Music is a language of its own, but even many of us who speak it don’t actually understand the grammar, can’t read it or possess a limited vocabulary. The For Beginners graphic non-fiction series, which has put complex topics from Buddhism to Marxism into an easily understood, illustrated format, addresses the topic with its latest title, Music Theory For Beginners.
The author, R. Ryan Endris, is a music professor and choral director at Colgate University. Endris acknowledges that the formal study of music can be daunting, but is determined to “set you on the path to learning what all those dots, lines, and symbols actually mean.” Writing clearly, he defines his terms, bringing light to words we often use without really understanding their meaning. He makes references along the way to rock, pop, folk and blues as well as classical music.
* Comin’ Right at Ya: How a Jewish Yankee Hippie Went Country, or, the Often Outrageous History of Asleep at the Wheel (University of Texas Press), by Ray Benson and David Menconi
Too countercultural for country radio and too country for FM rock, Asleep at the Wheel moved uneasily between worlds in the ’70s long before their enshrinement as a multiple Grammy-winning institution. The frontman of this Texas Playboys-style big band recounts their story with the help of onetime No Depression editor David Menconi. Benson is often funny: “Can I just say how proud it makes me to be lead vocalist of an ensemble so consistently honored for instrumental performances?”
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* Dirty Blvd.: The Life and Music of Lou Reed (Chicago Review Press), by Aidan Levy
Although gushing with hyperbole (“Nothing could prepare the public for the Lou Reed Shock”), Aidan Levy collects many insights for his biography of one of rock’s pivotal figures. Levy is especially good at sketching out Reed’s Jewish milieu and the music and literature that inspired him by the time he co-founded the Velvet Underground with John Cale. Reed made art from his cravings and self-destruction. The happy ending, recorded on his album The Blue Mask, was “a victory over his battle with addiction.”
* Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival (Oxford University Press), by Stephen Petrus and Ronald D. Cohen
Greenwich Village, among the most exciting places in the world circa 1960, was Mecca for the burgeoning folk blues revival. Although the culmination of that movement, Bob Dylan, is on the cover of Folk City, he receives only a brief but well-informed mention. Folk City surveys the wider landscape as its authors astutely recount the politics and aesthetics of a young intelligentsia that embraced old-time American music.
* Lee, Myself & I: Inside the Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood (Jawbone Press), by Wyndham Wallace
The title is honest: Lee, Myself & I is two-thirds about its British author and one-third about its subject, the American who wrote “These Boots are Made for Walking.” A Lee Hazlewood biography would be fascinating for the artist’s role as a sort of lynchpin between country music, the Rat Pack and the ’60s counterculture, and while impressions of the not-star can be gleaned from the book, its main interest is as a document of the obsessive, High Fidelity world of musical fandom in the era before Google and Amazon when learning about a figure such as Hazlewood required countless hours of research and devotion.
* Long Promised Road: Carl Wilson, Soul of The Beach Boys (Jawbone Press), by Kent Crowley
Brian Wilson is universally acknowledged as the musical genius behind The Beach Boys, but writer-musician Kent Crowley argues that brother Carl was the group’s soul. With Brian largely MIA after 1967, Carl took the wheel and kept The Beach Boys running, albeit as an oldies machine. Often cutting through decades of misinformation, Crowley writes sympathetically of the major players in the drama, including the brothers’ often-derided father-manager, Murry.
* Love Becomes a Funeral Pyre: A Biography of The Doors (Chicago Review Press), by Mick Wall
The tone is set at the get-go: Jim Morrison didn’t die in that legendary Paris bathtub but on the toilet of a rock club; his corpse was carried to his apartment to avoid police scrutiny. Determined to be a myth buster, Brit-crit Mick Wall doesn’t seem to care much for Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek or anyone else he met while researching his tell-all band bio—except himself.
