To paraphrase the Dos Equis commercial, I don't listen to rock music much anymore, but when I do it's often after reading an intriguing essay or book about a band I grew up with. I'll then go back to their best albums and perhaps even watch film clips or movies about them.
So as summer arrives and we take a break from this most dismal of political seasons, some book/movie/album suggestions:
• The Sun, the Moon, and the Rolling Stones by Rich Cohen. Whereas most accounts of 1960s rock bands are written by people my age or older, Cohen fell in love and later traveled with the Stones long after they had passed their peak and had become the "strolling bones." This is refreshing because it provides a sense of how later generations might interpret what we were once so obsessed with.
Cohen's irritating Hunter Thompson wanna-be prose style is offset by some fresh insights into how the Chicago blues became the Rolling Stones sound (and that of the Beatles and the rest of the British invasion as well). My favorite passage involves their reaction to the success of "Love Me Do," which they initially (and obviously mistakenly) thought would finish off them and all the other British blues bands for good.
Like usual, the cantankerous Mick-Keith relationship is foremost here (along with a brutal account of the estrangement and subsequent decline of the creepy Brian Jones). Like most, I find Keith the key to it all--there really should be a picture of him next to "rock 'n' roll" in any dictionary--but also recognize that it was Mick who cleaned up after him throughout and kept the Stones viable long after his mate had descended into drug-induced dysfunctionality.
Read Richards' authentically incoherent Life, then watch Gimme Shelter (where the Maysles brothers accidentally captured Altamont) and listen to Get Yer Ya Ya's Out, the stunning live album from that 1969 tour.
• Paul McCartney: The Life by Philip Norman. There doesn't seem to be much new or particularly insightful here but, at 800-plus pages, it's certainly thorough enough. The interesting part is that Sir Paul chose Norman to be his official biographer, given the way in which he savaged him in earlier books, including perhaps the best overall account of the Beatles, Shout!
Norman consequently plays mostly nice this time around, with the key question being what do you do with the rest of your life when you've become one of the most famous people in the world before 25. The answer from the second half of the book: not all that much.
Paul might be the greatest songwriter in the history of popular music, but the truth is that the vast majority of those great songs were co-written (sort of) with that other guy over just seven or so of his 73 years.
On the other hand, we should all be thankful that he's still out there doing shows, most recently, of course, in North Little Rock. The one I caught a couple years ago in Memphis was among the best I've ever seen (behind perhaps only the Stones at Chicago Stadium in 1975 and the Boss from the third row in 1978).
Read Norman's bio and then go back to the movie and album A Hard Day's Night to get a sense of what the excitement was all about.
• Who I Am by Pete Townshend. The first Who album I owned was Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy, a collection of (mostly) U.K. hit singles. But what really intrigued was reading Townshend's review of it for Rolling Stone, in which he was so witty and literate and self-deprecating. Thus began my realization that Pete is the most intellectually interesting of rock stars (yes, to damn with faint praise), more so than Lennon, Jagger, Bowie, or even Dylan.
There probably isn't enough about the music here, perhaps because Townshend seems to have never taken it all that seriously in the first place, but after the Beatles broke up, the Who was the group usually cited to challenge the Stones "world's greatest rock and roll band" claim.
After reading Townshend's often brutally self-honest account of his life, watch the documentary Lambert and Stamp about the aspiring film directors who discovered and molded the Who, in much the same fashion as Brian Epstein did the Beatles and, to a lesser extent, Andrew Oldham the Stones. And then listen to the extended version of the album that best captures the Who's unrivaled raw power, Live at Leeds.
• The chapter "Pilgrim's Progress" from Greil Marcus' Mystery Train is the second-best in that wonderful book, after the one on Elvis. The subject, The Band, is easily my favorite American group.
What Marcus called that "weird old American" music is perfectly expressed in their first two albums, Music from Big Pink and The Band (both on my desert island list). After giving those a thorough listen, watch The Band's poignant farewell in Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz--it was, I believe, Philip Martin who wrote that the scene in which a stumpy, leisure-suit clad Van Morrison delivers a goofy karate kick on stage was worth the price of admission alone.
He was right.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 05/30/2016