New Books in Music

Who is Motown’s first real star? The answer, of course, is Mary Wells, singer of such classics as “My Guy,” “Bye Bye Baby,” “The One Who Really Loves You,” “You Beat Me to the Punch,” and “Two Lovers,” among others. All of these hits were released in just four years between 1960 and 1969. In Mary Wells: The Tumultuous Life of Motown’s First Superstar (Chicago Review Press, 2012) author Peter Benjaminson chronicles the life of this singular performer from her early days as a young rock ‘n’ roll diva to her last years struggling with cancer. Along the way we learn that Wells was a tireless performer. She never stopped touring, never stopped reaching for the brass ring of financial success that eluded her for much of her career. It seems she never did receive the money she felt she deserved for the songs she released for Motown, while the record company appeared to rake in a handsome profit. She left Motown in 1964, released records with a number of different labels over the next twenty-six years, and finally received a paltry $100,000 from a law suit she filed against Motown in the late eighties. Whatever the case, Benjaminson shows well how Mary Wells star still shines bright. Her songs are known by most everyone, they are ingrained in the American popular psyche. Peter Benjaminson is the author of The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard, The Story of Motown, and co-author of Investigative Reporting. He has written numerous articles for the Detroit Free Press and Atlanta Journal-Constitution among others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

In Hip Hop’s Amnesia: From Blues and the Black Women’s Club Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Movement (Lexington Books, 2012), the second installment of his hip hop trilogy, Reiland Rabaka again discusses, in great detail, many of the essential historical, musical, aesthetical, political, and cultural movements and moments of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first African America. Building on his overtly Africana, feminist, and queer critical theoretical analyses of black movements in Hip Hop’s Inheritance (the first installment), Rabaka uses a more comparative historical eye in this book to show how (A) there are many aspects of early blues, jazz, bebop, and soul musical movements, especially as they related to other political and cultural movements of their times, that can inform us as to the place of modern rap and neo-soul movements and their relationships with other modern cultural and political movements, and (B) the modern hip hop movement (musical and otherwise) can benefit from an understanding of the ways actors in these other movements (musical and otherwise) dealt with situations similar to their own. In this way, Rabaka passionately argues, rap music can take its rightful political, aesthetic, and cultural place in the ongoing historical struggle of African Americans (men and women, straight and gay) to overthrow the bonds of oppression that have characterized their experiences in U.S. society. Reiland Rabaka is associate professor of African, African American, and Caribbean studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Humanities Program and the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he is also an affiliate professor in the Women and Gender studies Program and a research fellow at the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America. He is the author of ten books, including Against Epistemic Apartheid, Du Bois’s Dialectics, and the forthcoming third installment of his Hip Hop trilogy, The Hip Hop Movement. Click here to listen to my previous interview with Rabaka about Hip Hop’s Inheritance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Where does rock ‘n’ roll begin? In The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll (W. W. Norton, 2011), Preston Lauterbach makes a strong case for its beginnings in the backwoods and small-town juke joints, fed by big-city racketeering, of the black American South. It begins, possibly, on Indianapolis’s Indiana Avenue where Denver Fergusun ran numbers, paid-off cops, and operated the Sunset Terrace. It begins, maybe, in Houston where Don Robey was the proprietor of the Bronze Peacock, oversaw a network of bars and taverns throughout Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, and was a founder of the seminal Peacock Records. Maybe it began in Memphis, home of W.C. Handy, Beale Street, and the Mitchell Hotel. Or maybe it was the multitude of juke joints that littered the American South from Texas to Florida, Georgia to Chicago, in the 1930s and 40s that afforded artists such as Walter Barnes, Louis Jordan, Little Richard, and Roy Brown a series of non-stop one-nighters to ply their raunchy jumped-up versions of swing and the blues to an insatiable audience of primarily African American men and women looking for good times. In the book Lauterbach details the Chitlin’ Circuit as it was, a network of promoters, clubs, radio stations, con-men, highways and, most importantly, musicians that supported an underground artistic economy and lifestyle just beneath the surface of the mainstream music industry; a network that gave birth to rock ‘n’ roll. The Chitlin’ Circuit is Preston’s first book. He is currently working on his second, a hustler’s history of Beale Street. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

From the ball fields and barrooms of Hoboken to your turntable, uh, CD player, uhm, MP3 player comes Yo La Tango, uh, Tengo, and with them alternative, uhm, indie rock. In Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock (Gotham, 2012) journalist Jesse Jarnow chronicles the three-decade career these seminal rock stalwarts. This is the story of Yo La Tengo, a band composed of husband and wife team Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan, James McNew, and a rotating casts of dozens of others that include musicians, writers, recording engineers, comedians, barbecue joints, baseball teams and, of course, fans. They are a band that sometimes plays Neil Young loud and sometimes Lamb Chop quiet, sometimes within the same measure. They have maintained a solid career, starting small within Hoboken, New Jersey’s indie scene, and growing, one step at a time, into a professional rock band that pays their bills and treats others with respect. They are musically and gastrointestinally adventurous, playing and eating what they want, not what is hip. Along the way, a structural scene and musical genre–“indie rock”–emerged with them. Jarnow captures the band and the scene at every turn, providing a richly detailed account of the songs, albums, bars, fanzines, studios and people who make up the world of Yo La Tengo. Jesse Jarnow hosts the Frow Show on Jersey City freeform radio station WFMU. His work has appeared in the London Times, Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, and elsewhere. His next book, provisionally titled Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America is due from Da Capo in 2015. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

“Around 380 BC, the Greek philosopher Plato wrote in the Republic about the idealized society as having a “united influence of music and sport” where its people “mingle music with sport in the fairest of proportions.” – from the Rhythms of the Game: The Link Between Musical and Athletic Performance (Hal Leonard Corporation, 2011) As a youngster growing up in the Berkeley Hills in the early 60s, I loved jazz–the rhythmic jests and jolts of Louis Armstrong, the sensuous guitar of Antonio Carlos Jobim, the manic mastery of drummer Buddy Rich. I loved baseball, too, and my best friend and I imitated the kinetic rhythms of our favorite pitchers . . . the high-kicking Juan Marichal and the smoldering, snake-like delivery of Bob Gibson. And then there were the unique batting styles and varied rhythms of our favorite hitters– the whipsaw swing of Willie Mays, the languorous, looping swing of lefty Willie McCovey. And then came Muhammad Ali. Watching Ali box was pure magic – poetry. I’d always believed that Ali was a begloved body-jazz musician ever improvising new creative rhythmic repertoires in the ring. But it wasn’t until I read Rhythms of the Game: The Link Between Musical and Athletic Performance (Hal Leonard Corporation, 2011) and spoke with co-author Dave Gluck in this wonderful interview that it all made sense. Gluck, a peripatetic percussionist professor of studio composition at Purchase College, State University of New York, had the extraordinary experience of having New York Yankee All-Star centerfielder Bernie Williams walk into his office one day in 2007 to inquire about music classes. Williams, in addition to being one of the finest baseball players of his era and one of the greatest post-season players in baseball history, was in the process of making a transition into a second career as a professional musician. A classically trained student at a performing arts high school in his native Puerto Rico, Williams had always been as devoted to music as he was to sports ever since he was captivated by the sounds of flamenco guitar as a young boy. Williams’ illustrious baseball career included taking his guitar with him wherever he went and going so far as to assess the acoustics in major league ballparks (the tunnel in Anaheim Stadium was his favorite). Enter the third collaborator, music colleague Bob Thompson. Thompson is a two-time Grammy nominated composer, conductor, producer and performer, co-founder (along with Gluck) of the Rhythm and Brass eclectic jazz/classical group, as well as the Baseball Music Project. Gluck, Williams, and Thompson’s conversations became the impetus for a unique book, Rhythms of the Game: The Link Between Musical and Athletic Performance. This is a thought-provoking, fact-rich but also highly anecdotal, reader-friendly and entertaining product of three different men who love music…and sports… and the rhythms in life. Although the book isn’t specifically about jazz, it nonetheless is somehow all about jazz, and if you appreciated how Ornette Coleman and Keith Jarrett explored and pushed musical and performance boundaries, or how the transcendent talent of a Coltrane was as much the product of hours and hours of practice and study and not just a “gift,” and if you ever sought to understand the mysteries that musicians and athletes experience of “being in the zone,” you’ll love this book. With so many fascinating strands, Rhythms of the Game: The Link Between Musical and Athletic Performance will appeal to everyone – not just musicians, not just athletes, but to anyone, young or old. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Disclosure: I am a Meathead, an avid fan of Meat Puppets. I have been since 1986 when I first heard their version of “Good Golly Miss Molly” from Out My Way. I’m even writing a book about the band. The problem, however, has always been lack of secondary data. There are no books detailing the career of this seminal punk/indie/alternative/psychedelic/country trio, until now. In Too High to Die: Meet the Meat Puppets (Lulu, 2012) Greg Prato offers up an exhaustive history of the band’s thirty-plus years of music making. As an oral history he includes stories from all three original band members, plus most of the band’s other members, past and present. He also includes interviews with many people familiar with the band: childhood friends, girlfriends, fellow musicians, label executives, managers, etc. The collection of stories is convincing. They trace the path of a band that has consistently defied categorization, always stuck to their artistic guns, battled the inner-demons that seem to haunt too many great artists, and in the twenty-first century, in their fourth decade as a band, come out on top of their game. Other than listening to Meat Puppets’ music (which is what y’all should do), reading Too High to Die is a great place to begin your path to becoming a Meathead. Greg Prato is a writer and author whose work appears regularly in Rolling Stone. He is the author of several books including Grunge is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music, MTV Ruled the World: The Early Years of Music Video and, most recently, Dynasty: The Oral History of the New York Islanders, 1972-1984. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Since the “taiko boom” of the closing decades of the 20thcentury, taiko drumming has arguably become Japan’s most globally successful performance medium. Shawn Bender‘s recent book takes us through the history and spaces of this art, from the stretching of animal skins to make its instruments through the seemingly incongruous sounds of taiko in The Scorpion King. Taiko Boom: Japanese Drumming in Place and Motion (University of California Press, 2012) is a wonderfully rich study that will satisfy readers completely unfamiliar with the medium, as well as taiko aficionados. Based on years of fieldwork with a number of groups and extended experience living and working with taiko performers, Bender’s work focuses on the ways that the history and ethnography of taiko can help us understand how living and performing in modern global societies transforms our experience of the local, and how the performance of locality is embodied in the muscles and bones of human flesh. In the course of our conversation we spoke of many aspects of the work and of taiko, including the marathon-running drummers of Kodo, Pierre Cardin’s taste for loincloths, and interesting recent attempts to standardize taiko drumming through printed textbooks. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

“A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop, a-lop-bam-boom!”And so rock and roll was born. And so American culture changed forever. So says David Kirby in Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll (Continuum, 2009). “Tutti Frutti,” Little Richard’s first hit, recorded by Robert “Bumps” Blackwell at Cosimo Matassa’s J & M Studio in New Orleans in September 1955, co-written and sanitized by Dorothy LaBostrie after Richard’s original lyric (“A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop, a-good-goddamn/Tutti Frutti, good booty”) was deemed a bit too racy for a recorded release (it was, after all, a song about anal copulation, writes the author), is the lynchpin around which Kirby builds a biography of one of the greats of twentieth-century American music and art. His story moves from Richard’s childhood in Macon, Georgia, to his place among the greats of the old, weird America, to his legacy as the Architect of Rock. It’s Kirby’s contention, really, that Richard’s story is America’s story. It’s filled with entrepreneurs, con artists, straights, gays, gospels, devils, showmen and, best of all, outrageous and booty shakin’ music, and Little Richard Penniman, in a more than fifty-year career, embraces all of these and more with abandon. David Kirby is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. He has written on music for the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

You’ve probably heard of Telegraph Avenue (Berkeley), Harvard Square, The Village, and Haight-Ashbury. That’s where “the scene” was in the late 1960s, right? But have you heard of Yorkville? I hadn’t until I’d read Stuart Henderson‘s terrific social history Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s (University of Toronto Press, 2011). Turns out (and, Canadians, pardon my ignorance) that Canada had its own “scene” and it was in the Yorkville district of Toronto. Henderson, who is the L.R. Wilson Fellow in department of history at MacMaster University, does a remarkable job of tracing the rise and fall of Yorkville as a kind of “counter-cultural” capital. He also shows how Yorkville was part of a more general international cultural movement, one that spread all over North America and the World. The book is a fascinating look at a significant moment on Canadian and international history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Ben Cawthra‘s Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz (University of Chicago, 2011) discusses the way images of jazz and the musicians who played it both reflected and influenced our racial perceptions during the period between the 1930s and 1960s. Cawthra reveals the complex interactions between socially conscious photographers, magazine editors, record producers, jazz critics and the musicians themselves. From swing to bebop to cool, to West Coast Jazz to hard bop, Cawthra’s book gives the reader fascinating photographic and biographical portraits of Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane among others. The photographers, too, including Charles Peterson, Gijon Mili, Francis Wolff, William Claxton, Herman Leonard, William Gottlieb, and Roy DeCarava had nuanced and unique photographic styles. Cawtha also gives insight as to how African-American jazz musicians such as Gillespie, Davis, and Rollins attempted to control their own economic and image destinies within the ever-changing political economy of the record industry. Cawthra also explains how Life Magazine, the development of the Long Playing Record (LP), and the concurrent milestones in civil rights all influenced the photographic culture of jazz – and there is a fascinating section on the very conscious marketing of “West Coast Jazz” to emerging white suburban markets in the 50s and 60s. The complex confluences of such a wide depth and breadth of social history is bound to stimulate much thinking and raise many additional questions. Rich, thought-provoking, and with images and insights that stay with you: read it, look at the photos and think long and hard…there’s no end to the combination and permutations of analyses….like jazz itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music