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Review: 'Brian Jones: The Making of The Rolling Stones'

Everyone who has done their Rolling Stones homework knows that Brian Jones started the band, that he was their most naturally gifted musician, that he contributed more to their recordings than Mick and Keith want you to believe. Unfortunately, Brian did not live to drill his version of events into your consciousness the way Mick has with his carefully calculated interviews and Keith has with his critically drooled-over doorstop of an autobiography. Had he lived beyond 1969, Brian Jones probably would not have anyway based on the way Paul Trynka presents the guitarist/ keyboardist/ saxophonist/ sitarist/ marimbaist/etc. in his new biography Brian Jones: The Making of The Rolling Stones. The most vilified member of the Stones comes across as less violent, less perpetually drugged, less useless here.

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Review: 'How Star Wars Conquered the Universe'

How Star Wars Conquered the Universe is the Star Wars book I’ve always wanted to read. It’s a well-written, frank, vivacious, irreverent, reverent look at the most popular film series of all time and the phenomenon it heaved out into the galaxy. Others have tried to do what Chris Taylor does but have been hampered by the strictures of working within the Lucasfilm Empire or their own Sithy ambitions. What Michael Kaminski took 500-plus pages to do in his admittedly essential but not exactly fun to read The Secret History of Star Wars, Taylor does in much easier-to-digest form. We get the gist that despite his usual rap, George Lucas really did not have much of a plan for his space opera.

Review: 'Gimme Indie Rock: 500 Essential American Underground Rock Albums 1981-1996'

In the eighties, music fans who didn’t want to preen with the new wavers, pout with the hair metalists, or snooze with Lionel Ritchie really had to do their research. Groups like Black Flag, Throwing Muses, and The Feelies weren’t exactly playing alongside Mötley Crüe on MTV at 4PM, though you might catch them if you stayed up past Midnight on Sundays. You might also read about them in photocopied fanzines or get lectured about them from the Doc Martened blowhard at your local hole-in-the-wall record shop. 

In the Internet era, this kind of happenstance is less a prerequisite to discovering great underground groups, so from one point of view, Andrew Earles’s Gimme Indie Rock: 500 Essential American Underground Rock Albums 1981-1996 is about twenty years too late. Arriving in 2014, however, it still serves a definite function as a valuable tour of one of the least-eulogized roads of Rock history. More practically it’s a distillation of The Trouser Press Record Guide that hones a fifteen-year flood of small-label albums down to the must haves… or, at least, Earles’ idea of the must-haves. As is the case with any “best of” guide created by one person, the selection is highly subjective even as the writer reveals he chose some albums he didn’t like because of their historical importance. Taking that under consideration it isn’t unreasonable to wonder where certain artists (no Spinanes, no Velocity Girl, no Grant Lee Buffalo) or select albums (no Pony Express Record, no The Real Ramona, no The Stars Are Insane) are. Still I can’t say there are a ton of glaring omissions from Gimme Indie Rock.

As a writer, Earle certainly seems to have been influenced by The Trouser Press Record Guide (which he name-checks in his introduction) with his tendency to write about ecstatic music clinically rather than ecstatically. That kind of writing isn’t generally my cup of tea, but even Earle can’t hold back his awe from time to time, as when he uses more visceral terms to describe Team Dresch’s Personal Best, which “will knock unprepared listeners against the wall”. He is not fucking kidding.

Farewell, Richard Kiel

Best remembered for his towering 7' 1.5" stature and for playing the silver-toothed villain Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker, Richard Kiel won Psychobabble's heart when he terrified as the Kanamit in the unforgettable "To Serve Man" episode of "The Twilight Zone" and milked laughs in the "I Was a Teenage Monster" episode of "The Monkees" (more on that episode next month...). You may have your own favorite Richard Kiel moments since he acted in nearly eighty films and TV shows, most recently providing the voice of Vlad in the hit animated movie Tangled and appearing as a Giant in an episode of the kids' show "Blood Hounds, Inc". A less known aspect of Kiel's career is that he also co-wrote Kentucky Lion, a biography of abolitionist Clay. Cassius Marcellus Sadly, Kiel died yesterday a week after being hospitalized for a broken leg. The specific cause of his death is not yet known.

Review: The Criterion Edition of 'Eraserhead'

Eraserhead has been streaming on Hulu as a member of the Criterion Collection for two years, which means excited speculation that Criterion might give it a proper home-media release has also been circulating for years. The ultimate cult movie meets the finest video-distribution company to achieve cult status of its own. That is a relationship much happier than Henry Spencer and Mary X’s.

Siouxsie and the Banshees' Final Four to Finally Be Reissued Next Month

It has been four years since Universal Music abandoned its Siouxsie and the Banshees reissue campaign that saw the group's first seven studio albums remastered and ornamented with bonus tracks. On his Facebook page, bassist Steve Severin said the decision was down to those albums lacking sufficient bonus tracks back in 2010. Apparently, that was bollocks, because UMe, in conjunction with Polydor, will be reissuing Through the Looking Glass, Peepshow, Superstition, and The Rapture complete with bonus tracks this October 13. Hopefully, now that Universal and The Banshees are back on track that career-spanning box set Severin has been teasing for years will finally happen.

Review: 'The Zombie Book: The Encyclopedia of the Living Dead'

As much as I love monsters, I’m pretty burnt out on the whole zombie craze that really needs a pickaxe through the brain at this point. So I cracked open Nick Redfern and Brad Steiger’s The Zombie Book: The Encyclopedia of the Living Dead without a load of enthusiasm. I was relieved to learn it’s basically mistitled, though I’m not sure what would have been a better name for an eclectic encyclopedia that gathers together plenty of zombie-related entries (films such as Night of the Living Dead and Shaun of the Dead, alleged real-life voodoo practitioners such as Papa Jaxmano and the Chickenman, “zombifying” diseases like Mad Cow, etc.) and a lot of stuff that really doesn’t have much to do with its ostensible topic. True blue-skinned zombie devotees might get frustrated with entries covering monsters (space aliens and Texan gargoyles) that don’t have much in common with zombies. They may question the inclusions of AIDS, human cannibals like the Donner Party, and the Apocalypse, or wonder where genuinely zombie-related items like “Tales from the Crypt” and The Song of Ice and Fire/“Game of Thrones” (with its zombie “wights”) are. They may also get exasperated with an entry on Armageddon that not only has nothing to do with zombies but has nothing to do with Armageddon either (it’s about the U.S. Marine Corps’ detestable practice of having biblical quotes inscribed on rifle sites at great expense to taxpayers). As a reader who wasn’t really looking forward to immersing himself in an endless orgy of zombienalia, I really enjoyed the off-topic facts, myths, and rumors and the lively, often humorous way Redfern and Steiger share them.