What book are you reading?

[Mike from Boston]

Did you know Tommy James was mobbed up? (As in Tommy James and the Shondells-Money, Money-Crimson and Clover).
I guess they have a book out and his manager allegedly was the inspiration for “Hesh” on the Sopranos.

I am not reading this yet, but it looks really interesting.

James, Tommy; Martin Fitzpatrick (2010). Me, the Mob, and the Music. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 1439128650. The book extensively details James's relationship with Morris Levy.

Review /Interview here:
http://news.bostonherald.com/entertainm ... ition=also

[soulfinger]

Lonely Avenue: The Unlikely Life and Times of Doc Pomus.

[philipchevron]

Apathy For The Devil by Nick Kent (Faber & Faber)

It's something of a shock to be reminded in this "1970s Memoir" just what an unexceptional, dull even, journalist Nick Kent could actually be in his heyday, though in fairness, he'd probably be the first to say that himself. Behind the Lone Groover black-leather-and-guyliner thin-as-a-rake junkie persona, which made him almost as much a star as the people he wrote about, lay a writing talent that was 90% hackery and 10% inspiration. But it's the 10% that matters and it's a treat to be reminded again how thrilling it was to suddenly find oneself, as a reader, caught up in the transition from the mundane to the sacred: Kent was like a great golfer or jazz musician finding his way into the zone, and when he got there, it was a pleasure just to tag along. More importantly, now that clean and sober Nick Kent is a happily married man with an adored teenage son, he can still get there. Simply put, the zone is arrived at when Kent's passion for his subject and the language he uses to explain and describe that passion become one and the same. It is the mark not just of the true music fan but of the true writer.

Highly recommended to lovers of music and lovers of life. Bravo, Nick!

P.S. It's gratifying to learn that the NME, in its "golden years" was every bit as dysfunctional and prone to hubris as its detractors said it was. The picture Kent paints of it makes Private Eye's Street of Shame look like a model working environment by comparison.

[Clash Cadillac]

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen - Larry McMurtry

[Low D]

Working my way through the last of my son's Artimis Fowl books: "The Time Paradox". The way the plot is going, i can see why the Widow Adams chose Eoin Colfer to write the new Hitch Hiker's Guide installment. There's nothing quite as witty as time-travel humour.

[old barney greyheron]

Re-reading 'American Tabloid' and 'The Cold Six Thousand' by James Ellroy...scary, rivetting stoof.

[BelfastsLittlesHobo]

Reading Joseph McBride's biography Searching For John Ford. Started reading it as research but I'm well and truly engrossed!

[cagliostro]

What book are you reading?

I've decided to just see the movie instead.

Actually, I've made several starts and stops toward reading the latest Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy book, but since the wife and I had a kid, I can't seem to stay awake with books any more. And this is coming from a book junkie (and who graduated with a BA in English Lit).

[philipchevron]

Texas Tornado: The Times and Music of Doug Sahm by Jan Reid, with Shawn Sahm (University of Texas Press, 2010)

Sooner or later, all the great American folk music ends up in Texas and returns it to the world enriched and improved - jazz, Chicago blues, soul, gospel, Scotch-Irish-Appalachian bluegrass, country, Cajun waltzes, Irish jigs, German polkas, norteno and conjunto and lovesick Mexican dancehall ballads, they all pass through the Lone Star blender. Which means that when an 11-year old pedal steel prodigy from San Antonio, a son of German immigrants who sat in with Hank Williams when he came to town and cut his own first single as a vocalist before his voice had broken jumps the tracks to hang out in the city's Chicano West Side or with the black guys in the Tiffany Lounge and other blues shacks, something quintessentially American is going to take place. It's a fusion of musical dialects that could only ever have truly manifested in a part of the world that is almost defined by its Border-ness, whose Internationally-known central iconic image is that of an old Spanish mission church where the first truly cataclysmic event in Mexican-American culture took place, a standoff so shaded in grey that its repercussions, politically, historically and culturally, continue to be debated almost 200 years later; and because the Alamo is in America [or possibly Mexico, if you prefer, or both, as is glaringly obvious to the casual observer] its very ambiguity has not prevented clearcut black and white interpretations of its significance being claimed by every side. Indeed, the scholarship on the siege of the Alamo is itself an interestingly fluid aspect of its appeal, one that appears to me to both mirror and foreshadow developments in the US culture-wars.

Doug Sahm (1941-1999) is the single most important figure in American popular music in the second half of the 20th Century, a time when all these competing cultures were shifting into new alignment. I know Elvis Presley is more customarily considered the great musical filter of the era, but much as I love Elvis (and not just his Sun recordings, either), I respectfully demur from the party line on this. Elvis indisputably brought the tensions between Hillbilly music and "race" music into fresh focus, but it's Doug who liberally and joyfully draws on all the folk sources at his disposal, and his music makes no real case for integration and assimilation except its own existence. There is a great irony in the plain historical fact that Doug's first properly successful band, Sir Douglas Quintet [with whom he had his three biggest hits - "The Rains Came", "She's About A Mover" and "Mendocino"] was named and dressed by its producer, Huey P. Meaux, in an attempt to convince American radio stations that here was yet another great English band following in the wake of the massive US success of the Beatles and the Stones. Although the ploy worked, it was the least convincing piece of ethnic masking Doug ever lent his name to and indeed, the charade does not even make it to the end of the first SDQ album, by which point the blues, country and border dancehall elements are already well in place, and not a Liverpool accent can be traced.

I was fortunate to meet Doug Sahm, and his lifelong musical partner/rival Augie Meyers, a few times in London in the early 1980s, before my own musical course dragged me out of his orbit and, much to my regret, I did not meet him again before he died or, more specifically, before I had sent him the long-promised song I wrote for him. In fact, the very first day I began my four-year stint at Rock On Records in Camden Town, my immediate boss, Bob Dunham, appeared at the shop late on my very first day, hung over and raving about the SDQ gig in London - their first in 15 years - the night before. I met Doug and Augie on my second day when they visited the shop to check out and buy some records and sealed my impression that this was the best day job I ever had and Dunham my best teacher, a position I have had no cause to waiver from ever since.

In many ways, Doug Sahm defeats analysis. As Reid writes here, in what is - remarkably - only the first full-length biography, "Doug's philosophy as an artist was contained in a single premise: finding and protecting his groove" and his eldest son Shawn, who I am pleased to count as a friend and sometime colleague - is a rich source of life-enhancing stories of his own complicity in the constant quest to "protect the groove", only a very few of which he shares with his Pop's biographer. His music is its own best advocate, of course, and you could do worse than sample The Return Of Doug Saldana (Mercury, 1971) or Doug Sahm and Band (Atlantic, 1972) or Border Wave (Chrysalis 1980) or his very last album The Return of Wayne Douglas (Tornado, 2000), irresistible all.

[Sandyfromvancouver]

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Voices by Arnaldur Idridason (who's Icelandic). A Thousand Dreams, about how Vancouver's Downtown Eastside degenerated into what it has become.

[Low D]

"The Humours of Planxty" by Leagues O'Toole. As interesting to me for it's content on more obscure persons from "the Irish folk revival" like Johnny Monyihan as for it's history of the core group members. Can't wait to get to the Noel Hill parts...

[territa]

Texas Tornado: The Times and Music of Doug Sahm by Jan Reid, with Shawn Sahm (University of Texas Press, 2010)

haven't ordered it yet, will do so. Was your above review the intro? If not, it should have been.

[Sandyfromvancouver]

The Black Book by A S Byatt. Super. I love anything by her or her sister Margaret Drabble. I know they endure a horrid sibling rivalry, but I have a place in my heart for both. More, more I say, from each!

[Clash Cadillac]

Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America - J Anthony Lukas

A gift from Doc Harry

[firehazard]

Just finished Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and his Cosmic American Music, by David N. Meyer.
Which apart from having a madly long title, was actually a pretty good read. It's interesting when a biographer has an obvious distaste for at least one of the characters who recur in the story...