Drummer Georgia Hubley turns 66 on February 9, a convenient excuse to plug a favorite covers album that vies with the best. Fakebook's map points every which-way but weak, done respectfully but without pretense or caution, and shared like a favorite quilt. I wrote it up for the Phoenix in 1990, before used records stores started to feel nostalgic…

PEOPLE STILL COMPLAIN that they "can't understand pop lyrics," another way of asserting that Tin Pan Alley lounge-bar standards will forever outclass that noisy rock and roll. Not so. What the nay-sayers overlook is rock's song catalog, which is not only sturdy but flexible and overripe for singers to raid.

Most acts use cover records to kill time (Todd Rundgren's Faithful), pay respects (Metallica's Garage Days Revisited), or tout range (Siouxsie and the Banshees' Through the Looking Glass), instead of refurbishing guilty pleasures that send you gushing back to the source and digging out your Flamin' Groovies collection. But the thesis behind Yo La Tengo's insinuating summer sleeper Fakebook is that even stooge records (like The Flying Burrito Brothers’ 3rd) have silver linings. Even some of the album's original electric haunts (like "Barnaby, Hardly Working") go down as hushed revelations. Fakebook is a soft-focus record that reveals its edge in dark whispers. Georgia Hubley never uses more than brushes on her snare and cymbal, Ira Kaplan strums a rather stiff acoustic six-string, and Dave Schramm places his bittersweet steel-guitar touches with the care of acupuncture needles.

Rock liberated the singer (Dylan, Hendrix, Rotten), and as Kaplan shows, you don't have to be a crooner to master the soft touch. Kaplan's wobbly self-consciousness imbues these songs with just the right inward momentum. It's as if they set out to make a record-length version of "Alyda," the gentle ebb-and-sway duet that made last year's President Yo La Tengo such a knowing dialogue between electric fallout and acoustic repose.

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Like any former rock critic, Kaplan has a record jones, and his vinyl pancakes don't just sit there. Kaplan is such a Mets fan that he named his group (which also includes Al Greller on upright bass) in honor of the team's original shortstop, Elio Chacón, who yelped out "Yo la tengo!" ("I got it!") every time he went after a pop-up. To confront the critic-wannabe cynicism, Kaplan plugged in and retooled himself into a guitar hero of fierce proportions. Just listen to "Orange Song" on the newly available CD of President Yo La Tengo/New Wave Hot Dog, which includes their 1987 single "The Asparagus Song" backed with Neil Young's "For the Turnstiles."

Hubley has such a natural way with a song that it's clear Kaplan's sponging vocal ideas off of her—rock critic marries female drummer and learns how to sing.

Yo La Tengo shows have always been known for pushing past this nice Jewish boy's intellect and heading straight for Dante's playground. And live, the band excel with covers, which are often textbook-snoot: Bob Dylan's "I Threw It All Away," Neil Young's "Turnstiles," and Lou Reed's "It’s Alright (The Way That You Live)." Each a map for how non-singers can inform outré lyrics, they also model rock's un-hedging credo of mood over meaning. Fakebook combines arguments: Kaplan adopts an unassuming, non-singer delivery style that makes you sit up and listen, and he's put together a set of songs that sound like instant classics. Not only does Kaplan's drummer wife, Hubley, sing more on this record (on Kaplan's "What Comes Next?" and NRBQ's "What Can I Say?"), but some of the best moments come during their duets. And Hubley does more than give Kaplan something steady to work off: She has such a natural way with a song that it's clear he's sponging vocal ideas off of her—rock critic marries female drummer and learns how to sing.

On paper, you have to give Kaplan's taste the benefit of the doubt; he'll do a song by Cat Stevens if he likes it ("Here Comes My Baby," a hit for the Tremeloes in the '60s). And he redeems the home-made credulousness of "Speeding Motorcycle" by Daniel Johnston (Seattle's Jonathan Richman, only simpler). But when you hear Ray Davies' "Oklahoma, U.S.A.," you'll swear you've heard it before and pray that it's on your Kinks Kronicles. (It's not.) For frat hazing, there's "Emulsified," a "Monster Mash" clone by the Mighty Cravers that turns its source into as essential a collection as Nuggets (the At the Party compilation, on Candy Records). And "Yellow Sarong" will lead you to raid your friends' stash for anything by The Scene Is Now.

It's not jazz standards that are dead, it's lounge bars. And if people do still want to go out and hear the old tunes, these are the ones they'd rather hear, even if they've never heard them before. Fakebook isn't just an album for fans, like Joan Jett's The Hit List. It's a record about fandom that sends you packing to the used record store.

the tunes we carry

https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/the-february-thang-riley-rock-booth/pl.u-Xy3JfZYgZMz

Visit the new playlists page, with monthly custom threads and archival anomalies, including: a Willie Nelson Stardust Deluxe that sews up all the old stuff nicely, a Beck roundelay that lives up to his haircut, and more…

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* From the archives: Jimi Hendrix Meets the BBC, Peter Carlin nails Springsteen to the cross, and the Simpsons transcend their worst prophecies…

* Coming soon: Peter Richardson’s new book, Brand New Beat, on the history of Rolling Stone Magazine

* riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link

Musicologists have avoided Dylan longer than most other academics, in part because of how folk culture enters intellectual frames only gradually. Academics also need to invent new terms to deal with vernacular speech and how recorded sound differs from written notation. I took aim at this in Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary (1992): “Bob Dylan’s voice can crook emotion the way a prism refracts light…” to contrast against the “written” studio ethic the Beatles developed at Abbey Road (in my first book, Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary, 1988). Guitarist and theory professor Steven Rings has now bridged more of this gap in What Did You Hear? from University of Chicago Press.

Tim Riley: Well, Steven, what a wonderful book. Man, do I love this book. It’s so valuable, it’s so interesting, and I’m so taken with it. The first things I wanted to mention were that I just love this analysis of “I Believe in You,” the gospel song, and the high notes that he can’t hit with each pass. And then he finally hits the high note and it’s very satisfying. And then you’re left to wonder, well, is that all just for show? Just really a wonderful, wonderful reading of that song.

Steven Rings: Oh, thank you.

Tim Riley: And then I love the way you write about “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met),” and then you go to the live version of it, and then that is the first thing he says to the audience when he gets heckled. Oh my God, that is just a bullseye. How have we never noticed that before? I mean, that’s just really, really great.

[I’m curious about] what your specialty was as a young music theorist, what you focused on, and how you arrived at the University of Chicago, all of [00:01:00] that. So, the pre-history here.

Steven Rings: So, my prehistory… I grew up in Minnesota, though not Bob Dylan’s Minnesota. I grew up in the southeastern part of the state. It’s really a different world. I grew up in the Scandinavian, Lutheran Minnesota. I’ve learned a lot about Hibbing, in the Iron Range, over the course of this. There’s this wonderful book by Dave Engel about his background in Hibbing, and all the ethnic groups that came to work in the mines up there, and it’s a different world. But in any case, Bob Dylan was everywhere as I was growing up.

I was a guitar player early on. I also played piano as a little kid, like, dutifully did my piano lessons, but it was the guitar that I really took off with around age 10, played in a lot of bands, and that kind of thing.

Some things you never get used to. Other things come free in your inbox bi-weekly:

But then I switched to classical guitar in my teens, [00:02:00] and that’s what my first career was. I did an undergraduate degree in that, and then I taught in Portugal for a little while.

So, that was my kind of, I mean, in the music world, people would sometimes say legit, that was my legit phase. But then I developed a hand injury in the late ‘90s, and that ended my performing career.

So, I pivoted into academia. I always knew that I had a knack for music theory, and decided to pursue that. I went to one of the programs that’s the conservative home of American music theory, which is Yale, and ended up doing a first book that was very technical, mathematical music theory. But I always wanted to return to my pop music roots.

I had been a Bob Dylan fan for a long time, and really felt that as a research project it would scratch [00:03:00] an itch. I just wanted to spend time with the music, and now that I’d gotten my first book out the door, I could choose a little more what I was spending time with.

The other part was that I wanted to write about something that I figured academic music theory would have very little ready to say about. Bob Dylan doesn’t use very many harmonies, forms are pretty straightforward, and so on.

And yet, there is so much richness, and so much complexity, in this music of a different kind, that has to do with performative idiosyncrasy, performative inconsistency, all of these things that I talk about in the introduction to the book. And you know, to be honest, early on I felt like, wow, why did I set myself this challenge?

I found it really hard to grapple with at first, and to think about [00:04:00] how to engage his music. But by the time the book was finished, I was cutting enormous amounts of things, cutting chapters, I had so much more to say. So, it almost strikes me as kind of comical that early on I was, like, oh, how do I even engage this? I ended up having so much to say.

I say this with a caveat: I think some of these things are quite deliberate. I think others are not. I think there are a lot of things that show that this is just his musical way of being. He’s a very, very experimental musician. And I don’t mean that in the sense of post-war avant garde. I mean it in the sense that experiment is just his thing, and a lot of experiments go sideways and sometimes you hit gold with them. And so, I think sometimes it’s much more a question of trying something out and seeing what sticks.

Tim Riley: Well, I’ve read a lot in this space, and music theorists really do have trouble with this aesthetic. I think you do a really good job of describing the challenge and then providing lots of visual and oral examples as the evidence of what you’re talking about, and how you’re making sense of it.

I’m really curious how the music theory people embrace this book, ‘cause in my lifetime (and my background is classical [00:05:00] piano), when I was going to school there was just high and low culture. And high people just did not have any patience for low culture. In my lifetime, I have seen those distinctions largely evaporate. Now, people like us can teach this material at the college level, and it’s entirely respectable. It was not respectable 40 years ago, 50 years ago. And I think there’s been a lot of challenge for exactly how to do it.

I’ve always thought [Twilight of the Gods musicologist] Wilfred Millers was funny, when he says that the E major chord at the end of Sgt. Pepper is reminiscent of [Gustav] Mahler’s E Major chord at the end of his Fourth Symphony. And I was a young buck, but I was really tough on Christopher Ricks for writing a book about Dylan that did not mention Woody Guthrie [Visions of Sin, 2004]. This just seemed to me, like, how is that possible? And yet, he’s full of insight. He’s full of really interesting textual analysis. You can’t write him [00:06:00] off, but it’s just from such a completely different plane.

So, I’m curious how you think about it. The way I try to explain it to my students is that we have two very strong traditions: We have a written tradition, and we have an oral tradition. And most of academia was obsessed with the written tradition for the longest time. Now, we’re seeing this oral tradition.

It has landed mostly in ethnomusicology departments. However, you see political scientists engage with rock studies. You see literary people engage in rock studies. So, there’s a number of different portals, and it’s sort of like we’re waiting for it to land, you know?

Jazz is interesting because jazz combines the two. Sometimes it starts as oral, and it winds up getting written down. Other times, you’re using a lead sheet and that’s the starting point.

Steven Rings: Or in the swing era, it’s usually elaborate charts, and so on.

Tim Riley: Right. [00:07:00] I find your approach really persuasive and convincing.

Steven Rings: Thank you. In answer to your question, the book is sort of just out, so I only have a hint of how music theorists are reacting to it. Music theory as an academic discipline has been in a moment of reckoning since 2020, and is in the process of reorienting from a highly textualist classical music paradigm, to a paradigm where non-notated traditions are central. At this point, the most work is being produced in popular music…

more

* What Did You Hear? The Music of Bob Dylan, by Steven Rings (Chicago University Press, 2025)

* Scott Warmuth: on Chronicles, Vol. I, and “borrowing”….

* University of Chicago, Department of Music

* Just Like Bob Zimmerman’s Blues: Dylan in Minnesota, by Dave Engel (Amherst, 1997)

Motown’s Back Pages

"Ross was a space oddity, an outlier, and so became the natural object of others’ lust and disgust ('b***h-goddess'). She was the only Motown star you could imagine dancing with fellow freak Groucho Marx, her snaky shape in mid-frug just as semiotically recognizable as his cigar,” Devin McKinney in "The Motown Story: The First Decade, or A Star Is Born," American Music Perspectives, Vol. 4, No. 1, SPECIAL ISSUE: MOTOWN, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2025 (Tim Riley, issue editor). With more from Riley, Olivia Davis, Kit O’Toole, and Ben Greenman.

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* Coming soon: all the lists, and Cameron Crowe write a memoir, again, and Peter Richardson’s forthcoming Brand New Beat, on the history of Rolling Stone Magazine

* Don’t forget the archives: more on Dylan, the regrettable Philosophy of Song, and Love and Theft; how the Brahms piano concertos saved the symphony (on Andras Schiff); and sixty years of one-hit wonders with author Sarah Hill.

* riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link

Two years ago, this Woody Guthrie piece ran on his birthday (July 14, 1912) to boost awareness and renew anti-fascist history. Given Biden’s “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” moment, Guthrie imparts yet more wisdom: beware cynicism, the right’s lethal stealth tactic. And lo, our first rerun…

John Bonham (1948-1980) would have turned 76 at the end of this month (May 31). As a drummer he had chops beyond his years, and ears as big as any Page riff. When I covered Led Zeppelin’s mandatory box set release in 1990, it changed how I heard all those albums…

When I spoke with Jewell about her lucid and engaging history of college radio, my Covid case had grown pronounced enough that it bled straight onto the tape. She makes a smooth narrator, though, so the few places I do croak through you can hear just how ill I felt. I started by asking her what kind of history she teaches at Fitchburg State outside Boston…

Academic presses now fixing holes and taking risks where giants stutter, and the rest of us await the Big Leap Forward in long-form digital narrative…

The quote that leaps out at me now comes from a violinist, who requested anonymity: “He tries very hard with Mozart and Haydn… But he doesn’t know the meaning of the word elegant. He doesn’t have classical ideas about sound. Elegance and charm—he doesn’t know from that. That’s a terrible thing to say, and I feel bad saying it, because he hired me. It’s not like he’s not trying; he’s just barking up the wrong tree, looking for answers in the wrong places.” So note how that New York Times “essential recordings” list lacks core repertoire. I couldn’t get through his Brahms First and never tried the other three. The Haydn and Mozart escaped release. Beethoven, perhaps, gave him more to grab onto, but when people remarked on the Greatest Ozawa performances they’d say mention Schönberg, Bartok, or Stravinsky.

Watching an episode of Black Mirror ("Fifteen Million Merits," 2011), I looked up the song that Jessica Brown Findlay sang (“Anyone Who Knows What Love Is”), and reeled back to find Randy Newman’s name next to Jeannie Seally. I started going through discogs.com and finding a buried history of tracks he’d written for others during his long apprenticeship before landing his own record deal in 1968. Many of these, including a baller like “I Think It’s Goin to Rain Today,” took hold long before he started singing his own material and “Sail Away” wound up in Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train. Three years ago, Randy Newman wrote a PSA for KPCC, his local radio station. He turns 80 on November 30.

You feel flattered watching Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert film, and not just because you catch a contact high from her adoring audience. In a field of immaculate divas and country popsters, Swift creates her own rainbow fingernail category: rural Pennsylvania prom queen sets her diary to song with a charmed charisma and a singer’s dance moves. A lot of rivals now circle her career’s new gravity. As Taffy Brodesser-Akner put it in her New York Times Magazine profile, at a Swift concert “the night is sparkling and young love is amazing.”

The master guitarist Ali Farka Touré died in 2006 at the age of 67, widely praised for developing an “African desert blues,” woven from his Malian roots. This Earthworks domestic debut rode the Graceland world music wave alongside Salif Keita. He probably made his highest-profile album with Talking Timbuktu in 1994 with Ry Cooder. This US debut lingers with more meditative swagger, and when this ran in the Boston Phoenix in 1989, I chanced upon him at the Jazz & Heritage Festival in New Orleans. The music’s intimacy cast a surreal spell. He would have turned 83 on October 31.

Big fat media blip for the Replacements, a band with a casual brilliance that chafed hard against success. Make sure to read Bob Mehr’s pungent book (Trouble Boys) and crank up the Ed Stasium remaster. I caught a smashing Boston Opera House gig in 1988 when we were still scratching our heads about Bob Stinson’s replacement, but it remains a golden favorite, especially for “B******s of Young” and “Alex Chilton.” The next year they opened for Tom Petty as if to make his sturdy Heartbreakers sound shopworn. Track 10 from Disc 4 here features a “Strawberry Fields Forever” intro to “Mr. Whirly,” from a bleary set at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago that visits both “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Nowhere Man,” belying the band’s willful half-assery. Ironically Shook makes a better finale than the twilight shade of Don’t Tell A Soul. And in another groove-jumping move, drummer Chris Mars’s Horseshoes and Hand Grenades (Smash, 1992), not yet streaming, made for a whiplash coda.

When Living Colour reached No 13 on the Billboard album chart with its fourth album, Stain, in 1993, a lot of seasoned observers talked about watching the Jimi Hendrix phenom play out all over again on a twenty-five year loop. Seeing this band in a small club remains a high point of writing for the Phoenix, and Greg Tate’s comments on Mick Jagger’s involvement sounds like prophecy. (By the way, did anyone else notice how the Stones may have dropped “Brown Sugar” from their live set, but not off their most recent and quite sparky, live album?) Of course, Reid went on to produce James Blood Ulmer, Salif Keita, B.B. King, and many others; his Zig-Zag Power Trio’s latest is called Woodstock Sessions Volume 9. This preview ran in advance of the band’s Orpheum show…

John Lennon would have turned 85 on October 9, cue the holiday box set. Some Time in New York City (1972) still gets underrated, as does Rock and Roll (see this), and Lennon’s vocals win those arguments handily. (Some young turk should re-mash “Luck of the Irish” to omit that cringe Ono bridge.) The Elephants Memory band can still sound amateurish, but that counted for a lot in 1972, much like Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company, or Country Joe and the Fish. Sounding “slick” and “professional” in those days counted as inauthentic, and guess who needs those kinds of politics more than ever. “Woman Is the N_word of the World,” as soaring gospel imprecation takes a certain nerve, and Lennon was that rarity: a deeply humane troubled soul with the chutzpah to shoot off his mouth. “New York City” stands up against any Chuck Berry ditty you’d like to summon (The Who’s “Long Live Rock,” for example). In tribute, here’s the preface to my 2011 biography…

“When two great Saints meet, it is a humbling experience. The long battles to prove he was a saint . . .”

—Paul McCartney, dedication to Two Virgins (1968)

WHEN JOHN LENNON presented his fellow Beatles with the cover art forUnfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins in November of 1968, everybody recoiled. McCartney’s quote sat beneath a photo of Lennon and his lover, Yoko Ono, naked in their bedroom with postcoital grins. EMI’s lordly chairman, Sir Joseph Lockwood, refused to distribute the record, pronouncing John and Yoko “ugly.” In America, Capitol Records balked, and even when the album was shipped through an independent distributor, New Jersey authorities confiscated thirty thousand copies, declaring the cover “obscene.” Controversy subsumed the record’s experimental sounds. Nobody could understand why Lennon would deliberately extend the public-relations debacle he had already created by leaving his British wife and child for the Japanese-American “conceptual artist,” especially on the eve of the first Beatles album in eighteen months, the double White Album (originally The Beatles).

Loose exchanges, precious little respect…

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Time has papered over the photograph’s insolence: Lennon was pouring acid on the Beatle myth, demonstrating how shallow and ridiculous pop stardom seemed even as his band hit new creative peaks. This would be just the first of many media campaigns he waged to kick his way out of the Beatles.

He rebuilt his peacenik/politico façade while ridiculing his former partner McCartney (in “How Do You Sleep?”), before careening into a hackneyed drunken-celebrity “lost weekend” in the early 1970s…

That July of 1968, when this insouciant photograph was taken, the Beatles were slogging through the “poisonous” White Album sessions that prompted EMI engineer Geoff Emerick to quit in a huff. Drummer Ringo Starr walked out soon thereafter. The Lennon and McCartney songwriting collaboration had long since trailed off into independent work, even though the songs still bore the trademark Lennon-McCartney authorship. Increasingly, their partnership had graduated from aesthetic one-upmanship to outright conflict: in that same hectic period, the band vetoed Lennon’s first rendition of “Revolution” as too slow, and even the blazing remake sat on the flip side of McCartney’s “Hey Jude,” the band’s revitalizing summer single.

To the others, this widening rift coincided with Yoko Ono’s divisive presence. Lennon could not have chosen a more passive-aggressive way to disrupt the group’s chemistry. Yoko planted herself not only at recording sessions but at private group demos and Apple business meetings, offering comments as if she were a de facto member of the band. Not even the “Beatle wives” had ever been granted such access. She roamed the EMI studios unfettered, without so much as an introduction to George Martin, the band’s producer.

But whatever resentments among the band, the bond between Lennon and Ono was already immune to protest. By now, some forty [sic] years after the group’s breakup, the Lennon legend has graduated into myth of an entirely different order than the one that turned him into an international rock star, the one he retired from for the last five years of his life to raise his son Sean. On the radio, he sings to us from some idealized Tower of Song, frozen in time and memory like Buddy Holly or Eddie Cochran, those creative martyrs who haunted his own impressionable adolescence.

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The remaining three Beatles reunited in the mid-1990s to tell their own version of their story with the Anthology video and book, the band’s story tunneled into nostalgia. In 2000, the greatest-hits album 1 became the fastest-selling CD in history, reached number one in twenty-eight countries, and went on to sell more than thirty-one million copies worldwide, the best-selling album of the decade in the United States. At decade’s end, the Beatles became the best-selling band of the new millennium. (This would be the last release guitarist George Harrison oversaw directly; he died in November of 2001.) In 2006, the Cirque du Soleil’s Love began selling out six shows a week in a Las Vegas theater with a customized sound system by producer George Martin and his son, Giles. Its remashed soundtrack became still another huge hit.

Lennon’s own story, of course, had passed through rock’s looking glass long before. He hovered over every frame of the Anthology, and his familiar quotes heaved with subtext: it was hard to imagine Lennon participating in such a whitewashed, sentimental project devoted to enshrining a myth he had done so much to puncture during his lifetime. His post-Beatles revolts linked the personal with the aesthetic: he first ran off with Yoko Ono, then married her the week after McCartney married Linda Eastman, then howled at the demise of the Beatles (on 1970’s blistering Plastic Ono Band) even as he subtly helped to engineer it. He rebuilt his peacenik/politico façade while ridiculing his former partner McCartney (in “How Do You Sleep?”), before careening into a hackneyed drunken-celebrity “lost weekend” in the early 1970s. Finally, after winning a long immigration battle with the Nixon administration, he washed up onto the shores of storybook “monogamy” and parenthood during a five-year sabbatical. His assassination in 1980 quelled Beatle reunion rumors, but only temporarily…

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MORE

* Power to the People box set, 9 CDs, including One to One charity concert, 1972

* The Lenono [sic] Grant for Peace

* Plastic Ono Band box (2022)

* The Beatles Anthology Volume 4, with “Helter Skelter” take 17

* The Beatles Bible, About the Beatles, David Haber’s Beatles Links List,The Art of John Lennon, FestforBeatlesfans, more Beatles links hereand here

* Christoper Newport University primary source archive

* more Beatles links on timrileyauthor.com

reading pile

John Foster Barlow’s Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times (with Robert Greenfield, Crown, 2019) features choice quotes from Brazil’s Gilberto Gil and Wyoming’s Dick Cheney to move his story along. When he’s not tripping at Radio City Music Hall with JFK Jr, he’s prompting Jackie Kennedy’s thoughts on fame:

I’m really kind of shy. But I wanted to be with [JFK] and if that was the price, I was willing to pay it. I then came to see that people were making a big deal out of me, too. At first, I liked this. But then it made me feel like prey. Gradually, I realized that all this stuff in the press really wasn’t about me. It was actually a comic strip that had a character in it that looked like me and did some of the things I did but wasn’t me. It was something they were making up. And I read it quite avidly for a while, and then I realized that it was making me sick so I stopped…

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* From the archives: hagiography is his “middle” name: Springsteen and Landau Do Hollywood; George Clinton abides in the deepest funk; and Babygirl has nothing on Dying for Sex.

* Also: Tom Petty’s “American Girl” for One Battle After Another’s closing credits hits like a wet blanket. Jonathan Demme still owns this track for the finale to Silence of the Lambs. Imagine if Paul Thomas Anderson had used Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows”… This Times reporter fails to mention how sculptor Fred Ajanogha got a standing ovation at this Tina Turner statue unveiling in Brownsville, Tennessee.

* Calling T Bone Burnett: AJ Lee called, she wants to sing the Harlan Howard songbook! Pickup pickup pickup! (See No Fences.)

* riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link

To celebrate the anniversary of Help!, released this month in 1965, I talked with Steve Matteo. Matteo’s 33 1/3 title on Let It Be had a big influence on my 2011 Lennon biography, and his new book, Act Naturally, talks to fresh sources who worked on these projects. Turns out A Hard Day’s Night features the same cinematographer, Gilbert Taylor, who had just finished filming Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. I started by asking Matteo why he chose the Let It Be album as his first book-length project…

Kristin Hersh tours Europe in September after celebrating a birthday on August 7. So I went back to where I first tried to make sense of what made her Rhode Island band so compelling, and so fragile. just as they crested into alt-rock prominence. Sleater Kinney soon dominated the hipster crowd, but Hunkpapa holds up like a jangly oddity that makes sense of many other records.

One of the few drawbacks of attending Oberlin College between 1979-1983 had to do with that small Ohio town’s lack of a record store. The bi-annual student vinyl swaps were both heavily attended and fiendishly idiosyncratic.B ut it’s still embarrassing to think that this 1988 Phoenix review was my first exposure to Joy Division, and how catching up made me sound daft. So this marks my first stab at the topic, and seeks points for historical transparency. July marks the 35th anniversary of this CD collection, and Ian Curtis would have turned 67 on July 15 (b. 1956).

This week’s newsletter features an excerpt from my book review of Deliver Me from Nowhere for the Los Angeles Review of Books, plus an interview with author Warren Zanes.

Buffalo Tom guitarist Bill Janovitz has written a couple books on the Rolling Stones, and his new book talks to over a hundred sources to tell the Leon Russell story, which overlaps with the Stones in some telling ways. Here’s our interview.

Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021)

80 years ago on June 10th, 1943, the Allied forces invaded Sicily in Operation Husky, a battle that lasted six weeks and drove the Axis forces off the island to open up the Mediterranean sea lanes. Elizabeth D. Samet’s sage book, Looking for the Good War, writes about WWII as our dominant war mythology, and how nobody ever fights one war at a time. I talked with her about how war stories emerge, twining around historical memory, and why the concept of a “good war” can gather misconceptions…

Happy to report that the West Coast progressive sheet truthdig has returned, and ran this book review recently…

Why Steely Dan Doesn’t Suck, Radio Silence, April 2014

The Countdown to Ecstacy vinyl reissue, remastered by Donald Fagen for Geffen/UMe for release on May 26th, makes a good peg for this Steely Dan overview. Dan Stone had me write it up for Radio Silence, that handsome Bay area journal. (In the first paragraph, I dig myself out of that defensive headline.) Plus, Quantum Criminals by Alex Pappademas and illustrator Joan LeMay just arrived from the University of Texas Press. More on that in a future issue. Walter Becker died in 2017, but Donald Fagen still tours as Steely Dan, and the tapes keep rolling.

I first caught Friedman on Stephen Colbert talking about her deathless live 2016 Election Night barb (“I just wish I could be funny… Better get your abortions while you can…” she says). She seemed tentative with Colbert, but grateful. No surprise, he’s a gentleman. Somebody urged her to pitch a book and now nobody’s safe…

EXPANSIVE YET FORBIDDING, imperious yet embracing, pianist Rudolf Serkin mixed gravity with guilt to build a towering legacy. His recordings confirm him as a titan of the old school, a European who branded piano’s core repertoire with an air of authenticity. His philosophy of interpretive submission spurred rebelliousness in the next generation, and he hovers over classical piano’s firmament with peers like Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz, and Mieczysław Horszowski.

Peter Carlin and I met while checking out that cringey Las Vegas Cirque du Soleil show LOVE way back in the olden times before Obama, and we’ve kept in touch. He was working on his Paul book while I was working on John, and he gives good blurb. Carlin worked his way into Springsteen’s crew when he wrote his biography, and created alliances that make his new book on Born to Run, now 50, a worthwhile read. I asked him to own up to all those sordid rumors, and he did not:

Peter Carlin:

Well, when I finished my R.E.M. book, I took a little time off to lick my wounds, and then I had a bunch of time between when the book was done and its publication, and I started scratching around and thinking about what to do next. I'd had an idea for a long time—I was looking around at writing about something set in the '70s.

Later in the decade, there was an interesting moment where rock'n'roll became institutionalized, in a sense. When Jimmy Carter became president and, suddenly, you know, you heard all these tales, you know, any band going through DC would stop off and visit the president in the White House, which obviously had never been the case before.

We can’t even think of a word that rhymes:

And rock'n'roll was kids' music, and counterculture music. There was no exchange between the White House and rock'n'roll, and that began to change. But I got into that, and there were some other coincidental things happening in the culture at the same time, and I thought, well, that's interesting, but it just didn't speak to me.

I was trying to [00:01:00] write a proposal, and get my thoughts together, and I kept bumping up against the fact that it just wasn't touching me. I just didn't feel that sense of drive and internal disquiet that really compels you to take on a book.

The extent of control that he required, and needing to know every single note, and even the silences between the notes were exactly right, was because this was it: there would be no tomorrow…

I was thinking about other stuff that had happened around them, and I began to realize like, wait a second, it's been 50 years, or it will be next year, 50 years since "Born to Run." And I thought of the several boxes of archives I had left over from the Springsteen biography, and I just thought, oh, I bet I have a ton of leftover stuff in there about "Born to Run"—I should do something on that. So I talked about it with my agent who, after months of hearing me complain about my inability to write this other book was like, "Yeah, do that." And so I wrote a quick proposal and my editor at Doubleday was immediately in.

Then, I talked to Jon Landau, Bruce's manager. I'd actually floated it by him when I was catching up with [00:02:00] him backstage at a show in San Francisco and I said, you know, "This is something I might want to do next." He was immediately like, "Oh, I think we could be up for that."

So once the deal was done, I wrote to them and said, "Hey, this is actually going forward. I'd love to talk to you guys about 'Born to Run.'" Fairly immediately I got a note back from Jon saying we (Jon and Bruce) would both be into doing that. So then they were on board. The challenge was that in March of 2024, the deal kind of unfolded on Doubleday's end.

You know how publishing works. You need a lot of lead time between when you submit the manuscript and when the book comes out. Usually, it's a year (or even more) depending on the project. And this time around, clearly we weren't gonna have a year. The message was: if you can do this by October, then let's do this.

And I was like, okay, well, what else am I doing? So the clock was ticking from the [00:03:00] moment we all shook hands on it. I just dove right in and obviously the first thing I did was dig through all my leftover material from the biography, and then I suddenly realized, oh, I don't have that much leftover "Born to Run" stuff after all. Doing the biography was a story, you know. It was 60-plus years of a man's life, and none of it wasn't interesting.

It seemed key to this great big epic story of Bruce's life. There were certain parts of that book that got in real deep into the making of particular records, but somehow the making of "Born to Run" was more lightly sketched.

Fortunately, I could hit the ground at a pretty fast clip because I still had all my contact information left over, and so I knew how to get in touch with people, and they knew who I was, and they knew Bruce and Jon were into the project. So it was [00:04:00] relatively easy to get in touch with everyone, to connect with them, and to get to start talking to them, and collecting more information.

I very quickly ran to the usual archives, the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame, and the Springsteen Center in Monmouth. And then, I began ringing people up and visiting folks. Once that was done, I canceled all of my social plans and did nothing until it was done, which was in early November…

MORE

* Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run: publisher page

* Peter Carlin author page

* Bruce Springsteen.net: many of the Live Series editions pouring out of this shop have great reach and durability, just avoid Only the Strong Survive.

* The riley rock report interview with Warren Zanes on Deliver Me From Nowhere, the basis for the new film. New Nebraska package imminent.

* Peter Carlin appears at the Texas Book Festival in Austin on November 8

hot licks & rhetoric

The newsletter archives include implicit commentary on last week’s events: Kimmel met his moment, but he still looks tame by Jen Friedman’s standards. She walked up in front of the dude at a rally talking on the phone, ignoring him for the whole world to see. Jeremy Braddock keeps working on his Firesign Theatre project, including recent talks… and the new Darren Aronofsky film Caught Stealing, has faded rapidly, but so have a few other “mid-budget” thrillers this year. Austin Butler keeps on thumping it, and, in a casting twist to match the thriller’s wit, Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio show up as Hasidic gangsters.

This hagiographic Cameron Crowe NYT profile doesn’t mention Roadies (Showtime, 2016), his TV show which extends Almost Famous out into an real-time tour, with Carla Gugino, Imogen Poots, and Luke Wilson. The central irony of his career remains: he didn’t grow up to work as a critic, he grew up to make movies. The Carol Kaye portrait, where she refuses to accept a R&R Hall of Fame induction, fares better. And she doesn’t say it, but it’s obvious: that organization has a Big Gender Problem (Evelyn McDonell, 2011).

Few books explain the conflicting American narratives better than A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America by Richard Slotkin, which came out last year and doesn’t feel an inch out of date. Given publishing time lags, this counts as magnificent.

Riley appearances

“No Limits: Tina Turner’s Global Feminism”

Tina Turner Heritage Days in Greenwood, TennesseeSaturday, September 26, 2pm

“Rubber Soul Defies Context”

EF4Fest Celebrates Rubber Soul at 60November 6-8, Berkeley Oceanfront Hotel, Asbury Park, New JerseyWith Rob Sheffield, Nellie McKay, and others

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* recent Instagram posts: Chris Thile’s Bach Vol 2, Etta James, and LBJ’s scar.

* Coming soon: Peter Richardson’s Brand New Beat, on the history of Rolling Stone Magazine; and Peter Doggett’s Brian Wilson book, Surf’s Up, out in England.

* riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link

FEW ROCK BIOGRAPHIES rise to the level of their subject. But this past year has already seen extraordinary titles like Lightning Strikes, by Lenny Kaye, a musical memoir lived out in a beguiling new history, and Dilla Time, Dan Charnas’s life of rap producer and beat-meister J Dilla, (which has prompted a new documentary from Summer of Soul’s Questlove). RJ Smith has already etched a sturdy treatment of James Brown (The One, 2012), a figure who long deserved higher ground. Now, with Chuck Berry, Smith surpasses himself, portraying the shrewd, implacable trickster behind an ingenious catalog.

I got friendly with Bob Moses (RIP), a guitarist for Busted Statues, when I profiled the band for the Phoenix, and we stayed in touch. He asked me to write up a mid-decade navel-gazer for InfoPlease Entertainment Almanac, where he edited, and we worked hard to cover a lot of ground. Nobody saw it, of course, and it languished for years in a mayonnaise jar on Funk & Wagnall’s front porch. But the web divulges as it destroys, and it reads curiously like history even thought I wrote as a contemporary who had trouble sifting through all the Seattle hype.

This Boston Phoenix piece ran in the fall of 1988 as James toured behind his Wonderful Comeback. It was a barometer of how much had changed since his earlier days, with both Prince’s stardom and Terence Trent D’Arby’s upstart energy. James would have turned 75 on February 1st; he died in 2004.

IF WE LIVE IN A GOLDEN AGE of documentaries, too many of them go on for too long without revealing much. In “We Were Famous, You Don’t Remember,” directors Daniel Fetherston and Danny Szlauderbach approach the Embarrassment, punk's great left-of-center act, with earnestness and care, detailing the many sideshows (“Ron Klaus Wrecked His House”) and drive-bys (”Wellsville”). Some of this goes against the music's caterwauling grain, and only accents the band's freefall strangeness; on the other hand, it's impossible to imagine how this content might guide a better form. 

Throughout his sixty-year-plus career, Bob Dylan has combined an “incredible skill with a wildness of spirit,” as magician Penn Jillette recently put it. He towers above others—Bruce Springsteen, John Prine, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell—through volume, range, and brash unpredictability. In the past decade he has retooled Frank Sinatra crooning (Triplicate) and wrung suspicious reverie from Covid crazy (Rough and Rowdy Ways). In this latest book, he submits essays on sixty-six recordings, having his say about cherished records in a voice that favors wildness over skill...

The latest rockcritics podcast features Tim Riley, author of one of my favourite Beatle books, Tell Me Why: The Beatles: Album by Album, Song by Song, the Sixties and After. A couple weeks prior to our chatting, I asked Tim — currently completing a large-scale John Lennon biography — to submit a list of some of his favourite Beatle books, and it’s that list which forms the basis of our conversation. We delve into more than a dozen titles here, including a few obscurities, a few ancillary titles (Aesthetics of Rock, Peter Doggett’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On) plus, of course, Tell Me Why, which, among other things, is notable for its annotated (in-need-of-an-update!) Beatles bibliography.

Big thanks to Tim for taking time out to do this (and for putting up with my usual nonsense and semi-competence).

Titles discussed:

• Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head
• Mark Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions **+ **The Complete Beatles Chronicle
• Devin McKinney, Magic Circles
• John Lennon, In His Own Write and Spaniard in the Works
• Bob Dylan, Tarantula
• Allan Kozinn, The Beatles
• Wilfid Mellers, Twilight of the Gods
• Peter Doggett, Art and Music of John Lennon + There’s a Riot Goin’ On
• Ringo Starr, Postcards From the Boys
• Chris Salewicz, McCartney
• Jim O’Donnell, Day John Met Paul
• Beatles, Anthology
• Michael Braun, Love Me Do
• Richard Meltzer, The Aesthetics of Rock

Musical interludes (in order of appearance) by: Al Green, David Hillyard & the Rocksteady Seven, DJ Dangermouse, Bongwater, Peter Sellers, Irvin’s 89 Key Marenghi Fairground Organ, unknown house artist (“Revolution”), Rainer, Sunshine Company, First Moog Quartet, Los Fernandos, Cristina, Candy Flip, Bryan Ferry, P.M. Dawn, Sunshine Company (redux).

Ten years ago NPR had me on to rant about pagan rituals, from the vault. 

Jason Gross has edited PSF since 1993, overseeing an important venue for critics and passionate listeners. Like all the good editorial conversations, one topic begat another, so the links can help you figure out some of the sounds we reference. 

Igor Levit – Tristan (Sony, 2022)

Emanuel Ax, Leonidas Kavakos, Yo-Yo Ma – Beethoven for Three, Symphonies Nos. 2 and 5 (Sony, 2022) 

Why listen to symphonic music stripped of strings, winds, brass, and percussion...? 

A few weeks after Get Back aired last year, I spoke with Magic Circles author Devin McKinney about the film and its many quirks. As we take stock of the Revolver box set, the timeline sharpens: January of 1969 happens only three years after they record that 1966 breakthrough. 

Visit https://timrileyauthor.com for more Beatles. 

Grateful Dead books now rival those about Springsteen, Dylan, and the Beatles in the rock publishing market. Brian Anderson’s Loud and Clear chronicles its quest to create a Wall of Sound concert experience that reproduced the clarity and separation of home stereos. Stanley Owsley, the audiophile designer—and the real-life inspiration for Steely Dan’s “Kid Charlemagne”—insisted on separating as many audio channels as possible. The band poured its resources into realizing Owsley’s hi-fi ambitions, striving for maximum concert fidelity marked by exceptional clarity, volume, and balance. The Dead’s story runs parallel to the Beatles’ studio innovations in the previous decade and has influenced everything from modern touring workflows to venues like the Sphere in Las Vegas. Anderson, who grew up outside Chicago with Deadhead parents, interviewed many key crew members for this vivid account…

Tim Riley:

So, I want to start by talking to you just about your background. Your parents were Deadheads, they met at Dead shows, and so you came of age in a house where the Dead were like this staple, right? Give us an idea of your background, what your first show was, and what led you to this book project.

Brian Anderson:

Thanks for your interest in the book. It really means a lot.

We don’t like plugging our own product. Just sign up and leave us alone.

My parents were early Deadheads who were orbiting the band, and each other, while seeing the band perform in the early to mid-'70s, right in this Wall of Sound era. I really grew up hearing my parents talk about the sonic clarity of this sound system that the band was touring with, right? So, my parents would just kind of regale us with stories about seeing the band back in this era when they had this mountain of speakers behind them. Every time they saw the band, this mountain was getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And this mountain of speakers was called the Wall of Sound, and it kind of blew everyone's mind.

…one point that I really try to drive home in the book is that the Wall of Sound did not just drop out of the clear blue sky fully formed one day in 1974. It was this years-long progression that really began when the band began, you know? It was this show-by-show incremental growth and evolution, through fits and starts and trial and error.

When I was just a toddler in the late '80s, I went to my first Grateful Dead show. Really, my earliest flashes of memory are seeing the Dead performing on stage when I was just two, three years old. So, this stuff has been around for my whole life.

I've always been captivated by the visual of the Wall of Sound. Fast forward to 2015: I was an editor at Vice, and I wrote and published an initial 9,000 word feature story about the Wall of Sound. It just happened to coincide with the Chicago run of the Fare Thee Well shows that were celebrating the band's 50th anniversary. That story ended up getting a bunch of attention, and I remember foolishly thinking after that story came out that "surely this is the definitive take on the Wall of Sound."

It only took a couple of days or weeks after that for me to realize that the initial 9,000 word web story really only scratched the surface of a much deeper story about obsession and titanic human achievement in the Dead's quest for audio perfection. So I kept gathering bits of string, and I kept in touch with sources that I spoke with for that initial story, and reached out to new ones as well.

Then, in late 2021, I ended up acquiring a part of the Wall of Sound—and that really kicked this whole story into high gear.

The meat of the book moves chronologically through this first grand 10-year era of the Grateful Dead, from the founding of the band in 1965 through the end of the Wall of Sound, right when the hiatus hits at the end of 1974. There've been so many books written about the Grateful Dead, which I think is a testament to the enduring legacy of the Grateful Dead phenomenon, but I knew that I didn't wanna write just another book about the Grateful Dead. You know, as a journalist you're always looking for, "What new can I say?" When I acquired this artifact from the Wall of Sound, I knew immediately that I had a very unique angle. I had a window to tell this much bigger story about obsession and titanic human achievement in the Dead's quest for audio perfection. And I could tell it through this artifact—it let me do that.

Tim Riley:

Most people don't understand what it takes to put an act like that on the road with equipment like that and how much expertise and familiarity it requires. And it turned into a beast that they were tweaking, as the Dead were playing.

So, the first guy we have to talk about is Augustus Owsley Stanley, who you describe as an eccentric Kentucky born chemist, which I think is a very neat summary for a very big personality, big person. Talk to me about Stanley. He's been dead since, since when? You have a lot of testimony, and he has a very interesting story arc in this book. Tell us about Stanley.

Brian Anderson:

Yeah. Owsley is a very interesting character. He earned the nickname "Bear," because he had a very hairy chest. A lot of people in this world just refer to him as Bear. Bear died in a car accident in Australia in 2011, so we were never able to talk. He was a character in the book who is no longer around, who I wasn't able to interview, but he was so instrumental to leveling up the Dead from the very beginning. He first saw the band in late 1965, so very, very early days. He saw them at an early Acid Test, right? The Acid Tests were these psychedelic-fueled audio-visual happenings that took place along the West Coast over a number of months in late 1965 and early 1966. They were organized by Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. And the Dead were effectively the house band at the Acid Tests.

Where the Grateful Dead story gets really interesting is in early 1966, when they spent a couple months in Los Angeles, where Owsley rented a giant house for them. And at that point, he basically gave the band his home Hi-Fi stereo system. So, that became an early iteration of their sound system. It was a single Macintosh and a pair of theater speakers—the big, horn-shaped speakers that you would see in old movie houses. So that was Owsley’s home Hi-Fi rig—and he gave that to the band. He would be sitting around watching them rehearse or perform around Los Angeles, and he would be high on his own supply of LSD, and he saw the sound of the band emanating out of his speakers in color.

Owsley had synesthesia, so he could experience one sense through another. So, he saw sound as color, and this really had a profound impact on the way that he would be a force of ideas behind what eventually grew into the Wall of Sound. He had this realization, like, I have to remember what this is doing, what this feels like. And at the same time, he had an aversion to unclean signals, so distortion really bothered him.

When you look at what the Wall of Sound grew into, over the span of 10 years, the Wall of Sound was six individual PA systems. Each performer had their own rig, and that eliminated what’s known as "intermodulation distortion." What that meant was that no two sound sources were going through the same output, right, because every musician had their own rig. That eliminated distortion. You can see Owsley’s influence there, with his aversion to unclean signals, which he was making very clear to the band from the very early days. He’s like, "we need to purify the signal path from the instrument to the speakers to the minds of the audience," right?…

MORE

* Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection, by Brian Anderson (St. Martin’s, 2025)

* Owsley and Me: My LSD Family, by Rhoney Gissen with Tom Davis (Monkfish, 2013)

* No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead by Peter Richardson (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2015)

* All the Years Combine: The Grateful Dead in Fifty Shows, by Ray Robertson (Biblioasis, 2023)

* Mangrove Valley, substack HQ

* Dick’s Picks Vol. 24: 2/23/73 (Cow Palace, Daly City, CA), by date from Wall of Sound era 1973-1974

* Official Grateful Dead site

Come See About Motown

"Ross was a space oddity, an outlier, and so became the natural object of others’ lust and disgust ('b***h-goddess'). She was the only Motown star you could imagine dancing with fellow freak Groucho Marx, her snaky shape in mid-frug just as semiotically recognizable as his cigar,” Devin McKinney in "The Motown Story: The First Decade, or A Star Is Born," American Music Perspectives, Vol. 4, No. 1, SPECIAL ISSUE: MOTOWN, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2025 (Tim Riley, issue editor). With more from Riley, Olivia Davis, Kit O’Toole, and Ben Greenman.

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* From the archives: Get started with the Guarneri box set, 49 CDs and way too many superlatives; The Simpsons gets a thorough history by Alan Siegel, with writer’s room stories and quotes to refresh reruns; and George Clinton’s memoir gives an insider’s view of Motown and Phillie scenes, and how Bootsy Collins hangs out long enough to get the call from JB …

* Coming soon: Peter Richardson’s new book, Brand New Beat, on the history of Rolling Stone Magazine

* riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link

John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, John Lennon. Apple, 1970.

THE 1970s DAWNED with a blistering hangover. On September 13, 1969, just before Abbey Road began dominating end-of-’60s radio, John Lennon sang at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival, an early 1950s festival. He called his pickup group the Plastic Ono Band: Eric Clapton (lead guitar), Klaus Voorman (bass) and Alan White (drums). They launched with standards, “Blue Suede Shoes, “Money,” and then “Dizzy Miss Lizzy,” before turning to Lennon’s “Yer Blues,” an unreleased “Cold Turkey,” and “Give Peace a Chance,” his anti-war chant. Then he turned the stage over to his Japanese-American wife, Yoko Ono, who screamed against Lennon’s guitar feedback for almost half an hour. It stupefied the audience. One week later, at an Apple business meeting in London, Lennon told the other Beatles he wanted a “divorce.” However, Lennon agreed to keep a lid on his departure—they were in the middle of contract negotiations, and if word got out, they could lose leverage. From that point on, the chronology went extremely fuzzy for most fans, as Beatles group releases overlapped with the members’ early solo records. Plans progressed for a Let It Be album and film early in 1970 (shot in January 1969) as the breakup remained a secret...

Moonage Daydream, Brett Morgan, director (Universal)

IN A GLUT of music documentaries where overlong counts as serious and talking heads sling clichés, we should be glad about Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream. It lets David Bowie do all the narrating, delivers riveting concert footage, and boasts a detailed audio design by Bowie’s longtime collaborator Tony Visconti...

To die in the midst of a thriving career at 51 exacerbates the loss of this quietly gripping pianist. This piece ran last fall when I fell in love with his Janacek recording, music I hadn't known before; Vogt drew me in and made me listen closely. I'll also miss his chamber music collaborations with violinist Christian Tetzlaff. 

Buddy Holly looms over the Beatles catalog, and his influence gets harder to overstate the more history recedes. A celebration of the songwriter and record-writer pegged to his birthday...

Unlike a Tramp
Intro to Madonna: Illustrated by Tim Riley. Hyperion, 1992. 

When I wrote this book, Madonna's command of pop's cosmos felt unprecedented. Now in her fifth decade, triumphs like "Papa Don't Preach" and "Justify My Love" have lost their bang sooner than expected, and her Dick Tracy Oscar nomination now looks misplaced... 

“Cats Are Indescribably Wonderful,
Shostakovich’s Fugues Less So”

Playing with Fire: The Story of Maria Yudina, Pianist in Stalin’s Russia, by Elizabeth Wilson, Yale University Press, 352pp
Los Angeles Review of Books, August 4, 2022

Among other things, Elvis Presley invented the rock ’n’ roll comeback. Up until 1968, ”coming back” from a career break barely existed in the new style since most fell short, or failed...

To mark Woody Guthrie's 100th birthday, this issue reprints a Radio Silence (RIP) essay pegged to the second volume of Mermaid Avenue and several other releases. Guthrie's words keep on inspiring, and as his shadow lengthens, most of Wilco's and Bragg's catalog now takes place inside this new context.  

During another summer of congressional hearings, fights over national memory and history itself, Watergate can feel further than five decades in the past. In retrospect, Richard Nixon’s story feels both sealed off from our modern squabbles and a little pathetic; the petty cover-up President may actually gain stature next to the riverboat gambler insurrectionist cult tyrant. The Republican congress that impeached President Bill Clinton for lying about his tryst with Monica Lewinsky feels closer, and not just for the way Special Prosector Ken Starr blanched as Clinton parsed the legal definition of sex...

Prince' Graffiti Bridge, a double album originally billed as a film soundtrack, ran on some very fine fumes (Sign O The Times, Batman). And the guest-stars made the party hop. 

The January inauguration has thrown everything into twisted new context: trauma gloat turns prosaic, overstimulation mocks innocence. Suddenly, Severance’s cult of Kier feels cartoonish, like a miniature theme park. The many sex-driven scripts that wrapped in 2024 now feel like quaint throwbacks, and given the cowering media, the confusion-is-sex meme has ballooned in a puff. You can’t play that P. Diddy testimony for comedy, but parsing these soundtracks cues the gap between intent and effect.

#Metoo has already produced some swell movies, like Bombshell, 2019 (an easy target that might have faltered), or Promising Young Woman, 2020 (fierce enough to spawn a backlash), and She Said, 2022 (which almost made the New York Times seem respectable again). But of course, Hollywood’s true nature circles around pulp, and the male gaze reasserts itself despite the relentless impulse to expose taboos. Anora’s Best Picture Oscar accented this conundrum: we root for the emotionally armored professional gal (Mikey Madison), but do we really want her to end up with… a Russian mobster? Any non-rapist will do? These are her choices?

In Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022), Emma Thompson honors her desire enough to pay for a male prostitute (Daryl McCormack), and disrobes with disarming physical candor that makes her folly feel like charisma. The quietude of The Assistant (2019) underplays the mundane yet grating humiliations of an office drone (Julia Garner). As the latest Harvey Weinstein trial overlaps with Sean Combs’s freak-offs (rappers vie with moguls in debauchery), the Gods fret at how quickly outrage turns supercilious.

Sex is the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” of liminal spaces. Spread the word.

Hollywood’s box office might suggest that the high road to an erotic thriller with a 58-year-old female star lies in tapping a female director-screenwriter (Halina Reijn). Babygirl, a huge streaming hit, plays out a fairy tale about a flush CEO processing some intimate demons by cheating on her saintly husband (Antonio Banderas), realizing some stark truths about the Big Turn-On of High-Stakes Humiliation, and trading corporate success for honest orgasms. It’s so thin and manipulative you’d swear it was written by a misogynist. But no, Reijn, a highly regarded Nordic thespian directs this schlock and shoots for sincerity, even pathos. Disrobing at 58 gets treated as “brave.” In this soap opera it’s more like the shallow characters from Eyes Wide Shut return twenty-five years later for… more of the same phony outrage. And doesn’t Kidman already play some variant of this cliché in The Perfect Couple?

The music underlines the confused messaging. After Samuel (the daunting Harris Dickinson, from Triangle of Sadness) dares Romy (Kidman) with a glass of milk at a bar, Mozart’s Lacrimosa swells up in the soundtrack, because of course a pivot into darkness calls for his Requiem, some algorithm deemed it so. In the scene where they get down to business, INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart” from 1987 circles the characters, as if that song provides mysterious allure. Oh please: He-Man Michael Hutchence, Model Feminist. Then we get George Michael’s “Father Figure,” that hack 1980s take on dime store bedroom psychology. These choices belie the piece’s forced earnestness.

Because it treats grim situations with whimsy, you take the stakes a lot more seriously, and the characters live with you offscreen—you’d kill for this kind of bracing sanity in the face of death, and the characters seem to live outside the script.

Nobody “understands” much about what turns them on, and kinks by definition confound political correctness. This does not resemble a sophisticated idea. And while everybody deserves their private fantasies, you don’t have to betray a partner to figure out your favorite positions. Reijn presents a false playbook, a completely narcissistic plunge into over-calculated carnality, where risking a family gets framed as the Ultimate Turn-On, and the scene that maps out permission and consent redefines hairy puppeteering.

Gangster flicks put us in high-stakes scenes with low-IQ felons and ask us to sympathize. But what characters do we relate to here? Dickinson’s Samuel intuits what other people want, and he surfs that free-lance dom scene. He’s like a Sex Whisperer—in fact, Romy first spies him calming a mad dog on the street. After some defiantly unoriginal fisticuffs, Banderas’s husband complains, “Female masochism is a male fantasy,” to which Samuel replies “That’s a very narrow view of sexuality, actually.” That’s code for “nobody’s slumming here.” The interaction gets staged as the kid undercutting the husband with wise words of the newly enlightened. This Samuel character moves through these peoples’ lives with impunity, and the husband earns an extra halo because he learns how to bring Kidman to sincere orgasm. The bookend bit reinforces all this: in the “climactic” scene, Reijn crosscuts between Banderas servicing Kidman set against Dickinson in a hotel room—charming a dog.

Does anybody really think betrayal leads to better sex?

Comedy provides more possibilities, and more embrace. With laughs you get dividends, and less preaching. In 2002’s joyous Secretary, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader, sly smiles to the camera juiced up the tension, and a cool understanding of risks draped the encounters. It confused only the right-wing that’s constantly poised for outrage.

In Hulu’s gut-busting Dying for Sex, Michelle Williams confronts a cancer diagnosis with a hard-won goal: to finally reach orgasm with another person (the script by Liz Meriwether and Kim Rosenstock stems from a podcast memoir from Molly Kochan). Because it treats grim situations with whimsy, you take the stakes a lot more seriously, and the characters live with you offscreen—you’d kill for this kind of bracing sanity in the face of death.

Leaving her husband up front (good move) lands her on dating apps, a hilarious Nice Guy turn from SNL’s Marcello Hernández, and a deepening bond with her best friend, Jenny Slate (human kryptonite). Slate matches Williams for spark and resolve, and the stiff, prim Dr. Pankowitz (David Rasche) even gets a comic arc. The social worker Sonya (the striking Esco Jouley) signals early on her willingness to go past norms, and you sense a synergy of writers, players, and material that recoils at conventional solutions. Williams’s face radiates a complicated clutch of emotions, from sadness and confusion to delight and dismay. Rob Delaney (from that other marvel, Catastrophe) plays her gung-ho neighbor who enjoys playing sub, and the awkward choreography of their encounters enhances their realism, the opposite of Kidman seeking relevance on all fours. Williams’s gleam points this material far beyond Kidman’s glum.

Once again, the soundtrack confirms all your best hopes about clashing emotions: “I Touch Myself,” by the Divinyls, immortalized by Austin Powers; “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” by Cyndi Lauper; “Rebel Rebel” by David Bowie; “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor, and “Tainted Love,” Soft Cell’s swanky remake of the Gloria Jones original from 1965. Can anyone imagine any Babygirl scene featuring “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”?

Dying For Sex’s final act features an essay on mortality that lends all the sexcapades some earned depth. Do some great movies carry insufferable soundtracks? Sure. Do some great soundtracks get wasted on awful scripts? Of course, although which happens more might make a great social media spat. When these forces blend and set off boomerang flashes, you feel a great team chasing ideas, generating tensions, and making uneasy sense of situations that defy words.

more

Imdb pages for Dying for Sex, BabygirlRotten Tomatoes pages Dying for Sex, BabygirlMetacritic pages for Dying for Sex, BabygirlTime magazine’s Stephanie Zacharek offers a different point of view on KidmanDying for Sex podcastMolly Kochan’s memoir Screw Cancer: Becoming Whole (Donnie B Inc., 2020)

noises off

* From earlier this year: Preston Lauterbach’s riveting Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King (Hachette, January 2025): “Like the hint of deism in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, Elvis teases the Spirit without delivering an overly heavy dose of God…”

* Next month: The Simpsons by Alan Siegel, the Guarneri String Quartet box set, and Bruce Springsteen’s forgotten ticket scandal

* riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link

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