Words and Guitars

Soaking up the summer's hits (and misses) on the music-book shelves.

by A.D. Amorosi

Like diet books, the "rock" genre is an overflowing lot filled with questionably responsible souls writing questionably knowledgeable material with opinions so mealy, it's no wonder The Five People You Meet in Heaven tops the best-seller list. Yet, in a summer teeming with wrestlers, bike messengers, automatic millionaires and Lothario ex-presidents, this pop crop reads better than most — certainly better than Ric Flair. It just has to.

The Famous

Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend By Stephen Davis Gotham, 482 pp., $27.50

The well-documented Lizard King gets a greater level of ham-fisted hyperbole than Oliver Stone lent him with Stephen Davis (Hammer of the Gods) wielding the pen. As he's done to Mick and Keith (in the hilarious Old Gods Almost Dead), Davis, without unearthing anything new, accentuates the darkly salacious in ways that would turn Morrison red and Stone green with envy. At first, JM:LDL simply seems a way of gluttonously retreading the drug-imbibing, cock-yanking psychedelia of a mind noted for its daring prose. But the second time around is the kicker. With his dizzying dedication to the bending of all senses (sexual, olfactory, spiritual) and operose approach to a slow climax (the details of Morrison's last days tread as carefully and sexily as a cat burglar), Davis has created another cinematic escapade (with some Kenneth Anger-like twists) worthy of the Doors' theatrical, cabaret-rock experience.

So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star: How I Machine-Gunned a Roomful of Record Executives and Other True Tales from a Drummer's Life By Jacob Slichter Broadway, 304 pp., $21.95

You neither need to know nor like Semisonic to grasp the rancid ridicule of this Minnesotan drummer (a Harvard graduate with a degree in Afro-American studies) and his workmanlike take on stardom. Slichter is gloriously underwhelmed as he recounts with unglamorously bittersweet glee and shoulder-heaving sorrow a life of physical, psychological, financial and aesthetic indignity. Yes, there are the everyday tales of fickle label bosses, programming pricks and radio-station flacks deciding Slichter's livelihood and its costs in advance, and the heard-it-before story of being a million-bucks billed for band extravagances from limos to diners. But the real expense detailed by Slichter is the toll on one's humanity — how thinning hair didn't stop a stylist from bleaching him blond or how fame turned an educated man into a sound-bite blathering monster.

The Theoretical

Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory By David Toop Serpent's Tail, 352 pp., $20

The heady Toop — musician, curator, author of the ambient-driven Exotica — turns the question of found sounds from one of sonic indulgence to one of social and psychological import. Is there a way to grow sound important to the listener in the same fashion one would anything organic and nurturing? Can we create memories through music and, if so, who is (or should be) responsible? Is it people like the father Toop starts Haunted with — a dreary, uncommunicative man whose own tomes about weather offer a diarylike approach to the author's subjects? The topics are as wide-ranging as Japan's connection to the music of airports, the nonexistence of Cage-like silence, and the temporal nature of MIDI-experimental composition. Offering more questions than it answers, Toop's Haunted acts like a cultural shocker in which to draw out audiences and artists alike in their experiences of everyday noises, musical or otherwise.

The Techie

Sonic Alchemy: Visionary Music Producers and Their Maverick Recordings By David N. Howard Hal Leonard, 307 pp., $18.95

Everyone tells you great producers make bland bands brilliant or turn excesses to eccentricities. Few really languish over why. Though he often sounds rushed, Howard does explain the triumphs of Phil Spector, Brian Eno, George Martin, Willie Mitchell, Steve Albini, Dr. Dre and more. Sometimes he gets bogged down by minutiae like Shel Talmy's recording Keith Moon's drums with 12 (not four) mics. Sometimes he misses the mark, explaining again the tired tales of Martin's tape-cuts on Sgt. Pepper, but missing the experimental most of The White Album. No matter. That he fills whole chapters on Glyn Johns, represents the dub stylee of King Tubby and Lee Perry, and gives it up for Martin Hannett's spooky, post-punk ambience is enough.

The Downright Creepy

Take a Walk on the Dark Side: Rock and Roll Myths, Legends and Curses By R. Gary Patterson Fireside, 304 pp., $14

Patterson is rock writing's crepe hanger — an author (Hellhounds on Their Trail, The Walrus Was Paul ) whose silly but keenly crafted work hinges on the details of detritus. From questionably bizarre coincidences (Presley and Robert Johnson dying the same day, same month, 39 years apart) to the goofy (Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz: together once more), from the cult of the occult to "The Club" (those dead by age 27: Kurt, Jimi, Janis), rock fun never came at so sad a price.

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