Book Nook: Music Made Words

Books take longer to consume than records, so I find it hard to be as up to the moment with my reading as I am with my listening. But I'm always reading and most of that is (shocker) music books. Here are a few notable books on music from recent years.

Laurie Anderson’s Big Science by S. Alexander Reed (2021) It was over 40 years ago that I first became aware of Laurie Anderson, introduced by a double-page spread in Life Magazine’s The Year In Pictures. There she was, spiky-haired and playing a violin with a magnetic tape bow. Mike Tyson was a page or two over, shot from the back to emphasize his impossibly thick neck. But it was Anderson who intrigued me, having already developed an interest in avant garde music. Oddly enough, however, when people around me were going nuts over her 1982 debut album, Big Science, it kept me at arms length. Maybe the possibilities the photo had set whirling in my mind were too different from what I was hearing to be reconciled. I kept up with her over the years, though, intrigued by her collaboration with William S. Burroughs and later charmed by her relationship with Lou Reed. But it wasn’t until Landfall, her 2017 album with the Kronos Quartet, that I truly fell in love with one of her pieces.

Big Science still loomed, however, so when Reed’s book showed up, I welcomed the opportunity to take a deeper dive into its background and creation. This handsome little book is the 15th in Oxford’s Keynotes series, and only the second to take on a work of the second half of the 20th century, following John T. Lysaker’s 2018 book on Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music For Airports. It’s also the third book for Reed, following Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music and an entry in the 33 1/3 series on They Might Be Giants. And while Reed, a professor at Ithaca College, occasionally writes like the academic he is, the book is mostly a fizzy read, with his excitement about following Anderson’s trail of creativity coming through loud and clear. He also doesn’t shy away from musicological dissection when it seems useful, but always provides a way in for the uninitiated, using musical examples that almost everyone will know.

I was especially taken with his brilliance in setting up a structure that takes into account the album’s creation in the past and how it exists now. I’ll let him explain: 

“Foremost, I'm interested in the circa 1980 creation of these songs: "now" in the sense of chronos, or historical sequence. How did their concept, text, and music develop, and in dialogue with what real-world artifacts and events?…Second, I also describe what it's like to inhabit a private listening encounter, marking time not by dates and eras but from second to second: "now" in the sense of kairos, or experiential action. Third, I ask without nostalgia how Big Science resonates now in the twenty-first century, acknowledging in the book’s final chapter what some have heard as an eerie prescience in the record.” (Reed, Page 3)

This is a paradigmatic way to approach a work of the past and will be a great guide next time I revisit a classic album.

As for this classic album, Reed’s three-dimensional excavation and explication of the musical and conceptual components of every song, made the end result - when it works - even more impressive. There are still a couple of duff tracks - Sweaters, for one - that no amount of advocacy will rescue, but I find myself more immersed when listening to the songs I do like. Reed also gives Anderson her due as an extraordinarily brave, intelligent, and original artist in three mind-expanding chapters on her relationships with the musical context of the time (“New Music Versus New Wave”), sexuality and gender, and politics. People often bemoan the lack of liner notes in the streaming era. Reed’s book makes up for that lack - and then some - for an album that is a nearly bottomless well of fascination.

Ted Gioia - Music: A Subversive History (2019) Near the end of this enthralling, game-changing book, Gioia notes:

"...every major music genre today echoes, at least in part, some of the imperatives of prehistoric song. The rock star evokes the scapegoat from ancient rituals of symbolic violence. The country artist re-creates the pastoral strains of the herders, who relied on music to soothe domesticated animals, and celebrates the stable life of home and hearth. The hip-hopper returns to the monophonic chant that served to unite the first human communities, the oldest 'hoods of them all. The pop star draws an audience with erotic stylings and dance moves that remind us of the fertility rituals that gave birth to the love song." (Gioia, Page 450)

If any of that sounds farfetched to you, you desperately need to read this book. If it sounds like something you almost take for granted but don't understand why, you also need to read this book. Each one of those examples is based on broad research, and spectacularly synthesized into a text that informs you even as it excites you. Gioia goes DEEP, looking beyond and away from musicology to explore the transformative power of song, from the use of chants to scare away alpha predators from prey so human's could feed themselves to the ongoing threats to those in power from the artists engaged in a long line of "permanent revolution," such as Pussy Riot, those punk rock thorns in Putin's side. 

A key point he makes over and over again is that musical innovation almost always comes from where you least expect it - the oppressed, the poor, the marginalized - a trope that goes back to the earliest civilizations. Perhaps even more importantly, he notes that when rulers make claims about musical innovations they brought about, we need to "study these powerful figures in musical history, not for what they did, but for what they hid." That last quote come Gioia's Epilogue: This Is Not A Manifesto, 40 statements about music and its role in life and society. He describes them as precepts that forced him to "alter his beliefs" as he was researching and writing. Reading Music not only altered some of my beliefs but helped me to reposition my relationship to music, narrowing down for me what is of core importance in the music I love, and for that I am immensely grateful to Gioia. 

Alan Niester - Beyond The Printed Page: The Life And Times Of A Big Time Rock Critic (2014) The title for this often hilarious book is slightly misleading. While the first 50 pages or so detail, in his wry and witty style, his upbringing and the winding path he took to becoming a music journalist, the next 250 comprise reprints of concert reviews from Niester's time as a critic at the Toronto Globe And Mail. Not that there's anything wrong with that - and the reviews have more personality than most memoirs - but I wouldn't have minded a bit more "life" along with the "times," especially since he's got killer anecdotes, like the time he rode a bicycle from Niagara Falls, Ontario to downtown Buffalo for a concert, or playing in a garage band with future Bowie/Iggy axe-man Stacey Heydon, or nearly starting a race riot with a very drunk Lester Bangs. Lord knows what tales are still in the vault! 

The live reviews, however, constitute a fascinating, and often very funny, chronicle of the state of rock and pop from the Ramones in 1978 ("an explosion of torn jeans, aging black leather, and cultivated acne") to Jeff Mangum in 2011 ("intense but casual"). In between you get upstarts struggling to establish themselves, like U2 in 1980 ("one of the most vital and interesting new bands I've seen in the past few years"), to hall-of-famers struggling to live up to their past, like Carole King in 2005 ("She has developed a noticeable Rod Stewart rasp, most evident in the high notes and higher volumes"). Every review is a breeze to read and never less than interesting, and a few are all-time classics, such as Niester's snarky but evenhanded response to the Jonas Brothers in 2009, which he structures like a report card, grading them lowest on their lyrics: 

"English - D. Sadly, the boys' lyrics are cliché-ridden and banal, and filled with grammatical mistakes. For example, in the song World War III, they insisted they didn't want to fight "wit chyou" (sic). In Poison Ivy (not the Coasters' classic) they claimed that "Everybody needs some Poison Ivy." This is clearly wrong." (Niester, Page 299)

I look forward to having Niester's book on hand when needing to refer to a real-time reaction to a legendary band, say when writing an anniversary review. I will make sure to correct any typos, which are rife in the book, when quoting him, however. In the end, while his true love is prog-rock (he finally convinced me to listen to Wishbone Ash - the guitars are indeed great), he brings a broad knowledge and love of the music to everything he reviews, providing a fine example for critics everywhere and a fun read for everyone else.

Paul McCartney - The Lyrics: 1956 to Present (Edited with an Introduction by Paul Muldoon) (2021) This is a sly book in so many ways. From the start, Sir Paul admits he will never write a memoir but he’s happy to go song by song and talk about the process and context behind them and let something of himself take shape in your mind. Then there’s the fact that the first thing 90 percent of people will think when hearing his name is an endless spool of melody, then his fantastically versatile voice (at least in its prime), then his remarkable skill as a multi-instrumentalist. Lyrics could be dead last, although he has certainly crafted some gems, whether Blackbird, Dear Friend, Eleanor Rigby, For No One, or She’s Leaving Home, which are marvels of compressed emotion and/or narrative.

You’ll note that my little list of songs is alphabetical, which hints at my only real frustration with the book. Rather than progress through his songwriting chronologically, which would allow you to see his skills develop, from the “pronoun songs” of the early Beatles to the more allusive and surrealist stuff that came later, we are led alphabetically. Ordering them this way could also be his bid to reduce the distance between his achievement as a Beatle and his solo years, to which I say: Nice try. Moreover, putting things chronologically would also allow him to build on stories, such as the "Nerk Twins" Paris trip of 1961, or The Beatles in India, rather than just have them crop up here and there as fits the song under discussion. I suspect it's all in the game of one of the world's most famous people holding on to a shred of his privacy. 

That's not so say that The Lyrics isn't a revealing book. It's satisfying to read that even he his baffled by The Beatles' shocking trajectory, as when he says when talking about Eleanor Rigby: “To this very day, it still is a complete mystery to me that it happened at all...All these small coincidences had to happen to make The Beatles happen, and it does feel like some kind of magic. It’s one of the wonderful lessons about saying yes when life presents these opportunities to you. You never know where they could lead.” In the entry for Carry That Weight, he describes the business meetings as The Beatles headed to dissolution as "soul-destroying" - and you feel his pain at friendships and collaborations being ripped apart. He also goes deeper on his complicated relationship with that most complex of characters, John Lennon.

Naturally, there are plenty of instructive tidbits about his approach to songwriting, as when he remarks about Come And Get It, which he wrote for Badfinger: “But I was trying to write a hit, so I didn’t want anything too complicated.” He is also not shy about his bossy side, describing how he told the band not to change a thing from his demo (which he recorded in 15 minutes) rather than trying to "interpret" his song. Bossy, but 100 percent right as proven by the song's chart success.

He also drills down a little on his attraction to the ordinary, which stems from the working class roots he continues to stay in touch with, even with his fabulous wealth. In the section on Café On The Left Bank, he notes: 

"I'm actually quite a fan of 'ordinary'. I hope in many ways it defines me, and so also many of the songs I've written. Don't get me wrong; I like extraordinary people and things, but if people can be great and ordinary at the same time, that to me is kind of special. So my Liverpool family - my parents, all the aunties and uncles - they were great and ordinary, and I think the fact that this combination can be easily dismissed makes it even more special. So many people would dismiss my Liverpool family, but they're actually a lot smarter than the likes of Maggie Thatcher, say. Their attitude to life was not as uptight as many people I've encountered since. They were always up for a song around the pub piano, for example. So you can choose to be highly sophisticated but very uptight, or you can be not so sophisticated but at peace with yourself. I try and be a bit of a mixture, and I draw very strongly on that ordinariness."

One thing that is decidedly not ordinary is the physical heft and beauty of The Lyrics, which comes as two splendidly illustrated volumes in a handsome green slipcase. The photographs, may of them unfamiliar to me, are only surpassed by the artifacts, whether handwritten lyrics or drawings (many of which are quite good - another talent!), which make the books a joy just to flip through. Speaking of heft, the 858-page book only contains lyrics for 156 songs out of the 500 or so Sir Paul has written or co-written. Not only does that give you an idea of how much additional material is contained within, it also lets you know that songs were selected based on what McCartney wanted to get across. So Why Don't We Do It In The Road is here, giving him an opportunity to talk about the primal urge to procreate, while a late-career near masterpiece like Riding To Vanity Fair is left out - perhaps its still too soon to talk about what led to that dark-hued number. 

But as Paul himself says when talking about the line "Spending someone's hard-earned pay" in Two Of Us: "I don't know where that came from or what it means. I don't necessarily want meaning. I don't root for meaning all the time. Sometimes it just feels right." And this book, on the whole, feels very right. Make room on your groaning shelf of Beatles books for one more!

You may also enjoy:
Getting Back To Let It Be
Not The Price But The Cost
The Book Of Fab
The Beatles Thing
Overdosed On Pleasure: The Book Of Nilsson

Not The Price But The Cost

Lloyd Price, the untold story.

In 1969, 17 years after his first million seller, Lloyd Price nearly cracked the R&B Top 20 with the funky social criticism of Bad Conditions. "Psychedelic age on campus grounds/Tear gas, billy clubs and vicious hounds/People making promises that they can't keep/System's turning over for its final sleep/We're living in bad conditions!" That's a long way from Lawdy Miss Clawdy. It's also quite an accomplishment for a founding father of rock and roll to so successfully insert himself into late 60's culture. 

Lloyd Price NOW!, the album that contains Bad Conditions, also delivers credible takes on Light My Fire, Hey Jude, By The Time I Get To Phoenix, For Once In My Life, and other songs. It's a solid album, with Price in fine, soulful voice, but you won't hear a word about it in sumdumhonky, Price's new memoir. Except for a picture caption, you also won't hear a thing about how he ended up working with Don King to produce the notorious Rumble In The Jungle, or about how one of his labels released early sides by Wilson Pickett.

What you will hear a lot - and I mean A LOT - about is Price's disturbing and disgusting experiences with racism in the Jim Crow south. Growing up in Kenner, LA in the 1930's was a profoundly demoralizing experience for anyone of a darker tone, ruled as they were by all the iterations of "sumdumhonky" you can imagine, and some you likely can't. Casting a long shadow over Price's childhood was Ol' Jake, the barely literate local lawman. His idea of a good time was to hang around the railroad tracks with his friends, lying in wait for Price and other kids. "They'd stand to block our path and laugh their asses off. We were scared half to death because we didn't know what they might do next," Price writes in Who Feared Whom, the first chapter. "Sometimes they'd grab one of our hands and hold it to their ass and laugh while they farted on it and scream, "Boy, spot that!" This is what they called having fun: scaring little boys who were just eight and nine years old."

This is obviously horrendous and, along with cross-burning and lynching, forms a background which would be a challenge for the strongest among men to overcome. As Price puts it: "As we grow older we tend to let our minds review our souls and sometimes we are amazed at ourselves - and the things our hearts have withstood. As I see it now, the white man of my younger days was a master sociologist - and a brutal one at that - because he knew how to downplay a black man's pride, not taking account of the fact that we had limited opportunities." 

But overcome it Price did, following his desire to make music and also help support his family in the wake of his father's workplace injury. Of course, becoming a national celebrity with Lawdy Miss Clawdy at the age of 17 came with its own challenges, some of them the usual music biz tales of woe, some of them due to becoming a prominent black man in an America that rejected the very notion. Also, there's the fact that his music had a way of bringing black and white kids together on the dance floor in a society where race-mixing just wasn't done. Understand, Lawdy hit in 1952, which puts Price on the leading edge of both the rock and roll and civil rights revolutions.

But what of the music? Where did it come from and what were the roots of Price's creativity? Besides a few paragraphs here and there, we get precious little about it. We also don't hear much about trying to stay relevant in the rapidly changing world of pop culture - no thoughts on the British Invasion, the rise of James Brown and funk, not to mention disco and hip hop. While he does have some interesting things to say about being placed in the "oldie but goodie" ghetto, he spends more time asking questions with no answers like "Can you imagine an entire race of people who are afraid that God didn't like black people?"

Don't get me wrong - the tales of late-night drives through Mississippi in a brand new Cadillac or of bribing his way into Nigeria only to find "people, black people, peeing and pooping on the road" - range from harrowing to hilarious and are written vividly. But I ultimately found sumdumhonky to be an unsatisfying read. I couldn't help but feel that Ol' Jake might have won the day after all. To my mind, this makes Price's experience of racism even more tragic. It also makes sumdumhonky an important but deeply flawed book.

When I got sumdumhonky, I turned first to the pictures. Great shots abound - the trip to Hollywood for the 1953 Cash Box awards, getting down in a huge-collared jumpsuit in 1968, receiving an honorary doctorate in 2001. When I looked back at the photos after finishing the book, I was struck by the chasm between the story they told and the one the words depicted. Perhaps a good, tough editor or co-writer could have helped bring the two closer together.

One gift the book gave me was the discovery of Price's later music. Perhaps you'll enjoy it, too - here's a quick mix.

The Book Of Fab

They were the Japage 3 (detail of a photo by Jürgen Vollmer)

My wife and I are big fans of The Compleat Beatles, the 1982 documentary that chronicles the story of the Fab Four from beginning to end in a scant 119 minutes. Consistently entertaining, the movie perfectly captures the wonderful arc of their fascinating and incredible journey in a way as satisfying as great fiction. When the Anthology series came out, we relished all the new details along with the astonishing footage and wonderful unheard music, but we missed the concision that made the earlier film so much fun.

So when I heard about Mark Lewisohn's All These Years project, which is to be a three volume history of the boys from Liverpool, with the first book, Tune In, weighing in at nearly 1,000 pages, I was slightly unsure whether it was all too much. Would this be a trainspotters account, full of dull facts and inane arcana that add nothing to a tale already well-told elsewhere? Since it was Lewisohn, I had to see for myself. After all, he wrote The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, which is one of my favorite books about them, along with several other books that contribute to his reputation as a thorough researcher and lively writer who tells it as it was, without hagiography.

I'm pleased to report that Tune In is an unequivocal delight, a thrilling Dickensian epic page-turner that will without question go down as the definitive book on the subject. As each chapter went by, as the unlikely twists and turns continued to accrue, I continually asked myself How is this ever going to work? How are these dead-end kids (and in Ringo's case almost really dead - the doctors told his mother three times he wouldn't survive the night after he was struck down with peritonitis at the age of six) ever going to become The Beatles? And even when they do become The Beatles, how are they going to become any good? And when they do become good, how are they going to get from Love Me Do to Love You To - and beyond?

I still don't know how Lewisohn answers that last question as Tune In ends on the eve of the recording session for their first album. But let me tell you, even though I sort of know the end of the story, the suspense is killing me. So how does Lewisohn pull off this feat of legerdemain? Part of the answer lies in the notes at the back of the book, which lay bare the incredible synthesis of primary source material, prveviously published works and original interviews that it took for him to arrive at his engaging narrative. Another one of his secrets was "spending six hectic months" in Liverpool, which lends an unmatchable atmosphere to the book.

As an example, read how he describes the epochal moment in 1961when Brian Epstein made the journey from his Nems music store to the Cavern Club to see what all the fuss was about:

"The club was just a two-hundred-step walk from Nems, but November 9 was one of those smoggy, cold early-winter days in Liverpool, so damp that smuts glued to skin, so dark that the sooty buildings lost detail and car headlights couldn't put it back. Flights were canceled at the airport and foghorns groaned over the Mersey sound: the cawing seagulls and booming one o'clock cannon. The businessmen [Epstein and his assistant Alistair Taylor] picked a path through narrow Mathew Street, between Fruit Exchange lorries and their debris, and at number 10 Paddy Delaney showed them along the dimly lit passage and down the greasy steps."

This is how it's done, and it's just one of many, many moments that he expertly brings to life. Another thing that makes the book essential is how those twists and turns end up straightening out the story by adding the missing steps, such as the role of music-plugger Kim Bennett, whose persistence and vision kept The Beatles chance of getting a recording contract alive when Brian Epstein was meeting brick walls at every turn.

Lewisohn's solid musical sense further informs his writing, detailing the entire context of the milieu of the early Beatles, from influences to competition, and includes a clear-eyed look at their own burgeoning talents. Trust me, when he calls a tape of jam sessions featuring John, Paul and Stu "inexplicably, a horror," he's dead on. And if you've ever read Mick Jagger's assertion that the Stones were Willie Dixon and The Beatles were Luther Dixon, that will all become clear here.

Tune In will also give you an endless supply of anecdotes for conversation such as the pure gold of the time when Stu Sutcliffe sold half a painting for enough money that John was able to convince him to blow some of it on purchasing a bass guitar and amplifier. This was something no one else had been willing to do up to that point, and became a crucial step in their evolution. Why only half a painting? Well, it was heavy, painted on two boards, and after carrying one part of it, Stu and his friend Rod Murray just got distracted on the way to collect the other half...

Read it - and then join me in the wait for volume two.

 

I'm With The Swarm: Bug Music

One doesn't have to look too deeply into the effect of the African diaspora on music to start hearing about noise and distortion. The earliest musicians among the pygmy tribes had various ways of making parts of their instruments buzz and hum sympathetically, sounds that American musicians emulated by turning up their guitars, sticking a pencil in the speaker, or stepping on a distortion pedal. Of course, that was centuries after European culture attempted to eliminate noise from music. I may have first read about the connection between say, Link Wray's Rumble and Ghanian sounds in African Music, the essential text by the late Francis Bebey. But not even Bebey probed into why this might be, why humans seem attracted to scratchy buzzy sounds. In his hugely entertaining and deeply thoughtful Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm And Noise, David Rothenberg makes a bold attempt to figure it all out, and much else besides.

One big surprise in reading Bug Music is to learn that this hardly the first writing about the intersection between the music of arthropods and humans. Rothenberg's bibliography includes books dating back nearly 100 years and among the many poems he quotes is one by Anacreon from the first century B.C. However, this is probably the first time a musician has led the charge. Rothenberg plays sax with cicadas, speaks knowledgeably about music of all genres and eras - from Desprez to Deadmau5 - and has even provided a soundtrack to the book in the form of original music and a playlist of insect-influenced sounds.

Since he is not strictly a scientist, he is free to make all sorts of imaginative leaps. In Chapter Three, What Makes Them Dance, he starts a discussion of polyrhythms and repetition with this paragraph:
"Going along with the beat, but not quite on the beat. Don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. The perfect appeal of uneven evenness. Nature not Platonic but just slightly off. We find our way into reality by delving deep into the buzz, by charting the noise, mapping the chaos. Our world is not perfect, and was never meant to be. Once we recognize that, hear music in the fuzziness, only then are we halfway home."

This leads to a brief overview of grooves and polyrhythms and then to the work of primate specialist Björn Merker, who has pointed out that the species that shares 99 percent of our genes (the ape) shows little interest in making music, dancing to rhythms, or joining together in synchronized activities. We obviously do, and such things have likely contributed to our success on the earth, so where did it come from? A strong possibility is the insects, who, after all, have led the way in the development of societies. So while entrenched devoteés of European music may bemoan the buzzing, noisy beat music that has taken over the world, there is likely no stopping it. They should let an enthusiast like Rothenberg show them the way.

Reading this delightful, inspiring book will not only give you a new appreciation for the sounds of a summer night, but also a deeper understanding of the sounds on the radio - tune in.

P.S.: You can find Bug Music: The CD on Spotify and I also created a playlist of many of the songs he talks about, along with a couple of my own additions.

Overdosed On Pleasure: The Book of Nilsson

Biography Schmiography

"Neither of us could stop laughing, and finally I said, 'I can't take any more pleasure, John. I can't take any more pleasure. Stop! It's gotta stop!'" That's John as in Lennon, of course, being yelled at by Harry Nilsson in one of the haunting episodes in Alyn Shipton's fine - and necessary - new biography, Nilsson: The Life of a Singer-Songwriter. Nilsson and Lennon were in the midst of their famous "lost weekend" and were in the second continuous day of dropping acid and getting up to no good with two young women. This outrageous escapade began when Lennon said to Nilsson, "I'd love to get some girls and some acid and fuck'em," and Nilsson responded by saying he could get it done with one phone call. And he did.

Something about the gluttony described in that story, which Shipton gleaned from Nilsson's unfinished autobiography (a major source of information in the book), resonates with many of the themes in Harry's life and music. Even from his first album proper, Pandemonium Shadow Show, Nilsson was loading on piles of horns, strings, carnival barkers - everything AND the kitchen sink seemed to be the operating principle - enough that even when he's at his best you might find yourself saying "Stop! It's gotta stop." But he was so unique that you'll go back for more in fairly short order.

One doesn't need to be a psychologist (or even a pop-psychologist) to figure that Nilsson's need for surfeit, and ability to provide it, came from the gaping emotional wound left behind when his father abandoned him, an act compounded by his mother's lies about why he had gone. The final blow came when Harry later learned that for part of his childhood his father was nearby and was uninterested in seeing his son. Shipton deals with Nilsson's early life with brisk efficiency in the first chapter which ends as he is recording his earliest demos in 1962. By then he had a respectable job in a bank, showing an early aptitude for the computers that financial institutions were adopting at the time. However, he had already lived a couple of lifetimes at that point: born in Brooklyn, he criss-crossed the country both with his mother and sister and without, played high school baseball with Carl Yastrzemski, knocked over a liquor store to put food on his mother's table - practically the only thing he didn't do for his first 17 years was make music.

Even after he started it still took several years for his career to take off, but when it did it was obvious that a serious talent had arrived. From the beginning, RCA marketed him as "The True One," and even before his smash hit Nilsson Schmilsson album (his seventh for RCA) he had attracted the attention, and eventual friendship, of all four Beatles, had songs covered by everyone from Astrud Gilberto to Glen Campbell, worked on prestige projects such as John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (winning a Grammy for Everybody's Talkin') and Otto Preminger's Skidoo, and created a nationally televised animated special called The Point. By any lights, he was in the midst of an extremely interesting and richly musical mid-level career. "Mid-level" because, despite all his successes, RCA was not really making back their investment on his albums.

Enter Richard Perry, one of a swinging new breed of record producer, with whom Nilsson decided it was time to "'...do some rock and roll and get down." The resulting concoction was Nilsson Schmillson, an album I have dubbed "the white Thriller," both for its quantity of hit songs and its variety of material, which offers something for everybody - and every radio format. It went gold in a matter of months, earned him another Grammy, and has stood the test of time as one of the most enduring classics of the 1970's. The million-selling status of Nilsson Schmilsson may be unique in the annals of rock when you consider that it was achieved without any touring or live performances to speak of. However, it also sowed the seeds for Nilsson's personal and professional destruction, a transition which was stunningly rapid and which Shipton delineates in detailed reportage, with rueful affection but no judgement or sensationalism.

It's hard to imagine the deep feeling of worthlessness that must have fueled Harry's descent into a life of monstrous excess. Since he was joined in his descent by such fellow travelers as Lennon, Ringo, and Keith Moon, there is some entertainment value in the wild tales but it can make for painful reading when you consider the cost to Nilsson's music. Fortunately, Shipton is clear-eyed in his assessment of the patchy years that followed Nilsson Schmillson. The casual listener will likely be unaware of at least five of the seven albums (not including the somewhat bizarre soundtrack to Robert Altman's Popeye) Harry made from 1972 to 1980 - his last album wasn't even released in the U.S. But each one has something to offer and, with Shipton's guidance, I've assembled some of the tracks worthy of reconsideration in a Spotify playlist called Later, Harry. If you want to go all in, The RCA Albums Collection has everything he recorded for the label including many rarities and unreleased material.

One of the most remarkable parts of this remarkable story is Nilsson's third marriage to Una O'Keefe, who he met by chance in NYC when she was a nineteen-year-old on a student visa from Ireland and waitressing at Rumpelmayer's. After waiting for her to finish college, they married and went on to have five children. She stuck with him to the end, and it gives the reader comfort to know there was someone who cared for him unconditionally. Like Una, we have to accept the good Nilsson and the bad, and Shipton's book, along with the must-see documentary Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him)?, gives us the definitive take on an American original. So, put the lime in the coconut and read it all up.

P.S. Part of the fun of reading the book is running to YouTube to confirm that some of the crazy stories are really true, like the tale of the $5,000 TV commercial:

The Book Of Hook

Art is often the expression of the ineffable, and no art form is this more true of than music. Why does a chord sequence or a melody have the power to elicit an emotional response? Why does rhythm make our bodies move? Why do the lyrics of often very young people continue to illuminate our lives? You can analyze and deconstruct to your heart's content, but sometimes it's best to let mysteries remain mysteries. Of course, that doesn't stop us writers from finding something to say about anything that catches our attention.
And these days, it doesn't stop musicians from writing books about themselves and their music, exposing the inner workings of that which we fans hold so precious. I have avoided some of these books, either because they seem self-serving or because as I just don't want to know too much.
When I heard about Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division by their bass player Peter Hook, I was going to put it in the category of books to avoid. I still find something fragile in their short career, and in Ian Curtis's short life, for one thing, and for another, Hook sometimes seems to be a right bastard in interviews. On further reflection, it was precisely for the latter reason (and an interview with Hook on WNYC's Soundcheck) that I decided to read it. I figured Hook's ability to be unvarnished and even unflattering about himself meant he could be trusted.
Also, Joy Division's music is so intertwined in my very soul that nothing could change my fundamental relationship with it. I can still remember buying my beautiful ruby red vinyl copy of Closer, which was easier to find than the first album, and being instantly captivated. We all were, and even though Ian Curtis's suicide stopped their career in its tracks, it didn't freeze the music in amber: in the world it continued to grow in stature, and in my own life it has grown with me to become one standard by which all music is judged.
Whether it was wisdom or emotion that led Peter Hook to wait more than 30 years before writing this book, there is no doubt that the distance of time is to its benefit. His point of view is disarmingly clear and his recollections ring true throughout. His love and admiration for Joy Division's musical achievement is never in doubt and there is a sense that even though he was a participant he is not entirely sure how he and his rambunctious friends created it. He can describe it, but he can't unravel it.
While Unknown Pleasures is not overtly literary, it is well organized and does not fall prey to the breathless "and then this, and then that" structure of many "as told to" books. Hook also knows how to build drama and excitement as the scrappy group originally known as Warsaw works their way up the music scene in Manchester, to London and beyond. It was a fecund time and place and he does a great job conveying the sense of possibilities and how he and his compatriots in Joy Division, and at Factory, their label, made it all up as they went along.
Hook never puts Curtis on a pedestal, but he does recognize his extraordinary talent, which went beyond just singing and writing lyrics. In one telling passage, he describes the essential role Curtis played in the songwriting process: "...he had that ear - he thought like a musician. The way it worked was that he'd listen to us jamming, and then direct the song until it was...a song. He stood there like a conductor and picked out the best bits." He is also unhesitating in his praise and respect for the other band members, guitarist and keyboard player Bernard Sumner and drummer Stephen Morris. He never loses sight of their originality and growing musical prowess. Admirably, even though his relations with them are currently at a low ebb, he never indulges in gratuitous character assassination. The fact that Sumner comes off as essentially a cold and self-involved person seems based in fact rather than hurt feelings. Hook, who lists Closer as one of his top five albums, doesn't let personalities stand in the way of the pleasure of the music itself and nor should we.
The structure of the book is well-balanced between the nuts and bolts of the music itself, the work that went into making it and the often-entertaining antics of the players involved. The fact that these were basically kids acting the way most young rock musicians act also takes nothing away from the indomitable quality of Joy Division's music. The timelines and track by track analyses break up the narrative nicely, with the latter especially being worth the price of admission. His recognition of the greatness of Joy Division's music is not bound up in his ego; he recognizes that they were a fast developing but very young band. I am in full agreement with him that Closer is the stronger of their two albums (although not by much) and that there were still opportunities for growth.
As someone who is not a fan of New Order, I will always feel that those opportunities were wasted. I'm probably not alone in that - Hook himself might agree, but we'll have to wait for his book on his second career to find out. Based on the musical erudition, emotional connection and engaging personality on display in Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division, I just might pick up Hook's next volume.