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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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