Review: 'In the Groove: The Vinyl Record and Turntable Revolution'

Long ago declared dead, vinyl has made a zombie-like comeback in recent years that doesn't seem in danger of declining. A report on sales published in Variety just three and a half months ago provides strong support for such confidence. 

But if you're the kind of person who reads Psychobabble, you probably already know this. In fact, I'd discontinued music reviews on anything but vinyl quite a while ago and walk it like I talk it with my own music collection: I've sold off almost all of my CDs and replaced almost all of the essentials with their vinyl equivalents in a move I hope I won't regret the way I regret exchanging my original vinyl collection for a handful of magic beans back in 1990. 

Basically, I love vinyl, I have pledged allegiance to vinyl, and I demand you do the same. So a book about the current vinyl and turntable revolution should be just the ticket for someone like me. The book's bona fides are strong: its five authors include some of the most well-known rock writers of the twenty-first century: Matt Annis, Gillian G. Garr, Ken Micaleff, Martin Popoff, and Richie Unterberger. In a series of short essays, they discuss the history of the format, stand-out record stores, iconic album covers, the mono vs. stereo debate, important record labels, and, at its most advanced, the parts and components of various varieties of phonographs. There are also some potentially useful tips for phonograph calibration, but by mostly delivering the basics, In the Groove will most appeal to youngsters new to this whole vinyl collecting thingy and are just learning what azimuth is. 

Review: 'The Lyrics' by Paul McCartney (Updated Eidition)

From August 2015 to August 2020, Paul McCartney talked to poet Paul Muldoon about songs he'd written since 1956, and these talks became the basis of the 2021 book The Lyrics. In his foreword, McCartney explains that he'd been approached several times to write an autobiography, but the idea never interested him much, so this is the closest we'll probably get. In a non-linear way, it does get the job done, because the guy who wrote "Bip-Bop" and "Wild Honey Pie" often doesn't engage much with his lyrics and instead uses the various songs he discusses as pretexts to open up about The Ed Sullivan Show ("All My Loving"), Jane Asher ("And I Love Her"), the Beatles' decision to quit touring ("Honey Pie", of all things), the Rolling Stones ("I Wanna Be Your Man"), his bass playing ("She's a Woman"), his mum ("Let It Be"), his feelings about being on the receiving end of John Lennon's infamous nastiness ("Too Many People)", and quite a lot more. 

Review: 'Elvis Remembered'

Elvis superfan Shelly Powers chatted with ten people in Elvis's inner circle, posed for pictures with them, and assembled a bunch more vintage ones, and Elvis Remembered is the result. While this may all sound pretty superficial, and not all of Powers's questions are David Frost-quality, she's actually quite good at weaving "What's your favorite Elvis song?" level queries with more probing ones that reveal some fairly personal things about the icon. 

Powers's power to play on the surface before probing beneath is what makes Elvis Remembered worth reading, even if you sometimes have to wade through some completely idle chatter to get there. Really, these chapters read more like conversations than interviews, which could have easily been reigned in with sharper editing, but including expendable chatter like "How's the tea?" reveals her process: Powers gets her subjects comfortable with an amiable presence before diving in to get them to open up about Elvis's good qualities (his extreme generosity; his genuine interest in the problems of those less iconic than himself) and his not-so-great ones (his refusal to ever say he was sorry; his extremely asinine behavior with guns; his drug use). She also knows when to back off on topics that are making her subjects uncomfortable, which may not be the preferred technique of the most probing interviewers, but it's certainly the preferred technique of an empathetic human being. 

Powers also had the gumption to interview some fairly controversial figures in Elvis-lore, such as bodyguard Sonny West, who alienated some with his tell-all biography of his former friend and boss, and Larry Geller, Elvis's "spiritualist," who apparently claimed the King had occult powers or something. Despite the sketchy reputations of some of these guys, and Powers reveals some reservations about some of them in her talks with others, she remains a respectful conversationalist during her interviews and always manages to get something interesting out of them. Sometimes the revelations are downright bizarre, as when Elvis's Blue Hawaii co-star Darlene Tompkins reveals that "Colonel" Tom Parker tortured chickens in a carnival sideshow before managing Elvis. Yecch.

Review: 'The Spice Must Flow: The Story of Dune from Cult Novels to Visionary Sci-Fi Movies'

We are living through very Duney times. The last thing I reviewed here on Psychobabble was Max Evry's oral history A Masterpiece in Disarray. The latest is Ryan Britt's The Spice Must Flow: The Story of Dune from Cult Novels to Visionary Sci-Fi Movies. This is a very different worm from Evry's hulkingly exhaustive 500-page dive into David Lynch's bizarre adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi franchise. Britt delivers only half the page count but sets his blue-within-blue eyes across a more complete vista, reminding us that Lynch's film is only one stop along a hero's journey that began in the early sixties when Frank Herbert, a struggling writer with a debt to the IRS looming over his head, conceived a far off galaxy in which royal houses squabble over control of a sandy drug empire. Dune World was published as a magazine serial in 1963, fleshed out for the more pithily titled novel in 1965, and further expanded for a series of literary sequels. Then came Alejandro Jodorowsky's doomed aborted attempt to adapt it into a film, Lynch's doomed unaborted attempt to adapt it into a film, John Harrison's TV miniseries for the Sci-Fi channel, and Dennis Villeneuve's ongoing big-screen remake series.

Review: 'A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch's Dune, an Oral History'

Having only made one purely avant garde feature that became a smash by playing to freakos at midnight showings and one Oscar-baity period piece, David Lynch was a real weird choice to helm a blockbuster adaptation of Frank Herbert's space opera Dune. But chosen he was, though he couldn't quite be blamed for the critical and commercial disaster it became. Although Lynch's sensibility has never exactly been commercial, he was also at odds with a producer who didn't quit sync up with his vision on this particular project, a truly harrowing production in an inhospitable environment, source material that may be a bit too convoluted and esoteric to translate into matinee fare fit for Star Wars fans, and a truncated run-time that forced the story to get whittled down to a confusing nub. 

Review: 'We're Not Worthy: From In Living Color to Mr. Show, How '90s Sketch TV Changed the Face of Comedy'

Over TV's first several decades, there were never many more than two or three sketch comedies vying for American air-space at the same time. Your Show of Shows ruled the fifties. Laugh-In and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour took over in the sixties. The Carol Burnett Show and Saturday Night Live gave the format new life in the seventies. SNL continued its reign in the eighties while  SCTV from Canada and Not Necessarily the News on cable applied some competition. 

Review: 'Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever'

Watching Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert's TV reviews in the eighties and nineties was only partially about finding out which new movies were worth watching, especially if, like myself, you often disagreed with them (those guys had little affection for horror movies or David Lynch). Watching two guys who look like fairly benign uncles get genuinely exasperated with each other was a big part of it too. As anyone who reads Matt Singer's new book Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever (or watches that infamous behind-the-scenes video of them shooting a TV promo and calling each other assholes) will learn, Siskel and Ebert really didn't like each other. At least at first. After nearly two decades sharing the camera, a sincere love developed between the critics, and viewed from one of several angles, Opposable Thumbs is a sort of Sam-and-Diane love story. 

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!").