Bob Dylan has often been reclusive, but when he talks, he is usually provocative or at least interesting. As editor Jeff Burger points out in Dylan on Dylan: Interviews and Encounters (Chicago Review Press), Dylan has been consistently critical of reporters and critics, accusing them of shoehorning reality (and his words) into their own tightly boxed preconceptions. “But his complaints haven’t stopped him from talking,” Burger writes.
A collection of interviews and press conference responses arrange chronologically from 1961 through his Nobel Prize speech (read by the U.S. ambassador to Sweden at a private function in Stockholm). Many statements collected in Dylan on Dylan are disingenuous, especially the self-mythologizing of his early years. In many interviews he threw questions he considered inane back at the interviewer. Refusing to be trapped, he played cerebral Ping-Pong with his interrogators and loved contradicting commonplace ideas. “Colleges are like old-age homes,” he told Playboy, “except for the fact that more people die in colleges than in old-age homes.”
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100 Things Pearl Jam Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die (Triumph), by Greg Prato
Pearl Jam managed to become one of the most commercially successful bands of the ‘90s with a resolutely anti-commercial approach. They refused to release as singles those songs that could have been hits and abstained from videos when MTV was dominant in the music industry. Veteran writer Greg Prato approaches 100 Things Pearl Jam Fans Should Know as an unabashed fan of the band and the grunge scene they represented after Kurt Cobain’s death. The music was “organic and natural,” made by “people who could have been your friends.” Prato assembles a chronicle of the musicians who brought ‘70s metal and ‘80s punk together in the music that defined alternative in the ‘90s.
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A Spy in the House of Loud: New York Songs and Stories (University of Texas Press), by Chris Stamey
Anyone in New York in the 1970s-‘80s will recognize Chris Stamey’s picture of the city. In that pre-earbud era, “music leaked in everywhere”—from doorways, open windows, passing pedestrians with boom boxes and—of course—the clubs. Stamey was on hand for the birth of CBGB’s punk milieu but made his name in the thriving music scene of his college town, Chapel Hill, NC, and his ‘80s band, the dBs. Much of A Spy in the House of Loud concerns early days in New York and the beginnings of DIY music, supported by a loose network of indie labels, fanzines and sympathetic rock critics. It’s a vivid, thoroughly lived-through depiction of a time when music mattered greatly and a disaffected minority sought to overthrow the existing pop culture.
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We Are the Clash: Reagan, Thatcher, and the Last Stand of a Band that Mattered (Akashic), by Mark Andersen and Ralph Heibutzki
For most of us, Clash manager Bernie Rhodes’ 1983 decision to fire Mick Jones and Topper Headon and keep the band going was an egregious violation of trust—the spirit of punk defrauded by a scheming businessman. But Mark Andersen and Ralph Heibutzki argue differently in We Are the Clash. In their contrarian history of “The Clash II” (and its uncanonical album Cut the Crap), Joe Strummer’s rump version opened a “window into a band of immense vision and passion—as well as fundamental contradictions—as they wrestle with the meaning of success.” I’ll stick to my argument: for all involved, The Clash II’s meaning of success came down to milking a band name for the past penny and yes, with the exception of one song, “This is England,” Cut the Crap was crap.
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Wisconsin Riffs: Jazz Profiles from the Heartland (Wisconsin Historical Society Press), by Kurt Dietrich
Even local jazz musicians might be surprised to learn how many of their number came from or once lived in the Badger State. In Wisconsin Riffs, Ripon College music professor and onetime member of the fusion band Matrix chronicles in detail the careers of state players from Bunny Berrigan through Jamie Breiwick. He misses a few and doesn’t explore the sociology or cultural context but derives his account through extensive interviews with musicians and references to how they were represented in the media. Wisconsin Riffs will stir many memories for longtime fans and players and foster an awareness of just how much has happened here.
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