When it comes to telling the true story of Woodstock, more properly known as “An Aquarian Exposition: The Woodstock Music and Art Fair,” it’s hard to imagine anyone better suited for the role than Michael Lang. Now, 40 years after the world-changing event and right on time for the various activities celebrating the anniversary, the man who conceived the festival has decided to tell his story in The Road to Woodstock, co-written with Holly George-Warren.
One thing you learn early on in his book is that Michael Lang is a die-hard optimist. There’s no dream that can’t be realized, no obstacle that can’t be overcome. That attitude served him well on the road to Woodstock, because to say there were obstacles to getting the festival up and running would be a major understatement. Lang also manages to find the good in people, and despite profound disagreements with his Woodstock Ventures partners and others, there is no mudslinging here. (more…)
Nick Cave has spent the better part of the past decade reasserting himself in his role as true rennaisance man. After the subdued and stately The Boatman’s Call (1997) and No More Shall We Part (2001), many thought Nick Cave was settling into family life and maturity with grace. Instead, he rallied together his Bad Seeds and launched a salvo of albums culminating in 2008’s joyously raucous Dig, Lazarus, Dig. If that wasn’t enough he started Grinderman, a side band of vitrolic rock of near Birthday Party intensity. He wrote the screenplay and (with Warren Ellis) provided the soundtrack for John Hillcoat’s acclaimed film The Proposition. Why not a novel as well? (more…)
You won’t hear it from the literary highbrow among us, but Stephen King’s novel The Stand has all of the elements necessary to qualify as a (if not the) Great American Novel. If you’ve read King’s 1978 novel, you recognized themes of, in the words of editor Bill Rosemann, “faith, fear, violence, hope, religion, justice, sex, destiny, and redemption.” And if you’ve read the novel, your dreams were haunted while you were reading it, and even now some of the images from King’s story of civilization brought low by an escaped biological weapon remain fresh in your mind. You’ve probably even watched the fairly hokey mini-series that was made from the book. I watch it every time it’s on, often in all day Sunday marathons on the SyFy network.
It seems somehow inevitable that a story that evokes such strong images would attract graphic novelists interested in putting their own spin on it, and artists looking to make those images leap from the page with brush and pen. Marvel has answered the call, and is in the process of releasing a comic series based on The Stand. They have collected the first five issues and released them as the graphic novel The Stand: Captain Trips. The book takes us from the initial accidental release of the pathogen from a military research facility to the murder of people trying to get the word out via the media by military personnel. Of course looming over the whole tale is the presence of Captain Trips himself, The Walking Man. Many of the book’s other prominent characters, including Stu Redman, Frannie Goldsmith, and Larry Underwood are introduced along the way. (more…)
The name Zachary Mexico is a pseudonym. And most of the people he interviews in the story also are pseudonymous. They have an excuse, too:  China is a communist nation. Its official ideology demands fealty to the state, so telling an American author about sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll might get a citizen into a goodly bit of trouble. For that matter, the American author who took down the stories might not be able to get a visa to get back into China.
Mexico studied in China in college, and he missed the country. He went back in 2006 to find out what was happening for himself. He finds a place where everything is new and everything is dangerous.
China is overcoming centuries of poverty and decades of terrible government. Change is not easy, even if it happens peacefully. Mexico writes about people who aren’t sure what to do in a world that’s changing. Some people stay up all night playing murder mystery games, others consume a ridiculous amount of drugs (often purchased from illegal immigrants hailing from Nigeria). Others are just confused about the differences between the image of China that they grew up with and the modern reality. The Chinese are feeling their way into a capitalist world, and they are dealing with international partners who have more experience with capitalism but that are not necessarily more sophisticated. (more…)
Rock ‘n’ roll, of course, is all about The Kids. No matter what the makeup of its actual audience — and evidence suggests that it varies widely — there’s an assumption that pop music fans skew overwhelmingly young, and the more commercial the act the younger the presumptive audience. That assumption is sometimes trotted out as a preemptive defense against criticism: This music isn’t made for you, Mr. Critic Man — we’re doin’ it for The Kids!
Now, some of that is just bullshit face-saving — a cynical conflation of the ideas of “broad appeal” and “lowest common denominator” that’s frankly insulting to any audience, no matter how young — but there’s a kernel of truth in it. Youth is a time when, perhaps because our own lives are so small and proscribed, pop culture seems so terribly huge and important; it is life on an epic scale, in which we participate by proxy. In adolescence, especially, our skins are at their thinnest, our nerve endings so close to the surface that the joys and pains of art, of music, can touch us in a way that they never really will again.
And so it’s a good thing, I think, to spend time around young people, to revisit that perspective. The kids at The Rock Star Stories have been disseminating that view since 2001, when the Rich siblings — a quartet of showbiz kids from South Florida — started producing their cheapjack cable access-style weekly half-hour. The production values were strictly Wayne’s World level, but the Riches and their scrappy cohort of Boca Raton high-schoolers were soon landing interviews with national acts. From that grew a nonprofit youth media training organization, a show that airs in nearly 70 national markets, and now a new book. Off the Bus and On the Record transcribes 22 interviews from The Rock Star Stories, along with behind-the-scenes tidbits from the show’s on-air talent and production staff. (more…)
Andrew Mueller, I Wouldn’t Start From Here: The 21st Century and Where It All Went Wrong (U.S. edition, 2009, Soft Skull) purchase from Amazon
I Wouldn’t Start From Here is aptly titled, because you should skip Robert Young Pelton’s introduction. It’s a rant on how Americans need to read this book because we are all so lame and hate foreigners. Pelton has all the charm of someone who bought a copy of Let’s Go Thailand and a backpack the summer before law school, and now wants everyone to know how worldly he is because he smoked dope with a bunch of Canadians at a hostel on the Khe Sahn Road. Well, if Americans hate funny things so much, why did we elect as our president a self-described “skinny kid with a funny name,” the son of a Kenyan, with a grandmother and half-siblings who live in a more-or-less traditional Kenyan village?
And yes, Robert Young Pelton had to know about the election when the introduction went to press, because Andrew Mueller writes about the revelry of November 4, 2008 for this edition. (The book was originally published in 2007 in Australia.) So skip his introduction, unless you are an American who believes that you are superior to all other Americans because you sometimes read the news on Guardian.co.uk. (more…)
Okay, so the title triggers unbidden memories of a song most of us would rather forget — and may create the impression that the book is about a format whose time came and went 20 years ago — but trust me, if you consider yourself any kind of music geek, you need to get your hands on a copy of Travis Elborough’s The Vinyl Countdown: The Album from LP to iPod and Back Again. I went in expecting a book-length defense of vinyl, but Elborough’s really up to something different here: Over the course of the book’s 480 pages, he leads the reader back through the history of the long player itself — from 78 to 33 to 8 (track) and onward, all delivered from a chatty first-person perspective and dotted through with various footnotes, personal anecdotes, and observations. If that seems like a lot of paper for a single subject, it is — but Elborough takes an impressively wide approach, beginning by circling around the hows and whys of the long player’s creation and finishing right around the time Axl started crawling up his own ass for Chinese Democracy.
It can be a bit of a slog, but it’s fascinating stuff; you could devote an entire book, for instance, to the “speed wars” that erupted when Columbia debuted the 33 1/3 LP in 1948. Elborough kicks things off with a description of the press demonstration at which Columbia president Edward Wallerstein stood next to an eight-foot stack of 78s, holding an armload of 33s, and proceeded to stun the assembled journalists into silence by contrasting the older format’s four-minutes-a-side limit with his company’s new “Revolutionary Disk Marvel,” capable of playing an entire 22-minute symphony without making the listener get up off his ass to flip it over. This introductory section is filled with fascinating tidbits about the 33’s first few unsteady steps, but it’s just a primer — before long, Elborough is off and running with in-depth looks at what the LP meant for everyone from the avid music collector (the expanded time limits of the new format made building a personal library much more affordable) to Frank Sinatra (no LP, no concept album — and no In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning). (more…)
It’s hard to believe (for those of us who lived it, anyway) that it’s been fifteen years since Kurt Cobain committed suicide. On April 5th, 1994, the Seattle native left the world with the same cold-water shock his band Nirvana had on the world when the album Nevermind broke in 1991.
But to a larger degree, Cobain’s death has become a coda-like representation in our pop culture vernacular as the beginning of the end for the “grunge” era in Seattle. Greg Prato’s new book Grunge is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music disagrees. The book attempts to set this (and gads of other misnomers perpetuated by “so-called experts, who didn’t show up until the ‘90s, as Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament has said) straight.
Prato’s nearly 500-page digest does what no other documentary on the subject has before—it leaves the reflection to those who lived it, in their own words, without a filter. To that end, this is a truly great oral history. (more…)
Thank God for Ted Nugent. Seriously. The guy is a true patriot, and he has strong notions about America and what makes her great, which he lays out in his new(ish) book Ted, White, and Blue: The Nugent Manifesto (Regnery Publishing). By articulating his proudly conservative beliefs, he has done a great service to all patriots, no matter what their political persuasion. This is a book that everyone who loves America needs to read — even liberals. Especially liberals.
Because Ted Nugent is a brave man. Ted says exactly what’s on his mind, and that takes courage. Conservative commentators are often taken to task for substituting canned talking points for critical thought. Well, I’m here to tell you, people: Ted Nugent is not using canned talking points as a substitute for anything. When he trots out a well-worn anecdote or turn of phrase — spotted owls, “take the next boat to Cuba,” welfare = racism, love it or leave it, “more guns equal less crime,” and on and on — he leaves no box unchecked, and he’s 100 percent sincere about all of it.
As a culture, Americans may not have the most difficulty absorbing death — we don’t have any widows throwing themselves on burning pyres, after all — but we certainly aren’t the most well-adjusted people when it comes to contemplating the end of the end. And although we aren’t the only country to enact laws forbidding assisted suicide — I’m reasonably certain it’s illegal in most countries — we have devoted a substantial amount of public discussion to the subject, and as Jack Kevorkian could tell you, it makes a lot of people awfully uncomfortable.
It’s into this climate that Jack West releases The Last Goodnights: Assisting My Parents with Their Suicides, a memoir of his experiences with the planned deaths of his terminally ill parents. About 10 years ago, in a spectacularly painful convergence of shitty luck, West’s father and mother both discovered they were approaching death — and in a bit of even shittier luck, they both asked West to help them arrange their final exits. It’s an incredible story, but it’s true, and whatever your feelings about helping someone die, The Last Goodnights adds something valuable to the conversation.
West’s father, a prominent psychiatrist and UCLA faculty member who has his own Wikipedia entry and whose death made the obituary papers in the Los Angeles and New York Times, was a larger-than-life figure — he sparred with Scientologists, marched with Martin Luther King, examined Patty Hearst, and was one of the first American doctors to bring attention to the treatment of South African prisoners under apartheid — and from West’s loving-yet-unvarnished description of “Jolly’s” life, it isn’t hard to understand why he’d want to end it on his own terms, especially after being diagnosed with late-stage cancer.
Not long after agreeing to help his father end his own life, West learns that his mother has similar plans; she’s suffering from emphysema, mid-stage Alzheimer’s, and other ailments, and makes it known that she wants to make this decision while she’s still capable of making any at all. (more…)
![road-to-woodstock-cover-image-677x1024[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/road-to-woodstock-cover-image-677x10241.jpg "road-to-woodstock-cover-image-677x1024[1]")
When it comes to telling the true story of Woodstock, more properly known as “An Aquarian Exposition: The Woodstock Music and Art Fair,” it’s hard to imagine anyone better suited for the role than Michael Lang. Now, 40 years after the world-changing event and right on time for the various activities celebrating the anniversary, the man who conceived the festival has decided to tell his story in The Road to Woodstock, co-written with Holly George-Warren.
Zachary Mexico – China Underground (2009, Soft Skull)
![51r0mzqu-dL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/51r0mzqu-dL._SCLZZZZZZZ_1.jpg "51r0mzqu-dL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]")
Andrew Mueller, I Wouldn’t Start From Here: The 21st Century and Where It All Went Wrong (U.S. edition, 2009, Soft Skull)
Travis Elborough – The Vinyl Countdown: The Album from LP to iPod and Back Again (2009, Soft Skull)
It’s hard to believe (for those of us who lived it, anyway) that it’s been fifteen years since Kurt Cobain committed suicide. On April 5th, 1994, the Seattle native left the world with the same cold-water shock his band Nirvana had on the world when the album 
John West – The Last Goodnights: Assisting My Parents with Their Suicides (2009, Counterpoint)