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“Tribute bands occupy the lower rungs of the show business ladder,” Steven Kurutz writes in this, his first book. “Somewhere between lounge bands and wedding singers.” And indeed, they are one of the more curious offshoots of the music industry.

Why would a group of men—often firmly slid into middle age—spend their full or part-time music careers aping the sound and/or look of another band? On one hand, you’ve got a built-in audience ready to party and sing along with all you play, and you might even get famous or laid by connection. On the other hand, you’re playing someone else’s music over and over, and the audience is not interested in hearing the introduction “and now for something we wrote…”

Like a Rolling Stone is at times screamingly funny, sad and joyous, and is ultimately an affectionate look at musicians and bands who make a living (or not, as it sometimes seems) being something they’re not.

Much of the narrative covers the year that Kurutz spends tailing two Rolling Stones tribute bands—Sticky Fingers and their rivals, The Blushing Brides—as they shadow the real Stones on their Bigger Bang tour. Expect substituting venues like radio station bar parties and frat houses for stadiums and theaters, often with Spinal Tap-like occurrences.

Admit it, people: Guns N’ Roses’ 1988 multi-platinum debut Appetite for Destruction was the best Aerosmith album of the decade. Through the vicarious thrills this accessibly sleazy record offered, millions of middle-class high school kids had their final flirtation with juvenile delinquency before preparing to become tax lawyers, physical therapists and software engineers. More important, Appetite’s success turned angry Indiana hick Bill Bailey into paranoid, model-marrying, litigious, show-canceling, control-freak millionaire man-diva W. Axl Rose, the real-life, glam-metal version of Andy Griffith’s Lonesome Rhodes.

Of course, every jerk-ass celebrity eventually gets the biography he or she deserves, and Rose is no exception. Enter Brit hack journo Mick Wall and W.A.R. Let’s just say that whenever a biographer feels the need to explicitly state how committed he or she is to objectivity, it’s time to watch out.

Wall’s a sloppy writer and a lazy biographer (think Andrew Morton with tattoos, writing for Circus magazine) with an obvious agenda—much like the vengeful Victor Bockris had in his 1995 hatchet job Transformer: The Lou Reed Story. It’s safe to say that if Rose was a regular visitor to children’s hospitals or participated in benefits for blind amputees, you wouldn’t read about it in this book.

In Beatles lore, a woman named May Pang is forever linked to the phrase “Lost Weekend.” That 1973 “weekend,” which lasted 18 months, is when John Lennon left Yoko Ono and, according to legend, wandered drunkenly in a haze until she took him back. (He was thrown out of LA’s Troubador nightclub twice, once for heckling the Smothers Brothers and once for walking around with a Kotex on his forehead.)

But May Pang, the young personal assistant he was living with, remembers the time differently. Lennon, she says, was mostly happy and productive, working on Walls and Bridges and his oldies album.

For almost 20 years, she was the First Lady of Houston Rock Radio. On the air, across the stage and in the dressing rooms, KLOL’s Dayna Steele rubbed shoulders and interviewed plenty of rock icons. And her loyal legion of “Steeleworkers” made her one of the city’s most recognizable media personalities.

Since shutting off her mike, Steele has headed up a marketing and PR firm, ran and sold an online space-memorabilia Web site, and created Smart Girls Rock, an online community for young girls.

Steele has distilled much of her experiences in her new book, Rock to the Top: What I Learned About Success from the World’s Greatest Rock Stars (Brown Books, 192 pp., $17.95). It’s equal parts music memoir, self-help, business advice, and band primer book—and there were “hundreds” of rock and roll lifestyle and celebrity anecdotes that for reasons of space (or modesty) didn’t make it in. Houstoned Rocks spoke with Steele about business, pleasure, and why Lanny Griffith could have a second career as a wedding planner.

Well before he became a befuddled, cuddly, idiotic reality TV star and living cartoon, Ozzy Osbourne really was the Prince of Darkness. Fronting Black Sabbath, the heaviest of heavy bands with really no precedent in sound or style, he, guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward created one of the most influential bodies of work with the group’s first eight albums (and in particular the first four).

And while they gave birth to thousands of six-string hopefuls who dutifully learned at least the opening chords to “Iron Man,” “Paranoid,” “War Pigs” and “Sweet Leaf,” Sabbath – along with Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple – primarily set the stage for a entirely new genre that itself would grow dozens of branches, heavy metal.

Classic rock and metal journalist McIver (Justice for All: The Truth About Metallica) does a fine job chronicling not only Black Sabbath’s history and the various members’ personalities, but also gives detailed and subjective comments on pretty much everything the band recorded.

Ah yes, doo wop. Perhaps no other genre is so closely identified with a specific era in time than the one that relied on majestic vocal harmonies to alternately offer pleading paeans to love and nonsensical shimmy-shimmy ko-ko-bops, all delivered by immaculately dressed (and mostly black) singers in uniform silk suits in the mid to late 1950s.

But as any PBS pledge-drive viewer will tell you, love for the music of groups like the Flamingos, Platters, Five Satins, Crests, Drifters, Spaniels and a host of acts with bird names (Cardinals, Ravens, Orioles, Falcons, Crows) is still healthy, even if its fans aren’t quite as medically sound.

Legendary New York DJ and current Sirius satellite radio host “Cousin Brucie” Morrow and co-author Maloof have produced a gorgeous coffee-table book here. And while a bit light in word count, it still manages to pack in a lot of detail about doo wop’s origins, development and performers. It’s alternately a nostalgic look back into the archives for veteran listeners, as well as kind of a CliffsNotes starting block for the curious.

To his champions, Gram Parsons was a cult-hero musical genius and the primary inventor of “country rock.” But he was also a tragic figure who died prematurely, and whose work has never been properly appreciated.

To his critics, Parsons was a spoiled rich-kid wastrel who rode his good looks, marginal talent and insider connections to a promising career. But he ultimately pissed it all away through selfishness, out-of-control hard-drug abuse and reckless sexual liaisons.

Both groups will find plenty to admire as well as debate in Twenty Thousand Roads, a huge credit to author David N. Meyer, who has written an engrossing and detailed look at Parsons’s life and music. It’s the definitive account of a man whose work may have only appeared on six records during his lifetime, but whose influence has outshone his own contributions.

The book begins with a page-turning, can’t-make-this-stuff-up account of Parsons’s upbringing and Southern Gothic / Tennessee Williams-style family history. Born into a very wealthy (and elegantly wasted) Florida citrus power family, Parsons lost his father to suicide and his mother to alcoholism – the latter dying on the day of his high school graduation.

Even hipsters who detest the music and mythology of Bruce Springsteen will have to admit that the venerable rocker has one of the most dedicated and connected fan bases anywhere. These are people for whom simply listening to a studio CD is only the start of a very close journey between artist and admirer. This is especially true with Springsteen’s mythical live shows.

Canadian Lawrence Kirsch is such a fan that he wanted to present the written and visual show memories of other die-hards, and has done so brilliantly with For You. A lavish, gorgeous, detailed book, it is truly a pleasure to read and counters the often slapdash efforts of privately-published or “special edition” fan tomes. (The print run on For You is limited to 2,000 copies.)

Kirsch set up a Web site and solicited stories from fans about Springsteen concert experiences, receiving ones from a 1969 coffeehouse gig right up to last year’s Seeger Sessions tour. To illustrate it, he searched for concert photos – most of them unpublished until now – spanning 1971 up until his recent appearance on the Today show for the release of Magic. More than 400 of them appear throughout the pages.

A band has some kind of amazing longevity if you can still be “the new guy” after 30 years in the lineup. But that’s exactly the case with Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood, who puts down his life story here.

Unfortunately, Wood’s recollections consist of precious little about the music and fewer anecdotes about his fellow Stones than one might reasonably expect. Instead, chapter upon chapter detail Wood’s drinking / drugging / fucking / palling-with-Keith escapades that run together and, frankly, grow tiresome after awhile.

By the time Wood locks himself in the family bathroom for two days straight to freebase with a friend, you half hope that the ghost of Brian Jones would show up and never let him emerge.

At this point, even the most diehard Fab Four fan has to ask: Does the world reallyneed another Beatles book? It seems that amid the hundreds of tomes published about the group, every musical, personal, technical and sociological aspect concerning the Liverpudlians has already been covered, with the possible exception of something like What the Beatles Ate, A Day-by-Day Caloric Guide: 1962-1970.

So it’s with a natural skepticism that one might approach this fourth “major” comprehensive Beatles bio, after previously mined efforts by Hunter Davies, Philip Norman and, most recently, Bob Spitz. But Gould takes a different angle: while he tells the Beatles’s story and analyzes their music, he frames it within the context of the social and political climate of their homeland and its rebellious colony, the U.S.A.

Thus, in addition to the band’s story, readers get literary side trips covering the Profumo Affair, Britain’s “Angry Young Man” theatrical/literary movement, the origins of psychedelia and Eastern mysticism, the post-WWII sexual blossoming of the teenage female, and the dawn of the modern media age.

Out of Sync, the new memoir from former 'N Sync member, failed cosmonaut and gay American Lance Bass, came out last week. (It's surprisingly good.) Over the phone from New York, where he's living while starring as Corny Collins in the Broadway musical Hairspray, speaking in a slight Southern twang, Bass was very congenial. We talked about his critical words for Justin Timberlake in the book (he felt "completely betrayed" when JT broke up the band for a solo career), his coming out, and dating the actress who played Topanga in Boy Meets World. – Ben Westhoff

Houston Press: You’re said to be a very private person. Was it hard to spill for the book?

Lance Bass: It started out being really hard. Last year was a real confusing year for me, just because when I did decide to make it public that I was gay, it was very scary, because I didn’t know what the reaction was going to be. But, because the reaction was so positive and I got so much support – I’ve been the happiest person ever – that’s when I decided to write this book. I wanted to show how proud I am that now, in 2007, people are just so much more accepting than they were years ago.

HP: Are you worried that the media is focusing on your relatively brief critique of Justin Timberlake?

A compendium of dead rock stars and the tales of their demises is hardly an original idea. Nor are there many original, overarching ideas in this book. The vast bulk of the book’s 250 pages is taken up with a chronology of rock demises, from Robert Johnson’s murk-shrouded Mississippi Delta murder in 1938 to James Brown’s Christmas Day departure last year, each of which are appended to more or less standard bios of the artists. As bonus material, a trio of appendices offer up a top 50 of death songs; a list of 20 “reaper cheaters,” or survivors of close shaves; and five of rock’s most lethal occupations, one of which, of course is keyboardist for the Grateful Dead.

Unoriginal as all this is, I had a hard time putting Rock & Roll Heaven down. I was unable to find out much about authors Dimery and MacDonald, although it appears from what little bio I could grab from the jacket and the ‘net and some of their editorial choices for inclusion -- Zac Foley of EMF, Mickey Finn of T. Rex, and Brian Connolly of Sweet, are all in – that both are Brits. Their work is marked by dab hands at selecting photos you aren’t sick to death of, as well as telling quotes, such as this one by Keith Richards on Kurt Cobain: “I figured he was in the wrong business. What’s so tough about being lead singer in one of the biggest rock n’ roll bands in the world? You just deal with it.”

At first glance, it looks unlikely that this slim volume could do justice to the life and music of His Purpleness; it seems more like one of those quickie clip jobs. But Morton, co-author of The Penguin Book of Jazz, has written a scholarly but highly readable bio, filled with rich analysis and insight He says more in his limited space than many others could do with three times the page count.

And he couldn’t find a subject with more aspects to his story. Of the other visages on the Mount Rushmore of ‘80s music (Bruce, Madonna, Michael) it’s Prince who, pushing 50 today, has changed the least, looking, sounding and behaving almost exactly like his Reagan-era self. He’s also managed to release probably twice as much music as the other three combined, and still has near-bursting vaults of unreleased material.

But Morton’s theme is how an artist who is arguably the most multi-talented of his peers is still primarily known and regarded for an amazing string of records from his first decade (Dirty Mind, Purple Rain, Sign “O” the Times) and precious little from the next two. He also explores how the funky Prince of “Little Red Corvette” and “When Doves Cry” morphed into the seemingly otherwordly performer of bizarre quirks (changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol, the overwrought “SLAVE” cheek writings) and weirder music with an outer-space/mystical/Egyptian bent.

He’s not the long-lost brother of Joey and Dee Dee, and his name is known mostly to liner-note scourers, but Phil Ramone’s nearly 50 years behind the studio glass have given him a window on the recording techniques and temperaments of some of music’s biggest names.

The 14-time Grammy winner has produced or engineered records for Billy Joel (The Stranger, Glass Houses), Paul Simon (Still Crazy After All These Years), Barbara Streisand (A Star Is Born, Memories), Bob Dylan (the New York Blood on the Tracks sessions), not to mention duets and standards from Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Tony Bennett and Rod Stewart. He’s also helmed dozens of film and Broadway soundtracks and special events – Ramone miked and guided Marilyn Monroe during her famous “Happy Birthday” serenade to JFK.

Coinciding with the band’s semi-reunion (Sorry, Ed; no matter how good Wolfie is, no Michael Anthony, no reunion), this is the first full-length bio of Van Halen’s brilliant but erratic history. From their origins as a popular southern California cover band and their rise to rock gods in the David Lee Roth era, to even greater mass popularity with frontman Sammy Hagar and steep ‘90s decline, Van Halen’s messy saga is comprehensively and neatly told.

Christe is clearly a great fan: in the preface, he even details his quest to (successfully) learn to play Eddie’s solo showpiece “Eruption” from scratch. However, this is no hagiography, as he uses a keen and often subjective insight into the band’s music only someone who has worn out more than one copy of Fair Warning or OU812 could manage.

Eddie’s amazing guitar innovation; Dave’s even more amazing ego and showmanship and war of words with Sammy; tense Alex, amiable Michael, and even hapless Gary Cherone – all the band members come alive here. It also offers amazing details that will surprise even hardcore fans - well beyond the true reason for the infamous “no brown M&M’s” contract rider mandate (which was all about gauging a promoter’s attention to details).