Literary Canon Fire

Ok, MY canon:

Craig Morrison: Go Cat Go!: ROCKABILLY MUSIC AND ITS MAKERS

John Blair: The Illustrated Discography of Surf Music, 1961-1965

John Blair: Illustrated Discography of Hot Rod Music, 1961-1965

Mick Rock and Iggy Pop: Raw Power: Iggy & The Stooges

Susan VanHecke: Race with the Devil: Gene Vincent's Life in the Fast Lane

Robert Palmer: Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta

Clinton Heylin: From the Velvets to the Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk Rock

Mark Opsasnick: Capitol Rock

Cynthia Connolly (etc.): Banned in D C: Photos and Anecdotes from the Dc Punk Underground

Timothy Gassen: Knights of Fuzz

Giles Oakley: Devil's Music: A History of The Blues

Colin Escott: Good rockin' tonight : Sun Records and the birth of rock 'n' roll

Nick Tosches: Hellfire: the Jerry Lee Lewis story

Stephen Colgrave: Punk: The Definitive Record of a Revolution

?: Waltzing the Plank: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Australian Surf Music 1963-2003

Chuck Berry: Chuck Berry

Kim Cooper (etc.): Lost in the Grooves: Scram's Capricious Guide to the Music You Missed

V. Vale: Incredibly Strange Music, Volume I (Re/Search ; 14)

Billy Poore: Rockabilly: A Forty-Year Journey

Hmmm ... I've not read much "rock lit" ... I have Get In The Van and Somebody to Love? and Babel, Wˆitt, and Tarantula (do those three count? they're actually poetry collections), but I think that's about it.

Crap. I meant "canon fodder"... had a more subdued hokeyness to it, I thought. why in god's name one can't edit the topic header...

Rock poetry. Lovely stuff. I seem to recall something by Jim Morrison where he delivers a eulogy to his john thomas. I'm sure it sounded pretty avant until the beer wore off.

Anyway - if any of it counts, it all does. Always looking for new leads.

Not exactly rock, but Blues all around me, the B.B. King autobiography, was fascinating ... really one of the best autobiographies I've ever read.

Please Kill Me.

I couldn`t possibly do that, Bob.

I`d go for Spinning the Blues Into Gold, also - with some reservations - Bass Culture.

I haven't read it, but I've known about it for years: Greil Marcus's book Mystery Train. I remember reading Marcus when he wrote for Rolling Stone back in the 1970s.

A&R is a great rock novel by Bill Flanagan. I enjoyed X-Ray, Ray Davies fictional auto-biography! Please Kill Me and the Lester Bangs collections are a lot of fun.

P.S. Those touchstones stink! Billy Bathgate and Ray Bradbury? I've got nothing against them, but they've nothing to do with what I had to say.

Screw the books. #1 What's the music from all those references you mention Let's have the music the references refer to when the music is what it is!

Slickpdx.
Any relation to Grace?

No, Rick!

Lost me on 11.

Yeah, benwaugh it was pretty late. I'd clear it up if I could remember what I was talking about.

Almost Grown - James Miller
The Sound of the City - Charlie Gillett

Both cover similar ground but AM continues until the mid-seventies, ending just as punk hits the UK (did punk ever really hit the US?)

England's Dreaming - Jon Savage - an exploration of punk in the UK.

Bring the Noise - Simon Reynoldsexplores the links between rock and hip-hop.

And two great argument books -
The Heart of Rock and Soul: 1001 Best Singles - Dave Marsh
This Is Uncool: 500 Best Singles since 1976 - Gary Mulholland
- what both of them seem to agree on is that there are fewer great singles released from the mid-80's onwards.

I read Greil Marcus's Once upon a time: Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone last night (I'm not sure how whoever entered that into LT came up with that title; I don't see "Once upon a time" anywhere on the cover or inside the book, but nevermind; the cover displayed is the right one) and had to dig out my copy of "Highway 61 Revisited" to follow along. It was a good quick read; Marcus likes to find themes in his work, and here he's making the case that this song "changed everything" about rock n' roll.

Well, maybe. It was an interesting book; none of the stories about the reaction to Dylan playing it on stage or about the recording session were new to me, although (as usual) Al Kooper comes off as a guy who knows how to tell a story with self-deprecating humor.

Re: (did punk ever really hit the US?) - even after Elvis went to Vegas and Iggy Pop turned 60 (or is it 70?), I don't think it ever left - at least judging by all the punctured and decorated kids I see outside the clubs - like the extended family of the Scottish mime, Ronald McDonald, imagined by HR Geiger. All we could afford back in my day were sneakers and jeans... sheesh.

There is a series on BBC2 at present called the "Seven Ages of Rock" which is, wait for it, a history of rock music. Episode 3 was about punk - in it, Charles Shaar Murray defined the difference between the UK and US punk movements of the mid-seventies, 'In the US all the bands were bohemians, or want-to-be, bohemians. In the UK all the bands were yobs, or want-to-be yobs." It's an interesting, and valid, distinction - the major US bands were arty (Television, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, etc), the major UK bands were bolshy (Clash, Sex Pistols, Devo, etc).
My opinion is that the legacy of punk was that record labels (in the UK at least) panicked and ended up signing all different types of bands because they were frightened of missing out on the next big thing - it was from this that the UK produced a significant body of good music.

ps - I don't acknowledge modern punk bands as punk bands, they are just a sad echo of a movement that died years ago, probably in 1978. What is the point of bands like the Offspring?

That's because the cabal of scholarly-lite sages decided to overlook Rocket from the Tombs (featuring members who would go on to form the arty Pere Ubu and the ur-yobbo Dead Boys), Sonic's Rendezvous Band (featuring members of the MC5 - Sonic being arti Patti's old man - and The Stooges), Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers, Th e Real Kids, The Dead Boys, The Pagans, etc. These folks, many of them, had their yob credibility: drunks, junkies, petty thieves and street hoods. It wasn't about haircuts and bondage gear (though there was the occasional article of national socialist flair).

These bands, unlike Television, Talking Heads and so forth, received little promotion - or air-time - outside their hometowns (Devo of course, while I'm on the local/Cleveland kick - was a Cleveland band, of course - and actually did a few grimy songs early on). The Ramones seem to have been the only US 70s punk band that got a fair measure of air play.

I think the UK (and Australian) punk bands, in many cases, were great rock and roll bands (they were often anthemic - even/especially the "Oi" stuff - had a hard edge without losing the rhythm or melody. I was never able to get into the US hardcore thing, insofar as it no longer sounded "rock 'n' roll".

Modern punk bands do seem to me ersatz nostalgia acts. But I am an old man and therefore my benighted opinion don't count.

It's interesting the way the history of punk is written, with the US being portrayed as arty, the UK as gobby - perhaps because these are the bands that created the commercial breakthrough in the respective countries. It really denies what happened - in the US there were a bunch of proto-punk bands like the ones you have listed and others like the Dictators & New York Dolls that fed into the more arty strain. In the UK the 'oi' movement died very quickly, within 12 months you had the arty new wave - Gang of Four, Joy Division, etc. Even the old punks - the Clash, Lydon with PIL, the Banshees - started moving that way as soon as possible. Looking at it that way it's almost as if the UK was evolving in the same manner as the US.

The seminal punk band for the UK were the Ramones and when it comes down to it the Ramones are a back to basics rock and roll band.

I just read in the newspaper this morning that Devo have reformed and going to tour the UK - no news yet as to whether they will be wearing their energy cones and radiation suits.

to whoever listed what theyve read by patti smith...try kodak...always a favorite of mine,inasmuch as poetry goes

what we need is a solid history of power pop...ive read the bios of big star,the raspberries,et al.,but groups like Fotomaker,Shoes,Van Duren,guilty pleasures,nu?