Closer You Are: The Story of Robert Pollard and Guided by Voices (Da Capo), by Matthew Cutter
Robert Pollard became indie rock’s ultimate cult musician. A grade school teacher from Dayton, a decaying city hidden in heartland Ohio, Pollard and a floating crew of old buddies recorded several DIY releases as Guided By Voices before being “discovered” by the indie Matador label and a fawning fanzine press. Writing well but cramming his account with more detail than most us require, Matthew Cutter follows Pollard from his materially-pinched but emotionally supportive lower-middle class childhood, immersed in British Invasion rock, into his post-punk college years and the adult music hobby that finally became a career. Closer Your Are is a celebratory account of a prolific lo-fi artist and quirky songwriter who continues to release albums under half a dozen names.
The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, the MC5, and My Life of Impossibilities (Da Capo), by Wayne Kramer
“MC5 sounded like a car part,” Wayne Kramer explains in his memoir. In the mid-‘60s, when gigs were everywhere in booming Detroit, Kramer escaped his good-yet-awful childhood through music. He was drawn to rock, which he found “suggestive, motivating, and mystifying.” Early on, the MC5 “wanted our own songs on the radio” and although they never cracked the Top 10 singles chart, their debut album made Billboard’s Top 30 and they became one of the bands that set the precedent for punk. The Hard Stuff is a lively autobiography filled with anecdotes and what sound like honest admissions from a life on the edge. “Our weakness was our inconsistency” he admitted of the MC5. “We could be absolutely brilliant one night and a train wreck the next.” In recent years he married, adopted a child and overcame a longstanding fear of “being accountable for another human being.” Kramer grew up the hard way, but at least, is “a fully realized man” who can “persevere with dignity and a little grace.”
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In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea (Akashic Books), by Danny Goldberg
Out now in paperback, In Search of the Lost Chord contains a good bit of reflection and nostalgia, not from the perspective of a participant in the events of 1967 but from a teenager observer in New York, feeling the vibes and watching as the world tilted on a different angle. For Goldberg, ’67 was the milestone toward his career as rock critic and later, music executive (he currently represents Steve Earle)
My Years with Townes Van Zandt (Backbeat Books), by Harold F. Eggers Jr. with L.E. McCullough
With a reputation for brilliance and unpredictability, Townes Van Zandt was the round peg among the music industry’s squares. Although a prolific recording artist, he never had a hit, but inspired a generation or two of songwriters before his death in 1997, age 52. Harold Eggers met him as a teenager and, through the good offices of his music executive brother, became his manager for 20 years. Eggers recounts half a lifetime of stories about the conflicted genius who drank heavily and lived among demons and visions. His vivid first-hand account is sad for its sense of self-destruction amidst great ability.
