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 Publisher's Weekly Review
In this excellent oral history, Savage (England's Dreaming) chronicles the short life of Joy Division, the band that married punk's anger with hypnotic bleakness. Joy Division was born of northern English postindustrial stoic despair; Manchester, where the band was formed, had fallen from industrial might to blighted "concrete gulags," Savage writes. The dozens of interviews with band members, friends, family, and hangers-on tells how singer Ian Curtis, bassist Peter Hook, guitarist Bernard Sumner, and drummer Stephen Morris were inspired by the Sex Pistols' infamous 1976 Manchester show ("learn three chords, write a song, form a group, that's it," Sumner says). While Joy Division's performances were characterized by the crowd's punk energy and Curtis' possessed dancing, his haunting lyrics-inspired by atrocity-laden military texts, J.G. Ballard, and William S. Burroughs-made them stand out in the British music scene. Savage doesn't shy from the band's obsession with Nazism (the band's name was taken from a brothel at a Nazi concentration camp, and according to music writer Bob Dickinson, "they were haunted by the ghosts of Nazism and by what it did to Europe"). Just as the group achieved notice, Curtis's epileptic seizures worsened, and he killed himself in 1980. His widow Deborah Curtis notes, "People admired him for the things that were destroying him." Savage wonderfully captures the spirit of the band and an era. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Joy Division, a post-punk band in Manchester, England, in the late 1970s, achieved cult status in the UK and Europe and was about to embark on a U.S. tour when lead singer Ian Curtis died by suicide in May 1980. Savage's (England's Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock) riveting oral history draws heavily on candid interviews with the surviving band members-Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, and Stephen Morris-along with Curtis's wife, the group's manager, and journalists and friends. The result is a revealing portrait of four young musicians and the dynamic music scene in Manchester. Curtis and the others were influenced greatly by the Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop, and the -Velvet Underground, as well as the writings of William S. Burroughs and J.G. Ballard. Joy Division's music was described as dark, despairing, and menacing, yet their concerts were mesmerizing and usually garnered rave reviews, and Curtis was a charismatic performer. In the late 1970s, he began having epileptic seizures, sometimes on stage, and his mental health declined. The final chapter offers a powerful account of his last days and the shock of his death. VERDICT Joy Division recorded only two albums but deserve to be better known. This title will appeal to anyone interested in punk, post-punk, and 1970s rock music.-Thomas Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, PA © 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
A deep dive into one of rock music's most path-breaking bands and cautionary tales.The story of Joy Division has become post-punk folklore. Launched in 1976 in Manchester, a grimy and declining British industrial city, the quartet masterfully harnessed the Sex Pistols' energy, Krautrock cool, and Doors-ish pretension. Commercial success and critical acclaim arrived fast, but the band ended with singer Ian Curtis' suicide in May 1980, on the brink of its first U.S. tour. Veteran U.K. music journalist Savage (1966: The Year the Decade Exploded, 2015, etc.) was on the scene at the time, and this oral history reflects a level of access and attention to detail worthy of the band's importance, including band members Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner, and Stephen Morris, producer Martin Hannett, record-label impresario Tony Wilson, designer Peter Saville, and more than two dozen scenesters, photographers, and writers. (Curtis' contributions are mostly taken from newspaper articles; commentary from his estranged wife, Deborah, comes mostly from her own memoir.) Savage's quote-selection process emphasizes the youthfulness and naivet of the band, who were holding down day jobs, flirting with fascist imagery, and barely competent as musicians when they began. Their much-imitated innovationse.g., integrating electronic drums or having bass carry the melody lineemerged as the happy accidents of unschooled 20-somethings. Naivet cut both ways, though. Everybody involved confesses being at a loss to address Curtis' worsening epilepsy and depression and paid little mind to his lyrics, which plainly read as cries for help; shamefully, they hastened Curtis to a gig just after he was hospitalized for a suicide attempt. "People admired him for the things that were destroying him," his widow says, and the agonizing closing pages reveal how tragically blinding that admiration was.Neither easy hagiography or melancholy Curtis elegy, but a sober and illuminating account of a brilliant band's too-short career. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
