CONVERSATIONS WITH TOM PETTY. By Paul Zollo. (Omnibus Press, $24.95.) Admit it: You, too, have had the fantasy where Tom Petty becomes your best drinking buddy. Over a few rounds of Pabst Blue Ribbon, you tell him that "Damn the Torpedoes" is a classic document of American rock; he confesses to you that the Traveling Wilburys were a better idea in theory than in execution. But don't hate Paul Zollo, an editor at American Songwriter, for fulfilling the dream first and confirming what you've suspected all along: that Petty is an undeniably fascinating guy to talk to. Sure, there is some dead air in these interviews, but it's abundantly offset by Petty's indelible stories of his Florida upbringing by a father who liked to poke alligators in the eye for fun, and the time the supposedly laid-back Petty became so frustrated with a recording session that he punched a wall, shattered his fist and spent eight months retraining himself to use his left hand. And the chapter devoted to Petty's memories of a bassist who eventually died from a heroin overdose may be the most chilling deglamorization of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle since "Sid and Nancy."
DAVE ITZKOFF
PASSION IS A FASHION: The Real Story of the Clash. By Pat Gilbert. (Da Capo, paper, $18.95.) In 1976, the rock critic Charles Shaar Murray reviewed a Clash concert for New Musical Express: "They are the kind of garage band who should be speedily returned to their garage, preferably with the motor running." Within a few years, the Clash would emerge as one of the greatest bands ever. Gilbert, a British journalist, interviewed all the members of the group - including Joe Strummer, who died in 2002 - and he tells their story straightforwardly and well. Strummer was "an affable, lovable, often unfathomable lunatic." Mick Jones was less than affable, but he was the pacifist; he detested the violence of the Clash's fans. Paul Simonon was the cool-looking, unmusical bass player - Gilbert calls him the Stuart Sutcliffe of punk rock. Topper Headon was a terrific drummer with a terrible heroin habit. "We knew there was a problem in Holland when Topper said he needed a mirror to go onstage with," Jones says. "So we gave him a big wardrobe mirror and he laid it down flat." The Clash - "a strangely honorable outfit," as a friend of the band aptly puts it - combined a sincere contempt for right-wing politicians with a not-so-sincere contempt for rock stars. One musician complains, "They were saying one thing to the media, but behind the scenes they were saying, 'We want to be the next Rolling Stones.' " And they were.
DAVID KELLY
GUIDED BY VOICES. A Brief History: Twenty-One Years of Hunting Accidents in the Forests of Rock and Roll. By James Greer. (Black Cat, paper, $16.) It's the rare rock biography that can casually toss around words like "abstemious" or "heteroclites" without sounding pretentious, and, alas, this isn't such a book. The central appeal of Guided by Voices, the Dayton, Ohio, indie rock group that dissolved at the end of 2004, has always been the blue-collar aura of its frontman, Robert Pollard, who over the course of two decades compulsively recorded dozens of albums of surreal pop gems, none of which sold much more than 60,000 copies. But in this authorized account, Pollard just seems like a jerk - a frustrated former athlete who drives drunk, makes impetuous personnel changes in his own group and alienates any other band that comes within 50 feet of him. Unfortunately, Greer, a former Guided by Voices bassist, proves to be too perfect a Boswell, endlessly forgiving Pollard's personality flaws, obsessing over the band's drinking habits and excretory functions, and making generally outrageous claims in overwrought language ("you could make the case that his body of work in general is one long screed against the dying of the light"). If you really want to understand this band, just buy a copy of their album "Bee Thousand."
D.I.
NĖRD GIRL ROCKS PARADISE CITY: A True Story of Faking It in Hair Metal L.A. By Anne Thomas Soffee. (Chicago Review, $22.95.) As a junior at William and Mary in the late 1980's, Soffee saw a photograph of Guns N' Roses and knew she had to get out of Virginia: "They were what was missing from college radio - rawness, stupidity and filth." Dreaming of becoming a female Lester Bangs, she moved to Hollywood, "the Mecca of metal," where she proceeded to write a little and drink a lot. The author of "Snake Hips: Belly Dancing and How I Found True Love," Soffee didn't find true love in Los Angeles, but she did find sex, drugs and bad rock 'n' roll. She wound up doing publicity for "lesser gods" - for example, Vinnie Vincent, who at one time was a member of Kiss but, more important, "ghostwrote all of Joanie and Chachi's songs on 'Happy Days.' " She also learned important lessons at a workshop for publicists: "Encourage your bands to bathe before interviews. Good-smelling bands always get better press." This memoir is funny, trashy and smart, and comes recommended by no less a personage than Cynthia Plaster Caster, who's always had an eye for talent.
D.K.
RAISING HELL: The Reign, Ruin, and Redemption of Run-D.M.C. and Jam Master Jay. By Ronin Ro. (Amistad, $24.95.) It's one thing for this book to feature the name of Jam Master Jay in its title; quite another for it to open with a lurid retelling of the late D.J.'s unsolved murder. Because the story that follows is really about Joseph Simmons ("Run") and Darryl McDaniels ("D.M.C."), two working-class kids from Hollis, Queens, who became the first rap artists to have a platinum album, the first to have an endorsement deal with Adidas and arguably the first to legitimize hip-hop in the minds of rock 'n' roll fans. While Ro (author of the far superior Death Row Records chronicle "Have Gun Will Travel") writes without much flair and often repeats himself, there's an underlying "Citizen Kane"-style tragedy that emerges as Run-D.M.C.'s early success gives way to paranoia, creative paralysis and bankruptcy. That covers the group's reign and ruin, but their redemption seems to be limited to a couple of TV commercials and a tour opening for Aerosmith. And despite his sensationalistic prologue, Ro has no new information on Jam Master Jay's killing - just the same shrugs and speculations that have surrounded it for nearly three years.
D.I.
CLAPTON'S GUITAR: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument. By Allen St. John. (Free Press, $25.) According to St. John, Wayne Henderson is "perhaps the world's finest guitar maker." Henderson, who is in his early 60's and is reportedly a master bluegrass guitarist as well as a master builder, lives and works in a southwest Virginia town named Rugby (population 7). He wants every one of his acoustic guitars to be the equivalent of a vintage Martin, and he doesn't mind keeping the rich and famous waiting. Eric Clapton commissioned a guitar in 1994; 10 years later, he still hadn't received it. Why not? "It's the Squeaky Wheel Factor," St. John says. "If you want a Wayne Henderson guitar, you have to prod, cajole, remind, bribe, persuade, wheedle, prompt and entice him. Eric Clapton had done none of that." To speed things along, St. John became the official liaison between Henderson and "the Guitarist Formerly Known as God." Some of "Clapton's Guitar" will appeal mainly to fret freaks, but St. John, who was Christopher Russo's co-author on "The Mad Dog 100: The Greatest Sports Arguments of All Time," has created a memorable portrait of a likable, self-effacing craftsman at work. St. John writes, "Some people simply have the gift of being able to make a piece of wood sing." He doesn't come right out and say it, but you know he's thinking it: Henderson is God.
D.K.
AND THEY ALL SANG: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey. By Studs Terkel. (New Press, $25.95.) In the introduction to his latest indispensable oral history, adapted from interviews he conducted for his radio show on Chicago's WFMT, Terkel laments that "many names will be unknown to younger readers." He's probably right: aside from a 1963 chat with an unconvincingly modest Bob Dylan ("I'm just sort of trying to find a place to pound my nails") and an eerily prophetic conversation with Janis Joplin ("I'm not going to sing 'Down on Me' for 20 years"), Terkel's dialogues with more than 40 legends of jazz, blues, folk and classical music may not immediately resonate with the "Total Request Live" crowd. But his singular gift for bringing his subjects to life in their own words should strike a chord with any music fan old enough to have replaced a worn-out record needle. Miss this volume, and you will miss Louis Armstrong's stories of halting a civil war in Africa, Leonard Bernstein's (favorable!) comparison of the Beatles to "Porgy and Bess," and a charming little anecdote about how Enrico Caruso once ended up in jail ("I just pinched her fanny a little").
D.I.
DA CAPO BEST MUSIC WRITING 2005: The Year's Finest Writing on Rock, Hip-Hop, Jazz, Pop, Country, and More. JT LeRoy, guest editor. Paul Bresnick, series editor. (Da Capo, paper, $15.95.) Explaining how he selected the past year's best music writing, LeRoy, the hustler turned writer, says, "Snark is the new black, and that is why I didn't pick any of those articles." Actually, some of the best pop music is snarky, as is some of the best music criticism. So instead of snark we get a semi-inane interview with Bob Dylan ("You can say a lot if you use metaphors") and a completely inane one with Camille Paglia ("Beyoncé strikes me as a very centered personality"). Dave Eggers makes an unconvincing case for the significance of the 80's Scot-rock band Big Country; Robert Christgau contributes an interesting piece on "postmodern minstrelsy studies"; and Greil Marcus cogitates, as only Greil Marcus can, on Buddy Holly's "embodiment of ordinariness." And, of course, there's an article about the ghost of Kurt Cobain, containing this sentence about the alternative-rock scene: "It was a complex, long-percolating mixture to so suddenly spurt up in a single super Venti cup of Seattle sludge." You can say a lot if you use metaphors.
D.K.
THE DEVIL'S HORN: The Story of the Saxophone, From Noisy Novelty to King of Cool. By Michael Segell. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Would someone please forward Segell the memo that states that books about jazz are supposed to be academic and soporific? His freewheeling tribute to the instrument of Coltrane, Hawkins and Rollins begins with a wild retelling of the life of its 19th-century inventor, Adolphe Sax, who endured disfiguring accidents, assassination attempts and a cancerous tumor on his lip so that his namesake horn might outlive him. It's a story that could easily be its own book (or at least a movie starring Tom Hulce), but the rebellious, obsessive spirit of Sax figures prominently throughout Segell's explorations, as the author encounters modern-day disciples who have dedicated their lives to perfecting saxophone mouthpieces or archiving out-of-print saxophone music and recordings. He even attempts to learn the instrument himself from scratch. Some of Segell's journalistic wanderings (like his brief stint performing in the Purdue University marching band) feel frivolous, but based on the exuberance that is everywhere to be found in "The Devil's Horn," it's clear he grasps the jazzman's dictum that it's the journey, not the destination.
D.I.
ALIEN ROCK: The Rock 'n' Roll Extraterrestrial Connection. By Michael C. Luckman. (Pocket Books, paper, $13.95.) Did you know "flying saucers from other worlds dropped in unexpectedly" at Woodstock and Altamont? Luckman, the director of the New York Center for Extraterrestrial Research, knows this and plenty more about "a cosmic connection that is musically driven." Apparently, Elvis Presley's birth was "marked by the appearance of a mysterious blue U.F.O."; while "most people don't get an opportunity to view a single U.F.O. . . . Elvis saw more than his share." A naked John Lennon shouted at a flying saucer hovering over a Manhattan penthouse, "Stop, take me with you!"; Lennon later told Uri Geller he had seen little "buglike" people in the Dakota. (Geller has physical evidence of this encounter, "but is reluctant to have it tested by a laboratory.") Furthermore, in 1968, "Keith Richards reported seeing several daylight discs." The author cautions skeptics that "alleged drug use by rock stars" does not explain these intriguing events. There's much more: David Bowie "became increasingly concerned that aliens might be trying to control his thoughts." Jimi Hendrix said he came from Mars, and Sun Ra said he was from Saturn. Michael Jackson, who naturally gets a chapter all to himself, goes them one better: he's from a planet called "Capricious Anomaly in the Sea of Space," located "just beyond our solar system"; also, "Elizabeth Taylor has stated on more than one occasion, 'Michael Jackson is an extraterrestrial!' " Cat Stevens - a k a Yusuf Islam - says he was "sucked up" by a flying saucer, which, not surprisingly, spit him back out. Sammy Hagar claims aliens "downloaded everything that was in my head" (probably not a lengthy procedure). Finally, Jerry Garcia "admitted that for two days he was locked in a 'tremendous struggle in a sort of futuristic spaceship vehicle with insectoid presences.' " In an author's note, Luckman writes, "The ball is now in the media's court." Message received: the truth is out there.
D.K.
MUSIC LUST: Recommended Listening for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason. By Nic Harcourt. (Sasquatch, paper, $16.95.) Since 1998, the British transplant Harcourt has been the musical director of Santa Monica's KCRW radio station and the host of "Morning Becomes Eclectic," the influential show whose programming can ricochet from psychedelic folkie Devendra Banhart to glam-rock gods T. Rex to the chanteuse Nellie McKay, sometimes in a 15-minute span. So it's a bit of a shock to see Harcourt's name attached to this conventional collection of playlists and album endorsements. In bite-size chapters, he rapidly surveys categories from big band to Afro-beat to punk rock, but he's rarely given room to unpack the full breadth of his musical knowledge. (Surely he has more insightful things to say about the Who than that they "helped create rock and roll myths that are still retold today.") There are occasional flashes of Harcourt's wit and taste - guides to the album artwork of prog-rock painter Roger Dean and bands named after food - but these are too few and far between. And I'll never forgive him for omitting Bob Dylan and the Band's "Basement Tapes" from his list of the 20 best double albums.
D.I.