Five Music Biogs Actually Worth Reading:
Introduction.

This is a post I’ve been meaning to get around to writing for a long time, and, as there’s nothing particularly pressing going on here at the moment beyond lounging around in the newly-stifling heat playing Peaking Lights and Miles Davis records again and again, now seems as good a time as any.

So: music books! I read fucking loads of them, I’m afraid. A more artistically benighted corner of the publishing industry you’d be hard-pressed to find (well, I guess they’ve at least got one up on cookbooks or exercise books or something), but nonetheless, I’ll plough through just about any of ‘em. I guess that for me music books fulfil the same function that other readers assign to fantasy sagas or police procedural crime books or whatever: low effort, time-filling comfort reading. Motor through the words, harvest the relevant info and anecdotes, stick it on the shelf.

Some of them are better than others of course – at least some journalists and rock-writers have risen to the challenge of the full length book over the years with fine results, and well-researched biogs telling the genuinely incredible, culturally resonant stories of bands like, say, The Beach Boys or The 13th Floor Elevators, are deserving of a place on anyone’s bookshelves. By and large though, music books are pretty weak tea from any kind of literary POV.

Which makes it all the more thrilling when, occasionally, you happen to stumble across a certain, specific kind of music book which is little short of flat-out genius.

These books tend to be late-career autobiographies written by successful/iconic musicians who would almost certainly have never written a sentence intended for publication in their lives, had not their musical career given them a financially viable excuse to do so.

I don’t want to try to impose a half-baked, catch-all term upon these books, but they’re a very specific, almost accidental thing – less like bland, ‘people and places’ industry memoirs, and more like what might happen if you started dragging troubled, inspired people of one kind or another off the street, forcing them to write about their lives, and waiting until you struck gold.

Over the next week or two, I’m going to attempt to do a series of short posts running down my five favourite examples of this particular, nameless literary sub-genre. I hope you’ll enjoy the results, and if I succeed in drawing some attention to these volumes then, well.. good.

Labels: books