Lives in Music, Stories from Anthrax to Wagner

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Access All Areas: Stories from a Hard Rock Life (Da Capo), by Scott Ian

Two of the ZZ Top boys sported exaggerated cowboy beards. Not to be outdone, Anthrax’s Scott Ian grew uber hipster whiskers dropping from his chin to his ribs. The instantly recognizable guitarist and cofounder of the pioneering thrash-metal band hasn’t forgotten what it’s like to be a fan even though he’s long been a star. Anything but a career chronicle, Access All Areas is—as its subtitle promises—a collection of stories, many of them memories of bands he loved as a kid (Kiss ranks number one) or of meeting his heroes (Black Sabbath). Access All Areas includes the requisite road warrior tales, including his strangest and dullest experiences while on tour.

Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 (Penguin Press), by Ryan H. Walsh

In 1968 Van Morrison sojourned in Boston, where he performed the songs that became an album acclaimed by many as one of the greatest ever released in the medium of rock music, Astral Weeks. Musician-journalist-Bostonian Ryan H. Walsh explains Morrison’s presence in the city as part of his escape from the mobbed-up contract he signed with the aptly named Bang Records. He gathers stories from Bostonians who knew Morrison, including singer Peter Wolf. Mostly, Astral Weeks examines Boston in ’68, its thriving (and briefly hyped) psychedelic scene and a countercultural “family” numbering artists, musicians and children of wealth that devolved into a dangerous acid-driven cult. It’s a fascinating story of how the unbuttoned ‘60s came to a city that preferred to stay buttoned up.

Being Wagner: The Story of the Most Provocative Composer Who Ever Lived (Vintage), by Simon Callow

Richard Wagner was in some ways the prototype of the postmodern DIY artist. As actor-theater director-author Simon Callow stresses in his entertaining summation, Being Wagner, he “took matters into his own hands from almost the beginning” by composing innovative operas without commissions and reinventing the form he worked within. He was also notoriously prone to the prejudices of his age, including Romantic nationalism and anti-Semitism. Hitler was a fan. Callow’s witty account paints a picture of a vituperative man who personified thoughtless energy. His music “remains as restless, unsettling, destructive, sublime and dynamic as it ever was.”

The Ghetto Swinger: A Berlin Jazz-Legend Remembers (Doppel House Press), by Coco Schumann

A teenager in Nazi Germany, Coco Schumann was half Jewish and played music the Nazis deemed as racially degenerate. He traveled Berlin’s half-concealed swing scene anyway, wearing his yellow star in his pocket instead of on his coat. Eventually he was betrayed. He survived.

The jazz guitarist’s memoir is unusually interesting amidst the plethora of self-serving musician autobiographies. Schumann has a better story to tell than any pop star involving survival under the hardest conditions, the value of well-placed friends and the vagaries of fortune as well as the impulse to create. The Ghetto Swinger is a rare glimpse into the persistence of nightlife in Berlin (once a wide-open city) under the Nazis. At Theresienstadt, the ostensibly model concentration camp, Schumann entertained the SS guards with his music like his life depended on it—and it did!

Afterward, the plucky Schumann found work in a devastated country eager for diversion. Although he was Jewish, moving to Palestine didn’t occur to him, and despite his love for American music, he stayed on and became one of Germany’s top jazzmen, playing with Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie.

Girl from the North Country (Theatre Communications Group), by Conor McPherson and Bob Dylan

In a Duluth, MN boardinghouse in the cold Depression winter of 1934, a Bible-selling preacher and a down-and-out boxer turn up at the door. The house is kept by a troubled family—the father is sinking into debt and the mother into dementia while their daughter is pregnant and without prospects for a husband. Somehow or other, Irish playwright Conor McPherson was inspired to pen a two-act play, Girl from the North Country, from the oeuvre of Bob Dylan. The dialogue is wrapped around 17 diverse Dylan songs, including “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Slow Train.” In the introduction, McPherson is proud to say that his project has Dylan’s imprimatur.

Pioneers of the Blues Revival, Expanded Second Edition (University of Illinois Press), by Steve Cushing

Despite what Barry Lee Pearson writes in his introduction, the “blues revival” of the 1950s and ‘60s is a legitimate term describing the audience and aesthetic shifts that occurred as the blues was abandoned by young black Americans left the blues for R&B and soul and embraced by a white intelligentsia through whose influence the blues would vitalize ‘60s rock. Fortunately, the bulk of Pioneers of the Blues Revival belongs to Steve Cushing, host of the long-running radio show “Blues Before Sunrise” and a peerless interviewer. The expanded new edition includes 19 lengthy interviews with leading pioneers of that revival. Most of them were youthful enthusiasts—many British—whose amateur ethno-musicology chronicled the early history of blues, located many forgotten players and helped expose the music to a wider world.