aesthetically pleasing death of Ian Curtis.”

With such stylistic flair and free-ranging opinions, Mulholland can sometimes go a bit daft. About the only thing he likes in “The Last Waltz” are those cloying interviews Martin Scorsese had with Robbie Robertson to sell their cinematic ego trip about a grandiose farewell concert. Meanwhile, he treats the rest of The Band (who did not want to break up the group) as if they were Mumford and Sons. Not cool. The only guest spot he approves of is Muddy Waters, a rare foray into the dubious Rock Critic Guide to Street Cred.

In Bed with Madonna (aka Truth or Dare): “It’s like spending 113 minutes inside a homophobic joke.”

Elsewhere, Mulholland (who is white) delves deep into the ever-issue of white co-option of black musical culture and does so via an intellectual process, not by lazy virtue signaling. Like I said, he has a righteous streak. He uses it to body slam both the likes of “The Blues Brothers” (“trades on the non-existent joke of two ugly sexist white blokes being the Kings of Soul”) and “Ray” (“The sick, cruel, racist America is stylized-to-fuck until it has the requisite glow of nostalgic cool”), exposing the ineptitudes of both low-brow comedies and Oscar-bait star vehicles masquerading as biography.

As for “Ray,” the author dutifully misinforms us that Jamie Foxx won the Oscar for “Best Actor in Sunglasses.” Mulholland may be from England, but his cheeky sense of humor will be much appreciated by rock fans weaned on the good old days of Detroit-based CREEM magazine (“The Wall” is judged to be “the rancid toenail clippings of fetid rotting dogs”). You get the idea. Keep a lookout for “Popcorn” on the discount shelf or see if your library has a copy. Then have yourself a good laugh—and a good think.

But if you’re interested, I still have a few copies of my “Rock Docs” available for sale. Inquire in the comments below. Thanks, Rick Ouellette

Books that rock: Toby Thompson’s “Positively Main Street”

“If you’re really a Dylan buff, I mean tuned right into the stereo microgrooves of his soul, you’ll get a kick out of this.”

So begins the eager-beaver “Introgush” of Toby Thompson’s “Positively Main Street.” It was one of the first books I ever read about a music star and still one of my favorites. First published in 1971 and reissued in 2008 with the helpful subtitle “Bob Dylan’s Minnesota,” it depicts two trips to the North Star State taken by the recent college graduate in the late Sixties, while rock’s poet laureate was still in seclusion, two years after his mystery-shrouded motorcycle accident. Over the succeeding decades, books about Dylan have become a robust cottage industry and the exact number of Dylanologists now roaming the earth would be hard to quantify. Many of them have turned out portentous volumes indeed, befitting the decade’s “Voice of a Generation.”

But Thompson’s modest-seeming book turned out be a trailblazer, and it remains one of the most appealing on the subject, a genial and immersive street-level journal of time spent in Dylan’s hometown of Hibbing. He interviews friends, family, teachers and townsfolk. He visits all the relevant sights (both in Hibbing and in Minneapolis where Bob briefly attended college) and develops a friendship with Echo Helstrom, Bob’s high-school sweetheart who was the probable inspiration for his classic “Girl from the North Country.”

Echo Helstrom in 1969, photo by Toby Thompson. The pictures he took in Hibbing, of local landmarks as well as many of the adorable Helstrom, were previously used in “Positively Main Street’s” original incarnation as a series in the Village Voice. Several are reprinted in the look-back interview with Thompson in the new edition of the book. Helstrom later moved to California and passed away in 2018.

In today’s hyper-accessible and saturated media landscape, it’s a little startling to read how humbly the book came into the being. Knowing his subject’s real name and hearing an anecdote that his father and uncle owned a hardware store up there; he uses directory assistance to call the family business (actually Zimmerman Furniture & Electric Company) and is casually invited up to Hibbing by an uncle: Bob’s dad had recently passed away.

Thompson doesn’t need much convincing to pack up his semi-reliable VW Bug and take the long drive from D.C. to northern Minnesota during a deep Northwoods autumn. Toby is motivated as much by the imperative to become a member of the New Journalism as he is by fanboy fever. Sure, he’s the kind of guy who studied the lyrics of Dylan’s John Wesley Harding LP when it came out in late’67 (after a 20-month recording absence), comparing notes over the phone with friends. Almost a year later, with no other word from their hero, he decides on his mission—probably just as much to find himself as to get to the origin story of the man born as Robert Zimmerman.

There is a vivid Beat-style detailing of the drive thru the East’s REAL physical landscape, the infrastructure and turnpikes, before reaching out into the great Midwest Americana. Thompson tools down the legendary Highway 61 and hears “Just Like a Woman” on the radio as he’s approaching his destination. The clean-cut and unimposing (but insistent) young writer is soon out hitting the bricks of Hibbing, a small but somewhat well-appointed city with music shops, teen hangouts, lively taverns and a couple of cinemas (also owned by the Zimmerman clan).

You know it was the early days of the Dylan Studies discipline when Thompson is shocked to learn that Bob, who made his legend with socially-conscious folk songs, had fronted a rowdy rock band in high school. A glance at his school yearbook reveals a desire to “follow Little Richard.” But aside from the odd person (like his astute English teacher), there just isn’t a whole lot appreciation for “Bobby Die-lan” (as the locals often call him). The woman down at the music store, who sold him his first harmonica, says her old customer’s albums are not big sellers in these parts (“people don’t like his voice”).

These days, there is more appreciation of good ol’ Bobby Die-lan in his hometown. Each May, Hibbing holds a “Dylan Days” festival. This promotion for a Dylan cover-band concert is on the side of the house where Bob grew up. When the Zimmerman family sold this house, there was a codicil that called for his upstairs bedroom (included some personal possessions) to remain as is. Thompson visited that bedroom while writing his book and Dylan himself reportedly visits it from time to time.

Echo Helstrom was of course, someone who did get Bob. They went together their whole junior year of high school, bonding as two of maybe a handful of kids grooving to the sounds of the blues and the new rock ‘n roll emanating at night from faraway stations in places like Shreveport and Little Rock. Echo, who Dylan compared both to Brigitte Bardot and Becky Thatcher, is a fair-haired and mini-skirted blithe spirit with the “finest smile this side of White Bear Lake.” Although she had previously been interviewed (by author Robert Shelton for a book that would not come out until 1986), she was delighted with the attention and regaled Toby with tales of teenage Bob that few if any fans would have known. The two form a quick conspiratorial bond, heading up to Hibbing in the VW to kick up a little dust. They visit the old haunts, close down a bar or two and even a crash a local radio station so Echo can return the favor and sing a little tune she wrote (“Boy from the North Country,” natch), accompanied by Toby on guitar.

Nowadays, where self-serious writers like Greil Marcus pen whole books about a single Dylan song (Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads), Positively Main Street comes across as a breath of fresh air from a more ingenuous age. Towards the end of the book, Thompson interviews Bob’s mom at a local diner. She does protest a bit about a couple of unappreciated private details that showed up in the Village Voice article (and as to why he’s running around with “that Echo”) but the mostly cordial conversation reveals what readers have likely sussed out by this point: that Robert Zimmerman had a pretty solid and regular Midwestern upbringing.

And that’s OK, even better that way. I say this because there was a lot of deification of Dylan back then, as well a certain amount of mythmaking, some of it perpetuated by the liner notes of his first album that would have you believe he ran away to join the circus as a boy, never knew his parents, yada-yada. But real art and talent come from hard work and drive and knowing from whence you came, not from some magic talisman passed down to a lucky few. Bob Dylan did (and does) have a extraordinary knack for absorbing the great American experience in all its many forms, not the least of which was the stark but sensible place (“where the winds blow heavy on the borderline”) that informed his spirit, a place that Toby Thompson let Dylan fans feel for the first time.

Books That Rock: “Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968” by Ryan H. Walsh

The chaotic and convoluted process that would yield one of pop music’s most revolutionary and acclaimed albums is the story that anchors this captivating 2018 work by Ryan H. Walsh. Van Morrison was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland where he first came to prominence with the group Them. By 1968, in the aftermath of his surprise solo hit “Brown-Eyed Girl,” Morrison was living in a small apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts not far from Harvard Square. That year saw a whole host of decade-defining events and personalities criss-crossing each other in the greater Boston area. Walsh uses the making of Van’s cerebral classic as a philosophical thread that stitches them together.

There have been many good-to-great music books in recent years that focus on one particular year of the Sixties or Seventies. These books generally use one of two marketing strategies: superlatives (“1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music”) or the promise of esoteric information (“Fire and Rain: The Lost Story of 1970”). “Astral Weeks” goes the second route and one can assume the “secret history” is what Walsh determines it is. But that’s all good for people pre-disposed to the subjects at hand. This is an obsessively researched book with a Holy Grail-type quest at its center: Walsh’s search for a rumored tape recording of a Boston nightclub gig where much of “Astral Weeks” was played a month before the iconic album was cut in New York City.

Van Morrison performing on Boston Common, April 1968

Walsh casts a pretty wide net here, so Van fans should be forewarned. Also central to his story is the twisted tale of the cultish commune led by the mysterious Mel Lyman, a guy who went from a humble harmonica player in the Jim Kweskin Jug Band to a messianic figurehead of a community who owned a block of houses on Boston’s Fort Hill, topped by a water tower made to look like a fairy-tale tower. There are detailed anecdotes of student antiwar protests (esp. at Boston University) and about Timothy Leary and Ram Dass (nee, Richard Alpert), whose exploits in the promotion of psychedelics at Harvard was national news. But many of the offshoot topics here concern music. For pop history completists, there is a deep-dive retelling of MGM Record’s ill-fated “Bosstown Sound” hype, many pages devoted to the Velvet Underground for whom Boston clubs were a home-away-from-home (fifteen trips up from NYC in ’68), and the momentous concert James Brown gave at the old Boston Garden on the same night as Martin Luther King’s assassination: an event that the new mayor, Kevin White, arranged to have televised live to keep potential rioting at bay (it worked).

By 1971, Mel Lyman was notorious enough to warrant a cover story in Rolling Stone.

One thing that does join together many of these disparate elements is an overarching spiritual quest that informed much of the late Sixties. But in a related takeaway, we see that this process is not all sweetness and light. Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” is practically rock’s Exhibit A when it comes to enlightenment-seeking. Not surprisingly, this crusade didn’t exactly translate into everyday life: a choice Van anecdote is him drinking in the admiration of L.A. hitmakers The Association after a gig on Cape Cod, then calling them a bunch of “faggots” as soon as they were out of earshot. Morrison does have a long history of epic crankiness, though he did make a friend in Peter Wolf, singer for the local band Hallucinations (and later, of course, with J. Geils) and he invited Morrison to come up on stage to sing with him at the city’s premier rock club, the Boston Tea Party.

“I’m nothing but a stranger in this world.” The title (and lead-off) track to Morrison’s soul-searching testament.

The venue was housed in a building that was built in 1870 to commemorate the Rev. Theodore Parker, the noted Transcendentalist, social reformer and abolitionist who believed that Spiritualism was going to become the “religion of America.” Maybe not, but the Tea Party did become a “cathedral of the hippie era.” Those angel vibes certainly must have been conducive to the spirit of the age. Velvet Underground leader Lou Reed, more known for his streetwise lyrics, was an avid follower of New Age pioneer author Alice Bailey. In fact, Reed, who has a reputation as being ornery as Van, comes across very well here. The story of how he and the Velvets mentored singer-songwriter/local hero Jonathan Richman (then a suburban teenager) is one of Walsh’s more likable side stories. Richman would later form the proto-punk Modern Lovers, who would go on to make the Boston-rock anthem “Roadrunner” and, interestingly, “Astral Plane.”

The Velvets at the Boston Tea Party in Dec. of 1968 and a very raw version of “White Light/White Heat.” It’s a song said to be influenced by Reed’s devotion to the book “A Treatise on White Magic” by theosophist Alice Bailey. Accompanied by film images by Andy Warhol & Co.

And then on the lowest end of the spectrum is Mel Lyman, the kind of two-bit scumbag that often found themselves elevated in the well-meaning but not always wised-up Sixties. As a musician, his biggest claim to fame was playing a soothing 30-minute harmonica solo to the passed-over folkies who had just booed Bob Dylan for playing an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival. Lyman tapped into that reactionary energy to become the megalomaniac leader of his ultra-conservative commune. It was a scene marked by bullying, misogyny and an upfront volatility that ol’ Mel had no problem with (more than a few visitors were threatened at gunpoint). The best thing you could say about Lyman’s “family” is that they didn’t lapse into wholesale butchery like the Mansons. After Mel did everyone a favor by croaking in 1978, the commune developed their building/design business and to this day a now-multigenerational group still live behind the walls of their Fort Hill compound.

Walsh, to his credit, gives a fair definitive accounting of the Lyman gang and how they were intertwined with the area’s counterculture. He ends “Astral Days” with an impassioned overview of that album’s lasting influence on everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Martin Scorsese. Considering his great admiration for Morrison’s piece de resistance (and to the great early-to-mid 70s titles that followed) it’s probably a blessing that the book came out before Van’s recent descent into extreme anti-vax and conspiracy phase of the last few years. What a long, strange trip (as they say) and classic-rock music fans and students of Sixties culture should enjoy this novel and absorbing look at the weird, wonderful year that was 1968.

“Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey” Available Now!

The Last Waltz. The Kids Are Alright. Stop Making Sense. Standing in the Shadows of Motown.
The Filth and the Fury. Searching for Sugar Man. Twenty Feet From Stardom.

Over the last half century, music documentaries like these have provided us with a priceless moving-image history of rock ‘n’ roll. My just-released book “Rock Docs: A Fifty-Year Cinematic Journey” is a first-of-its-kind anthology of the rockumentary genre, viewing pop music’s timeline through the prism of non-fiction film. Since its earliest days, the look of rock ‘n’ roll has been integral to its overall appeal. Up and down the hallways of pop history there is always something interesting to see as well as to hear.

This book reviews over 150 films–actually closer to 170 but that number didn’t seem right on a book cover. It starts with a ground level look at the Beatles’ world-changing first visit to America and comes full circle fifty years later with “Good Ol’ Freda,” where the Fab Four’s secretary looks back through the years as both a fan and an insider. In between, readers will find many films to re-experience or discover for the first time.

The anthology format consists of 50 feature-length reviews and paragraph-length pieces on the remaining 100+ titles. In the coming weeks, I will be posting selected clips from the book. If you are interested in purchasing the book, please leave a message in the comments. The book is only $12 including mailing within the U.S.

Also, if interested join my “Rock Docs” Facebook group.

Click on the link below to see the first “Rock Docs” book sampler.

“Rock Docs” Sampler #1: The Early Days

Books that Rock: “Twilight of the Gods” by Steven Hyden (2018)

The daily posts I put up for my Facebook group Rock Docs (check it out if interested) generally fall into a few different categories: birthday tributes, trailers for upcoming music documentaries and seasonal-themed series (I recently had a weeklong string of posts about Irish bands centered around St. Patrick’s Day). Another frequent category that can’t be avoided: obituary posts. Any rock music fan of a certain age who is on social media knows these well. Whenever one of our beloved stars dies, the online tributes, often very heartfelt, come pouring in and last for days if not weeks. This phenomenon probably peaked in early 2016, when David Bowie and Prince passed away within a few months of each other.

Of course, a lot of this can’t be helped: rock ‘n’ roll is a youth-centric artform that is now about 65 years old. While many of the baby-boomer stars of its Golden Age are in their Golden Years, rock has ceded its primacy in the pop-music pyramid since at least the late Nineties. A book like Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock was inevitable.

Freelance author and podcaster Steven Hyden has acquitted himself well on this subject. Twilight of the Gods is an accessible, witty and committed book. Part of its success may be that Hyden was born in 1977 and grew up in suburban Minnesota, a Gen X/Millennial bitten bad by the Classic Rock bug. He is no portentous, self-serious scribe a la Greil Marcus, but he gets it. By early middle school he was subsumed by rock “as an act of faith: albums as sacred texts, live concerts as quasi-religious rituals, and rock mythology as a means of self-discovery.” An avowed agnostic, Hyden admits that “if there is a God, I was sure I had found Him on side two of Abbey Road.”


Hope I die before I get old—or not. Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend on the “Who Hits 50 Tour” in 2016

He first saw his favorite band (the Who) in 2002, so the timeline of his grand obsession was already leaning into advanced middle age. But by the end of the night, Hyden had found his musical Olympus as the Who rose to the occasion of past greatness. Or, more precisely, Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey did that. Bassist John Entwistle had recently died (after a night of latter-day rock-star debauchery) and Keith Moon, the original wildman drummer, was already a quarter-century in the grave.

But to Hayden and countless other fans, what may matter above all is the (hoped for) immortality of the form itself. Bands like the Beatles, the Stones, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd not only have a considerable repertoire of recordings but are also steeped in rich mystique and all sorts of esoterica. Like many before him, Hyden enthusiastically partakes of both the canon of accepted masterwork albums and more obscure discoveries, reads the books and music mags and views all the important rock docs.


By 1988, when American TV viewers were treated to the legendary “Freedom Rock” commercial, the canonization of Sixties and Seventies youth music was in full swing.

The result of this deep-diving is an often quirky book where the author explores all sorts of different tributaries on this long and winding musical river. Hyden tells of his great appreciation of both the rebel spirit of Bruce Springsteen’s wilder early albums and the more reflective tone of his later work (both men had complicated father/son relationships). He talks of how fans can keep the classic-rock experience fresh by embracing once-avoided “good bad albums” like the Stones’ Black and Blue and Neil Young’s Trans. And of course, no book about rock history would be complete without foray’s into the subjects of the occult (there is an excellent dissection of the Ozzy Osbourne song “Mr. Crowley”) and the old stand-by discussion of how awful the Eagles are (“They were cool like the captain of the high-school baseball team is cool… the kind of guys who will tape your ass cheeks together if you dare pass out early at the party”).

Not every section of The Twilight of the Gods works equally well. The “dad rock” chapter, while entertaining enough, goes on too long with its Wilco vs. Pearl Jam showdown. But Hyden mostly stays on point, often keenly so. Through the real-life example of his own divorced mother, he discerns a generational class of women who by the Eighties had moved on from the randy sex anthems of Aerosmith et al. Instead, they welcomed the embrace of goopy power ballads like “Open Arms” by Journey and “Keep on Loving You” by REO Speedwagon. But for good reason. Here, wised-up sensitive men were also looking for something more lasting. “These power ballads are about damaged people trying to make a go of love despite trying circumstances” and Hyden has the stats to mark this as a growing demographic.


Divorce Rock? Singers of this song type were often (and improbably) culled from glam metal bands.

As the author observes, eventually “you’ll see there is no beginning or end to music, only grooves that you can lock into until you find another groove.” But there is an end to the mortal coil and early on in the book he makes note of the rock notables who passed on while he was working on it: Chuck Berry, Gregg Allman, Leonard Cohen etc. Each of these deaths is mourned personally (online) often in ways that are inter-generational. In the the closing pages he notes, “The exaggerated arc of rock stardom creates a framework for understanding our own lives. Now classic rock is helping us understand, and accept, the inevitability of death.” Not the most pleasant thought, but I’m glad that Steven Hyden has tackled this thorny subject with such insight and panache.
–Rick Ouellette

Books That Rock: Michael Oberman’s “Fast Forward, Play and Rewind”

The annals of rock music journalism are filled with outsized personalities like Lester Bangs, Nick Tosches, Robert Christgau, Dave Marsh and others. They tended to be opinionated writers with national magazines, keen to rile things up. Less recognized in this field are the countless other music scribes who work for local or regional publications, welcoming bigger acts into town while also promoting the local scene.

Notable among this second group is Washington, DC-based Michael Oberman. He wrote a weekly interview column for the old Washington Evening Star from 1967-73 (his late brother Ron did the column for the three years before that) and interviewed many of the great rock, blues and soul artists during that classic epoch, and many of them before they really took off.

Oberman’s newly released book “Fast Forward, Play, and Rewind” collects many of those music columns with personal reminiscences and background narrative of meeting (and seeing in concert) such an array of pop music luminaries during this heady era. He watches the first moon landing backstage with members of Blind Faith. He has an interview with Peter Townshend cut short so the Who leader can catch Jimi Hendrix at his residency crosstown at the Ambassador Theatre, leaving Oberman there to do his reporter’s duty and check out headliner Herman’s Hermits! (Don’t worry, Michael caught Jimi earlier that week). The columns, though short pieces of 400-700 words, can sometimes reveal some fascinating interview tidbits, like the quirky details of the Cowsill’s ramshackle “Munster-like mansion” in Newport, RI just before hitting it big.

Pete Townshend in a D.C. hotel room, 1967 (Photo by Michael Klavans)

These pieces, though they are the snapshots in time they can’t help but be, are weighted down a bit by the fact they contain a lot of info that has long passed into rock fans’ common knowledge: like being told the personnel of The Doors. Wisely, Oberman intersperses these old columns with his “Musings” feature, newly written memoir-like mini-chapters on his experiences in the biz as well as his boyhood experiences. In the latter category, there are fun tales of youthful hijinx (his brother Ron’s good buddy was Carl Bernstein of “All the President’s Men” fame) and discovering great local music in the DC area. This includes the club scene in the Georgetown district and bands like the British Walkers, which featured a young Roy Buchanan, the blues guitar great. In the former, there are intriguing detours down the side lanes of the rock ‘n roll landscape. Oberman managed the Claude Jones band who not only played a Halloween gig at a mental hospital but also played host in 1970 to the notorious Medicine Ball Caravan travelling freak show at their shared home deep in Virginia redneck country.

Jimi Hendrix outside the Baltimore Civic Center (Photo by Michael Klavans)

My favorite part of the book, and the most pertinent in light of the recently-released movie “Stardust,” is the author’s retelling of the story of David Bowie’s first day in America, which the soon-to-be-superstar spent with Oberman’s family in Sliver Spring, Maryland. Michael’s brother Ron Oberman was by then a publicist for Mercury Recoords, Bowie’s US label. He had already met the singer in England and David had requested that he would like to spend the first night on his stateside publicity tour with a true-blue American family. Oberman’s father was a manager at the National Bohemian Beer Co. and Bowie asked for his business card as a memento. The card is what he’s holding in the picture below, sitting on the family sofa with Michael (on the left) and Ron in the middle.


Many thought that Bowie, in this much-circulated photo taken by Oberman’s mother, was holding a joint and not, innocently enough, her husband’s business card. (Oberman Family Archive)

Ron Oberman, who died in Nov. 2019 after a long struggle with fronto-temporal dementia, had a long and accomplished career in the record business, later moving on to Columbia and MCA where he helped launch Bruce Springsteen, the Bangles and others. His role in helping Bowie introduce himself to America was significant enough to make him the co-protagonist of “Stardust.” Michael Oberman is polite but steadfast in his dismay that the producers cast 56 year-old comedian Marc Maron to depict his brother (who was 27 at the time) as a “small-time publicist” instead of the director of publicity for Bowie’s label, which he was. The film producers didn’t take advantage of an actual participant in this event and finally told the surviving Oberman brother that they were going for more of a “buddy movie” (how original) centered around a cross-country road trip that never happened.

But you know that Hollywood will goes its own way, even if its the wrong way. “Stardust” (which didn’t get the rights to use any of Bowie’s music) is harvesting the bad reviews it probably deserves judging from the previews. If you’re more in tune with the folks who keep it real by the honest appreciation of pop music history that can only come from first-hand reporting, there’s a lot to like about Michael Oberman’s look back at this golden age of rock.

Michael has had a second career in fine-art photography and you can check that out, as well as finding a link for purchasing the book, at michaelobermanphotography.com

Books That Rock: Kathy Valentine’s “All I Ever Wanted”

“I waited so long, so long to play this part
And just remembered/That I’d forgotten about my heart”

I’m not sure if Go-Gos bassist Kathy Valentine wrote those lines in the song “Head Over Heels,” the band’s fourth and final Top 20 single. She co-wrote it with guitarist/pianist Charlotte Caffey but it has Valentine’s stamp all over it. The Austin, Texas native had brought over a few songs from her previous band the Textones when she became the final link in what would be become a history-making band: the hit “Vacation” and the closing number of their debut album “Can’t Stop the World.” Both those songs, and the later “Head Over Heels,” brim with deep notions of yearning, self-examination and personal determination against great odds. It is the refrain of “Vacation” that gives Valentine’s incisive and consistently compelling memoir its title. It totally suited the last-minute bassist (she was a guitarist while co-fronting the Textones) to be a supporting player in the ascendant Go-Gos. The Los Angeles band’s rise to be the first (and so far only) all-female band who wrote and played all their own material to have a #1 album is quite a story and Kathy neither sugarcoats the success nor sensationalizes the circumstances of their untimely initial split after just three LPs. Truth be told, the Go-Gos have long been a misconstrued group and though this is one member’s take, the tale of both her life and career are refreshingly parsed in these 270-odd pages.


Kathy Valentine today. On a life of artistic pursuit, she says: “A creative person gets used to subsisting on unequal parts of passion, delusion and relentless hope. No matter what happens, as long as I keep doing it, I’m still in the game, there’s still a shot.”

Like so many who make it big in show-biz and later write autobiographies, Valentine had early life complications. Born in 1959, her father was out of the picture by age three, and he would be a long time in making it back into her life. Her mother was a mini-skirted “babe” who enjoyed a good party—often with her teenage daughter along for the ride—while she wasn’t earning a degree at the Univ. of Texas. Valentine’s light-bulb musical moment came from seeing the pint-sized dynamo Suzi Quatro do her #1 UK hit (the raucous “Can the Can”) on TV while visiting her English grandparents. It wouldn’t be long until the she was chasing her own rock dreams in a high-school band, although after singing “Wild Thing” at an early show decided she wasn’t suited to be the main focal point.

Unsurprisingly, the tough times are there too. Date rape, an unwanted pregnancy and building substance abuse issues by her mid-teens are part of this story. These autobiographical details steeled Valentine against the world, and the self-medication that was part of the rock ‘n’ roll high life would not be recognized as needing an intervention until much later. This is a twice-told tale in the music business, so it’s in other areas that the reader gets the fresh insights that make this book valuable.


The Textones recording of a song that would get a makeover for the Go-Gos second album. Kathy left the band in late 1980, feeling they were stuck in neutral. She later heard thru the grapevine they were relieved she left, due to her heavy drinking. She took offense at the time only to understand better in her later sobriety.

One thread throughout these pages is that male musicians were uniformly supportive of her and fellow female bandmates, and “wanted us to do well.” That extends from from her early Austin days to rock stars she dated post-stardom: notably Blondie’s nice-guy drummer Clem Burke. Any sexism or patronizing seems to come from creeps in clubs (early on) to “industry suits” (later). The sisterhood squad she found in the Go-Gos provided her with surrogate siblings she never had and the musical success she worked for and craved.


The Go-Gos with new member Kathy Valentine (far right) in early 1981.

When it did arrive, it was all very sudden: from gritty L.A. clubs to arenas and international stardom within a year. She met Caffey at an X concert on Christmas night 1980 and (with the original bass player sick) found herself on stage a week later with a band on the verge of big things. Valentine’s prose hits the right tone here: forthcoming but not lurid, forthright but not self-serving. Sustaining the runaway success of the history-making Beauty and the Beat album was a challenge, with the constant touring, publicity ops, tricky business dealings and all the attendant rock-star bacchanalia that temporarily disguised internal problems within the band. Plus, they were up against the feeling that they were never being taken totally seriously. Here is Valentine’s rumination of when the group presented at the American Music Awards in 1982. “It seemed like most of the old guard didn’t get us… I sensed they thought of us as temporaries more than contemporaries, bits of fluff blowing by eternal monuments.”

The band would be on the outs not too long after their third (and in my opinion, best album, 1984’s Talk Show. “One hand’s just reaching out/And one’s just hangin’ on/It seems my weaknesses/Just keep going strong,” sings Belinda Carlisle on the opening track, the aforementioned “Head Over Heels.” Seeking strength thru the recognition of vulnerabilities, Valentine was sure her song would be a hit and show the band’s evolution. She was correct in the first case, but it is unclear how many saw the deeper qualities of this savvy group. They were looked upon as “America’s sweethearts” and “bouncy” and “frothy.” The bassist secretly fumed at the refusal of other band members to loosen up the band’s “static” formulation and to let others sing more, or spread the songwriting royalties around (esp. to their ace drummer Gina Shock, a big reason for their initial success).


The Go-Gos on the Tonight Show with guest host Joan Rivers in 1984. After a performance of current hit “Head Over Heels,” they pile onto the couch for a not-bad interview, but one that still placed extra emphasis on their being “adorable.” Back on stage they perform “Yes or No” a great song that tanked as the new single. There seems to be an effort to mix things up, with Belinda Carlisle sharing the lead vocal with Jane Wieldlin from behind the keyboard and Kathy playing on the drum-riser stairs. For me, lot more charming than the showcase gigs they did at the Greek Theater shortly after (also on YouTube).

The group’s initial split in 1985 was esp. hard on Valentine, who characteristically refrains from bitterness in the retelling. Belinda Carlisle and guitarist Jane Weidlin had solo success, while she became estranged from Charlotte Caffey who had spent the interim in part by kicking her heroin addiction. Kathy had less success with her own musical projects and broke up with longtime boyfriend Clem Burke. It was Caffey who was there for her when the reckoning with her alcoholism (and eventual sobriety) comes at the end of the Eighties. By the early Nineties ordered was restored as the Go-Gos reformed for the first of many successful tours while also releasing a pretty good comeback album, God Bless the Go-Gos, in 2001.

Like a lot of these memoirs, “All I Ever Wanted” pulls up a bit short, ending around the first band reunion, with a short epilogue tacked on. That concludes with an emphatic “Not the end” and indeed Valentine and the Go-Gos continue on, with a possible onelast tour (post-Covid) tour, a Broadway musical to their name and a documentary going into wide release in August. That film will hopefully be a worthy reexamination of this singular but oft-misunderstood band. But Valentine’s engaging book has a leg up on that tale, as well as being a vital retelling of her own wild ride on the rock and roller coaster.

Now available: The complete “I Was a Teenage Proghead” comic book!

 

Comic Book

Postage included (even outside the USA), please provide mailing address in PayPal

$5.00

Spin yourself back down all the days to…
Wilsontown High School, 1974

It was a time when the hair was long and so were the musical attention spans. That fall the mellow vibe of Wilsontown High gets disrupted by a mysterious rich-kid bully. But he makes a “sad” miscalculation when he focuses his grievances on Sean and Paul—two know-it-all aspiring rock critics—and their two new friends: clairvoyant Jane Klancy and kung-fu enthusiast April Underwood. Things are going to get personal in a hurry…

It’s here! The complete 32-page “I Was a Teenage Proghead” is now available in a shiny new standard comic-book format. Text is by me (Rick Ouellette) and artwork is by Brian Bicknell. The recently added 8-page epilogue catches up with the kids in the summer of 1975, a year after the events of Part One.

This project is 100% author-funded. If you would like to support indie, rock ‘n’ roll-inspired comics, you can purchase your own copy (and/or buy one for a friend) for only $5, postage included.

Thanks, Rick Ouellette

“I Was a Teenage Proghead” Part 3

This is final installment, see below the final page to find out how you can obtain a FREE copy of the full 32-page “Proghead” comic book when it comes out in print next month.

Text by Rick Ouellette, Illustrations by Brian Bicknell








This is my first foray into the world of indie comics and the first time in 25 years that I’ve written any fiction! So feedback is important. The first five people who comment with something specific that they either like or dislike about the comic will get a FREE copy of the complete 32-page “Proghead” comic book when it comes out next month. Entries outside the USA are welcome! I will contact you when the time comes for details. This is a print item only. Although I did not post Part Two of this to protect my intellectual property, you can look at Part One by looking for the link below. Thanks, Rick