Review: 'Decade of Dissent: How 1960s Bob Dylan Changed the World'

Bob Dylan has been narrow-sightedly lionized for his idealism, misrepresented as a protest singer, and denigrated as a disappointment for embracing beats and electricity. But despite his almost compulsive self-mythologizing, Dylan probably never wanted to be anything more than a successful songwriter, and no one's going to say he didn't achieve that. The number of powerful or timeless songs he wrote in the sixties alone is staggering. That so much of his autobiography was bullshit seems to matter little when you consider that the guy wrote "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Don't Think Twice It's Alright" and "My Back Pages" and "Positively 4th Street" and "Visions of Johanna" and so on and so on. 

Review: Bruce Vilanch's 'It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time'

Bruce Vilanch is the scribe behind such widely reviled pop-cultural specimens as The Star Wars Holiday Special, The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, and Can't Stop the Music, starring the Village People. That Vilanch didn't toss himself out of the nearest fifth floor window sometime in the early eighties could be a consequence of his mythical acceleration-powder intake or his equally legendary propensity for self-deprecation. 

Since Vilanch dispels the myth that he was some sort of incorrigible coke receptacle in his new book It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time, and goes above and beyond to remind us of his self-deprecating sense of humor, we can assume that the latter is responsible for him still being with us. One must surely need a prodigious ability to laugh at oneself to take a full-on wallow in their greatest failures for two hundred pages, which is basically what Vilanch does in It Seemed Like a Bad Idea. He takes us on a tour through the terrible variety shows, awful feature films, and crappy stage performances he wrote, mostly as an excuse to drop a lot of corny jokes one might expect from the guy who wrote that alien cooking show Chewbacca's wife loves to watch.

Review: 'The Yardbirds'

Despite never making a widely revered LP and hammering out only a handful of truly enduring 45s, The Yardbirds will always be remembered as one of the key British bands because they were the petri dish from which the country's three top blues guitarists—Clapton, Beck, and Page—sprouted. Of course, for those who care to really listen to what the group left behind, The Yardbirds are more than the sum of two truly innovative and electrifying musicians and one would-be B.B. King clone so overrated that acolytes proclaimed him "God" in graffiti all over London. And really, the majority of the Page-led era is pretty execrable. But the Beck-era Yardbirds were indeed one of the best rock bands of mid-sixties Britain, as a listen to "Heart Full of Soul","The Train Kept A-Rollin'", "Over Under Sideways Down", or "Roger the Engineer" will settle. For the quality of such records alone, The Yardbirds would be deserving of a biography of their very own.

Review: 'Star Wars: Complete Locations'

Perhaps more so than any other world-building enterprise, the never-ending Star Wars saga is largely dependent on its worlds, some of which aren't even deserts. Sure, you're likely to spend most of your time getting sand in your boots on Tattooine or Jakku or Jedha (that sand gets everywhere!), but you can also freeze your Tauntaun-straddling butt off on Hoth. You can slop around in the mud of Dagobah. You can even get all metropolitan on Cloud City or Coruscant. And if there's a location to be located in the Star Wars universe, it can likely be located in Star Wars: Complete Locations. 

Review: 'John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs'

Ian Leslie is not a rock writer. His first three books are all psychology texts apparently (I haven't read any of them). So his decision to tell The Beatles' story for his fourth will likely arch a few eyebrows. Why does this story need to be told again? Why is a guy with Leslie's particular credentials the one to tell it?

Leslie's format, in which he uses particular songs as entry points to discuss particular points along the Beatles timeline and beyond it, is not original. Neither is his focus on the relationship between John and Paul. Oddly, it's his background in psychology that makes John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs a compelling new entry in the massive Beatles library. The author didn't perform any new interviews for his book. He did all his research in the pages of other authors' works. But unlike most of those writers, Leslie really manages to make us feel the intimacy of Lennon and McCartney's relationship. 

Review: 'Queen: As It Began (Revised Edition)'

Queen became megastars by making bombastic, genuinely funny rock and roll that was full of personality. Behind the fist pumping, satin, and unitards, Brian May, Roger Taylor, John Deacon, and Freddie Mercury were three science nerds and a shy guy, respectively. They apparently didn't indulge much in noxious chemicals and valued their privacy. 

Review: Vinyl Reissue of The Temptations' 'Psychedelic Shack'

When conservative Motown decided to dip its toes into the spiked waters of psychedelia, its LPs rarely committed fully to the genre's artiness and spaciness. For every "Reflections" there was a cornball cover of something like "Up, Up and Away". So it isn't surprising that Berry Gordy had some trouble wrapping his head around the more committedly conceptual works that artists like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder served up in the seventies. 

Reviews: 'My First Holly Golightly Album' Vinyl debut

Emerging at the peak of the brit-pop boom, Holly Golightly was a bit of an odd duck. Like Damon Albarn, she did nothing to scrub the big black smoke from her vocal cords. Unlike Blur, Oasis, Charlatans, and the rest, she otherwise sidestepped the most Union Jacky, tea-sipping mid-sixties references to dredge up the swampy blues of the early Stones and Animals. Hard riffs, harder backbeats, and 1-4-5 progressions were her stock-in-trade, and she began to prolifically grind out raw records beginning with 1995's The Good Things. 

Review: 'Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival'

Lollapalooza didn't begin as the only annual rock festival that mattered. It was to be nothing more than Jane's Addiction's farewell tour, with, at Perry Farrell's behest, the added novelty of several genre-spanning guests, booths with political activists of all stripes, and burritos. It was only after that first tour bucked all logic to become an actual financial success that Lollapalooza became a brand. In came Pearl Jam,  the freak shows, The Smashing Pumpkins, Courtney Love,  a highly unpopular Ferris Wheel, Sonic Youth, and eventually, people like Metallica and Korn.

Review: 'Eternal Flame: The Authorized Biography of The Bangles'

The Bangles phenomenon was the perfect storm for getting under the skin of serious musicians. The serious musicians in question were sisters Vicki and Debbi Peterson, who started jamming and writing songs out of a serious love for UK and LA rock of the sixties. Enter Susanna Hoffs, who shared the Peterson's adoration of sixties rock and musical talents but radiated star-power a little more radiantly and was more malleable in her definition of artistic integrity. 

Review: 'God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys, and the California Myth' (Remastered edition)

In 1977, The Beach Boys were still a going concern, but one that had recently released fluff like 15 Big Ones while playing the oldies festival circuit. The group's reputation was not strong. Mike Love was flapping his chicken wings and croaking "Fun, Fun, Fun" for the billionth time. Brian Wilson was shattered. His history of making progressive, futuristic music was not what the average person thought of when confronted with the name "Beach Boys."

Review: 'Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning' (revised edition)

Tod Browning is not usually considered among the great directors. Although he made over sixty films, only a half dozen or so are regarded by film historians, and the public at large are mostly familiar with two. But they're both doozies. However, although Dracula is among the most iconic films ever made, it's also often dismissed as lazily directed. The other big Browning film, Freaks, is widely considered potent, but it's use of actual circus performers, many of whom are differently abled (a term that really applies here... anyone who'd call Prince Radian disabled couldn't have been paying attention to the film), has been attracting controversy for over ninety years. 

And Yet Another Three Motown Reissues...

This year Elemental Music is winding down its extensive Motown reissue campaign begun early last year, and the latest slate is its final full one, with three LPs by the label's three top groups. They're all fairly minor records, but each has something to recommend them. The biggest hit and best song among these albums kicks off The Temptations' Puzzle People. "I Can't Get Next to You" was a number-one hit and the first record with their new psychedelic-soul sound to crack the top-five. It's a great track: accessible, angsty, and a little sinister-sounding in the tradition of past classics like "(I Know) I'm Losing You". However, the album as a whole kind of flails around without landing on a specific point-of-view the way the Temps' best albums, such as With a Lot O' Soul and I Wish It Would Rain, do. The topical "Don't Let the Joneses Get You Down" successfully swims in the same tide as "I Can't Get Next to You", but similar stuff like "Message from a Black Man" and "Slave" fall down melodically. The smattering of covers of recent hits ("Hey Jude", "It's Your Thing", "Little Green Apples") feel like the filler they are. The other pieces of Puzzle Pieces are pretty good though.

Review: 'Art! Trash! Terror! Adventures in Strange Cinema'

Chris Alexander went from being a kid terrified by the House of Frankenstein spook house in Niagara Falls to a writer for Canada's Rue Morgue magazine to the editor-in-chief of Fangoria to the founder of his own horror mag called Delirium. Throughout his career he's watched a lot of creepy movies and chatted with, and even befriended, a lot of the people who helped make them. 

His new book, Art! Trash! Terror!, is a sort of summation of his career. It's full of critiques of the horror and cult flicks he loves best and excellent interviews with the likes of John Waters, Veronica Cartwright, Stephen Rea, Joe Dante, Caroline Munro, Blacula-director William Crain, Love Witch über-auteur Anna Biller, Werner Herzog, and Nicolas Cage, who unsuccessfully tried to convince Alexander to slit a rooster's throat and eat a giant snail's dick. 

Review: 'Pretend We're Dead: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Women in Rock in the '90s'

I'd always wanted to read a book like Pretend We're Dead: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Women in Rock in the '90s. The nineties alternative scene is one that hardly gets as much attention as the British Invasion of the sixties, the hard rock scene of the seventies, or the new wave of the eighties, but for a lot of gen x'ers, it was just as important. But most contemporary discussions of nineties rock would lead you to think it was a scene of one, and that one was Nirvana. I loved and love Nirvana, but grunge was largely a dead end of samey sounding records by guys who couldn't write a pop melody if their favorite flannel was being held for ransom. 

3 More Motown Reissues for the New Year

Elemental Records had so many Motown albums planned for the label's 2024 reissue campaign that it couldn't get them all out in 2024. So we're starting the new year with another look at fresh reissues of three classic LPs. 

The first is my personal favorite of the bunch, and one that begins with what might be my favorite side of music on any sixties Motown album. The Supremes' Reflections not only kicks off with my fave Supremes track and Motown track of the sixties, the mysterious and mournful psych-soul title tune, but it then bounds between a series of great album cuts (the tough and funky "I'm Gonna Make It" being a particular stand out) and excellent yet less well-known singles ("Forever Came Today" and "In and Out of Love"). Most of these songs were supplied by Holland-Dozier-Holland, who also produced The Supremes for the final time with Reflections.