Some music collectors will treasure Incredibly Strange Music for supporting their similar dementia, others will find the book to be a prurient look at the underbelly of the recording world.
Barney Hoskyns
Across the Great Divide: The Band and America
(Hyperion)
Seventeen years after the breakup of rock's ultimate backwoods quintet, the Band, comes a 400-page bio recording its freakish presence throughout the psychedelic and disco eras. Readers who recall the high points of the group's career--the early days backing Dylan, the final stand at the Last Waltz--will find Hoskyns' story validating their memories. What lies in the middle of The Great Divide is a dry stretch colored only by an endless procession of band-member tiffs and dope excesses.
Hoskyns makes up for the unavoidable hundred-plus pages of the Band's bland days by his heartbreaking portrayal of the late Richard Manuel, whose self-destructive drinking resulted in a 1986 suicide by hanging. Also intriguing is the attention given to Robbie Robertson: his post-Band career, friendship with director Martin Scorsese, and Levon Helm's resentment at Robertson's refusal to join the surviving members for another shot at the Big Time.
Across the Great Divide spills the goods on this once fiercely private group, and in doing so is forced to strip away the endearing moonshine n' cornhuskin' persona of the Band. By book's end, you'll never listen to "Cripple Creek" the same way again. Sadly, Hoskyns shows that for these five hokum inebriates, success was truly "a drunkard's dream if I ever did see one."
John Litweiler
Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic Life
(William Morrow and Company)
A Harmolodic Life somehow seems anticlimactic in comparison to the still-revolutionary music of jazz's supreme alto-sax rebel. Not that the author is at fault for watering down a colorful history--the quiet Coleman simply blows a more interesting story than he has lived.
Though Litweiler doesn't seem to be bothered by Coleman's behavior, readers may wince through certain passages. The musician was homophobic to an almost paranoid degree, and once wrote what he felt to be "the ultimate sport's anthem." "The Ball Song," written in Coleman's trademark cacophonous style, was to be performed at all major sporting events and sung by Frank Sinatra. This did not happen. Not only will the endless praise wear a bit thin for some, the detailed dissections of Coleman compositions will have nonmusicians flipping ahead in the book. Still, even these drawbacks should not keep jazz fans from this brave and informative attempt to comprehend Coleman's aberrant jazz approach. Most jazz biographers choose much easier and more traditional figures to expound upon. Litweiler has tackled a tough one and made some sense of jazz's most misunderstood musician.
Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave
Anti-Rock: The Opposition to Rock n' Roll
(Da Capo Press)
Elvis' hips didn't lose the Korean War for us, and in spite of those threatening Beatles, Jesus is as popular as ever. Authors Martin and Segrave have compiled a fascinating and detailed overview of four decades of politicians, preachers and educators--all common in their ranting that rock is the product of Communists, Satan, or both.
From stories of early-'50s paranoia regarding "the Negro threat" of doo-wop groups to Tipper Gore quotes from her PMRC jousts with Frank Zappa, Anti-Rock remains a head-shaking view of how the devil's music is most certainly going to bring about the decline of Western Civilization.
While the authors remain remarkably free of outrage, the reader probably will not. We expect the slew of compiled references on wicked folks like the Rolling Stones and Prince, but not some of the more ludicrous stories that the authors include. The oh-so-subversive Lovin' Spoonful was once considered a threat to democracy, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band took its lumps from a pious DJ for a musical reference to God. Yikes. Such refined logic is regularly churned out by our neighborhood churches and PTA groups, the authors remind us. The antirock quotes from figures like Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra and Jesse Jackson sound more ludicrous than appalling; we somehow expect them to sound as foolish as the rock bands they criticize. But the authors' intense research mainly centers on quotes from the kind of persuasive local community figures who affect lives with their soapboxing a lot more than Sinatra ever could. By the time you reach the recent suicide-for-Ozzy Osbourne brouhaha, the book has you realizing that all the years of Communist/Satanist/moral-threat accusations have yet to uncover any real bogeymen whacking away at those guitars.
Daryl Long
Miles Davis for Beginners
(Writers and Readers Publishing)
A recent European discography of the late trumpeter Miles Davis spends almost 400 pages merely listing the recorded song titles and session men of the jazzman's career. For Beginners, on the other hand, valiantly attempts to cram his entire 65-year history into a TV Guide-size comic book for adults.
Surprisingly, writer/illustrator Daryl Long and his three collaborators do a killer job of it, pulling a very Milesish move in saying a lot about the Prince of Darkness in very few words. Although the eye-grabbing graphics steal more than half of the volume's space, the text still manages to squeeze in both major jazz history and trivia. Davis' role in bebop, cool jazz and fusion is sufficiently explained in fewer words than you'd find on a menu, with remaining space permitting mention of such minutiae as the horn player's appearance on Miami Vice in 1986.
