A confession: I typically do not enjoy either memoirs by or biographies about musicians. I read a lot of them – and man, there are a lot of ’em – but it’s generally a chore. I would must rather listen to the music that’s being parsed. I generally don’t care where people grew up and what jobs their parents did – boring! However, I slog through in order to glean the odd tidbit that I can pass along in radio shows and every once in a while the subject matter and the writing rise to the level of the gateway music. That brings us to the books I’ve displayed haphazardly atop a table normally used for cookbooks at the McNally Jackson bookstore in Soho who were kind enough to indulge me…
We’ve got books memoirs by Elvis Costello, Chrissy Hynde, and Carrie Brownstein (who will be in town next month with her band) and a biography about Sam Phillips by Peter Guralnick who is best known for his two volume examination of Elvis Presley. We’ve also got a biography on Tom Petty penned by Warren Zanes who was in a dynamite rock band himself The Del Fuegos and these days works with Steven Van Zandt in the Rock n Roll Forever Foundation. We’ve got cultural criticism from Richard Hell and a piece of work from Patti Smith that resists any of the traditional literary categories.
