Review: 'Punk: The Last Word'

When you call your book Punk: The Last Word, you better be pretty damn comprehensive. A title like that yawps "Here's all that's left you'll ever need to know and everyone else can shut it."

At 600 pages, Chris Sullivan and (mostly) Stephen Colegrave's oral history is certainly fat. And they definitely cast a wide net to snare up whatever might be considered punk. Along with the expected punk rock bits, Punk: The Last Word also spews a lot of ink on fashion, venues, lifestyles, beatniks, underground theater, and old, dead philosophers and poets. 

Vinyl Reissue of The Animals' 'Animalisms'

While their top-tier British peers were progressing emphatically by the spring of 1966, The Animals were perfectly happy to continue on as if it were still 1964, doing what they always did best: putting their Newcastle stamp on American blues, soul, R&B, and tin pan alley tunes. "Shapes of Things","19th Nervous Breakdown", "See My Friends", "Substitute", and "Nowhere Man" were not enough to throw them off course. So May 1966's Animalisms was yet another platter of mostly other people's material, the two exceptions being Eric Burdon and new keyboardist Dave Rowberry's "You're on My Mind" and "She'll Return It" (I refuse to acknowledge the lame minute of clapping credited to Rowberry alone...whoops!). 

Review: 'Classic Monsters, Modern Art'

When I took my wife to see The Bride of Frankenstein at NY's Museum of Modern Art on one of our first dates, the one thing she commented on after seeing it for the first time was how "iconic" every frame of it is. It may not be as lauded as Citizen Kane, but Kane doesn't have an image half as indelible as Karloff's monster lumbering through a crypt or Lanchester's Bride shrieking in horror when she first meets him. As far as I'm concerned, the horror of the unseen (see The Haunting or The Blair Witch Project) will always be scariest, but the monsters, crypts, and grave yards of less frightening films will never fail to scratch the itchy shoulders of those like me who look forward to Halloween more than Christmas.

Review: 'SMiLE: The Rise, Fall, & Resurrection of Brian Wilson'

For nearly forty years, Brian Wilson's SMiLE existed more as a myth than a piece of music you could actually listen to. Sure, there were scores of bootlegs, but the average Beach Boys fan doesn't go that very, very naughty route. So, aside from a handful of songs that skittered out officially here or there, the SMiLE story was one that existed more on the page than emanating from speakers. While it was covered in any Beach Boys bio worth its salt, the biggest dose of SMiLE lore was Domenic Priore's Look! Listen! Vibrate! SMiLE! a truly wonderful, zine-like anthology of period press clippings and new essays first published in 1988. 

Review: 'Louder Than You Think: A Lo-Fi History of Gary Young and Pavement' OST

Gary Young was a bizarre yet extremely talented drummer and producer who consumed mass quantities of acid in Stockton, California, while listening to Yes; played in a punk band with the extremely punk name The Fall of Christianity; and most bizarrely of all, ended up as the drummer in slacker poster-boy  combo Pavement. While Stephen Malkmus, Spiral Stairs, and the rest of the dewy young guys lurched over their instruments in their baggy shirts with their shaggy hair dangling in their faces, middle-aged Gary would be standing on his drum stool, shirtless, twirling sticks like Tommy Lee. The incongruity delighted Pavement's audience of ironists, and Young's drumming supplied the pro-glue that held the whole melodic mess together. He only made one album with Pavement, but Slanted and Enchanted is the one most often cited as the band's best.  

Review: 'As Years Go By: Marianne Faithfull'

In 1990, Mark Hodkinson published As Tears Go By: Marianne Faithfull. Author and subject both disliked the book for different reasons. The author was embarrassed by his overwrought prose. The subject found it ghoulish, or in her term, "scaly." She seemingly thought that by focusing so much on her substance abuse issues, the author was "counting on her keeling over at any moment," as she commented in her autobiography. So, some two decades later, Hodkinson revised his text, brought the story up to date, and slightly altered the title to indicate As Tears Go By was now a different book.

Review: 'Visions, Dreams, & Rumours: A Portrait of Stevie Nicks' Remastered Edition

I'm not one to twirl around my apartment in a top hat and chiffon shawl, but Visions, Dreams, & Rumours: A Portrait of Stevie Nicks is not the first book I've read about the white witch. The other, written by Stephen "Hammer of the Gods" Davis, was disturbing enough that I waded into Zoë Howe's book with some trepidation. During these dark times, reading a book that makes me feel shitty is not at the top of my to-do list, but reviewing books about rock stars is what I do, so I agreed to review Howe's updated—sorry, remastered—edition of her 2017 bio nevertheless. 

Review: Blur's 'The Great Escape' 30th Anniversary Edition

If there was any question that Damon Albarn was positioning himself as the Ray Davies of the nineties with Parklife, The Great Escape shot any doubts dead. The Davies who spat at commercialization with "Holiday in Waikiki", gently mocked the ruined rich with "Sunny Afternoon", guffawed at trendiness with "Dedicated Follower of Fashion", and expressed disdain for a cad with "Dandy" was alive and alright in 1995 thanks to Albarn channeling him to craft such withering commentaries as "Dan Abnormal", "Stereotypes", "Charmless Man", "Top Man", and the positively Arthurian (the album, not the king) "Mr. Robinson's Quango". 

Review: 'The Dance Album of Carl Perkins' Vinyl Reissue

Intervention Records has crafted audiophile reissues of records from the very late sixties through the nineties. For their latest release, the label reaches as far back as it ever has to revive one of the key LPs of rock and roll's earliest days. Originally released in 1957, Carl Perkins's Dance Album lined up a superb set of radio classics, knocking the socks off bobby soxers, greasers, and four Liverpudlian history-changers in the process. But it would do Perkins a disservice to suggest his Dance Album's importance is solely due to The Beatles, as a unit and as solo artists, covering nearly everything on it. Perkins's songwriting stands strong alongside the era's best composers, namely Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry, his "Blue Suede Shoes" easily being one of rock and roll's defining songs and philosophical statements. He also stands out for the crystalline precision of his singing and six-string twanging. 

Review: Tears for Fears' ''Songs from the Big Chair' 2LP Anniversary Edition

Following a moody debut with a couple of angular arty moments, Tears for Fears went full smash with their sophomore album. Things like "Mad World", "Pale Shelter", and "Change" had been UK hits and well-loved underground nuggets in the US but nothing to prepare Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith for what was to come with the world-dominating triple-threat of "Head Over Heels", "Shout", and"Everybody Wants to Rule the World". The latter was consciously crafted to be heard on drive-time FM radio, a scheme that more than worked when it and "Shout" each took the Billboard top spot.