Los Lobos: Dream In Blue by Chris Morris (University of Texas Press)
Chris Morris provides a critical study of Los Lobos that reveals things even hardcore fans may not have known. At 182 pages it’s a slender volume but one never senses that there’s anything missing. This is a long overdue study of the best band in North America.
Petty: The Biography by Warren Zanes (Henry Holt and Co.)
Former Del Fuegos man Warren Zanes is one of the best rock writers working today. His book on Dusty Springfield’s Dusty In Memphis from a few years back is essential reading as is this thorough tale of Tom Petty. Those who think that Peter Bogdanovich’s four hour documentary Running Down A Dream covered everything there was to say about Petty and The Heartbreakers will be pleasantly surprised by what’s found in these pages. Zanes gets to the heart of Petty’s origins in Florida and tackles many hidden corners of the singer’s life.
Future Days: Krautrock and The Birth of A Revolutionary New Music by David Stubbs (Melville House)
Krautrock may be more popular today than ever as its influence sweeps across post rock, EDM, and other forms with almost alarming regularity. But even young people in the country that birthed this exciting (and some say misnamed) genre aren’t aware of it. Stubbs provides a thorough context for how this sprang from West Germany and points out that there wasn’t necessarily a single aesthetic or ideology. Like Krautrock itself, this book is serious, smart and often very, very funny.
Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split The Sixties by Elijah Wald (Dey Street Books)
Peter Seeger had an axe and was going to chop the cable! It was too loud! Dylan was never the same! All these things have been said time and again about that magical night in 1965 when Bob Dylan put his time as a finger-pointing singer behind him with some loud rock ‘n’ roll. Wald examines the context in which Dylan’s alleged revolt took place and reexamines many of things we knew (or thought we knew) about that night.
Girl In A Band by Kim Gordon (Dey Street Books)
This memoir follows Sonic Youth co-founder Kim Gordon from her youth in Southern California (the Manson Family murders hung in the air for a long time) to her time in the dirty old New York art scene of the 1980s to her role in one of the most influential bands of the 1980s and 1990s and the eventual dissolution of her marriage to bandmate Thurston Moore. Gordon is frank about her brother’s struggles with schizophrenia, her opinions on Courtney Love, and the extramarital affair that ended the seemingly unbreakable bond she had with Moore. Gordon is of course more than a girl in a band and this is more than just another rock ‘n’ roll memoir.
