Cassette From My Ex

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Cassette From My Ex: Stories and Soundtracks of Lost Loves (St. Martin's Griffin, 2009).


I had a really good feeling that I'd like this book. Jason Bitner used to run - or perhaps "curate" is a better word - a blog at cassettefrommyex.com, but it's been down for quite some time now. There, he got submissions from all over the map from people who'd held onto old mix tapes from old flames, and sent in photos and stories about them.

I wish that I had seen the blog before it vanished, but happily, the project did net Bitner a book deal. While the hardcover collection is out of print, it's easily obtained and definitely worth a look. It's just so fun, touching on all of these wonderful shared experiences with other people from the 1980s and 1990s who somehow knew all the same "rules" for making mixtapes as I did.

The last time I made a mix tape was the last day of 1999. It was kind of bitter. I made a second copy for myself and rediscovered it this past summer, cleaning out the basement of my childhood home. I have no way to play it any longer, which is probably for the best, because that is one mean, hurtful, heartbroken, dagger of a tape. They were always more than the sum of their parts, weren't they?

The book is full of essays and track lists, with lots of photos of the surviving tapes, track lists that double as love notes, and all sorts of heartbreak and blissful memories. Most of the writers were not known to me, but Claudia Gonson of the Magnetic Fields contributed a great story, as did - kind of unsurprisingly - Rob Sheffield, who's probably more responsible than anybody else for keeping memories of mix tapes alive all these years after we quit making them.

It's very fun, although probably not a book that you can expect to read in one sitting. It's fun to linger over, a couple of stories a night, while reading something a little heavier on the side. Recommended for readers who made these.

Turn Around Bright Eyes

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Turn Around Bright Eyes (It, 2013).


I really enjoyed one of Rob Sheffield's earlier books, Love is a Mix Tape. I like the style of his books, which blend memoir drenched in music with biographical essays about the business. Somehow he turns the very disparate parts into a cohesive story that makes sense, encourages you to laugh, and occasionally breaks your heart. From time to time, his taste in tunes makes me raise an eyebrow, but he always delivers the payoff.

So, if you've been following Sheffield's stories through magazines and articles, or from his previous books, you'll deduce that this story will be set a few years after his first wife's tragic, early death. So, now a widower in New York City, he starts looking for a social life again, and finds that karaoke, of all things, makes him happier than just about anything else, and gives him a great experience to share when he eventually falls in love again. My own experience with karaoke is all wrapped around a girl as well. The difference is that I never really enjoyed it all that much, have an even worse singing voice than Sheffield, and quit doing it after we split up. I might have done a mean version of "The Look of Love" by ABC before the end, mind.

Other topics in the book include a story about a rock 'n roll fantasy camp, featuring a cameo appearance by Micky Dolenz or somebody, and the stranger-than-you-think career of Rod Stewart. I admire the way that Sheffield makes these magazine stories (unpublished, in the case of the camp) seem like part of the narrative of his love story. It's a heck of a good tale, and it keeps me wanting to read more and more from him as we await some new memoir down the line. The happiness and optimism that fills this book keeps it from being the heartbreaker that Mix Tape was, but I like shiny, happy songs as well. Recommended.

I Want My MTV

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of I Want My MTV (Plume, 2011).


I pretty much wanted this book from the instant that I heard about it, and it didn't disappoint. It's a fantastic oral history of the network that every teenager in America, after 1983, cared about at least just a little bit, no matter how much they protest that couldn't have been the case. Dozens of network programmers, VJs, musicians, journalists and managers - Kurt Loder is one of the few insider names who, unfortunately, didn't participate - have all gone on the record to tell the story of the channel's first fifteen years or so, before reality programming and malaise finally set in and music videos were no longer in fashion, left to the internet's tender mercies.

Oh, there is dirt. I ended up feeling bad for Dale Bozzio of Missing Persons. I even ended up feeling bad for Billy Squier, of all people. Somehow, either I had forgotten or I had never seen this one legendarily awful video of him air guitaring his way around some blowsy bedroom through spasms and pants-on-fire issues while wearing a darling ripped pink tank top. Squier thinks it derailed his career. YouTube confirms its awfulness. It's even worse than that Journey video on the loading dock, but I wonder how much damage it really might have done. I'm not even aware of MTV singling it out in the late eighties as an example of a totally awful video. I don't even think that the local UHF "Ghetto MTV" station that we enjoyed, waiting for our cable company to pick up MTV, showed it.

(Actually, I think the story of what was then WVEU-69 would make a darn fine story as well. It started as a music video channel that kept the B-52s, Eddy Grant, and "Big Electric Cat" by Adrian Belew in ridiculously heavy rotation before eventually becoming the home of syndicated action shows like The Champions, UFO, and Spectreman. These days, it's a CW affiliate. Boring! But there was one Thursday night around 1984 where they played the uncensored "Girls on Film" and "China Girl" and some other nudity-packed videos. Legendary. Also, they'd frequently green-screen their VJs on top of the videos like they were pretending to interact with the artists. No way would MTV ever do that.)

Anyway, the book is huge - about 600 pages - and engrossing and funny, and assumes a degree of either reader knowledge or a willingness to pop onto YouTube. Naturally, there are omissions - for all they promoted and used the character, I was surprised that Randy of the Redwoods was glossed over entirely, while, on the artistic side, the prolific director Tim Pope was barely mentioned at all - and, just like the typical offerings on the channel itself, whacking great chunks will drift by in long discussion about artists or genres that won't interest everybody. But whether you're interested in the music or the incredible divastorm of office politics, a tangent sure to please everybody else who could not stand Adam Curry, there is plenty to enjoy here. Recommended for pretty much everybody in America presently between the age of 35 and 45.

Talking to Girls About Duran Duran

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Talking to Girls About Duran Duran (Plume, 2011).

I came into this book with elevated expectations and was mostly let down, but expectations are an unpleasant thing, and the fault of the reader. It isn't right to blame the author for them, but at the same time it is hard to fairly judge a book for what it actually brings when it steadfastly refused to provide what you wanted.

Rob Sheffield's previous book, Love is a Mix Tape, was a brutal, gut-wrenching memoir about the death of his first wife and all the music that they enjoyed together. This time, the approach is so much more scattershot. The chapters are a series of essays built around various pop songs of the 1980s, when Sheffield was in high school and college. In some cases, the musical selection bears just the slightest relevance to what he's discussing, and in others, like the aiming-for-legendary essay about one-hit wonders Haysi Fantayzee, Sheffield goes into full-throttle investigative journalism mode to learn what the heck it was we were listening to at the time.

Briefly, then, Love is a Mix Tape is a book that I might always own. It's that haunting and affecting of a work. This is like popcorn. I enjoyed it while I read it, but whacking great chunks of it are already lost to me, after just about two weeks. The chapter about driving an ice cream truck was funny, and so was the chapter about never, ever winning a match as a wrestler in high school but... well, I guess that one of these days, I would like to read a book about talking to girls about Duran Duran. That still sounds like it could be a blast, while this is just a curiosity that amused but did not resonate. Recommended as a library check-out.

You Never Give Me Your Money

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of You Never Give Me Your Money (Harper, 2010).

I've always been more interested in what the Beatles did after they split up, because the story is just so much more engaging, and so much more of a story. The tales of the 1960s are well-trod and everybody knows them. Trying to figure out how drunk Ringo was when he recorded the Bad Boy LP for Portrait, now that's obscure.

For people like me, Beatles books are frequently very annoying, as they dismiss the Beatles' comparatively more interesting careers into practical appendices, when they're not passing ugly judgments and criticisms about the supposed quality of the material. I'd really love to have a biography of Paul McCartney as detailed and comprehensive as Howard Soanes' Fab written by somebody who actually likes Paul's music a lot. I'm all for objectivity, but opinions really can color a work too much, you know?

Peter Doggett's You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup is the closest thing yet released to what I would most like to read on the subject. Against it, the book is simply nowhere close to being as comprehensive as I'd like. Vast swaths of Ringo's career go without mention, and his falling-out and legal troubles with Mark Hudson are passed over, despite a good deal of ink devoted to George Harrison's apparently similar business failings with Denis O'Brien, which brought down Handmade Films. By comparison, other segments of the story are burdened by an incredible amount of detail. An editor tasked to prune all the stories of Allan Klein and Lee Eastman's legal war would have been welcome.

The spectacularly well-chosen title reflects the book's overall focus. This is a book more about lawsuits than about musical success. As a result, the period of 1970-75 gets the most attention, as it was during this period that the Beatles were still, legally, a unit, and still suing each other. Once each man was no longer signed to EMI through their company, Apple, the detail begins slipping away.

I'm really most impressed by the objectivity that Doggett shows toward his subject. Each Beatle is shown to be a very flawed human being capable of making good music and horrible personal choices. Lennon's career, sadly, was one of incredibly mediocre records. Walls and Bridges was his highlight, the only genuinely terrific album that he ever made, and it is given praise appropriate to its quality. Happily, McCartney's albums don't suffer the general dismissal that Soanes routinely gave them in Fab. The fumbles, like Press to Play, are acknowledged, but so are the triumphs, of which there have been many.

I greatly enjoyed reading this book. I learned a lot, and appreciated the tone and position taken by the author. It's easily among the very top tier of books about the Beatles and highly recommended.

Turn! Turn! Turn! / Eight Miles High

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Turn! Turn! Turn! and Eight Miles High (Backbeat, 2002).

I finally indulged in a little of my inner hippie and read Richie Unterberger's mammoth two-volume chronicle of the folk-rock sound of the sixties, from Newport to Woodstock, during which time David Crosby morphed from chubby-cheeked cherub into Santa Walrus. It is dense, quite scholarly in tone and incredibly detailed in its research. Sometimes, there are issues trying to decipher this, as the author seems hell-bent on including far more material than the subject honestly needs. There seem to be, for instance, several hundred eyewitness accounts of "Bobby" Dylan's electric set at that game-changing Newport Folk Festival. After pages and pages and pages about it, I started to think that Unterberger planned to excerpt from every one of them.

It's absolutely sweeping in its scope, which is definitely going to mean that anybody tackling it is going to find an eye-glazingly dull patch for every one that entrances, and the uniform, uncritical tone doesn't allow projects to stand out as essential listening. I followed along with YouTube when I could, and, honestly, didn't enjoy as much of the music as I thought that I might. This was the music that I loved in high school before I discovered the Cure. All of that band's records have aged tremendously well; Jefferson Airplane's have not. Neither have Buffalo Springfield's.

To be honest, outside of the Beatles, who have always been on my playlist, the music from the period and the genre that I really do enjoy right now is music that I discovered quite some time after my teenage immersion in it: Dylan, the Byrds and, especially, Love, whose Forever Changes remains my favorite album of the sixties. I didn't listen to any of their music in high school, preferring other folkie hippies - add Simon & Garfunkel and The Mamas and the Papas to the names above - whose tunes I just don't care for at all anymore, and haven't for years. I wonder why that is. Anyway, Love doesn't get a very detailed mention, but the Byrds, through their first five albums anyway, form the backbone of the narrative.

This is how it should be; those first five Byrds LPs are really, really good, and I definitely recommend following video of the group so that listeners who find the Byrds' original recording of "Triad," before it was given to the Airplane, a little disturbing on account of the frightening concept of a threesome with Santa Walrus. He was a good-looking fellow, once! And Jim - slash - Roger McGuinn, with those blue granny glasses and piercing stare. I don't know that there was a cooler white man in the sixties.

But the books throw curve balls. Readers will be deeply in California, listening to some sunshiney pop played with a twelve-string, and suddenly Unterberger goes off on a tangent and the next thing you know, you're eleven pages into some treacle about Fairport Convention. Bloody hippies. Recommended anyway.

Rip it Up and Start Again

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Rip it Up and Start Again (Faber and Faber, 2005).



One day, I might figure out a way to write a "review" of something that doesn't have me expressing a quibble at such length that it overpowers and overwhelms my explanation that a book is otherwise good fun and you should read it. That said, Simon Reynolds either doesn't like the Cure - clearly one of the biggest and most influential of the postpunk acts that emerged during the period of 1978-1984 covered in his book Rip it Up and Start Again - or he figures they've been thoroughly covered at enough length by other writers and he didn't need to give 'em much mention here. I went into Rip it Up rather expecting them to be pretty key players, but they get about half a page in a pretty dismissive chapter about goth. He goes on for pages, and I mean pages, about The Pop Group, a band I had never in my life heard of, before mentioning that some of their members turned up in Rip Rig and Panic, a band that I've only ever known as those guys who were on that one episode of The Young Ones singing a song with incoherent lyrics. This isn't, clearly, a book to go into with expectations, because Reynolds is out to defy them.

Even while subverting expectations with every chapter, there is a lot of material here to absorb. England in the late seventies was an incredibly interesting place for new music. John Lydon's Public Image Limited bookends the first half of the narrative, with Malcolm McLaren's various weird and controversial projects weaving through. As kids throughout Great Britain became interested in reggae and dub, Tony Wilson started promoting Warsaw - slash - Joy Division, and synthesizers became inexpensive enough for every third twenty year-old in Sheffield to purchase one, record labels throughout the country - Virgin, Postcard, Factory - were releasing some really fun music.

Tasked with putting all of this into one flowing narrative, Reynolds somehow pulls it off. It seems like he's tied together dozens of disparate styles and movements from all around the country into a genuine and exciting theme of young musicians really trying something new, the desire for innovation in their individual schools being the theme that ties together acts that don't otherwise have anything in common. This feels like a really remarkable achievement when you consider that the American version, which I read, is something like 200 pages shorter than the original edition. Somebody pruned the absolute bejesus out of this book before issuing it here. I had no idea until I went searching for the link on Amazon and saw the outraged reviews.

(In one instance, it's to the book's benefit as far as I'm concerned. Lost to the American scissors is apparently a lengthy chapter on SST Records and industrial acts like Foetus and Test Department. Since I absolutely loathe that stuff, I find it no loss whatever. Errr, that is, I'm incredibly outraged on Reynolds' behalf. Yes. The American cover is depicted above, but clicking it takes you to an Amazon page where the UK edition is offered by sellers at a reasonable price.)

As the story winds its way throughout the day's new music - YouTube providing a fantastic soundtrack to groups unfamiliar or forgotten - it reaches a very surprising climax and conclusion with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, of all bands, wrapping up the story. Reynolds gets to Frankie by way of connections that would impress even James Burke, through McLaren, through The Lexicon of Love, through the Art of Noise and finally to that amazing, mountainous, world-changing, game-changing sound of "Relax." Recommended over my quibbles.

Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth (Feral House, 2001).



I've got a lot of time for bubblegum pop from the sixties and seventies, even if I did not know much of anything about its backstory before reading this very fun collection of essays. There's a lot worse out there than the Monkees and the Banana Splits, that's for sure.

Still, since the Rolling Stone-dominated American media has valued "authenticity" over fun, learning about this music has often required a little work, and Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth does assume a level of understanding about its subject that was sometimes beyond me. I think that I counted three references to the songwriter-producer team of Kasenetz and Katz before any of the writers identified who the heck they were. Jerry Kasenetz and Jeff Katz are only just the people who supposedly coined the term and were behind the 1910 Fruitgum Company and the Ohio Express. Among devotees, this would be similar to reading a book about the Ronettes and the Crystals and not knowing who Phil Spector was when you sat down.

I've been reading a lot of music history books lately - more to come in these pages! - and using YouTube to provide the appropriate soundtrack and fill in the gaps. I really liked this book's approach, using multiple writers and interviews to tell dozens of stories from multiple angles, even if some of the writers' enthusiasm overwhelms their material. A contributor called Metal Mike Saunders could really have tuned it down a notch or twelve, but that's just the dry and boring academic in me talking.

The book goes right up to the end of the 20th Century, even with bubblegum's heyday long behind it. Comic artist Peter Bagge brings the subject to the modern day with an illustrated essay about the Spice Girls and their clones and imitators (B*Witched, Billie Piper), correctly assigning credit and praise to Mel C, who surely deserves it. Did you hear her single "Think About It," by chance? It was only one of the two or three best singles of 2011. Truth, that. Recommended.

Love is a Mix Tape

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Love is a Mix Tape (Three Rivers Press, 2007).


What an absolute heartbreaker of a book! It's probably not possible for a sap like me to talk about it without evoking Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, so I'll get that out of the way. Hornby proved, to thousands of us, that we were not alone in obsessing over music and hoping to bond with some girl over it. Rob Sheffield was one of those who successfully pulled it off, and married a firebrand named Renee thanks to a shared interest in Big Star bringing them together.

Five years later, however, Renee was dead, killed almost instantly by a pulmonary embolism. So yeah, this book gets a little heavier than Hornby.

It's an absolutely engrossing memoir, and I love the way that Sheffield tells it, bouncing around his unlucky past and up through his mostly happy marriage, filled with fights about money and pets and his admiration for everything that Renee does. The circumstances of her tragic death will knock readers on the head as thoroughly as it must have been for him; he tells the story of her funeral that well.

Somehow, the story remains otherwise upbeat, geeky and silly despite the dark incident at the book's core. Sheffield's self-deprecating humor and his and Renee's love of music on cassette keeps the story invigorating and fun. He provides fodder for a hundred arguments among record collecting types - I'm with Renee on XTC, and Sheffield's just flat out wrong about the R.E.M. LP Document - and the feeling of optimism and hope in the book's final sections just made my day. Absolutely readable and compelling, although possibly not for people who never made mix tapes.