Stallion Alert Book Review: Fool the World: The Oral History of a Band Called Pixies by Josh Frank and Caryn Ganz (2006)

I had been meaning to read this book after I first read excerpts from it in Spin a few years back, but I forgot about it. Getting back into the music of the Pixies over the last few weeks jogged my memory, and I picked this thing up and read the shit out of it.

Other than the authors' annoying insistence on making it very clear that there is no "the" in front of "Pixies" (the title of the book is just the beginning), this book is fantastic. (And yes, we get it: the band is just called "Pixies." But everyone calls them the Pixies when speaking casually. Don't capitalize the "the" and move on. Sheesh.) It's exactly what it says it is: a history of the band told through the people who lived it. The full band participated, along with 4AD staffers, members of fellow bands (Throwing Muses, most notably), producers, friends - a ton of people.

And though there is perhaps a bit too much focus on the inner workings of the Boston scene that quickly spit out the Pixies after their formation, there's a ton of inside info pertaining to the inner workings of the band itself, as well. Though there's nothing mind-blowingly new here that superfans haven't heard before, there's plenty of cool stories of little things that happened here and there along the way that I had no idea about.

It's easy to forget that the band was together for such a short time, but this book really puts that into perspective, and gives you a plethora of reasons why they broke up when they did. There's the usual flogging of Bossanova and Trompe Le Monde, which I cold do without, but there's also some great stories of how those records became what they were, and I was happy about that.

This book is probably for the more serious fans, but if you consider yourself one of those, you'll love it.

Stallion Alert Book Review: Vinyl Junkies by Brett Milano (2003)

As an avid record collector, I always look forward to hearing the tales of those who share my passion/affliction. I also enjoy finding out about folks who are way more obsessive about this "hobby" than I am. It makes me feel better about the time and money I spend on my records. I go to record shows here and there (I'm gearing up to go to the Eugene Record Convention at the end of this month, in fact), and there is never any shortage of dudes who are clearly more involved in record collecting than I am. It's like any addiction: if it's getting in the way of you living your day-to-day life, you might have a problem.

While I've definitely made some purchases that might have been slightly ill-advised (or to the untrained eye, completely pointless), I don't think I'm in dangerous territory yet. Taking my wife to see the movie Vinyl was a good move: she now understands that there are people out there who are literally ruining their lives over the pursuit of records. Me? I just like 'em. And while my collecting is probably more intense now than it has been at any other point in my life, I've impressed myself recently by backing away from some tempting eBay auctions and leaving some records, even though I wanted them, sitting right where I found them in the bins at the record store.

So, as you can see, like any delusional addict, I have my legitimization for what I do. It's flawed at times, but like watching Vinyl, this book made me feel like not only do I not have a real obsession with record collecting, but that I should maybe not even consider myself a real collector.

There's the story of the guy who mailed two grand (in cash!) to a guy in Brussels he corresponded with on the internet, who claimed to have a rare Tony Jackson 10" that he had been searching for for years. The letter containing the money ended up being seized by the Belgian government and the dough disappeared. Ouch.

There are tales of dudes whose collections number into the tens of thousands; so big that they either have them in storage or literally can barely move around their house. To put that in perspective, I'm almost halfway through (alphabetically, at least) my collection (including CDs) on this blog, and we're not even to 500 yet. I have two shelves of vinyl that are each the length of an LP wide and about six feet tall. If we guess that I have about 500 LPs (and that might be generous), the guy in the book who boasted 20,000 has forty times as many records as I do. And my LPs take up a nice little chunk of wall space. A guy like that needs like two bedrooms stacked floor to ceiling.

So, yes. I like reading about dudes like that. Actually seeing the collection (like in Vinyl) makes it hit home a little bit more, but this book did a good job of detailing the living situations of some of the obsessed. The author also talked to Thurston Moore and a few other musicians (one of the guys from the J. Geils Band has a huge collection), who had some interesting perspectives on the record collecting game. Robert Crumb is also interviewed, and that dude's so hardcore he only collects 78s.

I blazed through this book in about two days, which was a bummer. For such a vast subject, it seems like it could have been a lot longer. I could have used more nerdery and more details, even though there was plenty. So, that was probably my one complaint. If you've got any interest in record collecting, this is definitely worth a quick read. But be warned: it might get you fired up to go digging through some bins. Be careful out there.

Stallion Alert Book Review: Slash by Slash with Anthony Bozza (2007)

I'd been wanting to read this book since it came out, but I had no intention of shelling out twenty-some bucks to do so. Instead, I waited almost two years and was able to get it from Amazon for like five bucks. And it was worth every penny.

I'm not a huge Guns 'N Roses fan, nor am I particularly a Slash fan. I usually enjoy the music he makes, but it's gone no farther than owning a copy of Appetite for Destruction. Though I am familiar with the more well-known tracks from the two Use Your Illusion albums, so that helped me a little when he was talking about that era of his career. I'm getting ahead of myself.

This is, in many ways, probably exactly what you think it is: the story of Slash's life from birth to present, warts and all (literally, in fact). And while the tales of debauchery are certainly omnipresent throughout this surprisingly long book, there's also insights that come from Slash the Musician that are equally interesting. Hearing how Guns came up with some of their most famous tunes makes for some cool rehearsal stories, as does the first person accounts of the inner workings of one the world's most dysfunctional bands. (Spoiler alert: Axl is a diiiiick.)

This book was every bit as good as I hoped it would be, and maybe even a little better. You don't have to be a fan of the music to enjoy it, and Slash's writing style keeps the whole thing casual, which becomes inherently necessary when dealing with some of the unbelievable shit this dude has been through.

Notably unbelievable: That Slash is alive; that Steven Adler is alive; and that neither of their dicks fell off. And really: I knew Axl was a nut, but this book, by just pulling together well-documented facts, a few new ones, and offering some asides about them, really doesn't leave any mystery as to why Guns 'N Roses broke up. In fact, it seems a miracle that they stayed together as long as they did.

I highly suggest knocking this one out over a long weekend.

Stallion Alert Book Review: 33⅓: Beastie Boys - Paul's Boutique by Dan LeRoy (2006)

I think this may be the only book in the 33⅓ series I've read so far, and that's a damn shame. I'll get to some others soon enough. If you're not familiar with them, they're short looks at the making of well-known records, usually giving insight into the recording/creative process. I've heard mixed reviews of some of them, but if you're a Beastie Boys fan, this is a solid read.

Paul's Boutique is the most interesting Beasties album for a bunch of reasons, but a lot of it comes back to two things: The G-Spot and The Dust Brothers. This book tells the tale of how the Boys ended up in the house that would become known as the G-Spot, and actually dispels a lot of the myths about what went on there. Worry not: they had some rowdy times. But apparently they were also very respectful of the house because, you know, it was a rental.

The story of how the Beasties hooked up with The Dust Brothers is fairly interesting (and very random), but the story of how the record got made once they joined forces is the real kicker. All that sampling and no computer program to keep track of it, sequence it, nothing. It's amazing that they pulled off those beats with just some samplers and some tape splicing.

Anyway, there's a lot more to it, and this book does a great job of getting to the bottom of this infamous record, even doing a track-by-track analysis of the entire album and all of its b-sides. Required reading for anyone who loves this slept-on (initially) classic.

Stallion Alert Book Review: Nirvana: The Biography by Everett True (2007)

I'm certainly not the most obsessive Nirvana fan on the planet, but I'd say I love the band more than your average enthusiast. I turned 16 at the beginning of 1992, and being in the NW, we felt like we really knew where the band was coming from. I don't want to get into the degree to which the band affected me too much, because there'll be plenty of time for that when we get to their records. But just know this: they were a huge deal to me.

Surprisingly, I never got around to reading Come As You Are, Michael Azzerad's 1993 book about the band. It felt like it came out too soon, and I was wary of it. Whenever a book pops up about a band who's still at the height of their popularity, you can bet it's been thrown together pretty quickly. I've heard that book is good, but I still don't have much of a desire to read it. I did, however, read Heavier Than Heaven, the Kurt Cobain biography by Charles Cross a few years back, and loved it. I'd been eying Everett True's book since its release, but didn't pick it up until I found it dirt cheap at Powell's a couple months ago.

Everett True is an English journalist, and one of the early (like really early) proponents of the band. I think he may have been the first person to do a major magazine review of the "Love Buzz" 7", and he was down with Sub Pop from the get-go. (He's also the guy pushing Kurt in the wheelchair in this notorious photo.) The point is, the dude was there.

He had an on-again, off-again relationship with Kurt and the band, but when it was on, he was on small legs of their tours with them or hanging out with them and seeing shows, etc. So, his perspective is a unique one. While Cross's book was thoroughly researched and very well-documented, True's is less linear, more written from memory, and prone to tangential diatribes that are initially off-putting but ultimately hilarious. The guy's got an ax to grind with everybody, and once I settled into his pissy disposition and rambling writing style, I really enjoyed it. And I had plenty of time: the book is about 650 pages long (there are extensive footnotes throughout, but still).

It didn't feel long, though, and that's always a good sign. True's matter-of-factness makes his stories both easy to believe and somewhat suspect, especially when he directly calls out Cross and sections of his book that he disagrees with. I didn't really care for that, but it's a minor gripe. True doesn't pull any punches when it comes to Courtney Love, and if you need more of a reason to hate her, this book can fuel your fire.

More importantly, it can also give you some real insight into what the guys in the band were going through as their fame expanded by measures that none of them were prepared for. I know it's easy to play the "wah-wah, he's a miserable rock star and everyone loves him" card with Cobain when looking for ways to avoid drumming up sympathy for him, but this book gives a clearer window into the ways Kurt was getting it from all angles. True does a fine job of distilling the chaos of Cobain's pre-suicide months down into a scary reality that, even though it seems far removed now, is still discomforting to read about.

I wouldn't be surprised if some purists have gripes with this book, because it could be polarizing (most things involving Kurt Cobain are), but I thought it was well worth a read.

Stallion Alert Book Review: The Show I'll Never Forget - Edited by Sean Manning

Thought I'd try another fun feature on the site. I'm always reading books about music, so why not write 'em up, eh?

I just finished this one, a collection of 50 essays from a broad selection of writers, each taking their own approach to recollecting their most memorable concert. It's made clear in the intro that the "most memorable" part is key–it's not necessarily the best show they've ever seen, but the one that stands out the most for whatever reason. Strangely, a lot of the writers admit to barely remembering anything about the shows they've chosen to write their pieces on. This is mildly annoying, because a lot of the essays end up focusing more on personal stories that surround the event, instead of the actual act or music in question. The most entertaining prove to be those that shoot for an equal balance, explaining the circumstances of the show, but also providing some solid details on the performance.

The entries are arranged chronologically, starting with Miles Davis in 1955, and ending with Metric in 2005. They're scattered well, with a surprising number of years represented by the shows that coincide with them. The music is all over the place too, with "big" artists like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Prince getting some ink, but lesser-known acts like The Lounge Lizards, Redd Kross, and Mink DeVille also getting in there.

I'm always game for reading about artists that I have I either don't know about or have no interest in, and only a few of the essays here tried my patience. The final one on Metric (by Daniel Handler and Andrew Sean Greer) was self-aggrandizing, four pages too long, and ultimately very boring. An unfortunate one to end on, for sure, especially since it's followed by the list of essays that didn't make it into the book (Pavement!). The other one that stood out as patently egregious was Max Allan Collins' take on a Kevin Spacey (seriously) show he saw when Spacey was doing a short nightclub tour to promote Beyond the Sea. He spends four pages simply doing a mini-biography of Darin, then tells us how his fame as a writer (and some shameless badgering) allowed him to meet Spacey after the gig. Neat-o.

Other than those, the rest were solid, or at least short enough to not push it. Charles R. Cross predictably writes about Nirvana (Halloween, 1991), but it's a sort of all-access view of the show that paints a quick but noteworthy picture of Cobain at a true precipice in his life, and a band at a huge moment in theirs. Chuck Klosterman writes a comical essay on Prince, Jerry Stahl tries a little too hard in an interesting take on an interview and show with David Bowie, and Marc Nesbitt's entry about seeing the Beastie Boys in 1987 with Public Enemy as the opening act was both funny and awkward. One of my favorite combos.

My favorite recollection came from John Albert, a writer I'd never heard of, who wrote up his memories of seeing Black Flag (pre-Rollins) in the fall of 1979. Hearing about his punk rock shenanigans made me both laugh and cringe. Also a great combo. I've since ordered his book on Amazon. It was only a penny, which makes me want to read it even more.

All in all, a damn fine book. I breezed through it quick, and actually learned about some artists of which I was sadly unaware, and was reminded that Rick Moody is a tremendous blowhard.