In a recent conversation with Warren Zanes about his new biography of Tom Petty (soon to appear in this column), I asked him if there were other music biographies he used as a model for his own work. He told me: “When I read, I read fiction; so, great literature is my model. I look for character development, narrative arc, and conflict.”
In another recent interview, Jeff Hanna of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and I got to talking about the books were reading. I asked him if there were any books he thought of as a model for his writing, and he quickly replied that he loves Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.
When I’ve chatted with other music writers and musicians this subject has often come up, too, so I’ve asked a number of them to share their thoughts in this week’s column, and I’ll follow up with some more in my next column.
This week, several music writers responded to the following three questions:
1. What music books do you consider to be models for your own writing? Are there other books that have influenced you as a writer?
2. What’s your favorite music memoir, and why?
3. If you could recommend one book about music that would help people understand the music business, what would it be?
Next time, musicians will respond to similar questions.
David Menconi
Author of Ryan Adams: Losering, A Story of Whiskeytown (University of Texas, 2012) and co-author, with Ray Benson, of Comin’ Right at Ya: How a Jewish Yankee Hippie Went Country, or, the Often Outrageous History of Asleep at the Wheel (Texas, 2015).
What music books do you consider to be models for your own writing? Are there other books that have influenced you as a writer?
Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train was formative for me, which is true for a lot of music writers of my generation. When I interviewed Marcus in the late ’90s (which was kind of a terrifying experience, since he was an idol of mine), he told me that he’d “gotten rather bored” with people telling him how much that book meant to them. So I kept that to myself. The Lester Bangs anthology Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung was also a milestone, as were Robert Christgau’s record guides — even though they all seemed well beyond my reach. Marcus was so brilliant, Bangs so gonzo, Christgau so erudite. They left their mark, but I quickly figured out I’d have to make my own way because there was no way I could do what they did.
Other books that were particularly influential included Peter Gent’s North Dallas Forty, which made me yearn to tell the inside story of the music business the way he revealed pro football, and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which made me yearn to write an epic. So when I took a crack at a novel, I tried to do both. That was Off the Record, published in 2000, and still the only novel I’ve ever written because it damn near killed me.
What’s your favorite music memoir, and why?
I’m going to do something obnoxious and plug a book I was involved with, though in a very minor way. Don’t Suck Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt by Kristin Hersh is ostensibly about the title subject, but it’s as much a memoir of their musical life together as a biography. And it is absolutely, utterly brilliant. I’m listed as one of the book’s editors, but all that means is that I read it and went “Wow,” along with everyone else. All credit goes to Kristin and Kristin alone, who did an amazing job. It really is one of the most beautiful, heartbreaking books of any sort I’ve ever read.
If you could recommend one book about music that would help people understand the music business, what would it be?
The one that stands out over all the rest is Hitless Wonder: A Life In Minor League Rock And Roll, by Joe Oestreich. Joe plays in the band Watershed, who were signed to Epic Records for about 15 minutes in the mid-1990s and never quite reached the brass ring. The tragicomic misadventures they endured were both amazing and hilarious, and the book is brilliantly written. You get a sense of both how hard the business is to navigate, and the love of music that lives on despite that.
Tamara Saviano
Author of The Most Beautiful Girl: A True Story of a Dad, a Daughter and the Healing Power of Music and a forthcoming biography of Guy Clark, and producer of This One’s For Him: A Tribute to Guy Clark (2012).
What music books do you consider to be models for your own writing? Are there other books that have influenced you as a writer?
Peter Guralnick and Alanna Nash have written several books about music that I love. Those two writers are my yardstick for research and getting the thoughts on the page when writing biography. I returned often to their work while I was writing the Guy Clark biography. My two favorite books about the art of writing are Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird.
What’s your favorite music memoir, and why?
It’s difficult to choose just one. I love Rosanne Cash’s Composed. As a prose writer, everything Rosanne puts on the page speaks to me. She is an incredible songwriter, of course, but I don’t think enough people realize that she is a beautiful writer in other contexts as a memoirist and journalist. In Composed, she is intimate and honest without being overly sentimental and her voice is distinct and fresh.
If you could recommend one book about music that would help people understand the music business, what would it be?
Truthfully, I haven’t read many books about the music business so it would be difficult to recommend one. However, if you can stand some blatant self-promotion, Rod Picott and I co-wrote From Art to Commerce: A Workbook for Independent Musicians, a workbook we use in our workshops that teach artists to be entrepreneurs. It contains no-bullshit-sometimes-hard-to-swallow realities of the music business.
David Cantwell
Author of Merle Haggard: The Running Kind (University of Texas, 2013) and with Bill Friskics-Warren, Heartaches by the Number: Country Music’s 500 Greatest Singles (Vanderbilt University Press/Country Music Foundation Press, 2003)
1. As you were writing your own books on music history, were there books of music history that you used as a model for your own writing? Are there other books that influenced you as a writer?
I’m not a historian, or a journalist, or an academic. I’m a critic. And my Merle Haggard: The Running Kind wasn’t a biography of the Hag; it was a critical monograph on the man’s music—how it works, what it’s meant, why it’s mattered to America—and it focused around my close listening to specific performances, each within whatever contexts I felt made sense for them. There aren’t a lot of music books out there trying to do that, not exactly. So I guess the closest to kinda-sorta models I discovered were those slim old literary monographs that used to get published. The one that meant most to me was F. O Mattheissen’s 1951 Theodore Dreiser, a swell little book (long out of print!) on the works of one of my favorite novelists. At the end of the day, though, I really felt like what I was trying to do in The Running Kind was something I had to invent. Probably all writers feel that way, I bet, at least at some point in the process.
What’s your favorite music book, and why?
I could pass most of a day listing favorite music books, but there are two I’ve come back to most over the years. Both are exemplars of close listening within either reality-based or what I’d call imaginative contexts—and both proved to me the music I loved was something I could grow up with rather than out of. Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music reinforced my desire to write about popular music while also helping to convince me that I really should go ahead and become an English major. Dave Marsh’s The Heart of Rock ‘n’ Soul: The 1,001 Greatest Singles Ever Made pushed me to listen more closely than ever and to aspire to write with as much smarts and heart as he did. With its title replacement of Roll with Soul, and with its argument that the key rock ‘n’ soul stories were about singles, not albums, about reconciliation, not just rebellion, it also stands in my mind as the great proto-poptimist work.
3. If you coud recommend one music book that will make you a better writer/listener, what would it be?
If I were to recommend one piece of writing to an aspiring music critic, it would be James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues.” Struggle to comprehend the enormity of the narrator’s “Freedom lurked around us, and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.” Learn by heart Baldwin’s “For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.” Spend your life to trying to live up to Baldwin’s story.
Jewly Hight
Author of Right By Her Roots: Americana Women and Their Songs (Baylor, 2011) and contributor to Rolling Stone, Billboard, and NPR.
What music books do you consider to be models for your own writing? Are there other books that have influenced you as a writer?
The books that have most influenced my writing are paradigm-shifters, works that challenge and sharpen my interpretation of how music is created, presented and consumed, not to mention how it carries cultural meaning. Some examples? Faking It: The Quest For Authenticity in Popular Music (Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor); Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey To the End of Taste (Carl Wilson); Meeting Jimmie Rodgers: How America’s Original Roots Music Her Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century (Barry Mazor); This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South (Zandria Robinson): Rednecks, Queers and Country Music (Nadine Hubbs); Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Cuture (Alice Echols): Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music In the Age of Jim Crow (Karl Hagstrom Miller); The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry (Diane Pecknold); Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music (Eric Weisbard); Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South, (Charles Hughes); Merle Haggard: The Running Kind (David Cantwell).
What’s your favorite music memoir, and why?
To be honest, I wind up spending a lot less time reading memoirs than I do, say, volumes of criticism, biography, musicology, cultural studies and historical research, because that stuff is simply more likely to have a more lasting impact on my thinking. I did, however, just pick up a copy of Carrie Brownstein’s new memoir [Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl], because I’m really interested in how she talks about the politically and musically radical communities of her youth. Based on watching Portlandia, I expect her writing to be pretty damn self-aware. Also, Bobby Braddock’s hulking memoir is rife with kooky stories.
If you could recommend one book about music that would help people understand the music business, what would it be?
The Selling Sound, for sure.
Geoffrey Himes
Author of Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA (33 1/3; Continuum, 2005); writer for Rolling Stone, the Oxford American, National Public Radio, and Paste, among others.
What music books do you consider to be models for your own writing? Are there other books that have influenced you as a writer?
By and large, I find music books more poorly written than music articles–which makes sense, for the per-word rate is often much better for articles. Like everybody else, I admire the books of Greil Marcus and Peter Guralnick, but perhaps the biggest influence on my music writing has been baseball writer Bill James, who often mistaken as a mere statistician when he’s actually a superb writer with a ruthless disdain for bullshit and a hunger for reality.
What’s your favorite music memoir, and why?
I really liked Chuck Berry’s Autobiography, because it was so obviously in his own peculiar voice with no filtering from a ghost writer.
If you could recommend one book about music that would help people understand the music business, what would it be?
Tommy Womack’s The Cheese Chronicles.
Alan Paul
Author of One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (St. Martin’s, 2014)
What music books do you consider to be models for your own writing? Are there other books that have influenced you as a writer?
Robert Palmer is my favorite music writer. I love the way he combined a true passion for the music, deep respect for the artists, and a musician’s knowledge. I love all his work and re-read Deep Blues regularly.
Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music and Stanley Booth’s The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones were also very impactful on me and books I’ve returned to repeatedly.
I also love and have learned various things from Stanley Crouch’s Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker; Barney Hoskyns’ bio of The Band, Across the Great Divide, though it needed more on the royalty dispute; David Browne’s So Many Roads, which may be the best book on the Dead; Dennis McNally’s A Long Strange Trip; Peter Ames Carlin’s Bruce; Robert Gordon’s Can’t Be Satisfied: the Life of Muddy Waters; Ashley Kahn’s Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece; and Galadrielle Allman’s poetic, elegiac search for her father, Please Be with Me. David Ritz’s Respect is incredible even if it betrayed Aretha Franklin.
That’s so many and I know I’ve left a lot off.
My biggest writing influences have been non-music books. Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion made me want to be a writer. I devour and gain so much from anything written by novelists Russell Banks, Philip Roth, and Wallace Stegner, who writes with so much empathy and simple, profound insight.
Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower is a masterpiece of reporting and concise writing. Robert Caro’s Robert Moses bio The Power Broker is a great piece of historical writing and essential to understanding New York City.
What’s your favorite music memoir, and why?
I’m not sure about a favorite but I loved Count Basie’s Good Morning Blues, written with the excellent Albert Murray. It provides so much insight into a very important figure and a fascinating cultural era. Bob Dylan’s Chronicles is great if rather bizarre in some of the choices about where to delve deep. Levon Helm’s This Wheel’s on Fire is tremendous. I generally prefer non memoirs for the wider scope and deeper perspective. The ones I tend to like the best have really strong co- or ghost writers, like poet Quincy Troupe on Miles.
I liked Keith Richards’ Life in short spurts but found it too dense to read straight through. I enjoyed John Fogerty’s recent Fortunate Son but found it sad, as well. Neil Young’s Waging Heavy Peace was unreadable to me. He needed a writer. That was real letdown.
If you could recommend one book about music that would help people understand the music business, what would it be?
Oh man. One of the ones above, I guess. You learn something from all of them, and taken together the realities of the business and lifestyle become clear. I’m not sure any one book does that, especially given all the changes. Fred Goodman’s Mansion on the Hill and Steve Knopper’s Appetite for Destruction are great. I’m not sure either alone is up to date or wide scope enough to be the only thing someone reads.
