There's no great urgency to book reviews. I don't hustle to read a book and write a review for the day it becomes available in bookstores. I usually don't even know the publication date of a book I'm writing about. There was one instance this past year when I almost ran a review a couple of months in advance of a book's official publication. When I checked with the publishers, they said they didn't mind if I ran the piece when I'd tentatively scheduled it, but ....
A lot of sure-to-be best-sellers don't show up on my desk until the day they hit the sales shelves. And sometimes I get advance reader copies months ahead of the publication date. I like that. Let me go on the record as saying I love advance reader copies. As long as they are physical copies.
What I don't love are electronically distributed ARCs (as we call them in the biz). More and more publishers are using these -- it's obviously a cheaper and more efficient method of making advance copies available -- but I have a hard time with them. I read some ebooks on my iPad, but sometimes it's difficult (for me) to transfer a NetGalley pdf to the iPad. And OK, boomer, I still have an irrational preference for the tangible.
I like printed ARCs because, being soft-covered and cheaply printed, they are perfect for traveling. I take them on the road, to the gym, to the office. I dog-ear their pages and scribble in them. I use them differently from a real book, which I treat rather preciously.
I really appreciate that I first received 1973: Rock at the Crossroads by Andrew Grant Jackson (Thomas Dunne Books, $29.99) as an ARC because I imagine that the highest and best use of the book will be as a reference volume.
It would be a fine thing if the publisher commissioned a series of similar books, each dedicated to a specific year the way the old Reach's Official Base Ball Guide recapped every baseball season between 1883 and 1939. (In 1939 it merged with its rival The Spalding Guide to form the Spalding-Reach Guide, which was soon subsumed into The Sporting News Baseball Guide, which continued publication until 2006.)
But the difference would be that while the Reach Guide and its successors were written in the immediate aftermath of the baseball season (most of it was probably written during the season) the hypothetical rock guides would be written from a retrospective distance of at least 20 years -- so next year the book about the music of the year 2000 might be considered. As Ken Burns said when he wrapped up his recent country music documentary series with the music of the late '90s, you really need about that much time to put things in proper perspective.
Anyway, Jackson -- who has previously written about a rock music year (1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music) makes a case for 1973 as very important indeed, without manufacturing too many hyperbolic claims for the year that allegedly bequeathed more songs to classic rock radio formats than any other. He calls it the zenith of classic rock, which one could take as a dubious achievement.
Having lived through 1973, I might have described it as a rather ordinary year in rock; the biggest single was the Rolling Stones' "Angie" (which Jackson points out was not written for or about Angie Bowie), which I'd characterize as second-tier Stones, and the second-best-seller was the annoying earworm "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" by Tony Orlando and Dawn, an act that seems emblematic of the era.
Sweet's "Ballroom Blitz" and Elton John's "Crocodile Rock" rounded out the top four, and while I retain a certain residual fondness for this kind of unabashed pop, it hardly seems like important work.
But 1973 was also the year of Bruce Springsteen's The Wild, the Innocent & the E-Street Shuffle, Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy, Iggy and the Stooges' Raw Power and Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark and while you could (and I would) argue that those artists produced even stronger work before and after those albums, that's not a bad opening argument.
While you could classify Jackson's book as a clip job in that there's little evidence he directly interviewed many sources, his mind is as lively as his research skills are sharp, and he's not a bad critic. He spends considerable time with Lou Reed's Berlin and dishes on the real Rikki who inspired Steely Dan's "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" (Donald's Fagen's college crush -- a professor's wife).
It's an entertaining and breezy account of a year that I hadn't given much thought. But I bet 1974, 1975 and 1976 -- to mention three other years one might imagine "ordinary" -- could yield similarly fascinating commentaries.
Email:
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Style on 12/08/2019