AC/DC Album by Album (Voyageur Press), by Martin Popoff
Rock music writer Martin Popoff organized a panel of fans as a sounding board for his latest book, AC/DC Album by Album, and as he admits: it’s a boys club. “There are no gals—though oh how we tried to find some.” Perhaps that’s not surprising, given the Australian band’s endless celebration of testosterone and beer. Making things interesting is the book’s conversational feel as Popoff and his panelist mates bat ideas back and forth across a knowledgeable chronicle of one of the world’s most popular hard rock acts.
Depeche Mode: Monument (Akashic Books), by Dennis Burmeister and Sascha Lange
Not sure if I entirely agree with the authors that Depeche Mode “always refused to follow chart trends.” The British synth-pop-rock act was au currant for much of the ‘80s when they set the beat on dance floors worldwide—but yet, yes, they weren’t so much followers as an embodiment of an aspect of those times. And, as Monument duly notes, they have continued to evolve. The massive coffee table book is graphically appealing and well designed, as befits a tribute to a group who were almost as visual at their inception as they were musical. The many photographs are revealing and the writing is in earnest.
Got to Be Something: The Rise of the Minneapolis Sound (University of Minnesota Press), by Andrea Swensson
By “Minneapolis Sound,” Andrea Swensson refers to the music that emerged from Prince and his circle—“funk, rock, new wave, and dance music that had never been combined so potently.” The author, a veteran Twin Cities music critic, hasn’t compiled another encomium to The Artist but, instead, a sound work of popular culture, local history and sociology focused on her area’s African-Americans and their fraught relations with the white city surrounding them. Not unlike Milwaukee, the Twin Cities lost flourishing black neighborhoods to freeway construction and “urban renewal” in the 1960s; riots and unrest followed; school integration projects in the ‘70s led a coterie of young black musicians into Prince’s desegregated aural world. Milwaukee actually gets a mention: Our R&B singer Harvey Scales was popular in Minneapolis in the ‘60s.
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Maestros and Their Music: The Art and Alchemy of Conducting (Alfred A. Knopf), by John Mauceri
Members of rock bands, jazz combos and chamber ensembles nod their heads at each other for direction. As symphony orchestras swelled in size during the 19th century, a different solution was needed. In Maestros and Their Music, Grammy-Tony-Emmy winning conductor John Mauceri describes his job as finding the essence of the music from an array of possible interpretations. No, Beethoven’s Fifth isn’t identical in each performance. The conductor wields a kind of magic—“we control time,” Mauceri writes. A veteran in his field, the author knew Leonard Bernstein, Andre Previn and many of his contemporaries, and has stories to tell about them and their sometimes thorny relations with their orchestras.
