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June 26, 2005
Record Weirdo Book Reviews
Passion is a Fashion, The Real Story of The Clash
By Pat Gilbert
This is the best of the two biographies I've read of the Clash. It's much more insightful and enjoyable than "The Last Gang in Town". While the "Last Gang" author set out to prove that all of the hype the band made up about themselves was just load of hocum, he forgot to mention how great the band was and why. "Passion is a Fashion" assumes that you already know that all the PR is BS and gets on with the music and the people that made it. The author, a former editor or MOJO, was granted a lot more access to the band and it shows. I now know too much about The Clash but still like them.
Lost in the Grooves, Scrams Capricious Guide to the Music You Missed
Edited by Kim Cooper and David Smay
This is a nice compendium of fanzine reviews and essays celebrating a slew of obscure and overlooked rock, pop, blues, jazz, and country albums. I've seen too many smarmy and condescending books covering the same ground but this one is pretty good. There is very little hipper-than-thou pretension here. Not only do the various authors dig up some fascinating unknowns, but they also reconsider critically underappreciated works by major acts. There's really no use mentioning names - the obscure ones are so obscure that they wouldn't mean anything and the big names might scare you off. There is a lot of emphasis on 90's alt-rock. I find the older oddball stuff more interesting.
I Am Elvis - A Guide to Elvis Impersonators
It took me a long time to write about this. The used bookstore where I found it has since gone out of business. I meant to include it in my "Elvis Impersonator Round Up" article but I didn't. You don't care, do you?
This is a fairly straightforward listing with biographies and contact information for 63 Elvis impersonators. Some of them are funny, some of them are sad, and others are downright pathetic. I can respect those that actually perform live, but the majority of Elvi in this book are simply lip-sync-ers or self-proclaimed "guardians of his memory" who don't do anything but dress up in a white jumpsuit, paste on some fake muttonchops, and hang out near public restrooms. It's kind of scary how serious most of them are. The anonymous author of the bios seems almost apologetic for including El Vez in the book. El Vez's crime? He's funny.
This book came out in the dark, pre-internet-proliferation days of 1991. How did we manage to live back then? Now, if you google "elvis impersonators", you get approxiamtely 12 gazillion results. Back in the early 90's you had to pay $8.95 to find 63 of them.
I have no idea where I got this.
I know nothing about poetry, so I can't tell if this is good or bad. I skimmed through it and there weren't any dirty poems, just a bunch of mopey stuff about rain and trees.
Posted by Big Kev at June 26, 2005 3:58 PM
