I finally gave up on Mirage Men. I just couldn't do it. The subject matter was interesting...I'm interested in belief systems, so I'm always interested to read about conspiracy theories (this one being that the CIA and other US secret agencies have been behind UFO activity, either through testing secret aircraft or through staging...really hoaxing...sightings, at least since the 1950s and perhaps even earlier), and so I'm always fascinated to learn why people believe the theories that they believe and why they reject the ones they don't believe. I really wanted to read this book.
However, the writing was not stellar, to say the least. The author seemed to feel free to be snarky about people and events he didn't like or believe. It was just too negative an experience all around that I wasn't motivated to continue.
So, that's two books I've given up on so far this year, compared with four read since the beginning of the year. Not a very good ratio, I suppose.
Giving up on that book opened up time to begin another book, and so yesterday afternoon I started reading Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell With The Rolling Stones (Da Capo Press, 2006; 258 pages), by Robert Greenfield. I'm already nearly halfway through it and finding it a good read. It revolves around the time in the early 1970s when the Stones were tax exiles in France and working on the recording of "Exile on Main St.", considered to be one of the band's best albums.
Showing posts with label rock and roll. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rock and roll. Show all posts
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
A reading update, and a book you don't have to read from cover to cover...
Time does tend to get away from me sometimes. It's Thursday already.
I'm still working my way through The Miracle Detective, and I'm making progress, but there's been a lot going on this week. Monday night was an SCA business meeting. Tuesday night was knit night. Last night I was just a bum, watching NCIS episodes on DVD while waiting to go pick up a friend after her night class. In the mornings, there's work. And...well, you get the idea.
Also on Monday night, I started looking through a book I picked up at the library Sunday, Billboard's Hottest Hot 100 Hits, by Fred Bronson (Billboard Books, 1995; revised and enlarged edition). And couldn't put it down for hours.
It's a book of lists. I love books of lists. Probably has something to do with the fact that I love making lists. Which is likely why I love the movie High Fidelity. I have the book around here somewhere, but I haven't read it yet. But I digress.
What Bronson did with this book was take all the Hot 100 lists from Billboard magazine, since it began publishing that particular list on a weekly basis on August 4, 1958, and assigned each song on each chart a numerical value based on its position that week, the did something mathematical with all the information and came up with a list of the 5000 hits of the rock era. But that's at the back of the book. He also worked up "top" lists for every year from 1956 (he used a series of Best Sellers in Stores charts for rankings before Billboard started publishing the Hot 100 chart) through 1994, for each decade from the 1950s through the 1980s, and "top" lists for a number of artists, writers, producers, record labels and so forth. There is also a series of specialized "top" lists, of which my favorite is probably either to Top 100 One-Hit Wonders or the Top 100 Songs that debuted at 100 on the Hot 100 list.
I guess you could say that Bronson is kind of a geek, with maybe too much time on his hands. He reports in the book's introduction that he did the same sort of thing with each week's top 30 list as broadcast on KRLA radio in Los Angeles, which he wrote down faithfully as it was broadcast on Friday afternoons. Until he discovered that the station reproduced the list and distributed it to record stores and he could just pick one up instead of writing them down. I can't laugh too hard at this. When I was growing up in Southern California in the late 1960s, I used to do the same thing on Wednesday evening (as I recall, although it's been a long time and I could be wrong) when KRLA's rival rock and roll station, KHJ, played their Top 30 countdown. Which of course means that I was a geek with too much time on my hands, too. This is something I'm glad to own up to now, although at the time I would have denied it.
Anyway, the book is great fun. If you like music, and if you stumble across it in the library, you might want to give it a look. It is also the ideal book for when you have some time on your hands but don't want to commit to reading a book all the way through. You can dip into this at any point and find out something interesting that you probably didn't know before. The only thing I wish is that there was a newly updated edition on the shelves at my library. There may well be such an edition, but I haven't come across it yet.
I'd really like to see what changes a decade and a half has made in that Top 5000 Hits of the Rock Era list.
Now. Back to The Miracle Detective.
I'm still working my way through The Miracle Detective, and I'm making progress, but there's been a lot going on this week. Monday night was an SCA business meeting. Tuesday night was knit night. Last night I was just a bum, watching NCIS episodes on DVD while waiting to go pick up a friend after her night class. In the mornings, there's work. And...well, you get the idea.
Also on Monday night, I started looking through a book I picked up at the library Sunday, Billboard's Hottest Hot 100 Hits, by Fred Bronson (Billboard Books, 1995; revised and enlarged edition). And couldn't put it down for hours.
It's a book of lists. I love books of lists. Probably has something to do with the fact that I love making lists. Which is likely why I love the movie High Fidelity. I have the book around here somewhere, but I haven't read it yet. But I digress.
What Bronson did with this book was take all the Hot 100 lists from Billboard magazine, since it began publishing that particular list on a weekly basis on August 4, 1958, and assigned each song on each chart a numerical value based on its position that week, the did something mathematical with all the information and came up with a list of the 5000 hits of the rock era. But that's at the back of the book. He also worked up "top" lists for every year from 1956 (he used a series of Best Sellers in Stores charts for rankings before Billboard started publishing the Hot 100 chart) through 1994, for each decade from the 1950s through the 1980s, and "top" lists for a number of artists, writers, producers, record labels and so forth. There is also a series of specialized "top" lists, of which my favorite is probably either to Top 100 One-Hit Wonders or the Top 100 Songs that debuted at 100 on the Hot 100 list.
I guess you could say that Bronson is kind of a geek, with maybe too much time on his hands. He reports in the book's introduction that he did the same sort of thing with each week's top 30 list as broadcast on KRLA radio in Los Angeles, which he wrote down faithfully as it was broadcast on Friday afternoons. Until he discovered that the station reproduced the list and distributed it to record stores and he could just pick one up instead of writing them down. I can't laugh too hard at this. When I was growing up in Southern California in the late 1960s, I used to do the same thing on Wednesday evening (as I recall, although it's been a long time and I could be wrong) when KRLA's rival rock and roll station, KHJ, played their Top 30 countdown. Which of course means that I was a geek with too much time on my hands, too. This is something I'm glad to own up to now, although at the time I would have denied it.
Anyway, the book is great fun. If you like music, and if you stumble across it in the library, you might want to give it a look. It is also the ideal book for when you have some time on your hands but don't want to commit to reading a book all the way through. You can dip into this at any point and find out something interesting that you probably didn't know before. The only thing I wish is that there was a newly updated edition on the shelves at my library. There may well be such an edition, but I haven't come across it yet.
I'd really like to see what changes a decade and a half has made in that Top 5000 Hits of the Rock Era list.
Now. Back to The Miracle Detective.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Recently read: "Wonderland Avenue" by Danny Sugerman
When I mentioned on an internet forum I’m active on that I was reading a book about Laurel Canyon and the music industry in the 1960s and 1970s, someone recommended that I read Wonderland Avenue: Tales of Glamour and Excess, by Danny Sugerman (William Morrow and Company, 1989; 407 pages), I figured I would give it a try. I read Sugerman’s No One Here Gets Out Alive, a biography of Jim Morrison, years ago. I wasn’t sure how much of it was true and how much of it was hopeful memory, but as a fan of The Doors from way, way back, I didn’t find it a waste of my time.
Again, I’m not sure how much of Wonderland Avenue I should really take as gospel truth, but I’m glad I read it anyway. Now, I’m not saying that Sugerman was a liar. I’m not saying that I can’t imagine that a major rock band would let a thirteen-year-old hang out at their office and rehearsal space. After all, it was the 1960s, a completely different universe than the one we live in today, in which any adult who lets a kid not related to them hang around is just asking to be investigated as a pedophile. I’m not even saying that I find it unbelievable that they would hire kid that age to answer their fan mail. Goodness only knows, stranger things happen in show business every day, and a good proportion of that fan mail was probably from kids who were not much older than that. But I’m not as sure that a major recording label would let a teenager write official press releases for the band, or hire on a teenager as press agent and then as manager.
I suppose what I’m really trying to say is that I don’t know how much of Sugerman’s story is how it really was, and how much of it represents how he wishes it had been. Unfortunately, we can’t ask him; Sugerman died of lung cancer in 2005 at the age of 50.
He’s lucky he didn’t die much earlier, and that’s a large part of what Wonderland Avenue is about. If he wasn’t already taking drugs when he met the members of The Doors, at the age of twelve through an umpire who worked the youth baseball games Sugerman played in, he was probably thinking about it. The umpire was also a roadie for The Doors and took Sugerman to a concert one night. The rest, given Sugerman’s unhappy home and school life and his rebellion against them, was probably inevitable.
The first part of the book details how the band, and especially Jim Morrison, took Sugerman under their collective wings. We see Morrison here as not a good influence, especially, but not nearly as bad an influence as he could have been. While he did not stop Sugerman from doing drugs, and actually facilitated the boy’s first use of cocaine, Morrison also insisted that he stay in school, do his assignments, and pass his classes. Morrison also gave his young follower stacks and boxes of books to read.
But then Jim Morrison was gone, first to Paris and then to wherever it is that rock and roll drug users go when they die. Bereft of his mentor, Sugerman started down an increasing and accelerating path of drug use and generally self-destructive behavior. Still, he more or less managed,, for a time, to function as press agent and then manager for Ray Manzarek, who had played keyboards for The Doors, and as manager for Iggy Pop who, if anything, was crazier than Jim Morrison ever thought of being. But the drug use caught up to Sugerman and, at the age of 21, he found himself in the hospital with less than a week to live unless he kicked drugs.
There were points while I read Wonderland Avenue where I was uncomfortable with Sugerman’s avowals of how much fun he had sometimes while he was taking drugs. This is not, I thought as I was reading, how to convince people that a cocaine addiction or a heroin habit (or both) is not a good thing. But I think that his excruciatingly detailed descriptions of what doing way too many drugs does to both body and mind manage to counteract any impression that he might give that drugs are fun.
Again, I’m not sure how much of Wonderland Avenue I should really take as gospel truth, but I’m glad I read it anyway. Now, I’m not saying that Sugerman was a liar. I’m not saying that I can’t imagine that a major rock band would let a thirteen-year-old hang out at their office and rehearsal space. After all, it was the 1960s, a completely different universe than the one we live in today, in which any adult who lets a kid not related to them hang around is just asking to be investigated as a pedophile. I’m not even saying that I find it unbelievable that they would hire kid that age to answer their fan mail. Goodness only knows, stranger things happen in show business every day, and a good proportion of that fan mail was probably from kids who were not much older than that. But I’m not as sure that a major recording label would let a teenager write official press releases for the band, or hire on a teenager as press agent and then as manager.
I suppose what I’m really trying to say is that I don’t know how much of Sugerman’s story is how it really was, and how much of it represents how he wishes it had been. Unfortunately, we can’t ask him; Sugerman died of lung cancer in 2005 at the age of 50.
He’s lucky he didn’t die much earlier, and that’s a large part of what Wonderland Avenue is about. If he wasn’t already taking drugs when he met the members of The Doors, at the age of twelve through an umpire who worked the youth baseball games Sugerman played in, he was probably thinking about it. The umpire was also a roadie for The Doors and took Sugerman to a concert one night. The rest, given Sugerman’s unhappy home and school life and his rebellion against them, was probably inevitable.
The first part of the book details how the band, and especially Jim Morrison, took Sugerman under their collective wings. We see Morrison here as not a good influence, especially, but not nearly as bad an influence as he could have been. While he did not stop Sugerman from doing drugs, and actually facilitated the boy’s first use of cocaine, Morrison also insisted that he stay in school, do his assignments, and pass his classes. Morrison also gave his young follower stacks and boxes of books to read.
But then Jim Morrison was gone, first to Paris and then to wherever it is that rock and roll drug users go when they die. Bereft of his mentor, Sugerman started down an increasing and accelerating path of drug use and generally self-destructive behavior. Still, he more or less managed,, for a time, to function as press agent and then manager for Ray Manzarek, who had played keyboards for The Doors, and as manager for Iggy Pop who, if anything, was crazier than Jim Morrison ever thought of being. But the drug use caught up to Sugerman and, at the age of 21, he found himself in the hospital with less than a week to live unless he kicked drugs.
There were points while I read Wonderland Avenue where I was uncomfortable with Sugerman’s avowals of how much fun he had sometimes while he was taking drugs. This is not, I thought as I was reading, how to convince people that a cocaine addiction or a heroin habit (or both) is not a good thing. But I think that his excruciatingly detailed descriptions of what doing way too many drugs does to both body and mind manage to counteract any impression that he might give that drugs are fun.
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