Houston Music Blog

​While growing up in rural Virginia in the shadow of his beloved Clinch Mountains, a young Ralph Stanley was given his choice of presents to celebrate his 11th birthday: a pig or a banjo. Thankfully for the history of American country and bluegrass music, he chose the latter, even learning to play it in the "clawhammer" style from his music-loving mother.

Ralph Stanley first began performing - not surprisingly - in church, where his take on the simple, a cappella hymn style favored by the Primitive Baptist sect led the congregation to dub him "The Boy with the Hundred Year Old Voice." Stanley traces his musical journey from those mountains and success with brother Carter as the Str Carter's 1966 death and modern resurgence via the soundtrack/tour for O Brother Where Art Thou. Stanley's ethereal and stunning a cappella version of "O Death" has sent chills up the spine of even the most jaded of hipsters.

​Neil Diamond's hipster cachet has increased greatly in the past few years: The Rick Rubin albums, Saving Silverman, ultimate Neil tribute band Super Diamond and Will Ferrell's deadly funny SNL impression, in which "America" is presented as an anti-immigration number. But his fans have long been an extremely dedicated lot, even when loving Neil was the height of uncoolness.

Music journalist and confessed fan Jon Bream does a good job here telling the tale of the "Jewish Elvis," from the scrapping days hawking his songs at the Brill Building to MOR superstar to spangly-shirted icon. And while the textual aspect is far too brief and mostly taken from previous sources (and a bit hagiographic), fans will appreciate the close to 300 photos of Diamond in action and memorabilia including rare posters, album covers and posters.

Daniel Kramer

The Big Man, the Boss and Mighty Max Weinberg at Toyota Center, April 2009

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Just as Bruce Springsteen winds down a frenzied period of back-to-back album and tour marathon - despite the death of Springsteen's cousin/assistant tour manager earlier this week in Kansas City, he and the E Street Band, as well as special guests Sam Moore (Sam & Dave) and Darlene Love, are scheduled to play a concert commemorating the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 25th anniversary at Madison Square Garden Thursday evening - the Boss-related library is expanding, with three new releases. Here are mini-reviews of each.

Big Man: Real Life and Tall Tales

By Clarence Clemons and Don Reo

E Street sax man Clarence Clemons' autobiography is notable immediately for its odd structure. The narrative is split into three parts: his recollections, those of Reo, and the "Tall Tales" of stories which he notes up from are part fact and plenty fiction. The Boss, understandably, pops up all throughout the book, and the best parts recount the salad days of the struggling pre-superstar years. Clemons' personal love for the man is evident.

Houston appears twice, but not because of Liberty Hall. Once, Clemons remembers a "300-lb. stripper" getting onstage to take it all off at an early gig, and then for the emergency eye surgery he had done the morning after "The Rising" tour stop, with a visiting doctor popping the Big Man's Big Eye right out of its socket in the hospital for a quick prognosis.

​In addition to his long career as one of modern jazz's finest trumpet blowers and composers, Wynton Marsalis has waged a sort of one-man PR campaign for jazz education. He extols the virtues of the music as a current and lively art with a rich history - as opposed to a genre whose best days and practitioners are behind - in all sorts of settings both musical and academic.

In the wide-ranging Moving to Higher Ground, Marsalis argues that jazz can also teach life lessons based on his own experiences as well as those of a who's who of jazz giants, many known by just one name: Bird, Monk, Pops, Prez, Duke, Miles, Dizzy, and Coltrane.

It's a quick read that also touches on race relations, traditions, and the relation of jazz to other musical forms ("The biggest mistake a jazz musician can make," Marsalis argues, "is to run from the blues."). He also takes the reader into the seemingly arcane and inscrutable ways of the jazz musician, whose world is rife with terms like "cutting session," "vamp," and "head chart."

[Ed. note: Sunday was the 23rd anniversary of the fatal bus accident that claimed Cliff Burton's life.]

Cliff Burton's ​When the mighty Metallica was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame earlier this year, some were curious about the appearance of a small, grey-haired man who joined the band at the podium. It was Ray Burton, father of former Metallica bassist Cliff Burton, who died in 1986 at the age of 24 after a freak bus accident while the band was on tour in Sweden.

And though he never lived to see his group become the massive worldwide success it would, his influence on thrash metal and his former bandmates remains formidable. Indeed, the three records on which his bass thumping appears - Kill 'em All, Ride the Lightning, and Master of Puppets - are often noted by Metallimaniacs as the group's best. In fact, up to half of their recent set lists drew from this titanic trilogy.

Combining original interviews along with previously published comments and Burton's own words, McIver's engaging and informative book brings to life a player who at this point is more myth than real.

Give the drummer some!

Over a career spanning decades, Joe Vitale's drumsticks have pounded for a who's who of classic rockers both in the studio and onstage. Ted Nugent, Joe Walsh, Peter Frampton, Neil Young, Dan Fogelberg, The Eagles, Bill Wyman, Ringo Starr and (most lengthily) Crosby, Stills & Nash have all employed his skin thumping services over the years. That's his big beats on FM staples like "Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo," "Rocky Mountain Way," "Life's Been Good," and "Southern Cross."

But Vitale is also a pretty busy man these days with his own projects. There's a autobiographical book about his rock and roll history (Backstage Pass, written with wife Susie), new solo CD Speaking in Drums and also son Joe Jr.'s debut CD, Dancing with Shadows, which dad helped write and produce.

The gregarious Vitale spoke to Rocks Off from his home in Ohio just before embarking on the European leg of CSN's 40th anniversary tour.

I hate to ask this question, as it is overly publicized and just all-around cheesy, but nothing else will fit what this book is about. So, with a heavy heart, I ask, "Are you ready to rock?" Readers of Jessica Hopper's The Girl's Guide to Rocking will find, in time, that this question, and all it encompasses, is essentially what she asks throughout this entire book.

Although some might think that starting a band is as simple as picking a name and going from brunette to hot pink, Hopper will quickly crush those unrealistic dreams in just five easy chapters. Starting out first with the basic fundamentals - the make-up of a band; what instrument is best for each individual; how to purchase guitar; etc. - she guides young girls through the real start-up of a group.

From there, she guides readers through the process of picking band mates, recording and even owning their own music business someday. Another treat is the array of music history spread throughout the book. From quotes from female musicians to book suggestions about those that have paved the way, Hopper does her best to keep the idea of "girl power" alive.

As the "godfather of progressive rock drumming," Bill Bruford has done stints on the road and in the studio with many of the genre's biggest bands. He was a founding member of Yes, spent years with King Crimson, and also thumped skins for Genesis, Gong, and U.K. before forming his own groups and then a jazz ensemble, Earthworks.

In this erudite and opinionated autobiography, Bruford eschews a straight narrative in favor of "chapters" answering a series of questions including "Why Did You Leave Yes?" (which Bruford did, just as they were breaking big with Fragile and Close to the Edge, to pursue the more challenging Crimson); "What's It Like Working with Robert Fripp?" (not surprisingly, difficult); "Is it Different Being in Jazz?" and "What Do You Call a Guy Who Hangs Around with Musicians?" (the drummer, according to the hoary joke).

If productivity alone conferred greatness, then flinty rock scribbler Dave Thompson would be the Trollope of pop-culture quick reads. I Hate New Music is the latest of over 100 titles this insta-book wizard has blinked into being. And dig the intro penned by the legendary Richard Meltzer, the Big Bang of exhibitionist gonzo rock criticism. The former Noise Boy delivers his usual caveman-crit jibber-jabber, while making creative use of the CAPS lock and asterisk keys on his steam-powered IBM Word-O-Matic.

Let's begin by overlooking the fact that this hardcover edition reads like it was proofed by upside-down cave bats. Now then, what's defined here as "classic rock"? Any obvious mullet rock like "Freebird" to Wreckless Eric, apparently. What's "new" music? Arcade Fire? Pearl Jam? Devo? Answer: all of the above.

When did it all go wrong? 1978. That year, evil corporations were convinced they could mold every album into the next Frampton Comes Alive!

When author and New Yorker journalist Alec Wilkinson first approached folk-music icon Pete Seeger about writing an expansive biography, the modest performer - who turned 90 years old Sunday - demurred. Seeger instead challenged him to pen a tome that "could be read in one sitting." The result, based on Wilkinson's research and hours of interviews with Seeger himself, is this on-purpose slim volume.

So what readers get is a pretty rapid-fire (and not always chronological) run through the Seeger's life: childhood with musically-inclined lefty parents; on the road with Woody Guthrie and the Weavers; family and military life; concerts for causes and worldwide travels; his association and marching with Dr. Martin Luther King; environmental interests; and the famous censored performance of an anti-Vietnam War song on The Smothers Brothers Show.

The most interesting portions deal with Seeger's hunting down by and testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee during the height of the Red Scare for charges related to his dabbling in Communism; his testimony is reprinted in its entirety here. Eventually cleared, he was still blacklisted, becoming a musical martyr and hero with instant credibility. (Of local interest: in the '50s, a group calling themselves "Texans for America" successfully lobbied to have Seeger's name removed from school textbooks.)

Barely out of her teens, Carol Ann Harris met Lindsey Buckingham in 1977 while working at the studio where the singer/guitarist was putting the finishing touches on what would be the band's huge international hit album, Rumours. As his live-in girlfriend for the next seven years, she'd accompany him and the band all over the world on tours, in the studio, on exotic vacations and to gala events and parties. And she tells all in this highly readable memoir.

Harris' take on the Mac's individual personalities mirrors similar accounts in other books: Stevie Nicks the spacey narcissist; Mick Fleetwood the lustful, financially incompetent big kid; and John and Christine McVie as amiable patrons of a pub that never closes.

In her life with the moody, intense Buckingham, a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality emerges. He was capable of incredible tenderness and joy, as well as cold emotional detachment and anger sometimes in the same day. She also recounts instances of physical abuse in punches and choke-holds she says a raging Buckingham would inflict on her. When she miscarries their baby, he takes the news with all the interest of a band business meeting.

Will all due respect to the other major biographers over the years - Scaduto, Shelton, Spitz, and Sounes - it's Clinton Heylin's Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited that stands as the best and most comprehensive book on the Bard of Hibbing. So it's wholly appropriate that the author takes on the whopping assignment of investigating and explaining the more than 600 original, copyrighted songs written by Dylan - this being the first in a two-volume series.

Tackling them chronologically when they were written rather than recorded or released, we get as good as possible glimpse into Dylan's mind as his songwriting skills progress from the 15-year-old who penned "Song to Brigit" to "Wedding Song," the last track off 1974's Planet Waves. But Heylin also notes that - as most Dylan fans know - none of his songs are ever truly "finished." To this day, he often changes lyrics or uses radically different arrangements and vocal inflections in concert. Just compare "Lay Lady Lay" on Nashville Skyline to the live version on Hard Rain.

Raw and untamed in its sound, performed by larger-than-life characters who might have popped out of fiction, and shrouded in a (often self-mythologizing) mystery, it's no wonder that the Delta blues attract such interest and scholarship, and is lauded as the most "true" distillation of the genre.

Combining history, sociology, biography, and analysis, musician/author Ted Gioia has produced perhaps the definitive book on the subject, just detailed enough for the hardcore fans and just accessible enough for the casual ones.

Gioia does a superb job in not only profiling the big names of Delta blues (Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf) but also scores of other performers of whom only a handful of recordings, if any, exist. Portions read like a detective novel, as in true "ramblin'" style, bluesmen appear in and out of towns, recording studios, juke joints and hotel rooms (often under different names), only to disappear into the void and emerge decades later - or not at all.

They are perhaps rock's most mythical treasure trove of performances, more than 100 songs recorded on low-quality tape rolling on a 2-track recorder by six musician friends mostly fucking around in 1967.

But the legend and impact of the so-called "Basement Tapes" (actually recorded in three different locations) would way outstrip the casual way in which they were recorded. In the process, they would turn the Hawks into the Band, drive Bob Dylan to a new direction (John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline) and, years later, help give birth to the alt-country movement.

After his 1966 motorcycle crash and relocation of his family to pastoral Woodstock, New York, Dylan found pleasure in simply enjoying nature or walking his daughter to the school-bus stop while rumors of his death and disfigurement swirled. Eventually, he wanted to do some playin' and singin', and gathered the then-Hawks (still on retainer as his backing band) for some musical messing around.

From their 1974 live debut in New York City to their final 1996 show in L.A., eight bruddas in leather have claimed the surname Ramone. But if there were a ninth member of the punk-rock godfathers, he would of course be Monte Ramone. For 2,263 performances in front of crowds ranging from a handful of bored club employees in the Bowery to stadiums packed with tens of thousands singing along in foreign countries, Monte A. Melnick saw it all.

He was the Ramones' road manager, procurer, party pal, confidante, soul brother, problem solver and much, much more. Melnick shares his experiences - and gets more than 50 players in the Ramones story to do likewise - in On the Road with the Ramones. Originally published in 2003, packed with more than 250 rare photos, it has recently been reissued in an updated edition.

Rocks Off spoke with Melnick, who now works at the Audio Visual Associate at the New York Hall of Science, about his years with pinheads, 1-2-3-4 countoffs, Dee Dee's syringes and gently navigating the explosive Johnny/Joey axis. 

With the release of their 1965 debut record, these five fine feathered friends were hailed as "America's Answer to the Beatles." The tag was both misleading and, well, pretty much inappropriate. That's because Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, Chris Hillman, Gene Clark and Michael Clarke - and their music - was nothing like what the Fabs were up to, much less some sort of planned Uncle Sam "response" to mop toppled hordes popping up and reselling American R&B to eager Caucasian teens.

And, as Martha Stewart would say, that was a good thing. McGuinn's chiming 12-string Rickenbacker, the Dylan covers, the raga-rock space-age songs and harmonies had pretty much nothing to do with whatever the Lads from Liverpool were up to at the time. 

Texas supergroup the Flatlanders (although it still exists) may have been "more legend than a band" but the same could also be said for the Flying Burrito Brothers (above, with female friends). The pioneers of country-rock were a short-lived act that went though numerous lineup changes, but records like The Gilded Palace of Sin and Last of the Red Hot Burritos are consistently cited by alt-country/No Depression/Americana acolytes as sonic holy grails.

However, the band and its story have been overshadowed by the live-fast-die-young/corpse-burning story of co-founder Gram Parsons. Like Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison before him, the doe-eyed Georgian (in all his marijuana-decorated-Nudie-suit glory) has become larger in death than he ever could be in life.

Rock journalist and radio host John Einarson, who has penned books on Neil Young, Randy Bachman, Buffalo Springfield and Gene Clark, wanted to set the record straight. He collaborated with Burrito co-founder Chris Hillman on this, the most comprehensive ever look at the story and music of the band. Rocks Off spoke with the Canadian scribe during a break in his current project, a biography on Love leader Arthur Lee, about Burritos myth, reality, and "Grampires." 

Another Beatles book? Doesn't the world already know everything it possibly can about the Fab Four, from the nickname of their favorite Hamburg pill dealer to the mustache style of the cab driver who took George through the streets of Rishikesh?

Well... no. And as long as interest in the band continues to flower - and pass along to new generations - Ye Olde Beatles Bookshelf will continue to groan under the accumulated weight of its tomes. Beatles for Sale, though, is the first one to make a comprehensive study of the group through the prism of its finances. Publishing, record contracts, Apple, Inc., merchandising, management, movies and even their fan club are studied with an accountant's eye.

The result is actually not dry and pretty fascinating - mostly how the biggest group in the world, before or since, made blunders that even today's MySpace minions wouldn't fall for. You never give me your money? Not unless it's in the contract, baby.

Rocks Off spoke with Beatles for Sale author and all-around Fabs expert John Blaney (Lennon and McCartney: Together Alone - A Critical Discography of Their Solo Work) about a wide range of money matters that would make a Liverpool taxman orgasm with delight.

  

At last, Pitchfork has laid bare its aesthetic in book form in this old-media attempt at pop music canonization. As the cover describes, The Pitchfork 500 is “Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present,” beginning with singles released in 1977.

That Pitchfork chieftains Scott Plagenhof and Ryan Schreiber chose that year is both telling and utterly predictable. Anyone familiar with the Web site knows its authors believe popular music was born that year, with the Velvet Underground serving as damn-near lone voice of cool in the wildernesses of hippiedom and dad-rock that came before.

You won’t be surprised to learn that there’s no country or Latin music in here, nor anything rooted in any tradition that dates beyond that all-important first year of the Carter Administration when disco, indie and punk Changed Everything Forever and Ever.

There is a lot more to Devo than whips and silly hats. Other than the band, no one knows this better than Jade Dellinger, co-author of the book We Are Devo!: Deviants in a Post-Modern World. (Currently, it’s the only biography about the post-punk/New Wave pioneers.)

“It’s sort of about the evolution and development of this, kind of, creative collective that became a band and unfortunately had a hit,” Dellinger says.

What many music fans don’t know is that Devo’s first intention was to not have a hit. When the members met at Kent State University in Ohio, their guiding principle was de-evolution, the theory that mankind is regressing instead of moving forward. This is driven home lyrically in several Devo songs, but most listeners never get past the yellow jumpsuits and quirky yet amazing synth-heavy dance beats.

Isn’t a lavish, coffee table hardcover book on “The Only Band That Mattered” something of a sell-out, a blatant attempt at a cold cash grab reaching out to middle-aged men whose Mohawks have turned grey or mall kids who think the Ramones are too soft?

Apparently so, according to co-author and Clash skin thumper Topper Headon, who dissed this tome in the pages of The New York Times, noting that it simply collected a bunch of old interviews and that Joe Strummer would be spinning in his grave about it.

You know what I say? Bollocks!

For any real fan of the Clash, this heavy effort is a must-have for the bookshelf, coffee table, or dilapidated squat. And as for Strummer, despite his proletarian beliefs, he always wanted to be a rock star. So he’d probably be quite proud that his band is worthy of such an effort almost 25 years after disintegrating. Recent releases like Strummer documentary The Future is Unwritten and the Live at Shea Stadium CD seem to bear this out.

The Sunset Strip running from Beverly Hills to Hollywood is only 1.7 miles long and is inevitably linked to celebrity and the film industry. But for a brief time in the mid-‘60s, it also served as the epicenter of American – and thus worldwide – rock and roll with its succession of nightclubs, coffeehouses, bars, and theatres.

And in those venues in front of the mostly teens and young adults who came to them, the careers of an awful lot of now-staple classic rock bands took flight, including the Doors, The Byrds, The Mamas and the Papas, Love, Buffalo Springfield, The Turtles, and Frank Zappa.

The Strip also served as the unofficial birthplace of garage rock (The Seeds, The Electric Prunes, The Music Machine) as well as home to bands with only-of-the-times names like the Peanut Butter Conspiracy, the Chocolate Watchband, and the Peppermint Trolley Company.

While the Allman Brothers Band will be celebrating their 40th anniversary next year with special projects and a tour, it’s hard to fathom that 37 of those years have gone by without one of the very siblings in the band’s name, lead guitarist Duane Allman.

When he died in October 1971 in a motorcycle accident on the streets of his hometown in Macon, Georgia, the 24-year-old had already made a huge impact on both fans and fellow musicians. Nicknamed “Dog,” and then “Skyman” (the latter given to him by Wilson Pickett), his moniker then morphed into “Skydog.”

Fittingly, Skydog is the first biography on the slide guitar master, and features a forward by ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons. Randy Poe is a longtime music journalist and current president of Leiber and Stoller Music Publishing. The paperback version of Skydog with revisions and updated info has just been released. Rocks Off spoke with Poe via cell phone while the author was at his son’s sports practice—hopefully dodging any fast-moving hardballs.

Rocks Off: Although he’s #2 on the list of Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest guitarists of all time, if you ask the average person to list the greatest rock players, you’d get Hendrix, Clapton, Page, Townsend, Richards…but Duane’s name would probably never come up. Why?

Despite his highfalutin Noo Yark media job, author Dana Jennings wants you to know he’s as country as corn liquor. ‘Course he might be dragging around too many liberal-elite signifiers to be the populist hero he’d like to be: for one, he works for the New York Times (to some good-ol’ boys, this is like writing for the former Soviet Union’s Pravda). Plus, he lives in upper-middle-class suburban New Jersey. Nevertheless, he insists he’s “still a goddamn hornpout-eatin’, rat-shootin’, stock car lovin’ hick.” And in his often loud, bull-horned prose, Jennings similarly plays up his über-bumpkin self-image throughout much of Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and Country Music.

Although he’s a little too juiced-up by middle-age poverty-nostalgia, Jennings does write passionately and intelligently about the classic honky-tonk music that shaped his hardscrabble working-class upbringing. Born a “whiskey baby” to teenage parents in 1957, Jennings reflects on the musical roots of his raisin’ in the snake-infested ponds, outhouses, dumps and tar-roof shacks of Kingston, New Hampshire. Along the way, we learn that New England can be as hick as anywhere below the Mason-Dixon (and that the term “hick” can even be used non-pejoratively).

As Jennings sees it, from 1950 to 1970 country music was made strictly by poor, hard-livin’ drunks for poor, hard-livin’ drunks. Not surprisingly, he just cant get it up for contempo cock-knockers like Keith Urban, or any other god-durn Nashville countrypolitan sumbitch. And if you enjoyed that previous line’s hickory-smoked colloquial quality (or if you’re a fan of, say, Jerry Reed’s citizens-band jabberjawin’ in Smokey and the Bandit) you’ll enjoy the corny rube-speak Jennings often integrates into his prose; he’ll sometimes strategically omit the preposition “of” to assumedly mimic his native North Appalachian tongue—e.g. “he got out the car”; a song “jumps out the speakers.” Instead of being born, he was “borned.” And you didn’t drive a truck; rather, you “drove truck.”

Memoirs about the famous written by family members usually fall into one of two categories: hero-worship hagiography or score-settling axe job. Astrid Young’s reflections on sibling Neil, though, creates an entirely new genre: A Famous Relative book…without much of the famous relative.

That’s right. Because despite the fact that the front cover features a huge honking photo of Neil (he’s on the back as well) as the selling point, there’s shockingly precious little about the author’s brother on the pages inside. Actually, Neil is Astrid’s half-brother, as they shared a father [noted Canadian journalist and commentator Scott Young] but not a mother. And since sis is about 16 years Neil’s junior and grew up in a completely different household, those hoping for anecdotes about a teenage Shakey bent over his guitar working out lyrics (“Down by the river…I smacked my baby? No, I need something stronger…”) will be sorely disappointed.

“As I write this book,” Astrid offers early on. “I’m hoping to enlighten myself as to who this Neil Young guy is.” Not the most promising of openings, to be sure (shouldn’t she have figured this out a bit earlier?) - and one that is left unfulfilled. “He is truly rock and roll royalty, which makes me, I suppose, a princess of sorts,” she continues. Uh, yeah…

Roxy Music emerged in 1971 out of art-school England. The first pop group to use artistic concepts such as collage in their music, Roxy helped define what would become known as art-rock, but at the time, they neatly completed glam-rock's glittering triad alongside David Bowie and T.Rex. Roxy influenced everyone from Bowie himself to the Sex Pistols and Scissor Sisters. Even today, Googling “Roxy Music” yields new band after new band citing them as an influence.

Named for the portentous first cut on Roxy Music’s self-titled 1972 debut, Michael Bracewell’s Re-Make/Re-Model offers a Proustian textbook examination into the formation of the concept behind Roxy Music rather than a more conventional look at the life of the band. Its begins in the 1950s and '60s, microscopically focused on the art and ideas being born and spontaneously taking seed at two art schools in England, well in advance of any eventual band members’ involvement in this web.

Don’t believe the line on this book as “Disgruntled Fired Eagle’s Hatchet Job on Don Henley and Glenn Frey.” Because while “Fingers” Felder truthfully tells of his time with the band from his perspective – and there are certainly sections where he writes too coyly or with a naiveté that’s hard to believe – Heaven and Hell is no axe-grinding tome. Instead, it’s a solid (and occasionally sordid) look into one of the biggest bands in rock history, a nice companion read to Marc Eliot’s To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles.

In this book’s early chapters, Felder relates his childhood growing up in poverty in Gainesville, Florida, his difficult relationships with his father and brother, and his path-crossing with a later who’s who of classic rockers who lived near the area: Stephen Stills, Duane and Gregg Allman, and Bernie Leadon – who as an original Eagle would open the door for his friend in the group. Oh, and there was this teenage guitar student of Felder’s – a certain “Tommy” Petty – who would go on later to do pretty well for himself.

Once Felder joins the already-successful Eagles to add a little rock edge to their peaceful easy feelings, he’s thrown immediately into a contentious group where politics and power plays abound. With the songwriting/singing team of Glenn Frey and Don Henley (whom Felder mostly refers to as “The Gods”) taking more creative and financial control, Felder feels the double-edge sword.

To Bob Dylan fans, she is The Girl on the Cover. The brunette with the wide eyes, long brown hair, and infectious smile forever immortalized on the arm her boyfriend on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. It’s the record that really launched Dylan’s career and legend with self-penned tracks like “Masters of War,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and, of course, “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

And though their relationship lasted on and off for about three years, Suze Rotolo has kept mostly silent. However, appearing on-camera to reminisce in Martin Scorsese’s recent Dylan film No Direction Home certainly seems to have opened the door for this book.

In the chapters B.B. (Before Bob), Rotolo tells of her unique upbringing as a “Red Diaper Baby” whose pro-Communist parents flooded her with a tsunami of books, music, and political ideas (though her father would tragically die early). She fought for a number of progressive social causes, though relating her experiences lead to the occasional purple prose here (“White people were looking at themselves and what their history had wrought, like a domestic animal having its face shoved in its own urine.”)

“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.