Various Music Related Books

[Misswe]

I work at an antique book store. Recently, I picked up a little book called The New Soundscape-A Handbook For The Modern Music Teacher by R. Murray Schafer. BMI Canada put it out in 1969. It's about the sonic universe and how we perceive what our ears take in. I'm still reading it, it's pretty cool.

 

Another book that I really enjoy is The Shapes Of Our Singing-A Comprehensive Guide To Verse Forms And Metres From Around The World by Robin Skelton. If you write lyrics or just like words, there are some really great examples of how folks in other lands write.

[PopTodd]

I've been searching desperately for a reasonably priced copy of this one:

Eno is a full-on genius in my world, and anything looking to have some sort of insight into the inner workings of his mind, is a must-read. I'm just not willing to pay $100 for a hardcover, or $44 for a used paperback. But the fucking thing is out of print.

Damnit.

What a charmed life Brian Eno leads! Since his wife, Anthea, doubles as his manager, he doesn't have to deal with any of the ordinary hassles of a three-tier career like his - record producer, musician, visual artist. Freed of the burdens of scrutinizing contracts and paying bills, he can devote his energies to creativity, cooking, playing with his two small daughters, shooting the breeze with other artists, and taking short vacations (usually sans famille, and in exotic places) to recharge his batteries.

 

Not that Eno is a slacker, mind - most weekdays he's up and working before dawn. This is just one of the fascinating facts we learn in A Year with Swollen Appendices, which is basically Eno's 1995 diary, unedited and uncensored (save for some intimate marital stuff). Also included are numerous E-mails to buddy Stewart Brand, which are added on a day-by-day basis, plus 120 pages of appendices on the pet theories, obsessions, and projects of Eno's that crop up unelucidated in the journal - axis thinking, for example, or the excellence of screensavers versus the crappiness of CD-ROMs, or Eno's koan system for generative music (music that "grows" itself as fractal variations within certain adjustable parameters), or culture defined as everything humans do that we don't really need to do.

 

Cobbled together, Eno frankly admits, to fulfill a book contract several years overdue, A Year really ought to be irritating. Yet it's an oddly riveting read, not only for its behind-the-scenes glimpses into the various big-deal projects that took up much of Eno's busy 1995 (producing albums by David Bowie and JAMES, working with U2, organizing a record/concert and a fashion show as charity work for Bosnia, directing art installations), but also for its healthy portion of quotidian trivia. In fact it's the trivia that best displays Eno's keen descriptive powers (at a children's party he's startled by an "astonishingly greedy little boy who hardly played but compulsively sat determinedly jamming food into his mouth"). Also engaging is Eno's candor: one night, he lets us know, "I pissed into an empty wine bottle so I could continue watching Monty Python, and suddenly thought 'I've never tasted my own piss,' so I drank a little. It looked just like Orvieto Classico and tasted of nearly nothing." We also learn that Brian rarely gets erections in Ireland, and that some of his sexual fantasies involve plump women ("on the beach watching topless French ladies with huge wobbling sousaphones of bumfat, wishing I could hear them fart").

 

Rigidity of mind is for Eno the least likable thing in the world. The closest thing to bitchiness in an entire year's secret thoughts occurs after a meeting with the Cranberries, who firmly reject Eno's oblique strategies and flexible approaches (the reasons any band wants to be produced by him in the first place): "Dolores has a rather startling clarity of intention about how she wants to record," he notes dryly of the band's obnoxious lead singer. Fanaticism, in pop or in politics, baffles Eno, and struggle and conflict are curiously absent from both his work and his worldview. He mocks the notion of "the glorious struggle of the artist," and remarks of painters like Francis Bacon, "I sort of admire . . . their obvious agony of effort, but it doesn't move me." Politically, Eno seems to align himself with a socially progressive, "kinder" capitalism (long-term planning, improved design) insofar as he participates in the Global Business Network, a future-scenarios development group founded by Brand and Peter Schwartz. His only comment on the life ninety percent of humanity are obliged to lead is uncharacteristically thoughtless: "In New York you often look at people working for an honest minimum wage in mind-numbingly awful jobs and think, 'They are the suckers, the poor suckers.' . . . Why on earth don't they turn to crime?"

 

Rejecting as adolescent the twin passions - romantic desire, underclass ressentiment - that fuel rock rebellion, Eno favors mind-states at once more mature and more childlike: fascination, reverie, awe, sensuous delectation. His great musical innovation, ambient, is closer in spirit to his other interests - food, wine, decor, perfume, gardening, screensavers - than to rock's expressionistic urgency. Clearly representing some kind of model-for-living to Eno are the delighted, open-hearted responses of his daughters, Irial and Darla, to the world. When five-year-old Irial imagines digging through to the other side of the universe and finding a new world there, Eno asks what would be in that world: "God would be there! And bears. Just bears and God."

Any leads?

[Vacant Horizon]

No - it is a new book he has out.

 

The only one of those 33 books I read was about The Band. I didn't like it, so I never finished it.

 

Besides Shakey, and the David Lee Roth book, my favorites books to read are the day by day books, the gear books, or the books written by Martin Popoff.

 

i agree. Shakey is awesome. i really would love to see an updated version of that. at the same time, i would've loved to see more of neil's creative process in that book. and other rock books for that matter. i'm so curious and fascinated by the time between when a song doesn't exist...then it does. what happens there?

[Analogman]

I would be surprised if he ever lets someone get that close again. He did try to stop the dude from publishing the book at one point.

[Moss]

An incredibly entertaining read:

 

He was an angry man. And there is a lot of bile in this book, but a lot of humor, too. I love what he had to say about Mingus and Monk. (Monk was a weirdo, and Mingus was a big, intimidating man.) Some great stories.

 

EDIT:

I need to re-read this.

 

A friend of mine took a class that Quincy Troupe taught at UCSD. He said people still ask him about the part in the book with Charlie Parker in a car with a girl and fried chicken. I chatted with Quincy at a poetry reading but decided not to bring it up. Very nice guy.

[Analogman]

I read this a while back. I am going to buy a copy of it this month.

 

The Monkees: The Day-By-Day Story of the 60s TV Pop Sensation

[DrNo]

 

My favorite music bio, hands down.

[Analogman]

I acquired an e-book version of Tony Iommi's book (Iron Man: My Journey through Heaven and Hell with Black Sabbath) the other day. I think this may be the first rock book I have read on my Nook. I am glad I did not pay for it, because it is not that great.

 

That Monkees book is great by the way. Towards the end it has a lot of information about Michael's early albums.

[Moss]

I bought the Faces book awhile back but have not started it yet.

 

[Plumplechook]

This book by James Young, a one-time keyboard player in Nico's touring band, is the best music-related book I've ever read. Part tragic, part hilarious - but consistently fascinating.

 

[Analogman]

I bought the Faces book awhile back but have not started it yet.

 

That book is great. I learned a lot of stuff I did not know about.

[Oil Can Boyd]

I just finished this (and thought it was pretty good):

 

 

One funny anecdote:

They were playing the early Bonnaroo festivals, when Bonnaroo was a little more focused on jam bands.

Someone shouted out "what does Yo La Tengo mean?"

Ira responded "it's Spanish for Chinacat Sunflower ..."

[PopTodd]

I just finished this (and thought it was pretty good):

 

 

One funny anecdote:

They were playing the early Bonnaroo festivals, when Bonnaroo was a little more focused on jam bands.

Someone shouted out "what does Yo La Tengo mean?"

Ira responded "it's Spanish for Chinacat Sunflower ..."

Quick wit worthy of Groucho.

Excellent!