HISTORY

Donald Clarke, The Rise and Fall of Popular Music

Robert Palmer, Deep Blues

Charles Gillett, The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll

Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music

These four books are great primers for any journey into rock. The Rise and Fall of Popular Music provides great context, tracing American music from the minstrel shows through Tin Pan Alley, the Jazz Age, the swing era, and the rock explosion, which is where Clarke begins to falter. That’s why it’s necessary to get the rest of the story from the seminal The Sound of the City. Focusing in more narrowly, Deep Blues remains the essential starting point, an easy, intelligent, and compassionate exploration of rock’s humble origins in the Delta blues of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. The classic Sweet Soul Music by Guralnick (whose Elvis biographies are also recommended) chronicles the music that developed parallel to rock and roll, focusing on the heart-melting vocals of Sam Cooke, Solomon Burke, an Otis Reddding.

BIOGRAPHY

Stephen Gaines, Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys

Stephen Davis, Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga

Danny Sugerman and Jerry Hopkins, No One Gets Out Alive: The Biography of Jim Morrison

Dave Marsh, Before I Get Old: The Story of the Who

Charles Shaar Murray, Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and the Post-War Rock and Roll Revolution

Heroes and Villains, Hammer of the Gods, and No One Gets Out of Here Alive constitute the holy trinity of rock biographies. These books are page-turners that set the standard for the rock and roll lifestyle. And, no matter how you feel about the artist going into these books, you’ll turn the last page with a lust for their box set and a new appreciation for your own humdrum life in comparison. As for Before I Get Old and Crosstown Traffic, these seminal bios stand out for providing not just the story of a band or an artist but the cultural context from which the music sprang.

CRITICISM

Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock and Roll Music

Joe Carducci, Rock and the Pop Narcotic

Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions an Carburetor Dung

Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues

Richard Meltzer, The Aesthetics of Rock

Chris Cutler, File Under Popular: Theoretical an Critical Writings on Music

Where Nelson George imbues music history with a thesis and Chris Cutler imbues a historical thesis with music, Bangs, Meltzer, and Carducci remain critic’s critics. Their highly personal, densely coded, stubbornly humorous, stream-of-super-consciousness prose (Bangs more than Meltzer, Meltzer more than Carducci) is essential reading for anyone who wants to write criticism – or, for that matter, anyone who can name two bands on the No New York compilation or who likes to spell the second person possessive adjective yer. Mystery Train in the meantime remains among the greatest and most accessible serious critical works ever written about rock and roll.

FRINGES

Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming

Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk

Valerie Wilmer: As Serious As Your Life: John Coltrane and Beyond

Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond

Please Kill Me , which chronicles the birth of punk and the CBGB scene, remains one of the most compulsively readable books of its ilk, while England’s Dreaming tells a more historically minded story of the rise of punk in the UK. As Serious As Your Life is as good an argument for the importance of free jazz as there is. And, as for Experimental Music, I checked this book out of a library when I was eighteen and it opened up a new world to me. I never knew before who wide the parameters of music and instrumentation could be stretched. Since then, I’ve been on a desperate search for a copy I could call my own. If you find one, do let me know.

BUSINESS

Fredric Dannen, Hit Men (Vintage)

Russell Sanjek, Pennies From Heaven: The American Popular Music Business in the Late Twentieth Century

Donald Passman, Everything You Need to Know About the Music Business