old punks web zine
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Book Reviews, part II

Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk to Your Action World: Winners Are Losers With A New Attitude
+ TV Reviews

Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain (book review) (Grove Press): Uncensored? And how! Lou Reed is quoted using this pick-up line on a pretty boy at Max’s Kansas City, “Well, look, why don’t you come back to my hotel with me… and you can s—t in my mouth. How’d you like that?... Does that repulse you?... Well, I’ll put a plate over my face, then you can s—t on the plate. How’d you like that?” Yeesh! Everyone praises the Velvet Underground as the first band to sing about what was real, but like a theater critic once wrote, “Diarrhea is real too, but I shouldn’t have to pay money to see it!” Please Kill Me is a rogues gallery of degenerate sex fiends, sleazy groupies and pathetic junkies. These are also the founders of the American punk scene, so for better or worse this Punk Babylon is well worth reading even if it is depressing and shocking. Then again, most of you probably live for this.

The book is the result of old and new interviews with many of the original scenesters including Iggy Pop, Richard Hell, Wayne Kramer, Dee Dee and Joey Ramone, Patti Smith, Debbie Harry and Legs McNeil, one of the authors of this book. Legs was a founder of PUNK magazine and claims credit for coining the word in 1975. Writes Legs, “The word Punk seemed to sum up the thread that connected everything we liked - drunk, obnoxious, smart but not pretentious, absurd, funny, ironic, and things that appealed to the darker side…I thought the magazine should be for other f—k-ups like us. Kids who grew up believing only in the Three Stooges. Kids that had parties when their parents were away and destroyed the house. You know, kids that stole cars and had fun.”

And what fun they had! Richard Lloyd of Television remembers “I was in such an alcoholic state that I needed something to calm down my shakes. I needed to get away from alcohol. So I began to ask Terry to let me try some heroin.” Ron Asheton of The Stooges tells of Iggy’s first case of V.D. (A gift from Nico), “He came up to me and said, ‘Well, I think something’s wrong’... So he whips out his c--k, squeezes it, and green goo comes out. I said, ‘Buddy, you have the clap.” Maybe Minor Threat created straight-edge to create a balance in the punk universe.

Like all catty interview books, Please Kill Me is a Rashomon of egos, drug habit deceptions and personal vendettas. The NY scene started with the Velvet Underground, an integral part of Andy Warhol’s Factory; suicidal beautiful losers whose lives could be summed up by, “Look at me, I’m beautiful, glamorous, rich, and constantly stoned. I hate myself, but I loath you, darling. Kiss Kiss.” Wayne/Jayne County claims credit for David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust character. Malcolm McLaren, manager of The Sex Pistols (and for a short time the NY Dolls) for once says something insightful, “I was disappointed with the fact that much of their behavior (the American bands) was wasted energy - I didn’t think it even had any philosophical purpose. It was trashy energy, easily disposable energy, an energy that didn’t really bear any genuine point of view, except jealousy, which is so time wasting.”

About the UK punk bands someone says, “The thing that makes art interesting is when an artist has incredible pain or incredible rage. The New York bands were much more into their pain, while the English bands were much more into their rage. The Sex Pistols songs were written out of anger, whereas Johnny was writing songs because he was broken hearted over Sable…” Manager and record company rep Danny Fields says, “Malcolm’s strategy for the Pistols was the theory of chaos. It was out of control and had nothing to do with anything musical. It had to do with this phenomenon of terror that was coming over from England. They put safety pins in the queen’s nose and they would vomit and curse and say it’s the end of the world. I always say when the music moves from the music section to the front page of the newspaper, you’re in trouble.” I add that Malcolm did all this to sell ugly, overpriced clothing to negative-trenders.

Legs McNeil finds twisted romance in the lives of drunk and drugged out punk stars. If that’s your cup of piss, Please Kill Me is the best book ever. The decline and death of Johnny Thunders is detailed in all its junkie glory. The last chapters are about the death of the original NY punk scene and a good number of its participants, but you don’t get the feeling McNeil finds any bigger meaning to it all. He’s like the junkie who doesn’t know wrong or right, all he wants is his next fix. There are no moral lessons here, just stories. But, man, I couldn’t put this book down! 

The Philosophy Of Punk - Craig O'Hara (book review) (AK Press):(special note: if you would like to quote from this review as a scholarly reference, please do so, as long as you follow standard footnote rules)

You gotta love hippie punks. They volunteer at food co-ops, distribute meals to the homeless and recycle pickle buckets into drums for people who can’t drum to save their lives. Anarchist hippie punks you gotta love less. Sure, they confront the National Front while others cower, but man are they a wet diaper full. Anarchy is the delusion the world needs neither laws nor government. Free of these evil influences everyone will do their own thing and all tension, hatred, fear and greed will fall away like broken chains. We’ll never get old and we'll never die. Of course this might require the forced re-education of all who don't agree. 1984 anyone? Anarchy is the biggest pipedream of any belief system, making communism look like supply-side capitalism in comparison. Anyone who believes the absence of laws, police and armies won't lead to a world like The Road Warrior (if not Hellraiser) should be treated as mentally defective. A D.C. anarchist zine recently wrote, "If there were no laws there would be no criminals". Eyes roll to the back of my head and the mind boggles. How then to classify rape? Tough love?

In this vein comes The Philosophy of Punk, by Craig O'Hara, the paperback edition of a Masters thesis written at Boston University. Anarchy punk is obviously Craig’s music and lifestyle of choice, so this paper was easy to research and write. I mean as much research as a few punk and anarchist fanzines, flyers and books, plus sitting outside punk shows talking with his fellow unwashed. I'm not an expert on punk but as I read The Philosophy of Punk I took notes, and my gripes are as long as the book itself.

O'Hara wrote this thesis knowing full well his teachers knew nothing about punk culture, otherwise they would have demanded more comprehensive research. He writes about punks as if they’re a new aboriginal tribe he alone has seen. Written at a purely high school level, the "facts" carry little authority. He writes, (pg. 3) "A ‘show’ is what punks call a concert. It is different from an average music concert because there is the goal of removing the audience/performer separation." He creates a non-existent punk mythology by suggesting a link between language and culture. The word "show" doesn't connote or denote any broken barriers. "Show" is used more often than "concert" but it means nothing in itself. Being only one syllable it's easier to say, but beyond that there's nothing in my dog-eared Punk Handbook on the use of "show". Then again, my edition is from '92.

(pg. 4) "Hardcore music is usually faster than the punk music of the 70s, but the ideas and people involved are virtually the same.” 70’s punk had nothing in common with hardcore, especially Craig’s PC hippie anarchy hardcore. 70’s punk was about drugs, garage and girl group nostalgia, sexual misadventure, cabaret-style decadence and general lowlife fun. UK punk was more political, but activism started small with Crass around 1978. The Clash were political but it was packaged with their Jackson Pollack-inspired drip paint clothing. Hardcore is mostly a white, middle class American endeavor children grow out of with time.

O'Hara writes he first got into punk in 1982 (the beginning of the Reagan era, a time when hardcore was very political in response to the dreaded right wing enemy). He blows off the ‘70s as irrelevant because both he and punk activism were barely existent. To O'Hara, punk is anarchy, activism, scene building and anti-racist, anti-sexist and pro-animal. Everything else may call itself punk (like oi) but (in whispered voice) it really isn't. That's the real point he's trying to make, and he does it very poorly.

(pg. 16) "The most frequently mentioned comparison between punk and a known art movement is Dada." He vaguely sites three studies to back this but it’s as random and irrelevant a guess as any, and not even worth making. Is all academia this lazy and contrived? (pg. 22) "Punk has incorrectly been labeled as simply one of these phases in which the rebellious person tries to show that she is different from her peers." Sorry, but statistically it’s so true it’s a Universal Truth. You don’t say “punk for life” unless you know and fear it isn’t. (pg. 23) "Rebellion is one of the few undeniable characteristics of punk." (pg. 24) You can say the same about greasers, metal dudes and indie film directors. 

I don't know where he comes up with these gems of ignorance: "As punk is now comprised of a clear majority of middle and service class whites instead of inner city working class or minorities..." (pg. 40) "New York's emerging Straight Edge scene who shared the same clubs and favorite bands as the skinheads." (pg. 48) "Fanzines are sold primarily through the mail." 

My favorite imagination stretch (and there's plenty of them) is where he asserts punk bands aren't in it for the money. (pg. 132) "This goes back to the beginning of punk when there were few people in the movement and the idea of making money from the music was ridiculous." Is he serious? ‘70s bands were desperate to sign with major labels and make as much as possible. This whole D.I.Y not-in-it-for-the-money deal started with Minor Threat, Crass and The Dead Kennedys. It’s a white, suburban rich kid fantasy that had nothing to do with the punk ‘70s.

The entire premise of The Philosophy Of Punk is flawed. Craig O'Hara is an anarchist who believes anarchists are the only real punks. If you don't think like he does you're not punk because punk is a pure belief in love, peace and anarchy. That's all well and good for an opinion piece in a high school newspaper, but this book is called The Philosophy Of Punk, not Craig's Punk World. Either he’s completely ignorant of punk history or he’s a bad liar. I think it’s a bit of both.

He states that if you don't agree with him you should write your own book. That’s all the world needs – thousands of ignorant two-bit ideologues writing bad history books. He knows painfully little about punk outside his own opinions and tries to cover for it by saying he doesn't care. He writes (pg. 10) "The time and birthplace of the punk movement is debatable. Either the New York scene of the late sixties/early seventies or the British punks of 1975-76 can be given the honor." If you don't know punk and rock n’ roll in general originated in the U.S. the last thing you should be doing is writing a book on music history.

The author's ambivalence towards violence is the most telling idiocy of the book. Hippie punks are by nature non-violent (as long as they get their way), but anarchist punks are all for destroying property in the name of The Struggle. O’Hara’s both for and against S.H.A.R.P. beating up nazi skins, but quickly regains his footing by giving two big thumbs up to vandalism and theft. He writes (pg. 59) "The fact that people loot stereos and televisions instead of food shows that they have been convinced that a better life is more money and more goods." Ignorance like this has to come from marxist pamphlets. People loot liquor and electronic stores because they’re criminals. They don’t think they’re smashing the state when they liberate VCRs and cases of vodka.

On pg. 77 O'Hara writes "If government forces disappeared today, there probably would be rioting, crime, murder, and destruction on a scale possibly greater than is presently occurring, but that would not be Anarchy." But golly, let's give it a chance, right Craig? The truth is that most people equate anarchy with violence and random mayhem because that’s what it offers in practice. Is Craig O'Hara naive or just very dumb? Either way he loses.

I'd love to know what grade Mr. O'Hara received for The Philosophy Of Punk. The writing and research blow. His facts are mere opinions backed by little more than statements of truthfulness. Did he fool his Review Board? Probably.  

Post Punk Diary 1980-1982, by George Gimarc (book review) (St. Martin's Griffin): The sequel to the world's best punk bathroom reader (Punk Diary 1970-1979) is available for $24.95 - pricey yet invaluable for both the elderly and the curious. The author was a DJ with a radio program called "The Rock And Roll Alternative", and while his show originated in the US, his focus was on UK punk, post-punk and new wave, which makes sense since Britain's music scene was a locomotive compared to America's unicycle with one flat tire. America produced the world's first jazz, R&B and punk bands, but the voracious British music press and buying public inspired the world in a way the American media and public had no interest in pursuing. American punk bands were always more appreciated in the UK than they were at home. Then again, XTC was appreciated more in the US than in the UK.

Post Punk Diary 1980-1982 deals with the post-punk period that saw the rise of hardcore and street punk, and the quick rise and fall of new wave as radio’s commercial alternative. Entries take the form of a diary, each day bringing a batch of 7"s, albums, press releases, promos, gossip and concerts into the lives of the reader. The handy index allows you to follow your favorite bands from conception to breakup, and the book is filled with album covers, concert posters, buttons and newspaper snippets.

As with the first book, this comes with a bonus CD filled with song and interview segments with bands like Devo, Gang Of Four, The Ramones and Elvis Costello. The CD often gets stolen, so check before you buy. George Gimarc the DJ comes across as your average Boss Jock playing the Boss Hits his Boss told him to play, but he had early access to all the greats and he's put together two fine books. He's milking his collection for cash, but these books are invaluable. 

Punk: The Illustrated History Of A Music Revolution, by Andrian Boot and Chris Salewicz (book review) (Boxtree): Picture books pretty! No must think. Hurts brain. Pretty pictures...nice. It seems like within the same week a gaggle of punk photo collections hit the stores, as if there’s a demand for it. I don’t believe in art for arts sake. If there’s no reason for it, it’s a waste of time and money. Most of these books are crap anyway. This one had lots of words in it so I bought it. Maybe I learn something too.

This is good even though the layout is difficult to follow. Text is placed over dark splotches of random patterns, and it's hard to figure out where a paragraph continues on the next page. I guess the idea was to show the anarchy of punk also applies to graphic design. What I got from it was a migraine headache.

Once you get past the visual disorientation, Punk: The Illustrated History is for the most part (the last chapter stinks) a great book. It reads much better than it skims. What first seems to be a pretentious wordiness is actually a funny, opinionated and fact-filled writing style. Maybe it's just that I agree with most of their comments. They nail the New York Dolls as Rolling Stones clones. They point out that Johnny Rotten and Malcolm McLaren are both pathological lying egotists. Photos of Elvis Costello are given the following notation: "...a very angry young man beloved of those with some further education."

They nicely cover the early French punk scene that inspired the British movement, the importance of pub rock and glam, and how reggae turned punk into a political movement via The Clash. Unlike all other punk books I've read the authors plot punk's history on a time-line that acknowledges punk scenes around the world came together on their own at about the same time. Too many books provide a history of the movement that centers on one or two band as if the world revolved around them as they would the sun.

That said, the last chapter stinks. In a last minute effort to bring this history of the ‘77 movement into the here and now, they slap on references to Nirvana, Green Day, Rancid and The Offspring. They say grunge bands are "heirs to the spirit of punk". Really. Another moaner, "Nirvana became the inspiration for grunge". Even I know Grunge existed before then. And of course, "The Clash...also seemed at the core of the songs by Green Day". Ouch that’s so wrong! I bet the publisher made them throw that last one in.

Punk '77: an inside look at the san francisco rock n' roll scene, by James Stark, (book review) (self-published): (First, a disclaimer: this review is based on my personal opinions on old punk scenes in general. I was not a part of San Francisco's scene so I don't write from first-hand knowledge. Maybe for those involved every band and show was super.)

Nostalgia for the ‘77 punk era runs high, but hopefully the trend has run its course. Maybe it revives itself every so often like a typical fashion cycle. It used to be morality, politics and cultural trends ran in twenty year cycles. Now with the media working at a feverish pace to stay new and fresh, pangs of nostalgia (real and imagined) come and go, dictated by disposable consumer culture.

1977 was the year the Sex Pistols and The Clash broke punk around the world as a threat to civil order. Punk existed years earlier but it was swept aside the moment Johnny Rotten sang "God Save The Queen" and a small island nation went ballistic. The American punk scene was fragmented, small and barely appreciated by the American press and public. American bands found more success and support in the UK than they did at home.

Punk 77 is a self-published, 95 page book of photographs and text relating to San Francisco's scene of the mid to late ‘70s. James Stark was the official photographer for local band Crime (and by extension the local scene), no major accomplishment because the bands were relatively unknown and broke, populated by art school types, students, beatniks, hippies and other assorted weirdos. It was like this pretty much in every city with claims to America's punk heritage. New York City was a major player because it was the nation's media and songwriting capital. Los Angeles drew attention as America's entertainment capital. Cities like Cleveland, Detroit and Akron were where punk grew on its own without help from the outside world. Iggy, Pere Ubu, Devo, The Dead Boys and the MC5 flew under the radar. Punk's art came from New York City, but it’s guts grew up in the industrial mid-west. San Francisco's scene produced The Avengers, The Dils, The Germs, Negative Trend, Crime and The Screamers, but it's important to remember most pre-hardcore bands weren't what the kids today would call hardcore. The SF scene was tied to the larger L.A. scene and was, according to this book, influenced by more popular bands that toured the city. SF holds the distinction of being the last stop on the Sex Pistols last tour.

Books like this prove the word “punk” is meaningless. Rock’s always been about rebellion. How Patti Smith's mythical poetry sung over Door's influenced psychedelia became punk is an accident of time and place. The NY Dolls were the Rolling Stones in drag. The MC5 recorded psychedelic hard rock. Maybe the punk label only applies to the subversive attitudes of band members and their followers. Maybe it was just the title bestowed by journalist Legs McNeil to any band he liked stuck. Maybe punk means nothing (like Art) because anyone can apply it to anything at any time. The early San Francisco punk scene was like any other city's underground rock scene - it consisted of a relatively small group who hung out and found clubs to play. As more famous bands played the city, new bands formed and others changed their styles. The many great pictures in the book show a fashion sense evenly mixed between new wave wackiness and Damned/Pistols brand of self-loathing and aggression. And like all other scenes, some of the bands were great, some were good, but most were average at best.

Punk 77 contains anecdotes and insights you can read into for days. Some are self-serving lies, others artistic pretentiousness. For the most part you get the impression the SF punks didn't as a whole kid themselves about the limitations of the genre, and maybe they didn't make more of it than it deserved. Tony and Chip Kinman of the Dils are quoted as saying, "One of the punk ideas was to destroy the idea of Mick Jagger and Rod Stewart, destroy the idea of the star. The way it turned out was you still had Mick and Rod, but you had them in your own neighborhood, which was worse in a way." The punk world needs more honest insights like this.

I wish there was more meat in the last chapter dealing with the dissolution of the original punk scene by the new hardcore generation. The calculated nihilism of the Sex Pistols, the political posturing of The Clash, the extreme speed and violence of hardcore and maybe especially slam dancing combined to destroy old punk that was often fun, creative and downright goofy. When the media saw punk as a violent threat to society, bored suburban kids imagined their own hreat potential and flooded the closest punk scenes, ruining shows with random violence and stifling rules on clothes, hairstyles and attitudes.

Jeff Raphael of the Nuns says, "I think all the violence that was happening was by people outside of the scene, people from the suburbs. There was a lot of media propaganda about people losing eyes, and all that fighting and stuff. What I saw were people from the suburbs who wanted to get into fights, who wanted to break heads. They had nothing to do with the punk scene at all. They just wanted to create havoc and fugg people over." Hey, just like in Los Angeles!

From that point on punk became obsessed with defining itself by rules and purity tests. That's why you'll hear dimwits say the origins of punk are in anarchy. They just don't get it. Old punk was just rock. The more hardcore claims it's about something, the less something it proves to actually be. Real scenes happen outside of definitions anyway.

PUNK DIARY 1970-1979 (book review) - George Gimarc (St. Martin's Press) (1994): I can honestly say this is the most useful and fun book you'll ever find on old punk and new wave. Compiled in the form of a business diary, events are chronicled as they happened by George Gimarc, who for over fourteen years produced the radio program "The Rock and Roll Alternative".

The first entry from 1970 is on The Stooges, and the last in 1979 on Tom Robinson. Everything is covered, from record releases to band formations and breakups, live concert reviews and gossip from the trenches. With the help of the handy index you can follow the paths of your favorite groups as each event unfolds. Under X-Ray Spex the first entry reads "Polly sees the Pistols - July 3, '76". The last entry is "band splits up - Aug 7, '79". Along the way you learn more about the band than you thought possible in this format.

The writing style is informative, promotional and critical all at the same time. Punk books are often dogmatic and forced, written by rock journalists beating prose out of bands more famous by reputation than actual following. I suspect a number of diary entries have been updated to make them more complete, but the perspective is from a time when the music and bands were new. New Wave and punk were the same thing in the ‘70s, and this book should put to rest any claims otherwise.

There is too much information to read this cover to cover. Each listing is a link to another page as you trace the progress of bands, labels and personalities. Hundreds of bands you've never heard of are discussed, but if you read these listings you'll find names who went on to form other bands you do know. Talking about nostalgia, the ‘70s concert scene in the U.K. was a punk's dream. On the same night, Saturday, May 12th, 1979, you had to choose between Squeeze, Roxy Music, The Undertones, XTC, The Dickies, Holly and the Italians and The Jags. How many good shows come to your town in a month? A year?

Shoppers Alert: a CD comes with the book. Most copies I've seen are missing the disc. It contains private tapes and interviews The Ramones, XTC, The Damned, The Dead Boys, Gang of Four, The Beat and others. The disc alone is almost worth the price. Punk Diary 1970-1979 is a great book. Don't let the title fool you. This is a complete encyclopedia on the old days of punk, and more fun than a barrel of open punk pins.

Punk. The Definitive Record Of A Revolution, by Stephen Colegrave & Chris Sullivan (Book Review) (Thunder’s Mouth Press): Tipping the scales at 6.2 pounds, this is the weightiest punk book ever, maybe not intellectually but surely by volume. Retailing for $35 and clearance priced at $7.99, I was forced to carry this around for an hour wondering how they managed to cut lead slabs into thin, flexible slices. Also, at 12” x 11 ½” x 1 ¼” this isn’t a book you throw in a bag and read on the bus. It’s a brick that demands to be placed on a flat solid surface. The thing also dares you read it since 99% of the text is composed of barely relevant quotes with chapter leads as hyperbolic as the Weekly World News, so what would make the perfect bathroom reader instead just takes up whatever space you give it, daring you to read it again at a later date. 

Punk is an ART BOOK in every sense of the capital letters. It does succeed well in that regard. Turn each page slowly and marvel at the dazzling parade of photographs and fonts in all shapes and sizes. It’s almost irrelevant what the words say because what this book is about is itself, with punk as the McGuffin. The combination of layout, text and image is designed to glory in style by documenting style in all its styles. I’m not a style junkie so I just look at Punk as a nice collection of images, and I appreciate the effort put into it. I know the original punk scene was fashion-obsessed but what I liked about punk in the ‘70s was the music itself. Some clothing choices came with it but I don’t take seriously the idea that punk style is as important as the music. Punk clothes and accessories have always been priced at the high end of the capitalist scale.

As a thing to look at and to keep on the shelf I love this book. I tried reading it but the first paragraph was so dumb on so many levels I gave up:

 In 1977 the dictionary defined punk as many things, but none of them were anything to do with a musical movement. All the definitions were uncompromisingly negative. This absence of acknowledgement at the peak of punk is indicative of its place in contemporary Britain. It was never a comfortable movement; it was not understood by most people over 21; it refused to conform or to conform itself to a musical trend. No wonder the dictionary tried to ignore it… 

Do I really need to dissect this? 1) Dictionaries don’t anticipate word usage, they only add them when time proves it warranted. Even a current slang dictionary would be a printing behind on something like this. Colegrave and Sullivan knew this when they wrote the book, but they’re making a dramatic point no matter how silly. 2) Punk was stuck to the music by the people involved in the music because of its negative connotations. Mostly it’s a juvenile delinquent reference but in NYC they liked to point out it’s slang for a male prostitute. 3) Maybe it wasn’t music for people over 21 but a lot of people over that age knew damn well what punk was about since it was only the latest manifestation of teenage belligerence. I myself have seen this cycle repeat and reinvent itself ad nauseum, and you can only shake your head when someone half your age acts like they know something you’re too old to understand. 4) The Ramones were the only band to do something so unheard of you can say they refused to conform. The rub was that these pinheads thought they were performing top-40 music. 5) The online Merriam-Webster dictionary lists “punk rock” as the 4^th definition of the word “punk”. Here’s the definition: rock music marked by extreme and often deliberately offensive expressions of alienation and social discontent. Punk is ignored no more.

I can’t read quotes without first knowing who’s speaking, so for each one here I had to look below the quote and then look back up again. Doing this ten times on a page made me seasick. Relying on so many quotes is also lazy and screams of filler no matter how long it took to compile them. This being an ART BOOK I see each quote as a pop-art Batman graphic that jumps out and screams “BAP!”, “POW!”, “SKOOCH!!”  Punk covers 1975 to 1979 with a high concentration on UK bands, especially the Sex Pistols. You might not like who is included, excluded or not given enough attention, but Punk does cover a great many of the basics, and in that regard it’s a fair enough rendering of punk history.

The authors’ own written sections hit an eleven on the self-importance scale, much of it not warranted. Punk isn’t fully what it pretends to be, but it’s still decent. The book’s style and effort compensate for what it lacks otherwise, and coming from a guy repulsed by too much conscious style, that’s a compliment.

Ramones: An American Band, by Jim Bessman (in association with the Ramones) (book review) (St. Matrin's Press): This is an odd book. The author’s name is nowhere to be found on the cover, which might lead you to believe Jim Bessman acted only as ghostwriter, yet it’s written as a standard third-party band biography using random Ramones quotes. It’s not like I just discovered Jimmy Hoffa’s head in my bowling bag, but I make the point anyway.

The book is one, big fat fan-club kiss to the band, with its ever optimistic outlook and frequent abuse of the exclamation point (“Carly Simon said she was a Ramones fan when Joey and Marky performed at a Jerry Brown rally!”) and rabid hyperbole (“Everyone in the known universe loves the Ramones today. Indeed, they’re the Grateful Dead of punk rock!”). Each new album (the book came out after Mondo Bizarro) is the one everyone is sure will finally make the Ramones rich and famous. Their influence is immeasurable, yet they never did sell enough records to make them a runaway commercial success in an industry they wanted to rule. Always the bridesmaid but never the bride - that’s the story of the Ramones.

Bessman doesn’t pretend band members never had problems with drugs, but the issue is given little weight, and he happily passes on the band’s assertion that “5third & third” “dealt with a destitute ‘Nam vet they’d met who’d been reduced to hustling sex”. Dee Dee wrote that song about himself so while the book doesn’t completely sanitize the band, don’t expect any shocking revelations.

The Ramones are to punk history what Ford was to the automobile - they didn’t single-handedly invent it but their legacy exceeds that of any other. At CBGBs they were frequently billed with the Talking Heads, which made sense because both played minimalist dance music. The Ramones played bubblegum rock not unlike The Bay City Rollers (Joey thought the Rollers were their only competition), except they played as fast as they could, created an unprecedented wall of blazing guitar fuzz and wrote lyrics mirroring the daily concerns of Forest Hills, Queens cretins raised on TV, booze, drugs, comic books and bad horror movies.

While not technically talented as musicians the Ramones were surprisingly tight in the studio (or at least the studio musicians hired to help fill out their sound were), and had a thing for sleigh bells the same way the Clash did for police sirens. No matter how much the Ramones’ sound was augmented in the studio, though, played live each song was given the same raw, stripped down intensity. Ramones albums changed over the years, yet their live shows were stuck in 1976.

Where the stereotyped punk band only knows four chords, the Ramones knew only three. Once described as “Three chords, four leather jackets”, the Ramones looked and acted like The Three Stooges with Beatles mop-tops (the name Ramones is Beatles trivia). The ripped jeans, t-shirts, sneakers and haircuts were carefully planned uniforms each Ramone was required to wear. Joey and Johnny say these clothes were how they always dressed but Dee Dee hated that look. Prior to the Ramones, Joey played in a glam band and dressed to a lesser extent like one of the New York Dolls. I never fully accepted C. Jay as a Ramone because he looks too much like the heavy metal dude he admits to being (“I was a mega, mega Sabbath head”).

The first three Ramones albums (Ramones, Ramones Leave Home, Rocket To Russia) are their best, most of the songs written by the time Ramones came out in 1976. Subsequent albums grew away from the minimalist thrash that made them famous to a more direct Phil Spector influence. The Ramones wanted was to be loved, famous and rich. The Ramones, enforced mainly by Johnny, made decisions based on what they thought fans wanted. They were always a business, and though Joey and Johnny barely spoke to each other for years, when it came to business they were all business.

Why didn’t The Ramones break through on the radio? The answers are simple: 1) Lyrics like “Beat On The Brat” and “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue”, 2) They’re not pretty, and 3) The Sex Pistols soured the music industry on punk bands.

The ‘80s and ‘90s saw the Ramones touring and releasing material but they lost some appeal when hardcore broke with Fear, the Dead Kennedys and the Bad Brains (who took their name from a Ramones song). Old punk bands in general have less appeal to fans who prefer their stage heroes to be their own age.

Ramones: An American Band does a decent job of describing the band’s sound. They had “a simplicity that took sophistication to appreciate”. Ramones associate Arturo Vega said the band “reflected the American character in general - an almost childish, innocent aggression”. The Ramones worked within narrow parameters but created an impressive body of work. The Ramones became their own genre. Describing the Ramones’ sound is difficult because it’s hard to accurately define the essence of an aesthetic.

Again and again the book details the typical story of a Ramones fanatic: 1) Heard the album for the first time and thought it was a joke, 2) Listened to it again because it was there, 3) Slowly got the joke and realized something clever and vital was going on and 4) Hooked for life. This happened to me too. In 1976 I thought “Beat On The Brat” was horrible, but now I think the first three Ramones albums are perfect even though I don’t like the lyrics of “Beat On The Brat”.

Ramones: An American Band is not bad for a fan-club book, but since the band told the world it’s “Adios, Amigos” someone should write an exhaustive history. It’s the least we owe them.

ROTTEN: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, by John Lydon - (book review): The story of The Sex Pistols is the great Rashomon of our punk times. Each band member, the manager and assorted hangers-on tell a different "true story" of a band that lasted long enough to smash the face of British music and open the punk floodgates in the United States. American bands created punk but The Sex Pistols made it a worldwide scandal, generating the media coverage needed to propel it as a popular movement. John Lydon's biography, Rotten, plays right into the Rashomon motif by mixing the author's own memories and opinions with sometime contradictory accounts by other players in the scene. Lydon is brutally honest about his own life and involvement with the Pistols, but this book does not answer the riddle of Johnny Rotten - is he a pathological liar, a true punk visionary or just an ass?

Rotten covers three major areas: John's formative years, The Sex Pistols era and his place in punk history. Each is covered in great detail and leaves contradictory impressions. John's family was dirt poor and his father aggressively detached. His mom was the greatest. The man who wrote "I'm probably a bastard since I am one by nature" loves his Mommy as much as Elvis loved his. He's made it his life's work to incite others yet he concludes "I've never seen anything solved by violence". Not only does Lydon take all the credit for the success of the Sex Pistols, he often cites himself as the source of all things punk.

Having read this book I can no longer compare the Sex Pistols with The Monkees - a triumph of packaging and marketing. The Pistols were a real band who rose and fell with the same intensity with which they pissed off others and destroyed themselves. Contrary to everything John Lydon says, the Sex Pistols would have been nothing without the contributions of Malcolm McLaren and Glen Matlock.

If you believe like I do that Sid Vicious was punk's village idiot, Rotten is an overflowing toilet of good stories. Deriving his name from a crazy hamster, Sid strangled cats for fun, cut himself with can lids and burned himself with cigarettes (the last also a James Dean habit). Also big into throwing glasses and whipping chains, Sid would fight anybody and usually lost. He couldn't and wasn't expected to play bass in the Pistols. He was there because he was John's friend and McLaren thought a total loser might be good for the band's image as agents of chaos. This was a punk joke on the audience that soon destroyed the band.

Rotten is a great book for anyone interested in early punk music and culture. It paints a vivid picture of working class life in England, where "either it's music, football, hooliganism, or boxing." Johnny Rotten is obviously intelligent and when he's not spewing sound-bites like a carnival barker his opinions are persuasive and well considered. One the other hand, if you spend every waking hour of your life making asshole comments and doing asshole things, then no matter what else you've accomplished you'd still be just an asshole. That's the bottom line on the institution we call Johnny Rotten - he's clever, influential, but in the end an asshole, and I'm sure Johnny wouldn't have it any other way.

Retro Hell: life in the 70s and 80s, from Afros to Zotz, by the editors of Ben Is Dead magazine (book review) (Back Bay): I can't stress how vital it is to keep good reading material next to where the Tidy Bowl man anchors his yacht. As technology enables fewer people to do more work in less time, those of us who do work are afforded scant opportunity for book learnin' and such. I'm lucky to even get lunch, and commute times here in L.A. are obscene (of course by this I mean bad obscene. Good obscene while commuting -- I wish!). Some days, visits to the men's conference room make up my only breaks. That's my time, baby, and I grab life by the short hairs by learning!

Retro Hell is listed in the Library Of Congress catalog as a dictionary, which may be true, but the book is too random and ill-researched to be authoritative. Barely researched if at all would be more accurate. Entries contain foggy memories of personal experience and some make no sense at all: "Soccer Team Names (from '75 to 82'). Some of the soccer teams I played on and names of some opposing teams: The Bionic Women, The Bionic Girls, The Asteroids, The Rolling Stones, The Moon Zappers, Space Invaders, Solid Goaled (darby)". Darby is the main editor of the Ben Is Dead zine, which folded a year ago. Ben Is Dead was a personal zine and possibly the best of its kind, but is this a reference book or a personality-cult inkblot test? It's cute that Nina writes Spit was "the cause of more fights between me and my sister than even Monopoly!", but what the hell is this game Spit? Is this a dictionary of culture or the cryptic memories of strangers?

Anything Bruce Elliot writes about seems to be nicely researched, and some memories are fun: "Hickeys: They were fun to give but a curse to receive. I wore turtlenecks to cover them up, even in the summer. And if my parents asked what the hell that was, the answer was always that the faithful curling iron burned me (again)." Still, it’s obvious how they put this book together - get everybody associated with Ben Is Dead to make a list of everything they remember from the ‘70s, use outside sources to add to the list and then pass around said list for further input. Darby has an entry for someone she calls "The Hip Hypnotist" who worked rooms in Reno and Vegas during her youth. Why isn't New Jersey's Uncle Floyd in here? He had a short-lived variety show after SNL. He had the Ramones on a few times and has been doing the adult/kiddie format for 25 years. Where's the entry for "The Coffee Achievers" - a bizarre ad campaign for an addictive stimulant that went something like "Coffee gives you the time to dream it... then you're ready to do it!”

It's not the end of the world. No matter how lazy this endeavor is (regardless of how many hours they put into it) there's still a load of good-natured nostalgia to be had in Retro Hell. And like with porn, sometimes you even learn something useful from it.

Running With The Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, by Robert Walser (book review) (Wesleyan University Press): The Intellectual Process, when applied to academia, is a two-sided coin. On one side it can be used to explain the world in measurable terms of science, psychology or any other set of theories and equations that bring order to chaos and reveal why things happen and people do and say the things they do and say. In other words, it's a fancy way of seeing what's in front of your eyes. On the other side, the Intellectual Process can be used as an excuse and rationalization for things not worthy of too much fancy thought. Heavy Metal isn't grist for any academic mill - because there's no underneath to the shallowness on top. I don't just say this because I don't like heavy metal, I say this because metal’s merits have always been defined by the brain-dead explanation "because it ROCKS!". I stopped asking metal fans what they like about their music after the fourth straight response of "It just rocks, man". It’s like trying to find out what's great about pudding, and the only answer you get is "It's pudding, dude, pudding (accompanied by air pudding spooning)"

Robert Walser, when he wrote this book in 1993, was Assistant Professor of Music at Dartmouth College. He holds doctorate degrees in musicology (the study of music, the effects of music in combination with other music, and music toxicology), and musical performance. He's played in jazz bands, polka bands, classical ensembles, symphony orchestras, and diddled the guitar in rock, country, world beat (defined as any music white people can't dance to) and heavy metal. In other words, he's a music whore. I think he wrote this book to 1) address the dearth of such scholarly study, 2) hopefully win tenure and not have to get a real job, and 3) because metal rocks!!!

For the record, pun crock has more than its share of idiots and idiot ideology, but, as Pee Wee Herman would say, everyone has a big 'but' but you can't let that stop you. Some kinds of punk at least have some redeeming qualities in offering some coherent social and political discourse. Punk makes some people dumber than they were before but it's also been a positive inspiration to improve yourself and the world around you. All heavy metal accomplishes is the chance for long-hairs to bang their heads.

In the intro, Walser states heavy metal is the single most successful and enduring musical genre of the last thirty years. Ok..... Then he claims the Ramones and Sex Pistols took heavy metal and made it into punk. Uh huh..... Dee Snider is quoted as saying "Heavy Metal is the only form of music that still retains the rebellious qualities of 50’s rock and roll. Sure.... What Walser does the rest of the time is defend metal as a legitimate form by not only comparing it to classical music, but by insisting it is modern classical music. Mostly what the book proves is that cultural anthropology is a joke. You can reinterpret metal lyrics all day in socio/political/economic terms but that still doesn't change what a writer for Musician Magazine in 1984 described as "...a transitional music, infusing dirtbags and worthless puds with the courage to grow up and be a dickhead." The author provides this very quote in order to dispute it, but he does a piss-poor job. I don't think the proof is in the music, no matter how many endless, jargon filled run-on sentences Walser strings together.

I picked up the book because it claimed to address the issue of gender in metal. Only rap is more hateful towards women. I’m fascinated by the idea that for such a macho (read homophobic) style of music, its stars have for the most part been ultra-effeminate if not flat-out transsexual. Walser's lofty defense of metal's 47 flavors of teenage misogyny just made me laugh.

Running With The Devil could have made its points just as well as a lengthy pamphlet. Instead it rambles on and on like a Senate filibuster for a cause nobody believes in but the speaker. If you like heavy metal, then good for you. I'm happy you like to rock, but please don't make it something it's not. They say history is written by the winners but in punk it's the losers who define the genre. Your worst hair bands sold more records than any great punk band ever did. This proves nothing. There are 100 wrong reasons and two right reasons for anyone to want to be punk. At least punk has those two reasons. A thousand years from now anthropologists will look back at punk and see a lot of good amongst the violence and bad fashions. They'll look at heavy metal and just see cross-dressers with guitar fetishes. 

Salad Days, by Charles Romalotti (book review) (Layman): I received this novel, steeped in personal history, after a few e-mails from the author, whom I can tell is sincere and energetic in his desire to succeed as a writer.  A lot of effort, heart and years went into creating this book, which from all indications is self-published through Layman Books, http://home.flash.net/~layman/. I would like to see Charles succeed. He's traveled the country a number of times promoting both his book and himself. It’s great hardcore’s been around for so long that novels about it are being written.......(pause)...... I wish Salad Days was better so I could say something nice about it as a finished product. The problems with the book go beyond simple editing, which it seemingly never received from the many people thanked in the Acknowledgments. The whole work needs to be erased and started over again. Everything about it is wrong, and I'm so sorry to have to say so.

I admit I haven't read a novel in at least a decade. For this zine I've read many books on music history and personally I prefer truth over fiction because I'd rather learn than escape. My college major was comparative literature but that was a long time ago. I know very well my own writing is in serious need of editing, which I can only do for myself long after I've finished writing something. It's very hard to edit your own work. Simple mistakes hide themselves from the conscious mind.

What's wrong with Salad Days? For starters it's written in the first person but stilted by formalities of the third person perspective. Instead of describing himself physically the author contrives a passage in front of a mirror where he looks at himself and describes what he sees in dispassionate detail, almost like an FBI report. Instead of writing what the main character Frank (the author by proxy) thinks, Romalotti uses dialogue, which has an almost contradictory set of rules. Instead of flowing first person perspective you have endless dialogue quotes only given tone by "I said, concerned", or "I professed boldly". There's something about how the intent of dialogue is laid out in this book that reminds me of minimal acting notations added to plays.

The author also tries too hard in his narrative to be poetically insightful. He piles similes on top of metaphors in a confusing mess that perpetuates Strunk and White's spinning in their graves. It's a bit too rchetypal Dashiell Hammett, Damon Runyon and Earnest Hemingway, and it doesn't add to the flow. Also, when I read something like "The snow covered the lawn like a bubble bath", I stop reading for a bit as I ponder what the hell that means.

The dialogue itself is full of simplistic declarations and slogans. "Why are you a vegetarian?" "Because I can be." "The music means everything to me. Without it, I'd be lost". Many short questions are inserted simply for Frank to knock them out of the park with a statement of purpose or dedication. In the first 21 pages I counted 29 references to specific punk bands, songs, places and publications. They come too fast and furious, as if Romalotti made a list of every single punk thing he likes and spaced them out evenly, no matter what. It's name-dropping that acts as product placement. Too many images at the same time are confusing, which makes it even more important to not visit the thesaurus as often as does Romalotti.

I'm going to say the most horrible thing about Salad Days, only because it's true. It is the positive punk equivalent of The Turner Diaries. It can only appeal to those pre-disposed to liking it regardless of how well it is written. The people giving it great reviews, printed on the back of the book, are log-rolling, which is an industry term for saying something nice for personal reasons. They're supporting the scene, a nice guy and the idea of punk novels. I can't blame them. They do what they can.

Charles Romalotti needs to learn or be guided to a basic understanding of how to write a novel. I know I can't write one, so spare me that line of sarcasm. He has a passion for writing and I applaud his effort. What he needs is to find someone who will take every page he writes, rip it apart and tell him what is right, what is wrong, and why. This needs to be done until the job is finished. There's only 150 pages of story in this 300 page book, and it was a very, very slow read. Charles needs to figure out why that is so if he wants to succeed. Good luck. I'm rooting for ya! 

Search & Destroy (book review) (RE search): Nostalgia has its price, in this case $19.95 for a reprint of the first six issues of Search & Destroy, a San Francisco-based cut & paste punk mag from '77 to '79. Bomp started earlier, but S&D and PUNK were the first to focus mainly on an American punk scene that existed in only a few cities (NY, LA, SF, Detroit and Cleveland quickly come to mind). The magazine took it's name from the Iggy and the Stooges song that opens 1973's Raw Power. Referring to the handy index Iggy also gets the most mention in these issues.

There's plenty of articles on media-famous bands like the Sex Pistols, The Ramones, the Clash and the Damned, but the articles are in-depth and interviews are conducted at a time when even the big names were relatively obscure. The mid-‘70s CBGBs scene is surprisingly given more than its due, considering S&D had no budget and was typed on an IBM Correcting Selectric II typewriter in a room above a SF bookstore. All the late ‘70s local bands are here too, like The Nuns, Crime, Weirdos, the Dils and the Mumps. To be honest a lot of these bands weren’t very good, but they were the scene back then so mostly I keep my mouth shut.

The book's index is a goldmine of insight on how bands saw themselves and their cultural roots. William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and even Surrealism are cited by bands as inspirations. The volume opens with a long interview with Jello Biafra on punk history. Jello is smart but also very paranoid. He knows punk history, but once politics is invoked, be it of record companies or Washington DC, the guy's convinced invisible spaceships under the control of Jerry Falwell follow him waiting for instructions from The Committee to assassinate him with what will only appear to be a stroke. 

Is this worth twenty bucks? There's a second volume for the same price so if you're thinking of buying this to be a good little punk historian you're really talking $40 - a collector's price. Because of the high cover price and higher level of esoterica I'd say pocket the cash and read a few articles every time you visit a bookstore. Borders and Tower seemingly don't care if you sit there all day like it was the library.

Classic Rock Albums: Never Mind The Bollocks - The Sex Pistols (book review): This focuses mainly on the demos and their place in the evolution of the Sex Pistols’ sound from live to studio. Pistols' soundman Dave Goodman recorded most of them, with Chris Spedding of "Motorbiking" recorded a few others. Chris Thomas, who produced both Roxy Music and the hated Pink Floyd, receives most of the credit for the studio album. Heylin lays out the dates and particulars of the demos with a lengthy precision that repeatedly shut down my mind. I really don't care if session three of the demo for Song X took place on a Tuesday, not a Wednesday as referenced in The Sex Pistols Diary Day By Day. If you're into forensics, the attention to detail will give you either a woody or a wetty.

The Great Question the book addresses is: What defines a band most, their live or studio sound? I’m a proponent of the studio sound, while many diehards prefer the raw feel of a live show captured in the studio. To me a live show and a studio album should have little in common besides professional presentation. A live show is a group dynamic of sights, sounds, smells and alcohol. A studio recording is about quality and technology; it's about striving for the most professional display of your skills. The heartbreakers and PJ Harvey demos were great, but most demos aren’t that interesting. Without professional studio albums bands with great live reputations wouldn't have made a dent. This was true especially with The Sex Pistols.

A bootleg albumof demos from the Goodman sessions, titled Spunk, was released a week before the official album. These are the tracks Malcolm claimed captured the band at their best. Bollocks I say, Bollocks! "No Feelings" moves along nicely but the rest sounds like tin cans and string compared to the deep richness of the studio album. Johnny's singing in the studio is clear and exact, exhibiting intelligence, control and vitriol. On the demos he's just spitting. Steve Jones' guitar work on the demos is incidental, whereas in the studio he insisted, to everyone's chagrin, on adding layers and layers of overdubs in homage to Phil Spector's wall of sound. Jones also played most of the bass tracks on the album, something the band preferred to keep a secret. The studio album has a sound big enough to fill a stadium, and I think that is its greatest accomplishment and the reason why it's considered one of the best rock albums of all time.

You'll learn a great deal about the recording process from this book. It's more proof that when it comes to the studio nobody has a clue what's going on. Many things are either made up on the spot or the result of accidents.

Classic Rock Albums: Never Mind The Bollocks - The Sex Pistols was one of a series of books that focus on seminal albums. Other books in the series cover The Beatles, Bowie, Cream, The Who and Nirvana. I found this at the close-out shop, and it's definitely worth the few bucks.

As a public service, below is a series of definitions for the word "Bollocks", which landed the Sex Pistols in court on a charge of obscenity. They won the case...

bollock  Verb. To reprimand. Noun. A testicle.
bollockbag Noun. The scrotum and testicles.
bollock-brain  Noun. Idiot, imbecile. Derog.
bollocking  Noun. A severe reprimand.
(the) bollocks Noun. The best, a thing or situation of excellence. Abb of 'dog's bollocks'.
bollocks (!)  Noun. 1. Testicles. S.e. until mid 1800s. 2. Rubbish, nonsense, drivel. E.g."That film was bollocks." Exclam. An expression of frustration, or defiance.* Also written as bollox.
bollocksed  Adj. 1. Worn out, ruined, tired. 2. Very intoxicated.  bollocks to that! Exclam. A defiant exclamation.

Shock Value, by John Waters (1981) (book review): Now the elder statesman of America's deviant film directors, John Waters is the greatest artist to come out of Baltimore since Edgar Allen Poe. Starting in the late ‘60s he brought together the creme of Baltimore's addicts, drag queens and degenerate dropouts to make what can only be described as John Waters films. Obsessed with tabloid sensationalism, sexual misadventure, over the top acting and a deep need to offend, Waters' first book covers his life up till Desperate Living. My favorite chapters are about Baltimore, casting ugly people in films, and Edith Massey - the Egg Lady. The book opens with "To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about. If someone vomits watching one of my films, it's like getting a standing ovation."

With Shock Value Waters created a new form of journalism - equally catty, informative, profane, profound, camp, snide and respectful. He's moral and amoral at the same time, counterculture and establishment in somehow equal measures. It must have something to do with being Catholic.

Shock Value is best read out loud in the same voice that narrates Pink Flamingos. If you've seen John Waters give a lecture, he quotes long passages from this book as if he just thought them up. He hasn't made a real John Waters film since Hairspray, but his books and the old films will be there forever, so enjoy. 

Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography, by Victor Bockris (book review) (Simon & Schuster): I'm not a big fan of poetry because it's the devil's playground of precious pretentiousness. Patti Smith's music is good but if I’m not in the mood I find it heavy, long and boring. Her old boyfriend Tom Verlaine's band Television also saps my energy like a sponge. So, I read a book on her life!  That's what I do for you, the kids. Because… I …care.

The unifying theme of every book I've read about the early NY scene is that most of the players were drug addicts, psychopaths or both. Patti Smith was (at least then) nuts. Only ambition, almost equally nutty friends and creative flair kept her from being a lower Manhattan bag lady arguing with pigeons. Patti's the poster child for the fine line between insanity and genius. Some also find a link between drugs and creativity. Patti was a doper too so she had the best of both worlds - insanity and drug dementia. From such influences legends are born.

Her fans and the NY literary community are protective of their goddess. You can tell by the negative reviews this book has received. Victor Bockris, who in the early ‘70s published the first collection of Patti's work and conducted a very early interview, is berated in one review for using quotes from previously published interviews. What?! This is a biography. Patti Smith didn't cooperate in the writing process. Bockris quoted from many interviews and articles. To say this book is illegitimate for that reason is a joke.

I also can’t trust anything Patti Smith says because she's crazy and full of herself. She name drops and compares herself to an endless babbling brook of historical and religious figures. She spews out stories, rationalizations and rants that frankly reek of dementia. There's no pattern, reason or logic to her insanity. All you can do is take it in and not believe a word. Bockris has written a number of books on music and literary figures of the NY scene. He's very fair and supportive of Patti Smith in his book, and whatever it is he's saying about Smith that her fans seem to hate is done with subtlety and lack of editorial comment. This is no Albert Goldman hatchet job. Victor Bockris is not Salman Rushdie and Patti Smith is not Islam.

Patti banged a virtual Who's Who of the ‘70s arts and music scene, including Robert Mapplethorpe, Jim Carroll, Todd Rungren, Tom Verlaine, Bob Dylan, Paul Simonon and moody alcoholic Fred "Sonic" Smith of the MC5, whom she married and nursed until his early death by misadventure. Patti's place in rock history as a feminist is shown to be a lie since she admitted she liked to be slapped around, and in marriage she became a parroting, subservient suburban housewife.

Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography is a good and fair book. If Patti Smith comes across as creepy and insane that's not the author's fault. It's the material he's working with that's to blame. And another thing, Arthur Rimbaud was a real asshole.

The Story Of Rock'N'Roll: The Year-By-Year Illustrated Chronicle (book review) (MBS): $1.99 close-out at Borders (Ca-Ching!!). The editor, Paul Du Noyer, writes in the Introduction, "Rock music began in many different places, has followed many different paths, and has arrived at many different destinations - simultaneously! ... A team of experienced writers, British and American, leads you through the maze of music from old-time jive, rockabilly and doo-wop, right up to ragga, rap, and grunge. Nothing happens in isolation. Everything overlaps and few things ever come out of nowhere. This book makes all the connections."

Is he ever right and is this a great book. My zine focuses on punk, hardcore and new wave - narrow categories to be sure, but in the timeline of music these are small pieces of a much larger puzzle. Punk is little more than a product of its influences. You don't have to like The Beatles, Elvis, Buddy Holly, The Rolling Stones, Jerry Lee Lewis, Coltrane, Dylan, Elton John or James Brown, but you're an ignorant dipwad if you think they've had no influence on your favorite punk band. Even hardcore didn't land in a spaceship - it's only one stop in the history of music. I recommend this book because it leans heavily toward punk and new wave. The book's snide attitude and easy-to-follow format make reading about bands you don't care for fun and informative.

The layout and tone of The Story Of Rock'N'Roll are reminiscent of Entertainment Weekly, a useful magazine for quickly keeping tabs on pop culture. Sidebars and smaller articles pinpoint personalities and events so succinctly and painlessly you wish every book were written this way. This book isn't just about rock - it also seamlessly incorporates film, politics and bad-taste pop culture -- the three square meals of any well-rounded deviant. While the text is fact-driven with only a slight hint of commentary, the book's many photographs are gems of mean-spirited whimsy. A 1970 photo is pointed to as "The Partridge Family and their amazing performing teeth. A television sensation." One from 1978 simply states "Blue Oyster Cult had The Jam as opening act. Why?"

Punk and new wave are covered in great detail. A typical paragraph from 1978, "The Damned split up; two months later they'll perform an equipment-trashing farewell gig at London's Rainbow Theatre then, in September, they'll play a reunion concert as Les Punks, with Motorhead's Lemmy on bass, allowing Captain Sensible to stand in on guitar for Brian James who cannot be lured back. They decide to reform permanently, but as James owns the name, they have to appear as the Doomed while they involve learned friends in getting their old moniker back. The Police dye their hair blond for an appearance in a US TV advert and gain an immediate new punk credibility..."

This edition ends with 1994 and a picture from Woodstock II with the comment "Disaster or Fiasco?" It just doesn't get any better than that. Highly recommended. 

Stranger Than Fiction: the life and times of Split Enz, by Mike Chunn (book review) (GP Publications): Split Enz was the biggest thing to come out of New Zealand until Peter Jackson directed The Lord Of the Rings. NZ is a country consisting of two larger islands and one smaller island, with cities given names like Whangarei and Invercargill, which might explain how Split Enz titled the same album both as Waiata and Corroboree. New Spliz Enz’s career spanned from 1972 to 1985 but their fame peaked between 1979 and 1982 when they were a top new wave band. They began and ended an eccentric, progressive pop band, but for a while, both True Colours and Waiata made the band very popular. They rode high on the new wave but receded along with the trend and their own insistence on being quirky and non-commercial. They were going to reform for a Millennium eve concert with David Bowie but that fell through.

Author Mike Chunn was Split Enz’s original bass player. He was gone by 1977 but he stayed good friends, and for this book he’s had access to everybody and everything Enz-related. Every stubbed toe and musical note is accounted for. Stranger Than Fiction is 272 pages of facts, figures, anecdotes and glossy paper that weighs a ton. Chunn writes like a fly on the wall but it doesn’t come off as contrived because these people are like family and they provided every conceivable help along the way. Chunn writes in a florid style as whimsical as the band itself. Sometimes it’s nicely poetic while other times it’s a bit fey. With his engrossing stories and vivid images he almost novelizes the band’s history. The book’s layout is kookie, and sometimes the backgrounds are so distracting it’s difficult to read the words (many web pages suffer this same affliction).  

Split Enz sported a healthy number of members over the years, with Tim and Neil Finn in the lead. Neil later formed Crowded House, which at one point (in a reversal of sorts) had older brother Tim as a member. Split Enz began as boarding school friends who idolized The Beatles. The band's original name was "Split Ends", later changed to "Split Enz" to reflect New Zealand pride. Their early look of weird haircuts, weirder clothing and face painting is credited to Noel Crombie, who besides playing percussion and drums was a visual genius who designed album covers and stage sets. The book doesn't trace the styles back to the Italian "Comedia 'Del Arte", but that's the true origins of Split Enz's early look. As years went by the elaborate stage shows continued while the costuming and makeup was toned down. The band gave Noel's creations names like "The Zoots", "The Twits", "Black and Whites" and "The Clowns". Some people were turned off by the visual aspects of the band, but from the start Split Enz were obsessed with performance, which meant a full stage show. Stranger Than Fiction convincingly hints that the band's look may have inspired UK punk fashion trends to the point of being an original inspiration, up there with Richard Hell's safety pinned shirts and heroin chic hair.

The story of Split Enz is interesting yet typical: band forms, perfects their craft, gains local notoriety, suffers innumerable setbacks and forward movements toward fame, gets treated indifferently by record labels, hires and fires worthless managers and tour bookers, repeatedly tours to the point of mental and physical disorder, makes very little money for years, hits it big, gets swept up and away by the pressures and absurdities of fame, rides the crest of a popular musical movement, slowly fades, gets sick of the process, and then breaks up hoping for new starts. Split Enz were always well received in New Zealand and Australia. England appreciated their stage show. The United States only took notice when "I Got You"and True Colours hit in 1980. 1981's Waiata continued to thrill new wavers but the next year's Time And Tide, a step away from the expectation mill of hit singles, made little impression in a market that was moving towards post-punk and alternative.

Fans get pissy if you call the band new wave, but if not for the huge crest of interest in the style in 79-80 Split Enz would never have made it as far. True Colours and Waiata were simple affairs from a band that thrived on complication but they were good albums and put money in pockets that were empty for years. The pressure having to write hits on a regular basis may be more than most can handle, but Split Enz were able to do it for two albums. Maybe that's all they had in them. That's nothing to be ashamed of since they did well for themselves as both creative and popular artists.

Here's some fun facts from Stranger Than Fiction: When the band relocated to Australia, all but Phil Judd switched to using their middle name as their first. A highlight of their live shows was the playing of the spoons. Fans could buy Split Enz plastic spoons to play along with the band. An Atlanta look-alike contest had only one entrant. Tim Finn described their look as being "completely asexual". Their fan club, still active, is called "Frenz Of The Enz". They run web sites and await the second coming. The band didn't know one of their tours was called the "Take No Chances" tour until they saw it on a poster.

New Zealand is made to seem fairly Victorian in its settings and mindset. The band members are presented as very nice people who got along well. There's no drug benders or psychotic mishaps. The pressures did get to them, especially Tim Finn, but they're too well grounded to wind up in jackets with wrap-around sleeves. Stranger Than Fiction is a love letter to the band from a former member. The writing can be a touch pretentious but at least it's not gushing. There's not much dirt or trauma to report, so VH1 won't be doing a history of Split Enz in our lifetime.

Subculture: The Meaning of Style, by Dick Hebdige (book review) (Methuen & Co.): I bought this in 1979, and since then I’ve tried reading it every so often, but this less than 200 page book gives me a headache after two pages. It’s so academic and filled with leftist jargon, for all I know Hebdige made it all up like L. Ron Hubbard’s Dionetics. Chew on this sample, "This is not to say that semiotics was easily assimilable within the Cultural Studies project. Though Barthes shared the literary preoccupations of Hoggart and Williams, his work introduced a new Marxist 'problematic' which was alien to the British tradition of concerned and largely untheorized 'social commentary'". Ouch! There's puss oozing out of my ears! I was an English major in college and I know my way around a thesaurus, but this is from hell. People who write like this should leave the library every few months and see what's happening in the outside world. At the time, Hebdige was a research assistant at the Polytechnic of Wolverhampton. Their chess team was brutal.

Being from 1979 this was one of the first scholarly attempts to make sense of the punk revolution that had taken England by storm. He traces the flow of youth culture from the teds, mods, rockers, rastas, skins to the punks. Hebdige considers all these movements in stilted marxist terms where class and power assume the simple forms of Worker (good) and Boss (bad). Marxist theory is the study of oppression through economic and social controls. In practice it’s a genocidal death cult, but that’s another story. Applying marxism to punk in absolute terms is bankrupt because anyone can look back on history and define it any way they choose. The truth is that culture often only gestates at the peripheral edges of art and politics.

Malcolm McLaren talks of the Sex Pistols as if they were a determined part of a deep fascination with subversive culture, and that every concert and t-shirt was a designed piece of a formulated and executed plan to implement Chaos Theory. Bullcrapola. The carny sold overpriced clothing to insecure trendy people. He was asked to manage bands only because he was the most successful of the lot and he showed the ounce of drive and ambition missing all around him. He saw the Sex Pistols as a means to sell clothes. He was a businessman, and not a very good one either. That he let Sid Vicious join is proof he either didn't know or didn't care. Talk about revisionism! He wasn’t in control of anything.

Dick Hebdige is Malcolm's academic cousin, and his discourses on myths, icons and tribes are intellectual masturbation. It’s a series of guesses as to why people get into punk - some do it for the aggression, some for the fashion and others because they just relate to the music, the musicians and the fans. To frame it in pretentious academic terms is possibly giving it too much thought, and to view it all through the failed prism of marxism a mental and moral failure.

Sure, writers and political/artistic movements are a source of inspiration, but not to the level indicated in this book. Human motivations are often less intellectual than Hebdige wants us to believe. When the past is laid out in purely academic and philosophical terms, why look back on a time of your life when everything you did was fueled by hatred, booze and pills. In retrospect you too can be a frigging genius. 

The Boy Looked At Johnny: The Obituary Of Rock And Roll, by Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons (book review) (Faber and Faber): This was the first book on punk, written while the original UK ‘77 movement was breathing its last. A thin yet packed 94 pages, in the long run this is more a collection of articles on subjects like drugs, The Sex Pistols, gender, class and American punks. Lived rather than researched, the authors rip apart their enemies and fondle their heroes with wit, spit and more than a little s--t. Eventually their humor and venom wear thin, but while it lasts you'll never read a funnier or more insightful book on the earliest days of what we now call punk rock.

Let's start with great lines from the book. On Television's "Little Johnny Jewel": "The only people who bought it were New Yorkers who believed they were the reincarnation of French homosexual poets." On American bands: "...old and cold and still coming to terms with the fact that the sixties ran out on them." and "No American new wave band likes another - but they all have clean butts and a nasty taste in their mouths." On heavy metal: "...was brutality ham-fisted renderings of blues-based white rock - a totally moronic and downered wipe-out which complimented the Seventies teenage leisure activities of arson and alcoholism." On the in-crowd at the Roxy: "They were the type of people who hung out till closing time for fear of what might be said about them if they left."  

Burchill and Parsons call Malcolm McLaren a "curly clothes cutter", Bernie Rhodes "the lying printer", say Mick Jones "chanted stray battle-cries like a harassed housewife", called Television the "Lice Queens of Rock", Richard Hell a "toad-eyed bastard" and The Heartbreakers a "junkie band". On punk's evolution: "..started as a movement born out of NO FUN and ended as a product whose existence was NO THREAT." They refer to Rolling Stone magazine as the "Dope smoker's Reader's Digest". Here's a great line about the Bromley Contingent, the original Sex Pistols hangers-on: "a posse of unrepentant poseurs committed to attaining fame despite their paucity of any talent other than being noticed." It’s funny and all too true.

Here's what the authors do like: David Bowie (the king of glam), Jonathan Richman, Johnny Rotten, The Rezillos, Talking Heads, Tom Robinson, Poly Styrene, the "magnificent" Suzy Quattro, Blondie's first album, Joan Jett and Patty Smith, whose Horses they call the best debut album of all time. The book title comes from that same song. Most of all they love speed, as in the drug. To them it's the cure for oppressive capitalism and the common cold. Amphetamines are useful drugs that make you smarter, stronger and more alert. Both authors were heavy users of uppers at the time they wrote the book.

Here's some other names on Burchill & Parsons' hate list: the Ramones, the Damned, The Jam, The Stranglers, Lester Bangs, Nick Lowe, Ian Dury, Elvis Costello, all drugs not in the upper family, and Rastas ("the misogyny of the Rastafarians surpasses even that of Hitler's nazis"). There's a pattern of whom they like and dislike which runs along the lines of female and gay power. The nazis were known as big women haters? Here's another hysterical rant: "A guitar in the hands of a man boasts COCK - the same instrument in female hands therefore (to a warped mind) screams CASTRATION." Oh please. It sounds like the diaper load that comes out of professional man-hater Andrea Dworkin's fat mouth.

The Boy Looked At Johnny is a great combination of literary masturbation and dead-on rock history and criticism. Its tone is poetry-slam neo-beatnik. You have to read this slowly because each paragraph is filled with obscure mental images and cultural references. Like watching The Simpsons, knowing the references makes the experience that much richer. A lot of this would be childish sarcasm if it weren't so often on target. I don’t agree with everything. Back in ‘78 they're calling DEVO "old hippies"?

Julie Burchill later worked for newspapers and magazines, including Vanity Fair. Tony Parsons has written a few books. Both were still teenagers when they wrote this. Britain's first punk journalists were kids who knew the scene and knew how to write. The Boy Looked At Johnny was written as punk's obituary in 1978 - premature to say the least. They were young, dumb and full of speed but what they write is refreshingly candid and funny. Is this journalism? Not really, but it's some of the funniest and insightful words you'll ever read on the subject. 

They Died Too Young: Sid Vicious, by Tom Stockdale (book review) (Parragon): For a 74 page book only 4 1/4" by 3 1/4" this sure packs a wallop of information on The Sex Pistols and Sid Vicious, punk's uber-idiot turned dead teen idol. Whatever talent Sid had wasn't as a musician or human being, but as a loser in every category. Moron, blind follower, violent wimp, addict, fashion victim, sadist, pussy-whipped - yeah, Sid did it his way.

Born John Simon Ritchie on May 10, 1957, Sid's mom was a hippie drug addict who dragged little Simon around as she moved from one crash pad to the next. Considered mildly retarded by his friends, Sid was a glam fashion hag who worshipped Marc Bolan and David Bowie. He met Johnny Rotten in 1973 and followed the green-teethed one around like a puppy. An original follower of the early Sex Pistols, Malcolm McLaren's vehicle for selling overpriced clothes and sketchy leftist slogan politics, Sid drank too much and ate too much speed. He liked to hit people with chains and throw bottles when he thought nobody was looking. Tensions between Rotten and Glen Matlock, the band's only real songwriter, led to Sid's induction into the band. Unable to play bass, Matlock was snuck into the studio to record bass tracks for studio work.

Once introduced to Nancy Spungen - heroin addict, groupie whore and as unlikable as Sid was stupid, events wound down to their inevitable conclusion. Nancy was to Sid what Yoko was to John Lennon. The American tour was a disaster, Sid couldn't play, the band broke up, Sid attempted a solo career by imitating Johnny Rotten, he shot heroin, killed Nancy, went to jail, got out on bail and overdosed on more heroin brought by his mother. Upon his demise you could almost hear a toilet flush in Hell.

Why he's a hero is anyone's guess. If being a loser is a goal in itself, then here's your hero. The back of the book describes Sid as "Punk Pioneer and musical anarchist". He was neither, and if not being able to play your instrument is anarchy then I’m Gnome Crapsky. They Died Too Young is the name of a mini-series of big little books on folks like Marc Bolan, Kurt Cobain, Bruce Lee and Jimi Hendrix. Sid didn't die too young by any account, and I'm surprised he lived to be 22. Sid was a cretin, a moron and a talent-free zero. His death wasn't a loss to either punk or himself. I have a friend who would kill me if she ever knew how much I think Sid’s a putz. Please don’t tell her. 

This Ain't No Disco: The Story of CBGB, by Roman Kozak (book review) (Faber and Faber): This is the best and only book written about New York's legendary CBGBs nightclub. I doubt another book will be written since Roman Kozak covers the subject perfectly. Printed in 1988, it could use an update to cover the action of the interim years (a short chapter indeed). From 1976-83 Kozak was editor of the "Talent and Venues" section of Billboard magazine, and in that capacity he became a CBGB regular. This Ain't No Disco takes a journalistic approach to history, so there are many quotes and an objective fairness of reporting that considers competing sides of an issue. Kozak allows the narrative to be shaped fairly exclusively by those who made up the CBGBs scene. The straight reporting is a refreshing change from most punk histories which treat the subject matter on the level of the Kennedy Assassination.

What is CBGBs? It's a 350 person capacity scuzz bar in the Bowery, a scuzz part of lower Manhattan, next to the scuzzy Palace Hotel where bums sleep in their own puke. It has the general shape and feel of a cattle car, and often smells like one. The sound system and acoustics are the best. The letters "CBGB” stands for "Country, Bluegrass, Blues", while "OMFUG" officially means "Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers". Word has it it really means "Only Musicians F--k Ugly Girls". CBs was not the first NY club to feature punk bands but it's probably the most important.

Hilly Kristal owns CBGBs, and the line of him being a redneck tricked into letting Television turn the club into a punk bar is way off the mark. Hilly was himself a musician, DJ'd in the military, sang at Radio City Music Hall, booked national college tours, managed bands and tried other ventures like the CBGB Canteen and CBGB record label. Life took him from the NJ Jersey farm where he grew up and planted him as owner of a derelict bar in Manhattan. He thought country music would be the next big thing and chose that as the theme for his bar, originally "Hilly's On The Bowery". CBGBs opened in December, 1973. When Television talked Hilly into letting them play (The Miamis claim they performed there first), Hilly couldn’t care less because he had an open policy of letting just about anyone play as long as they might be able to draw a crowd. From the beginning there was poetry, folk, rock, performance art, dance and punk at CBs, and it was this laid-back attitude that allowed bands like Patti Smith, the Ramones, The Plasmatics, Talking Heads, Television, The Dead Boys, etc. to constantly work on their material.

Critic Robert Christgau says of punk and its attraction to rock critics of that era, "It seems to me that punk as a whole was a very aestheticized movement. They were very aesthetically-conscious people even if they took an anti-art stance. And the writers, most of us, it seems to me, had been waiting for something like this to happen for a long time. I think punk responded to some real mainstream assumptions of rock criticism, which were not mainstream assumptions of rock and roll. Rock critics are much more interested in rebellious music, in new music. They are much more interested, despite what people say, in short catchy songs with a hard beat. I know people think of rock criticism as a wimp profession, when in fact most of the great critics really liked, and were really weaned on pre-Beatles stuff, and they really liked the approach of the 50s. And punk is really not a recapitulation of the 50s at all, but in certain kinds of formal ways - its brevity, its attack - it is a modernization of that kind of idea." The early punks were art-types who saw what they did in the context of art. This interpretation cannot be applied to the ‘80s hardcore bands. The Dead Boys were the bridge between old punk and new hardcore.

This Ain't No Disco is filled with great stories and accurate, fair history. Anything you want to know is here, from the Hell's Angels, the competition with Max's that led to booking wars, and to the night a woman got caught with Stiv Bator's meat in her mouth. Connie Barrett, who managed a number of NY HC bands, says of the bands she deals with, "Music is a very hard business and hardcore started very much like a hippie thing. There are a lot of the same attitudes. Without beards, no hair. But the same attitudes. It's basically a love, peace, and tranquillity kind of thing, but the way it came out is that it's a "love, peace, or I'll kick your ass. Which is kind of 80s updated hippiedom. But it is becoming a business and losing a lot of its ideology."

It's a quick read at 133 pages and nothing is left out. Read it today! 

The Trouser Press Guide to '90s Rock, edited by Ira A. Robbins (book review) (Fireside): When I first leafed through this book I was pissed, as I'm sure you all were as my whims are the pulse of the nation. It's bad enough when some (y)(g)(b)(p)uppie assumes since I listen to punk I must also like Smashing Pumpkins and Beck - you know, since it's all alternative. It's even worse that a formerly cool book on punk and new wave seems to be saying the same thing. On top of that it appears editor Ira Robbins left out everything I like, putting in instead alterna-bands I've never heard of like Jacob's Mouse, Pale Saints and Compulsion. The Guide blows off the early careers of old bands they've been nice enough to even retain for this edition, as if it's irrelevant to today's music consumers.

It's not as bad as that, but why let reality get in the way of a good tantrum. The Trouser Press Guides have come out periodically since 1983. The Trouser Press was a fairly popular music magazine that covered the early NY punk scene pretty much as it happened. The 4th edition of the Guide came out in 1991 and it's a great resource for general punk and new wave info. On the internet the All-Music Guide and the Rough Guide are also good. In the preface of this latest ‘90s edition, Ira Robbins writes that this is a companion piece to the 4th edition, which makes sense but still, the end result is half-assed. Now I have to carry around two large books if I want to get the whole story on a band? Better to have called this latest edition The Trouser Press Guide to 90's Alternative, Hip Hop and World Music, and not deal at all with any band they're not going to discuss in full detail. Sure this new guide may fill in some gaps but I'm turned off seeing bands still around from the last guide tossed into the dumpster for crap I'd never listen to in twelve reincarnations.

Unless you're a ‘90s music kind of person there's not much here for you. The 4th edition is great but at $20 new it may not be worth it. Until something better comes along I'll stick with sources on the internet. 

Underboss: Sammy the Bull Gravano's Story of Life In The Mafia, by Peter Maas (book review) (Harper Collins): (year 2000 update: As proof you can never leave your past behind, Sammy and his family were picked up in Arizona for running the state's largest ecstacy ring, using steroid and white power-filled high school jocks as enforcers.)

I'm tired of reading about punk rockers and their degenerate lives, so I went back to the old standby of the mob book, so I could read about their degenerate lives. I've often wondered what the romance is with organized crime - I mean, these guys whack their friends on a regular basis, commit violent crimes against honest citizens, run drugs, extort cash, x, y, and z, but we still view these characters with awe, fear and maybe more than a little envy. Envy, I guess, of their ability to keep and gain control through fear and intimidation. This feeds into the common person's fantasies of invincibility and universal respect. When somebody screws you over it's nice to imagine thugs will have a little "talk" with the guy, and the next time you meet he'll grovel at your feet begging forgiveness, which you may or may not give.

Gangsters always held an appeal for the downtrodden but it wasn't until 1972's The Godfather that the Mafia took on an air of a romantic aristocracy. In real life, the mob is a scuzzy organization with no security and little money for most of the foot soldiers on the street. You read about big scores but you don't see these people living the high life. Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, leader of the Genovese crime family, has spent decades pretending to be insane, walking around the neighborhood in a cheap bathrobe and slippers, mumbling to telephone poles. He's not living the high life. John Gotti, "The Dapper Don", fronting himself as a plumbing parts salesman, flaunted his sizable mob income with flashy suits and ties, which went against everything the old Wise Guys taught. What's the point of having millions if you can't spend it? And what can you say about an organization that intentionally keeps most of its members poor and in constant fear for their lives?

Sammy Gravano, under Gotti, was the #2 man in the Gambino crime family when he "switched governments" and testified against his old associates. Underboss is a very readable book by Peter Maas, the author of two other great mafia books, The Valachi Papers and Serpico. A very fast read at 300 pages, Maas details Sammy's rise in organized crime in succinct detail, a nice change from having every event explained ad nauseam. It reads so quickly you know a sequel would be as easy as shaking down a developer for a contracting job.

Through many hours of interviews, Maas gets Sammy's perspective on his life in organized crime. A tough kid from The Neighborhood, Sammy ran with gangs and through hard work and reliability worked his way up the mafia corporate ladder. Sammy paints himself as a man of honor, which is a relative thing. He admits to nineteen murders, which means the actual count is much higher, and I'm sure he left out the many tales of sadistic violence that goes along with being a top collector and enforcer. Sammy Gravano is not a tough guy with a heart of gold but a brutal thug and murderer who carried out orders with cold efficiency. I'm happy he turned states evidence, only because Gotti was setting him up to take the fall, but nobody should consider this man a hero. The book ends with Sammy having his tattoos removed, the only one remaining a small head of Christ on his arm. Sammy jokes, "I guess God still wants me." Maybe Sammy is the best of the worst, but if God is willing to forgive the crimes, the murders and the sheer brutality of this man, you have to wonder what it takes to get into hell.

Underboss and Donnie Brasco: A True Story Of Murder, Madness, And The Mafia provide a service in that they paint a less glamorous, more accurate picture of life in the mob. Some other mafia books I've enjoyed are Wiseguy: Life In A Mafia Family, The Squad (which asserts J. Edgar Hoover was in cahoots with the Mob, and in exchange for denying the existence of organized crime he was fed the names of winning horses and also had the services of Mob hit men to wipe out social scum who evaded prosecution), and Contract On America: The Mafia Murder Of President John F. Kennedy, which will make you so paranoid you'll line your walls with tin foil. 

The Velvet Underground Companion: Four Decades Of Commentary, edited by Albin Zak III (book review) (Schirmer): Where does one begin to estimate the value of the Velvet Underground to the history of punk and what's been passing itself off as alternative since the late ‘70s. Are they that important? Yes, of course, but the pretentiousness of many of their followers makes giving them their full due an act of bitter begrudgery (look ma, I made up a word!). The Velvets knew how to build a great wall of fuzz but they weren't the first to do so. Phil Spector, British Invasion bands and many regional garage bands of the era all made an indelible impression on those who were to follow. The story of the Velvet Underground is one of a blending of avant-garde jazz, folk pop, beatnik urban romanticism, Eastern droning and the impact of Andy Warhol's sponsorship as a part of the floating freak show of glamour and art that was his life.

Their fame in the world of art comes from their association with Warhol's "Exploding Plastic Inevitable" multi-media show of loud music, projected images, flashing lights and strange people acting out kinks for the audience, be it fans or an unsuspecting annual meeting of psychiatrists. Warhol produced (a lie!) the first VU album that also bears his name on the cover. The Velvets did exist before and after Andy, but who knows if they'd be recorded or remembered if Mr. Snap-On-Hair didn't force Nico on the band and put his name behind them. When one talks of the VU's greatness you must ask if it's based on their music alone or their involvement in a hip scene that defined a generation.

In their day the Velvets played small clubs and their recordings were sparsely distributed. The recording quality of their first two albums left much to be desired, and it wasn't done on purpose. They had no idea how to record. The Velvets recorded four albums between 1967 and 1970. Loaded, Lou Reed's best effort to achieve commercial success, fell by the wayside as the band broke up for good. Doug Yule kept the name alive for the 1973 album Squeeze, but VU fans generally make believe that one never existed.

Their early sound is described in the book as "a combination of rock n' roll and Egyptian belly dance music", which isn't far off. John Cale saw the band as an extension of his earlier