Review: 'Nazz' Vinyl Reissue

In a post-John Wesley Harding/post-Music from Big Pink environment, most rock bands were leaving behind the potent influence of the British Invasion to embrace a more staunchly American, borderline rural sound.  Even British bands were following Dylan and The Band's leads, as The Beatles made the New Orleans-influenced "Lady Madonna" and the Stones channelled Delta country and blues into Beggars Banquet. 

Review: 'The Amplified Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana'

In late 1993, Nirvana was just two years into their global fame and had just three albums under their belts, but they'd already done and experienced enough for young journalist Michael Azerrad to fill a full and eventful biography. Ads for Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana were all over MTV, and for rock geeks of my generation, it became an immediate must read, especially after Kurt Cobain took his own life just a few months after publication. I guess we were a bit desperate to make some sense of what had happened.

After the author added an extra chapter acknowledging what had happened, my friend Phil bought the revised edition and loaned it to me. I devoured it in a couple of days and have not forgotten much of what was in there. Nevertheless, when I saw a copy of it at my local library about six months ago, I snatched it up and reread it for the first time since '94.

Soon after, when I discovered that Azerrad was once again expanding his book with additional material and insights to be republished as The Amplified Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana for its thirtieth anniversary, I almost didn't request a review copy since I'd reread the original text so recently. But since that edition was published so long ago and at such a crucial crossroads in Nirvana's career and Cobain's life, I was very curious to see what Azerrad had added, so I went ahead and submitted my request to HarperOne.

I'm very glad I did, because there is literally another complete book in The Amplified Come As You Are. Azerrad has nearly doubled the original's 335 pages to a whopping 609. There is additional material on every single page of this new edition. Occasionally it's no more than a short sentence, but more often, it's a block of text that outweighs the old passage it illuminates. 

Some of it involves facts and figures Azerrad has gleaned over the past 30 years, but mostly we get additional insights into the band's personalities; little details about their routines and behavior that might have been awkward to slip into a traditional rock-bio narrative but work well as annotations; personal stories about the writer's interactions with Cobain, Krist Noveselic, Dave Grohl, Courtney Love, Chad Channing, and the book's other major players; and revised attitudes and regrets. 

One thing is very clear in the original book: Azerrad takes much of what Cobain says at face value, which is not something a biographer should do with any subject, especially not when that subject is a heroin addict, like Cobain was, or a guy who wanted nothing more than to remodel his past, as Cobain did. Azerrad expresses regret for mirroring Cobain's disdain for his own hometown of Aberdeen, Washington, and his own father, who apparently wasn't as bad as Kurt always made him out to be. Azerrad clears up some of Cobain's tall tales, such as his claims that the things he sings about in "Something in the Way" were directly autobiographical. Essentially, Azerrad vastly improves Come As You Are by bringing a middle-aged man's perspective to a story written by a guy in his early thirties. One can't help but wonder how Cobain might have similarly reconsidered his own story if he were still with us today.

Review: 'Withnail and I: From Cult to Classic '

If you've ever found you've gone on holiday by mistake, drank a bottle of lighter fluid, or recited Hamlet's soliloquy in the rain while your only friend in the world drifted off to a successful acting career, you can relate to Withnail. If you've ever had to endure the madness of someone like that, you can relate to I (not I as in Mike Segretto; I as in Marwood). 

If you have any idea what I'm talking about, you may now or ever have been a member of the Withnail and I cult. Bruce Robinson's 1987 film is famously a comedy without jokes, yet as Toby Benjamin's new book on the film accurately observes, "every single line of the screenplay is superb," which I'd slightly amend to "every single line of the screenplay is superbly funny." Vulgarly funny ("I fuck arses"? Who fucks arses? Maybe he fucks arses!"), demandingly funny ("We want the finest wines available to humanity, we want them here, and we want them now!"), pathetically funny ("We've gone on holiday by mistake!"), insightfully funny ("They're selling hippie wigs in Woolworth's, man."), ominously funny ("If I medicined you, you'd think a brain tumor was a birthday present."), economically funny ("Scrubbers!").

Review: 'High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape'

In the age of streaming, entertainment has become so intangible and ephemeral that it makes sense there would be some pushback. In terms of music, this is most obvious in the vinyl revival, which I consider myself a small part of as both a devoted vinyl consumer and a reviewer of vinyl reissues who excludes other formats. There's no greater antidote to a tinny stream from a tiny phone than a slab of plastic you have to pull from a lovely 12-inch jacket, wipe down, slap onto a turntable, and flip halfway through. It may sound silly, certainly self-contradictory, but vinyl returns the soul to music by making it corporeal again.

One of the weirder offshoots of the current vogue for physical media is that cassettes have made a bit of a comeback too. Clearly, I get vinyl. Cassettes? Not really. They always sounded terrible, with their hiss and muddiness. They all look alike. Their cover artwork is shrunk smaller than a CD insert. They unravel. They melt in the sun. If you were to ask me my thoughts on cassettes, I'd say they suck. 

But while reading Marc Masters's new book High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape, I realized my own relationship with cassettes is more complicated than this. Not as far as pre-recorded music is concerned. I think I owned about a half-dozen pre-recorded tapes when my urge to own Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones, LTD., caused me to shift formats because the Record World in which I was shopping only had that Monkees album on LP. I bought the vinyl and never looked back to pre-recorded tapes. 

Blank tapes, however, were a different story. I loaded up on them, using them to make straight copies of albums I'd accumulated on LP and CD so I could listen to them in my Walkman or car, mixtapes I compiled from my collection, and, after I got my first Tascam 4-track, recordings of songs I'd written. The sound of a cassette demo was shoddy and hissy, but haunting and real in a way that recordings made with the high-tech digital recording apps so readily available today are not.

Because my story is not unique, the cassette is. Vinyl is cooler and sounds better. But you can't record on it. You can't personalize it. And the fact that cassettes were great because they personalized music is the main thrust of High Bias. Masters provides one short chapter on the format's development and role as a vessel for pre-recorded music before getting into the format's really interesting qualities: its integral role in the history of hip-hop and lo-fi indie rock, DIY music distribution, bootlegging, and Portastudio demoing. He discusses the live tape trading networks that sprung up around The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Throbbing Gristle, Sun Ra, and The Butthole Surfers. He explains the unique cassette cultures in Syria, India, and Egypt that don't really have American equivalents. He embraces the unraveling and the hiss.

 In the midst of the vinyl revival, there have been all sorts of books about that format's history, art, maintenance, and collectability. There aren't that many books about the cassette, but High Bias is provocative and satisfying enough to fill the void on its own.

Review: Lol Tolhurst's 'Goth: A History'

If you'd asked one of the original punk groups in the seventies--say, the Clash or the Sex Pistols--if they were punks, they would have sneered at you and damned the very idea of being labeled. Same goes for the original Goths--say, Siouxsie and the Banshees or The Cure. Lol Tolhurst, drummer of the latter group, says as much in Goth: A History. But with time comes a certain perspective, and today Tolhurst obviously embraces that old label, hence his new book celebrating some fifty years of pallor, gloomy songs, wiry hairstyles, black garb, and black moods. 

Review: 'The Alex Ross Marvel Comics Super Villains Poster Book'

 

In 2019, Marvel artist Alex Ross created a mural of heroes for the comic giant's NY offices. A few years later he followed it up with the natural dark counterpart, and now Abrams ComicArts has compiled these portraits in The Alex Ross Marvel Comics Super Villains Poster Book. 

Because Ross created each painting individually before situating it in the larger work, he is able to give each baddie his or her own page to be pulled out and pasted on your wall. With nothing but a plain white field for background, each colorful creep is free to pop from the book's 11" x 16" pages. 

Review: 'The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha' (Directors' Cuts series)

Paul Thomas Anderson's early career with such a clear and explosive style that you'd think he'd already been making films for decades. His debut, Hard Eight (aka: Sydney), was modest, but he went right from that to a sprawling epic (Boogie Nights) and an even more sprawling epic that was also ferociously outlandish and borderline supernatural (Magnolia). Everything about his filmmaking was so specific and consistent--from his rawly emotional and often juvenile dialogue to his actors' operatic performances to the details of his LA settings to his thrilling tonal shifts to his willingness to dive headlong into wild ideas--that Paul Thomas Anderson didn't seem as if he ever needed to stray from his wholly individual path.

Review: 'Werewolf Stories: Shape-Shifters, Lycanthropes, and Man-Beasts'

Werewolves are many things. They are scary and mystical. They are metaphors and metaphysical. They are the subjects of monsters movies, fairy tales, and folk lore. They are people who transform into four legged animals and furry two-legged weirdies that look suspiciously like Oliver Reed. They are fictions, and for a kooky few, non-fictions.