Review by New York Times Review
Kurt cobain revered him, as did David Bowie. To Patti Smith he was "up there with the pope." Bob Dylan, gushing about him to his friend Allen Ginsberg, said, "Tell him I've been reading him and that I believe every word he says." Iggy Pop put him in a Stooges song. And Jello Biafra, of the Dead Kennedys, used his methods to help him write lyrics. Yes, across the rock 'n' roll generations, they all loved William Burroughs. For the pre-punks and the punks and the post-punks, he was the literary man of choice. And Burroughs, after his fashion, loved them back. Creakingly he conferred his presence upon them - his mind like a rustling of locusts, his antique courtesies and his psychotic-futuristic worldview. When the Sex Pistols got into hot water over their single "God Save the Queen," he wrote them an encouraging letter. So there's a brilliant idea behind Casey Rae's william s. BURROUGHS AND THE CULT OF ROCK 'N' ROLL (University of Texas, $27.95), which is that if you simply follow Burroughs through the rock 'n' roll years you'll see him achieve a flickering ubiquity - lurking here, eavesdropping there, photobombing the whole parade. It becomes a kind of alternative history. In the 1950s Burroughs is in Morocco, opiated, getting tipped into trances by the Sufi musicians of Joujouka (later to be famously bootlegged by Brian Jones). He pops up in Swinging London: There he is, cadaverously, on the cover of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," right next to Marilyn Monroe. In the '70s he's in downtown Manhattan, living in a converted Y.M.C.A. locker room (perfect) that he calls the Bunker, where Lou Reed and Joe Strummer come to pay court. He relocates to Lawrence, Kan., and the rock 'n' roll acolytes maintain a steady love, through the '80s and into the '90s: Lydia Lunch, Grant Hart, Tom Waits... and Cobain himself, who in 1993 visits Lawrence and presents Burroughs with a book about Lead Belly and "a large decorative knife." The two men talk, and then - with the meeting almost over - Burroughs takes Cobain's tour manager aside and says, "Your friend hasn't learned his limitations, and he's not going to make it if he continues." To the musicians, Burroughs was a touchstone. He had made an anthropology out of his drug habit. His books droned with antinomianism: Time was a trick, language a virus, sex a mistake, blah blah. His "cut-up" technique - slicing up texts and rearranging the slivers - broke down blockages for stalled lyricists. (Bowie regarded cut-ups as "a kind of Western tarot.") Plus he had his own geriatric, conservatively styled cool: "part sheriff, part gumshoe," as Patti Smith described him. His lifestyle had embalmed him. For decades he looked around 62 years old. To Burroughs, the musicians were, if not gods, then in touch with the godly. In 1973 he went back to Morocco for Oui magazine, and watched the Sufis play with Ornette Coleman: "Magnetic spirals spun through the room like clusters of electronic bees that meet and explode in the air releasing the divine perfume, a musty purple smell of ozone and spice and raw goatskins." Interviewing Jimmy Page for Crawdaddy in 1975, having just attended a performance by "the Led Zeppelin group," Burroughs finds the guitarist gratifyingly in touch with his magical side, "aware of the risks involved in handling the fissionable material of the mass unconscious." Burroughs respected this: "As another rock star said to me, 'YOU sit on your ass writing - I could be torn to pieces by my fans, like Orpheus.' " Ian Curtis, the Joy Division singer who killed himself in 1980, was a Burroughs fan. From this searing light, the SUN AND EVERYTHING ELSE (Faber & Faber, $28), Jon Savage's new oral history of Joy Division, we learn that Burroughs's "Naked Lunch" was on Curtis's bookshelf, along with J. G. Ballard and the poems of Jim Morrison - it was all sustenance, food for what Curtis called "my own esoteric, and elitist mind." (In Rae's book, the two men meet - awkwardly - after a show in Belgium in October 1979.) Curtis and Joy Division have been thoroughly historicized - in books, documentaries, biopics - so one of the more striking things about "This Searing Light" is how fresh and necessary it feels. An oral history can be an evasion of authorial responsibility. Not this one. Savage's book, exquisitely organized, will drive you back into Joy Division, into the uncanny processes that created (and then destroyed) the band, into the everyday dourness and the soaring, transcending solemnity, into the interstellar shimmer that the producer Martin Hannett put around the massive chords of "Transmission." "Ian just looks straight into the camera while he's smoking," says the photographer Kevin Cummins, examining the contact sheet of a Joy Division shoot from 1979. "It's the eyes, this slight translucency of his eyes looking into the camera that sends a chill through people." Joy Division was an initiation. Afriend of the band describes the experience of listening for the first time to a newly released "Unknown Pleasures": "Ian comes on, Track 1, Side 1, and he says, 'I'm waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand' - that's it, you're in it straight away." Is William Burroughs in more fun in the new world: The Unmaking and Legacy of L.A. Punk (Da Capo, $28)? He IS indeed. This is an anthology of essays and testimonials from the players of Los Angeles punk rock, curated by X's John Doe with Tom DeSavia. Burroughs flits into an interview with Henry Rollins, who cites him as part of the canon of cultural expansion he discovered after a couple of years singing for Black Flag - discoveries that were then handed on, in altered form, to Black Flag's slavering and frequently violent audience. "I think Black Flag was one of those bands that just kind of ramrodded eclecticism into the brainpan of a lot of their fans," Rollins muses. "I think it did have some results, and it did help." "More Fun in the New World" includes an enjoyably bitchy essay by Terry Graham, long-suffering drummer for the voodoo-punkers the Gun Club. It wasn't easy, apparently, to be in a band with Jeffrey Lee Pierce: "Back in Los Angeles, now without a bass player and our guitar player ready to jump ship, Jeff's hairdo grew into a mushroom cloud of possibilities. Who to play bass? Jeff even suggested a second guitarist - himself. New songs and fashion cues were demanded by Jeff to keep Jeff interested in Jeff." The T.S.O.L. frontman Jack Grisham rather stirringly laments his collapse into undistinguished and non-Dionysian middle age, his vanished capacities. No longer can he walk "into a room where the awe-flash cannons its way to the cheap seats." "Rock 'n' roll fame," warns Grisham, with Father Time nodding gravely behind him, "is like a credit card with an interest rate that climbs past prime - your prime." The highlight of the book, however, is the essay written by Maria McKee (and DeSavia), once of the heavily hyped, somewhat punkified country rock outfit Lone Justice: Her twist on the old, old music-biz story is all the more affecting for its sensation of long-delayed anger. " The questions and implications were mounting: Did I look as good as I did a year ago? Maybe I put on a few pounds? I'm going to have my photograph taken, and we're going to film some videos. Then that tension begets an eating disorder.... Yes, a textbook ... cliché, but less spoken about and less discussed back then." Why are there two new books about Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young? Because this is one of the great rock 'n' roll stories. It's like a Greek myth. At a house in hazy-lazy Lau- rel Canyon - some say Mama Cass's place, some say Joni Mitchell's - in the gilded summer of 1968, three voices convene and mingle like chemically boosted zephyrs. David Crosby (ex-Byrd) brings hairy-chested hippie attitude, Stephen Stills (ex-Buffalo Springfield) a wiry soulfulness, and Graham Nash the eerie pop plainsong of his band the Hollies. Crosby and Stills sing for Nash, who listens carefully and then joins in - and the sound they make, the three of them in harmony, is so pristine, so blithe, so immediately, effortlessly and preposterously beautiful that they fall about laughing. And basically - barring some great songs, the addition of Neil Young, a couple of spikes of glory and a few million dollars - it's all downhill from there. A supergroup is formed. The pure voices acquire a bottom end: the rustically funky rhythm section of Dallas Taylor (drums) and Greg Reeves (bass). The world has its hour, stadiums are filled, and from that wavering, immaculate high we sink lower, lower, we voyage into dissonance, out of the '60s and into the '70s, into cocaine wallows, smutty money and elephantine ego-war. CSNY: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (Atria, $28), by Peter Doggett, is, I think, better written than crosby, stills, nash & YOUNG: The Wild, Definitive Saga of Rock's Greatest Supergroup (Da Capo, $30), by David Browne. (Why wasn't one of these books called "Voyage Into Dissonance," or "Elephantine Ego-War"?) Doggett is particularly good on Neil Young, who maintained his status in the CSNY setup via the dark arts of ellipsis and absence, and by conjuring a powerspace around himself with the clanging electric wand of his guitar. "If he spoke," Doggett writes of Young's onstage presence, "it was in a laconic mumble that it would take audiences another year to recognize as irony." And then, at the end of the set, Young would play "Down by the River," suddenly seizing the show "like a gladiator lifting his victim's head." Superb image. Browne, on the other hand, is very good on the tribulations of David Crosby - his addiction, imprisonment, reentry and subsequent elevation as a battered talisman of something-or-other. Of burnout survival, maybe. "At the Catalyst in Santa Cruz, fans screamed 'We love you!' and 'Welcome back!' Inaloose shirt that helped hide his prison weight gain, Crosby tried to make light of his fall from grace." The fall is generational, the fall is musical, the fall is chemical. "It was cocaine," Doggett writes, "that would make slaves of an entire musical community, until the whole industry ran on cocaine time, cocaine etiquette and cocaine ethics." They did record some tremendous songs, CSNY - their sense of harmony could be hard and sharp as the stroke of an ax - but what finally obsesses us is their inability to keep it together, to hold that revelation for more than a wobbly Woodstock-like moment. "Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young," as Doggett notes, "have spent approximately two of the past 50 years as a functioning band, and the other 48 years fending off questions about why they are no longer together." The legend of Wu-Tang Clan, another supergroup, is rather different - birthed in antagonism rather than angelic congruence. Once upon a time on Staten Island there were two lethally rivalrous housing developments: the Stapleton Houses and Park Hill Apartments. Enter the farseeing, turbo-imaginative Robert Fitzgerald Diggs, a.k.a. RZA, who in 1982 convened a gathering of M.C.s representing both developments. Together they would - as Will Ashon writes in CHAMBER MUSIC: Wu-Tang and America (in 36 Pieces) (Faber & Faber, $24) - "put their differences behind them in order to conquer the rest of New York and then the world." The legend is of course hyperbolic, as Ashon explains: Of the eight assembled M.C.s, only one - Ghostface Killah - was from the Stapleton Houses. The point, however, is that Wu-Tang Clan was formed. And then continued to form. J. R. R. Tolkien would have recognized the genesis of this crew, and the subsequent elaboration of the Wu-Tang universe - the hissing, ringing swords, the mystic clouds, the smoky samples, the gallery of bellowing personae - as a considerable feat of "sub-creation": building worlds in imitation of the primary act of the Creator. But Wu-Tang were not into Tolkien: They were into chess, Hong Kong samurai movies and the Supreme Mathematics of the Nation of Gods and Earths (an offshoot of the Nation of Islam). Ashon's book is a sequence of 36 linked essays/digressions exploring the economic, intellectual, metaphysical, cultural, political, emotional and musical context of WuTang Clan's debut album, "Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)." It is a work of gung-ho breadth and surging critical electricity; I was happily reminded of Ian MacDonald's brilliant Beatles book, "Revolution in the Head." The second chapter, or chamber ("Don't Cry"), traces the passage through black music of a particular tearing, high-frequency sound - from the "gruff overblowing" of Illinois Jacquet's saxophone in 1942, through the raptures of the famed gospel shrieker Archie Brownlee and the screaming of James Brown, all the way to its deployment as a sample on the Wu-Tang track "Protect Ya Neck," where the producer, RZA, turns it "into something else altogether, some kind of cold, magic-lamp sliver of beauty.... He thins the sample until it sounds like a note bowed on a single string, then takes the first interval and loops it round so there's no start and no finish to the phrase." (Incidentally, this is exactly what it sounds like.) The third chamber, "Rules of Engagement," is a genealogy of the Wu-Tang M.C.s through their various incarnations. It is also a poem: "Robert Diggs begat Rakim Allah begat Prince Rakeem begat the RZA.... Russell Jones begat Ason Unique begat 01' Dirty Bastard begat Big Baby Jesus begat Osiris.... Dennis Coles begat Ghostface Killah. And it is said that none could be iller." RZA, apart from his other attainments, was a music industry visionary. He sold Wu-Tang Clan as an entity to a label called Loud, but also got solo deals, with other labels, for the individual Wu-Tang M.C.s. It was a marketing strategy, Ashon argues, straight from the street: "Having created a frenzy around this supergroup, he sold it cheap in order that, like Ready Rock [crack], he could snap off chunks and resell them all over again (that is, the individual M.C.s from the Clan). The consumers of these offcuts (the major labels) then had to sell on the product they'd bought to the general public, in a manner similar to street dealers further down a cocaine supply chain." (The other end of the chain, as it were, from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.) If that's too audacious a bit of cultural studies for you, you might enjoy instead Ashon's analysis of the breathing patterns of 01' Dirty Bastard: "ODB likes to alternate between short, staccato phrases and small breaths and then long, complex two-bar wailing excursions at the end of which he hard-sucks a lungful before continuing." You can hear ODB when you read that - his whooped inbreaths, his quaking vibrato like a beam of sound hitting a disruptor. A peep in the index and - yup, there he is: William Burroughs, from whom apparently there is no getting away. Burroughs has run spectrally but stickily, like a thread of ectoplasm, throughout this column, and in "Chamber Music" he appears during a discussion of Masta Killa's rap in "Da Mystery of Chessboxin'." Having referenced the lines "This technique attacks the immune system / Disguised like a lie paralyzin' the victim," Ashon can't resist invoking the old professor of language-as-a-virus himself: "Burroughs sees language as malevolent, much as in Masta Killa's rhyme." Did Masta Kilia regard language as a virus from outer space, though? Maybe he did. Maybe Burroughs sits immortally in the upper levels of Wu-Tang, wreathed in the freemasonry of the most sorcerous hiphop ever made. Maybe there are more than 36 chambers to this thing.... James PARKER is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 9, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Has there ever been another band quite like Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young? Fifty years ago this year, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash released their eponymous album. The following year Neil Young, joined them for Déjà Vu. Two books Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: The Wild, Definitive Saga of Rock's Greatest Supergroup by David Browne and Crosby, Still, Nash & Young by Peter Doggett chronicle the glorious, complicated, and extremely messy story of these four mercurial, highly talented men, a tale that reaches from the Whisky a Go Go in West Hollywood to recent group tours.Even though each artist sang in his own distinctive voice and had a idiosyncratic songwriting style, what set the band apart, ironically, was their unified sound: lush harmonies, instrumental brilliance, and classic songwriting. Browne refers to the band as undergoing rock's longest-running soap opera, while Doggett notes that together both iterations of the band released just 22 songs during their brief heyday, and most of them have become rock standards. Both books examine in much detail the convoluted careers of all four men, including their solo works as well as their pre-CSN&Y days, such as stints in Buffalo Springfield, the Hollies, and the Byrds. Both describe their rich hippie milieu, from the short-lived utopian paradise that was Laurel Canyon to Woodstock, and portray the lively cast of characters they met along the way, including Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and James Taylor, to name but a few. For better or worse, they embodied their generation, its idealism and its excesses. Both books are worthy in their own right. No need to choose. Get both!--June Sawyers Copyright 2020 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
As Doggett (You Never Give Me Your Money) notes in this appreciative, attentive history of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the 1960s group spent roughly "two of the past fifty years as a functioning band" and the other 48 years "fending off questions about why they are no longer together." Doggett zeroes in on that brief, musically fruitful period when David Crosby (who came from The Byrds), Graham Nash (of The Hollies), Stephen Stills and Neil Young (both of Buffalo Springfield) united to create chart-topping mellow folk-rock fronted with an "unearthly vocal blend." In between tracking the ups and downs of the band's relationships, particularly Young's peripatetic unpredictability and Crosby's weaknesses ("instinct, ego, vulnerability, and cocaine"), Doggett delivers a solid rundown of its artistic highs (the release of the 1970 Déjà Vu album) and more frequent lows (constant infighting and Stills's arrest for narcotics possession). The group disbanded in 1970 but came together for a 1974 reunion tour, when they realized that performing to "Woodstock Nation" fans at least "guaranteed them a healthy income" on the nostalgia circuit. (Young recalls "the four of us and our handlers dividing up the loot and finding out exactly how much we made" after a Filmore show.) This honest, occasionally laudatory history will delight its baby boomer audience. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Longtime Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young (CSNY) fan and music journalist Doggett (You Never Give Me Your Money) focuses on the formation and early years of "America's first rock supergroup," the unstable union of Graham Nash, formerly with the Hollies; David Crosby, Byrd member; and Stephen Stills and Neil Young, who played and fought together in Buffalo Springfield. Four started as three: Crosby, Nash, and Stills discovered their exquisite harmonizing at the home of Joni Mitchell, Nash's girlfriend at the time. They released their first album in 1969, then added Young to the lineup in time to perform at Woodstock. Using his interviews with CSN (but not Y) and friends and foes of the band, and incorporating those with material from the band's archives and secondary sources, Doggett writes of egos amped up on drugs, fame, and rock star privilege, who made beautiful music and spoke to and for their generation. The author's disdain of Young is evident, but the behavior of the other three is portrayed just as honestly and unapologetically, and the casual sexism of the time is not soft-pedaled. VERDICT For fans of the group and 1960s California rock lore; read with David Crosby's Long Time Gone (with Carl -Gottlieb) and Jimmy -McDonough's Shakey.-Liz French, Library Journal © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An enthusiastic history of one of rock music's most significant supergroups.Rock journalist Doggett (Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone: 125 Years of Pop Music, 2015, etc.) traces his protagonists from their origins through their early success in the Byrds (David Crosby), the Hollies (Graham Nash), and Buffalo Springfield (Stephen Stills and Neil Young). As the author shows, the Los Angeles rock scene of the late 1960s was a meeting place for nearly everyone who came to prominence in folk or rock. Prime among them was Crosby, who strutted around in a cape and whose counterculture credentials included introducing the Beatles to LSD. After one night at a popular music venue, Crosby, Stills, and Nash came together for a stoned singing party that gave birth to a new sound. With the addition of Young and the band's appearance at Woodstock, the legend was underway as well as the melodrama of fights, breakups, reunions, and excess. Doggett frankly admits that he is a fan of the group, and he traces the band's career from concert to concert, recording session to recording session. In addition to providing the stories behind the better-known songs, the author spends plenty of time on their lives offstage, including their liaisons with the likes of Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins. Throughout, Doggett does a solid job differentiating among the four members of the group, each an interesting, if not necessarily likable, personality. Young gets most of the blame for the group's breakups, though with four enormous egos, everyone receives a due share. The author backs it all up with voluminous documentation, including interviews with all the participants and ample quotations from contemporary reviews of almost every record and concert, including the members' solo projects. The narrative is eminently readable, with few dull passages, even when the protagonists are sulking during one of the band's numerous fights.A must for CSNY fans and anyone who remembers the era when it ruled the pop charts. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
