Joy Division's "New Dawn Fades" Music Review.

Recorded exactly a year after another Manchester band's dramatic post-punk debut, "Shot By Both Sides" by Magazine, had influenced its guitar riff, "New Dawn Fades" closes side one of 1979's Unknown Pleasures. Like John McGeoch and Barry Adamson in Magazine, the guitar-bass pairing of Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook combines into a disorienting tune that marries anthem with dirge. For just as Howard Devoto dampened enthusiasm in one Mancunian line-up, so Ian Curtis does here.

His lyrics, like Devoto's single, reflect the disillusion following punk's initial burst and fade. They share the same image, too: a weapon, a victim. Curtis intones at the end of verse one: {I took the blame./ Directionless so plain to see,/A loaded gun won't set you free./So you say." Stephen Morris' drums clang away in Krautrock mechanical style. Hook's bass keeps descending as Sumner's guitar ascends. Martin Hannett's icy production layers this in backward tapes from the band's "Insight" to open "New Dawn Fades" with a disembodied whir. Over and over, the guitars sound like dim chimes.

At nearly five minutes, this feels epic. The band locks into its groove, as Curtis shifts in verse two to another perspective. {An angry voice and one who cried,/'We'll give you everything and more, The strain's too much, can't take much more.' Oh, I've walked on water, run through fire, Can't seem to feel it anymore.} However, much as listeners may hear this a a harbinger of his suicide the next year, there is a respite. For Sumner stops the ascent, and ends by a brief guitar snippet with a hint of hope.

Image. This was submitted to Spectrum Culture 8-13-15 for staff pick #8/top ten Joy Division songs.

P.S. We each first had to send our own top 15 picks to be culled, in reverse order. These are mine. 

15. I Remember Nothing
14. Wilderness
13. Shadowplay
12. Atrocity Exhibition
11. Insight
10. Candidate
9. Interzone
8. Disorder
7. New Dawn Fades
6. Colony
5. Novelty
4. Transmission
3. Isolation
2. She's Lost Control
1. These Days

No "Love Will Tear Us Apart." Great song but it's been ruined for me by too many radio plays.

Michael Moynihan + Didrik Soderlind's "Lords of Chaos": Book Review

This book has sparked much attention, considering its volatile subject. Reading it at a distance of 15-20 years from the events, the subtitle "the bloody rise of the Satanic metal underground" betrays the gist and the gore of the account. That is, it examines the media role in "satanic panic" while it responds to it. Michael Moynihan, joined by Didrik Soderlind, extracts the roots of the black metal scene, especially in Norway. The first three chapters range widely, with surprising scholarship sprinkled into the narrative, with engaging metaphors and clever asides. Entertaining and educational, this start bodes well to expose this scene for everyday readers, who likely lack knowledge firsthand.

The authors then delve into the "bloody" events. They preface their manner of investigating this milieu in an "unflinching fashion" with a reminder some may overlook. Twice on pp. x/xi they remind us. "It is not our job to pass judgment on our subjects; we expect our readers to have the intelligence to do that for themselves." And, noting our our world needs "dangerous ideas more than ever," even if it "may not need the often ill-formed and destructive ideas expressed by some of the protagonists" in this study, nevertheless "we felt all along that this is an issue for the individual reader to decide." Intriguingly, my public library system shelves this in the Young Adult musical section.

While the central characters are well-known within the small black metal community, the authors enrich their presentation with scholars and observers less expected. For instance, Jacob Jervill, a Christian minister, laments the decline of attention paid to evil within the State Church of Norway, and he analyzes the vacuum left by the diminished force of that tradition in a system where affluence, conformity, and comfort spark not contentment but unrest among some growing up feeling outsiders.

Likewise, in Ch. 10, critiques by the members of Ulver, by Simen Midgaard, and by Pal Mathiesen deepen one's understanding of the forces tempting youth towards acts of destruction and sounds of despair. Varg Vikernes, as a lightning rod for such energies, typically avers: "I never say anything to 'provoke,' but I 'provoke' intentionally to say something." (qtd. 162) His pronouncements fill many pages of this work, and the authors editorialize vis-a-vis his "ex post facto revisionism" his habit to frame previous remarks in light of his present concerns. These do evolve or shift, as the Nordic concentration among this set turns from a youthful dalliance or dance with the "adversary" to a more folkish and saga lore-inspired Odinist or Ásatrú focused revival of the suppressed old beliefs. (213)

Michael Rothstein speaks of the willingness of certain believers to then turn to Thule and UFOs as extended forays into Northern occultism. These searchers then find authorities, however discredited, to support their worldview. (188) So, Lords of Chaos (the title taken rather anti-climatically from a clique of Ft. Myers, Florida, teens led by one of their number who called himself God) serves too as a reminder of how alternative and fringe movements gravitate towards earlier conspiracies and cabals.

For this, Hendrik Mobus' interview offers the most in-depth example. Calling himself a scapegoat like a "modern Loki," (292) he and Varg (p. 162) justify a shared ambition to recast black metal in a "militant heathen" (303) mode of attack. In retrospect, the authors place the satanic adjective of their subtitle in a time period late in the 20c, waning more than waxing by the time of the 2003 2nd ed.

But as Vikernes rationalizes, the dramatic claim of why medieval stave churches were burned across his homeland echoes, even as the mindset of the perpetrators may move with the times, new and old. "Show Odin to the people and Odin will be lit in their souls." (96) Many may scoff at this confident proclamation, but a few do seek out heathen ways as more invigorating than Christianity's claims.

P.S. This book while footnoted could have been improved by an index. The chapters skip about and transitions diminish as the pages add up. It aims for an international coverage but this weakens the later sections. As it progresses, it's as if journalism has been inserted or recycled. Women barely appear; this may not be the fault of the authors, but it symbolizes a lacuna worth questioning. The clip art and illustrations may lighten density but it lessens the impact as not all are necessary. It could have listed a discography, to supplement URLs for indie labels and told more about the music itself from leading bands as well as their deeds, crimes, and punishments. A needed if now-dated resource.
(Amazon US 1/4/17)

Randal Doane's "Stealing All Transmissions": Book Review

 
How did the late '70s arrival of The Clash to a nation they loved and who loved them, in Randal Doane's phrase, jostle the privileged perch granted FM free-form radio and long-form rock journalism in American popular culture? Doane attempts to answer this complex topic in a few pages. He matches an affection for what was pitched as "the only band that matters" with a professor's determination to apply theory and scholarship about popular culture to the band's American impact.

FM radio crackled with battles between disco and new wave, Steely Dan or the Eagles. Guitar heroes Van Halen threatened Boston and Kansas. Pre-packaged rock radio in syndication, and then MTV, took advantage of alternative rock trends. The Clash and other punks rallied to break down barriers on air. Doane's examines, circa 1978-81, a brief success by the underdogs against the suits. Even if The Clash was signed to CBS. That band marketed its message as widely as possible. The result (as this reviewer can attest) is that many younger listeners picked up guitars and books, inspired by not only the "molten" noise of early import singles, but the Clash's lyrical range and cultural references.

A dean at Oberlin College, Doane combines academic critique (and its concomitant tendency to lapse into seminar-speak) with livelier glimpses from his formative years as a fan growing up in Stockton, California. He enriches these youthful reminiscences with an imaginative journey. He invents a quest narrative, following the figures narrated over four sides of London Calling as that album's storyline follows dreamers and schemers from the band's hometown across the sea to success or failure in Manhattan. (I note as an aside that the first box-set retrospective issued by the band is called Clash on Broadway, a location which fits both London and New York City, even as it emphasizes the latter.)

Doane straddles the boundaries between fan and critic throughout this study. He analyzes the music industry as a Clash historian, and as an often discrete investigation into the state of American rock radio in the 1970s. He documents the struggle on FM stations between AOR, disco, hard rock, and the new wave upstarts. These were often marketed by Sire Records and eager labels, some indie, some subsidiaries of the majors, who allied with the bands which claimed to challenge the system. Of course, they also aspired to chart success and lucrative tours. This bifurcated presentation, by not only the bands in their clash of ambitions but Doane's staggered structure of his chapters between those on The Clash and those on radio, weakens this as a cohesive thesis. However, considering particular chapters apart from this diffused presentation, Doane's attempt to analyze The Clash within an American moment as the 70s leapt into the 80s provides a useful perspective of the band's impact. It draws upon books by Clayton Heylin and Jon Savage, integrating their research with his own predilection for New York City area rock stations. This case study looks into how they did or did not play the Clash, and rivals or colleagues from both local and British punk and new wave scenes.

This book is enhanced by backline roadie Barry "The Baker" Auguste's introduction. He conveys the changing fortunes of a band gradually if seemingly suddenly, for one behind the scenes, lifted from clubs to theaters to arenas by its third album, London Calling. This book does not delve very far into the mid-1980s phase of the line-up. Instead, Doane sticks to the first three albums, and he shows what worked and what did not on the various domestic and import versions of their incendiary self-titled debut, and the more, uh, diverse, follow-up, Give 'Em Enough Rope, produced by Blue Oyster Cult associate Sandy Pearlman. As for the sprawling triple disc, the what to me felt the never-ending experiments of Sandinista!, brisk coverage is given. Doane marvels at it, as diehard fans tend to do.

Tellingly, he offers no real attention to their more mainstream album, the last one with their steadiest line-up, Combat Rock, and none to the album made by Joe Strummer, Paul Simenon, and new recruits to replace Mick Jones and Topper Headon, the widely disdained Cut the Crap. It would have been intriguing to follow the fortunes of the band: their tours, their radio play, and their LP sales. Certainly one wonders how The Clash, once they topped the charts, dealt with their long-term prospects. It's a relevant example of the music industry's own determination to encourage or ignore a band. Yes, the band's saga during their global roller coaster of the 1980s has been covered before. But Doane stops the story early on, preferring to end while the band anticipated greater fame in the U.S. and beyond.

Given this wistful denouement, Doane's study offers a muted celebration and a cautionary tale of how rock radio and promotion U.S. markets tried to fend off, ignore, or embrace us, then-scattered and once few, fans of punk and new wave. Even if the academic tone slows his pace, Doane places The Clash within their attempt to break into the American market. Best of all, his diligence and scrutiny  reminds readers about when such inventive music, combative attitudes, and intelligent lyrics (well, some of the time) mattered for millions of fans growing up then. Today, the hit-and-miss history of the one punk band which made it big as arena rockers endures. And, professors grow up to be fans, or in my case, reviewers. For, the Clash were the first "real" band I ever saw, in March, 1980, at the Santa Monica Civic. They arrived hours late, but nobody (except for punctual me) seemed to mind. (Spectrum Culture 9-7-14)

Dave Laing's "One Chord Wonders": Book Review

How punk was deployed as a reaction against what Dave Laing calls the "gigantism" of AOR, pop and progressive rock is familiar. Laing, an English researcher, chooses a more academic approach. He scrutinizes how late-1970s British punk applies to cultural critique. He incorporates insights from Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva. This reprint of Laing's 1985 semiological analysis precedes Jon Savage's first-hand account, England's Dreaming (1991). Introduced briefly by The Adverts' guitarist-singer, T.V. Smith, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock  takes its title from that band's song, a tribute to D.I.Y. spunk.

Unlike Savage or Smith, Laing distances himself as a scholar. He finds predecessors for punk's nexus within pop culture. In its collision of the authentic with the commercial, punk's predicament echoes that of British folksong proponents in 1899 and London pub-rockers in the earlier 1970s. Movements seeking a return or revival of "basic" music confront those who capitalize on its inherent potential for profit. Craving exposure, musicians often must capitulate to the system. Rejecting one tradition, innovators resurrect another, back-to-basics. Johnny Ramone, cited here, embodies this choice. "We're playing pure rock'n'roll with no blues or folk or any of that stuff in it." 

Instead, punk promoted "artiface, exaggeration, and outrage." One chord wonders turned an insult into a celebration. Distorted sounds and mangled meanings created a "frontal assault" on triple-disc or concept albums of the mid-1970s. However, Laing reports how this music reworked old lyrical themes. Us vs. The Man repeated. Narcissism remained along with protest. Lacking a danceable element, punk stressed exclusivity and negativity. Failing to break out in 1977-1978, punk, Laing asserts, faded rapidly. He notes how broadcasters resisted its disruption and preferred easier listening.

In chapters titled "Formation," "Naming," "Looking," "Listening" and "Framing," Laing dissects the  strategies claimed by punk. Drier at times, if supplemented by data, the middle section of his book muddles along. Ivory tower jargon slows its pace. It revives in its later stages, where a short "picture section" shows how punks adopted their public roles to what Laing defines as the movement's "provisional discursive formation." That is, punk offered positions to adopt, roles to play and rules to adhere to. Laing presents publicity shots, professional photographs taken in concert, and vamping  poses as proof. The last category portrayed one trap punk fell into. Originally seeking to provoke or to subvert, earnestly posing punks "allow themselves to be consumed as pin-ups of sex objects." 

The final chapter, "After," adds an intriguing analogy. Laing notes that prior to punk, new bands felt making an album was equivalent to making a full-length film. Such an artistic effort seemed to overwhelm. Therefore, professional producers and studios had to be recruited and funded. By contrast, Laing reasons, punk was akin to creating a magazine or a paperback. Cassettes around 1980 began to change the way music by amateurs was distributed. Laing contrasts the cost of a hardcover book to that of a photocopy, as fans began to join with musicians to reproduce their efforts cheaply. 

Enriching this study, Laing refutes the claim that most punks came from a working-class background. He compares their class and education to that of beat groups between 1963-1967. He finds little difference in these categories. Such statistics deepen the value of this compact book. It may serve well in seminars or by scholars accordingly, as a critical contribution to Popular Music Studies. 

Finally, Laing places punk within intellectual contexts. Benjamin and Adorno looked at Dada and at the "shock-effects" of radical art, as predecessors to punk, in Laing's estimation. Similarly, he ends with Barthes and Kristeva. They located within the avant-garde "the site of the return of the repressed." Some punks embraced mid-1970s semiotic possibilities of confusion. Fragmenting, discontents chose other fashions, sartorial and musical, to emulate by the decade's end. Diehards chose "anchored meanings" of mohawks, Oi and slogans embroidered across leather jackets. 

What united punk, for one or two years in the later 1970s, was the tension between realistic lyrics decrying conformity and repression and the sonic jolt that undermines musical predictability. Full of paradox, punk in Laing's judgment produced a problem. It set out as a rock alternative, but it had to stay recognizable as rock, to bring in an audience, to sustain a career and to meet industry demands. (Spectrum Culture + Amazon US 5/4/15)

Alex Ogg's "Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables: The Early Years": Book Review

Intended as liner notes for the 25th anniversary of this punk album, Alex Ogg's project had to wait five more years for what turns into a longer book on a thirty-eight minute 1980 LP. Legal disputes over songwriting credits, added to the protracted resentment between singer Jello Biafra and his bandmates, notably guitarist East Bay Ray and bassist Klaus Flouride, tested the patience of the author and the Dead Kennedys, past and present. This story, told efficiently by a veteran chronicler of punk, reveals that the American underground in the late 1970s could match the best of the British punks when it came to political commentary paired with feisty music. Furthermore, unlike so many righteous punks before and after the DKs, this San Francisco outfit retained its sense of humor. However, as an Angeleno, growing up a near-contemporary of the band, I challenge Ogg's claim that this was the peak of proto-hardcore. To me, the band's debut resembled the blur and buzz of the Germs' first LP. I'll admit that unlike that short-lived L.A. band, the DKs outlasted Reagan's first term. Ogg as the subtitle shows narrates the start of it all, but he stops very soon after the album's release and their first tour.

How the DKs scaled the summits of the American independent label punk scene so rapidly, Ogg reminds readers, can be credited to their discipline. More on the intellectual influences informing the band members might have answered the question of how they managed so quickly to create two classic singles, "California Über Alles" and "Holiday in Cambodia". Within this milieu, few dared to roam beyond a few "provocative" topics. Most punk bands preached against racism, some against sexism, many against conformity, as expected for spiky non-conformists to conform.

Biafra, raised in Boulder, Colorado, and apparently embittered at delivering pizzas to smug lefty college kids his own age (he dropped out of an equivalent institution early on, the University of California, Santa Cruz, tellingly), decided to widen his target range. He spoke for an overlooked echo-boomer generation, coming of age during Watergate, too young to be hippies, but who had to listen to those not much older ramble on over and over about how great it was then and how dismal it all turned out by 1980, as youth woke up from years of Carter's malaise on the morning after, snuggled or smothered by Reagan's revived or reviled "values".

Although now a balding, gray statesman in cahoots with the state's prison guard union, cutting deals with corporate sponsors, while managing in his return to rule to convey a pale-Green image in keeping with his earlier gubernatorial reign, Jerry Brown for the late 1970s represented to this band a "Zen fascism". Risible though this seems to this Californian critic in retrospect if not to Ogg, who takes this (semi-)seriously from the mouth of Jello, this song roused "the suede denim secret police" who were bent on arresting "your uncool niece". Evoking Nazi imagery if spinning the shock value trafficked in such regalia by certain punk colleagues, "Come quietly to the camp/ You'd look nice as a drawstring lamp" conveys its own uneasy message. Biafra's message, within the jerky anthem's campy medium, either strengthens or weakens its lyrical conceits. The song lives on, covered often.

Its follow-up, "Holiday in Cambodia", has garnered fewer cover versions and parodies. It's a darker song, as its Pol Pot theme dramatizes, and it's more disturbing. It castigates those smug Boulder or Berkeley collegians, those who curry favor with bosses, those who pretend solidarity with the masses. It contrasts this mindset with what would happen when the self-proclaimed progressives of the West go East: "Well you'll work harder with a gun in your back/ For a bowl of rice a day/ Slave for soldiers till you starve/ Then your head is skewered on a stake." Ogg skirts extended exegesis of these two songs, assuming that readers as listeners probably know them well, but he does take pains to, in true rock journalist fashion, tell us about the vintage tube microphones used to capture this song's roar.

Without the churning, Echoplexed, surf-tinged guitar of East Bay Ray, Klaus's doom-laden bass, and drummer Ted's bashing backing, these songs, for all their lyrical baiting, would not have succeeded. Ogg credits Jello's voice as a "human theramin" and attributes a Kabuki-like ranting and wailing for impact. Many listeners to the band, myself included, have found Biafra's self-consciously theatrical delivery trying, but in live shows as on record, the DK's sought to stand out from punk yammering.

Boosted by Geza X's production of "Holiday", these singles remain arguably the band's best vinyl moments. Geza X (member of the L.A. band the Bags, on production he crafted early releases from Black Flag, Weirdos, and the Germs, as well as San Francisco's Avengers) labored to make this song wail, so it's a shame that Jello's wish for him to produce their first album was rejected by the rest of the band. To me, this decision dulls the sonic power of Fresh Fruit, and it feels muffled as a result.

Recorded for $10,000, the album appeared in 1980 on the British indie label Cherry Red. Ogg reminds readers that between the Dickies signed by A+M in 1978 and Husker Du by Warner Brothers in 1985 (and by then, they were not really part of this scene anymore), no American underground band had been issued on a major label. The DKs started Alternative Tentacles to issue their records.

Distributors IRS had balked, due to a distant Kennedy acquaintance, from releasing the album, for the barbed band name (amazingly or inevitably, preceded by a Cleveland band who then declined to go on with the same moniker) led to many double-takes and dead-on-arrival rejections by the record industry. Tracks included hints of musical influences as diverse as Duane Eddy's guitar, Buddy Holly's vocals, MC5's slogans, and Sparks' lyrics, attesting to the band's affection for their childhood idols. It ends with a throwaway cover of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman's "Viva Las Vegas", made famous by Elvis Presley. True to the LP's prickly, brooding, snarling vibe--part Travis Bickle, part Mothers of Invention--the production was credited by the band to the friendlier of engineer Oliver DiCicco's two cats, Norm. Neither Lester Bangs nor Robert Christgau welcomed the record; the latter critic disdained its "Tiny Tim vibrato". Biafra sneers throughout the entire record, true, but this "sustains" Ray's guitar tremelo; it suits the frenetic delivery Jello Biafra adopts for his stage persona.

The original band was already splintering during the making of the record, with second guitarist and oddball even by DK standards 6025 soon departed. A new drummer stepped in--later to claim some of those songwriting royalties which have earned the ire of Jello vs. Klaus and Ray, one learns if in diplomatic fashion via the long-suffering journalist Ogg who patiently hears each side out as they argue. This underlying subplot, still rankling these early band mates today, provides a telling coda to the ambitions of many in the punk era to make a career out of their passion, vs. the compromises the original lineup fended off in their attempt to remain independent of corporate tentacles and truisms.

"Yakety Yak" compiles quotes about the band and album by celebrities in and beyond the rock scene. A closing chapter by Ogg's co-author of The Art of Punk, Russ Bestley (reviewed by me 22 October 2012), titled "Grafical Anarchy" shows how collaborator Winston Smith (who legally changed his name to that Orwellian protagonist) conspired with Biafra to create collages inspired by Situationists.

The LP cover never got the reproduction Judith Calson's San Francisco Chronicle photo deserved. This was taken during the "White Night Riots" following the short sentence handed down to Dan White after his "Twinkie Defense" for the shooting of Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone in 1979. The front cover shows three police cars on fire; the back cover shot of a hokey music combo led to lawsuits by one of its members, so this image was defaced or replaced on later pressings. This pattern would repeat during the band's career, although Ogg avoids much mention of more litigation.

The political subtext of the band gains some attention by Ogg, but how the members gelled to create these singles and the album from a perspective tinted by their predecessors from the 1950s and 1960s whom other punks might have disdained needed more elaboration. Bestley gives a nod to this crucial continuity as context links what the San Franciscans were doing, with jarring détournement (literally "re-routing): cut-up montages from ads, photos, and pamphlets arranged to shake the viewer up. Smith's Fallout Magazine helped rally recruits to the DK cause, but its contents and range do not earn the coverage that could have explained how printed texts and posters widened the band's DIY appeal. Certainly AT's mail order reach, and diligent product placement in indie record stores, accounted for the international audience the band garnered early on, into their heyday, and up to today. Given Bestley and Ogg's knowledge of these multimedia within political punk, more coverage was needed.

Jamie Reid for the Sex Pistols and Gee Vaucher for the English anarchist collective Crass served as counterparts in this guerrilla art form of collage as cultural critique. This packaging boosted the Dead Kennedys' impact. The band and Smith wrapped its records in striking artwork and album inserts. Among punks today, their red-and-black logo endures, but Ogg and Bestley glide past how those two symbolic colors might or might not stand for the band's principled assertion of anarchy. The band's commitment to radical politics as well as pranks and poses needed more elaboration.

Yet, as Biafra (an eventual Green Party presidential campaigner, he came in fourth in a nine-way race for S.F. mayor in the fall of 1979 to replace Moscone) reminds Ogg, Jello mused on what the DK's might achieve: "imagine if Crass was funny". The DKs were. Whether this ensured their success or failure, you are left to ponder, given the eclectic evidence Alex Ogg, Bestley, Smith, and photographer Ruby Ray present for our inspection. (6-13-14 to PopMatters + edited to Amazon US)

Mark Cunningham: "Horslips: Tall Tales": Book Review

At last, musicians played traditional tunes in a lively, innovative way that made an Irish boy feel "proud" rather than "pathetic". So Maurice Linnane recalls when he heard Horslips as a boy on the radio, in this large-format biography of this pioneering 1970s Celtic rock band. Mark Cunningham, himself a musician and producer, integrates reminiscences from each of the five members, along with archival material from photos and media. This handsome design intersperses thoughtful analyses and entertaining stories into editorial commentary on gigs, albums, critical reception, and career moves. 

Having grown up with Beatlemania, as well as an eclectic exposure to Irish music and culture, four of the five musicians first met in 1970 to mime a "suitably hairy" band for a Harp commercial. Three of them worked in advertising and promotion; the real band they then formed was determined to remain in Ireland and to retain control of not only its music but marketing and presentation. Bassist Barry Devlin defines this "funky ceilidhe" approach to "deconstruct tunes and use them as the basis for new material"; Violinist, guitarist, and concertina player Charles O'Connor agrees that the band would "transfer melodies" from traditional sources. By the end of 1971, they electrified dancehalls in more ways than one. Appealing to the emerging glam rock movement, they dressed in leather, snakeskin, and even curtains from Clery's. Suitably, they also blended a bold visual look with fresh sounds.

Horslips may have confessed no "cultural responsibility to incorporate the traditional context; it just evolved" as keyboardist, piper, and flautist Jim Lockhart avers. But it captured attention soon, as the band knew not only how to work the media but to work themselves in an intelligent, disciplined fashion. By 1972, their self-released debut, Happy to Meet, Sorry to Part made them Ireland's first home-grown rock success. Follow-up The Táin mingled Yeats' treatment of Cú Chulainn with Old Irish sources, bypassing Thomas Kinsella's translation as "too recent" for lyricist and percussionist Éamon Carr. These "indigenous" inspirations mingled with superheroes and Marvel Comics for Carr, a poet who also began to sprinkle into songs his verse patterns filtering both the Beats and Basho.

Turlough O'Carolan's life story flowed into their third album, Dancehall Sweethearts, but that and its overproduced, more mainstream if lackluster follow-up loosened the intricate fit of rock with folk which had made their first pair of LPs critically and popularly successful. An acoustic Christmas-themed album mid-decade revived their spirit, enthusiastic reception on tours at home and overseas increased, and by 1976, their arguably most consistent and most powerful record emerged. A teenaged guitarist, soon to be known as The Edge, attended his first rock concert at Skerries. He was so impressed by Horslips that he resolved to join classmates who became U2. A triple-movement "Celtic symphony", the Book of Invasions managed to slip a stanza stolen from Swinburne and what Carr calls a "Bowie-esque whiff of alienation" into a confident examination of origin myths.

The Famine and immigration continued as themes in Exiles (1977) and The Man Who Built America (1978). The latter used Mici Mac Gabhann's memoir Rotha Mór an tSaoil to ground its narrative. Reflecting this novel mix of Irish heritage and American reinvention, Devlin and O'Connor appear to have sought a polished, slick  musical delivery, in an era when arena rock and punk competed for loyalty among fans split over the merits of progressive rock's concept albums and mythic lore. The other three musicians preferred to ground a "stadium rock sheen," as guitarist Johnny Fean puts it, within a firm foundation balancing an accessible radio-friendly sound with their obvious strength, as shown best in Táin and Book, of a carefully constructed interplay of Irish narrative and trad tunes.

Devlin reminds readers of the band's lucky inheritance. They grew up exposed to both rock and Irish music, and they learned as they grew older from traditional players. Unlike their English peers, Horslips had no need to create a song-cycle about elves: "We're pinching from a culture that's alive."

Cunningham's book understandably relies on storytellers who regale us with life on the road as well as in the studio. While cultural examination is unsurprisingly understated compared to tall tales (with their Irish license plates and accents, they get mistaken for subversives in a jittery Troubles-era London and Wales, as well as for the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany), a reader nonetheless gains some sense of how Irish identity infused their music and lyrics, and their concerted effort to retain an image that would appeal to all in their divided homeland as well as far afield, during a tumultuous era. One senses that, as Devlin produced some of U2's early demos, those four Dubliners learned some crucial lessons about a similar ambition to stand for an island which united disparate factions.

This underlying legacy endures. Despite the band's weariness by their last studio album 1979 to reconcile its image as "conceptual rockers" into a "post-punk landscape" U2 would capitalise upon, their live act ensured their enthusiastic reception past their breakup in 1980. Cunningham documents the subsequent careers of the five men in a variety of the fine arts, their legal battle over reclaiming rights to their songs, the remasters and reissues of their twelve albums, museum exhibitions on their Irish impact, and their eventual reunions from 2009 on.

A couple of slips show: a transcription has Devlin remarking on an "alter" boy and elsewhere crediting the short story "The Trusting and the Maimed" to "Flannery O'Brien" rather than O'Connor, which nonetheless might have made Myles na gCopaleen chortle. But overall, research results in a welcome survey of the band's Irish impact. A thorough discography is appended; supplemental sources are listed (including my Estudios Irlandeses 3 [2008]: 132-142 article). The band's genial discussion, enriched by those who join them here, creates an enduring appeal. This recommends Tall Tales: The Official Biography to those who will be quite happy to meet them, and surely sorry to part.
[Estudios Irlandeses 10 (2015): 160-161] (Also on Amazon US 3-15-15)

Mark Blake's "Pretend You're in a War: The Who & The Sixties": Book Review

While Mods and The Who inevitably join together, the band's ties to modernism, in art and culture, have not received the in-depth attention they merit. Mark Blake incorporates many years of interviews with Pete Townshend, John Entwistle and Roger Daltrey, adding material gleaned from multimedia and previous books on the band. As an editor at both Q and Mojo magazines, and a biographer of Queen and Pink Floyd, Blake presents a solid study. While thwarted by the tendency of Townshend to tell one story to one journalist and another to another scribe a few years later, and while complicated by the reticence of Entwistle, the demise of Keith Moon and the determination of Daltrey to get his side of the record straight (all four sometimes at odds with other bandmates and witnesses) the band members invigorate Blake's narrative. They were a fractious four who insisted on autonomy even as they combined their talents to make rousing music. This offers a readable and accessible consideration of the band's origins, its tensions early on and its struggles as fame took over.

Blake treats the formative years of the band, their early musical ambitions before the band and their early members, especially drummer Doug Sandow, who were edged out before Moon was recruited. The detail here surpasses other treatments I have read, so those less obsessed by history may find the research too meticulous. Fans may argue for its necessity; it exposes the Who's deep London roots.

Townshend's tutelage at Ealing Art School under Gustav Metzger, known for action painting, and Roy Ascott, known for cybermetrics and confrontation, earns welcome inclusion; I wish more had been given over to these impacts on the guitarist's formative years. Pete embraced a liberating lifestyle along with the music. He plunged into London's swirl of art, books, and films as part of this cultural upheaval. Again, his prescient immersion into home taping and mechanical recording techniques is notable, and deserved more depth here; Pete mastered intricacies of production rapidly.

Despite some production oversight being left to the band's managers, the spirited pair of East End-bred Chris Stamp and Oxbridge-tutored scion and heir to a classical music pedigree, Kit Lambert, Townshend took much of the band's control away from Daltrey. Relegated to the mike, as his confidence grew, Roger became a powerful, more nuanced vocalist. This took years, as his wish to guide the band competed against Townshend's technical skills and formidable ego. But Daltrey by decade's end channeled Pete's lyrical gifts and vulnerable sensibility into his own cocky, strutting and preening presence. The book's title comes from Pete's attitude when the Mod models took the stage.

While their managers contended, while the guitarist and singer bickered and fought for leadership, so the stoic bassist, John, and the manic drummer Keith, sought their share of the Who's spotlight. The band ascended quickly into the top ranks, but preceded by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Kinks, The Who had to catch up to talented peers and rivals. The Kinks especially competed with The Who sonically and lyrically from the mid-1960s on, and Blake documents this contest well.

The mythic Mod connection was pushed more by management and media, as Townshend longed to speak to his fans from that cohort, but the Mods themselves never lasted very long. "'A powerful, aggressive little army' with its mysterious dress code, music, dances and semiotics" sums up the unity of The Who and Mods. Yet equally crucial were the art school lessons Pete learned from modernism.

Mentors such as Ascott, Metzger and Helmut Gorden (the most eccentric of many contenders) merit mention, and Blake notes their suggestions to an eager student. Pete merged pop art into the classical tastes of Lambert. He integrated Henry Purcell and music-hall into three-minute ditties, often singles, which conveyed "black humour and sexual perversion" as "cameos, essays of human experience."

The "visual gimmick" accidentally invented at Harrow's Railway Hotel (evoked lovingly) when Pete smashed his guitar led to a routine. Keith destroyed his kit, Roger lassoed his microphone, John stood stock still on the side. Pete loved and hated this. His frustration at rock-star poses led to his own changes, in his lyrics, his music, and then his attire, as he chose before decade's end his workmanlike white boiler suit and Doc Martens as onstage fashion, contrasting with his three colorful bandmates.

Keith, under Lambert's sway, found pills, expensive champagne and excess inviting. John succumbed to drink and drugs, if in a quiet, self-critical manner. His musical talents shone in the band, but not enough compared to the main songwriter. John longed for his ideas to be accepted more by the band, which under Pete's dominance roused Roger's understandable resistance. Unlike The Beatles circa 1966, one senses The Who did not close ranks out of friendship  so much as necessity, when songs had to be assembled, and tours had to be endured, to pay the bills that the lavish lifestyles of the band required. Blake leaps from the band members getting by in flats or living with their parents to mansions, luxury autos (more than one meeting a quick demise), and conspicuous consumption with barely any transition. Perhaps the band's entry into the upper ranks of British rock happened that fast.

What wearied The Who, barely into their career, was the pace they had to keep to stay on the charts, on tour, in the studio. 1965-1966 as recounted here resembles the last stages of The Beatles. At least, unlike that foursome or the Stones, the machinations of Allen Klein to take over The Who's finances were fended off by Lambert, Stamp and Townshend. Yet, the band by the close of 1966 lacked continuity or consistency in their releases; the experimentation of Jimi Hendrix, Cream and Pink Floyd signaled an era far from Mods vs. Rockers. Pete's "story-songs" struggled at times to chart.

By then, the drug culture which consumed the Mods had soured for Pete. He distanced himself from the scene, even as he loved spending money and acting out his artistic ambitions. This bifurcation helped his music, however. His decision to turn to Meher Baba is well-known, but it did, as Blake shows, ease Pete's egotistical compulsion. He appreciated the awareness of the damage done by his insistence on pushing limits and refusing to listen to the wisdom of his comrades. That drive enabled Townshend to rise above his peers and to reign as a young eminence, but it also aroused his disgust with the contradictions a rock celebrity's career represented, if that star spoke for pure intentions.

Meanwhile, John Entwistle connived, sometimes with a Keith bent on hotel-room smashing, while Roger gave up Dippity-Do. He groomed a leonine mane atop his buckskin vest and rugged, tanned physique. Among a homely band, Roger stood out. Despite or due to his short stature, he grew into the role that Pete and he had worked out, as the confident voice for Pete's torments and triumphs.

Blake regales readers with many familiar stories. Pete's versions, whether set down in his 2012 autobiography or as venerable, conversational anecdotes, can differ with each other as well as with bandmates. Roger gets his own words in, with similar contradictions now and then. The truth of Keith's legendary Holiday Inn debacle in Flint, Michigan, or what song Jimmy Page did or did not play on, may never be known, but it's fun following the narratives as these moments enter rock star lore. Blake strives to keep straight who said what to whom and when. This accuracy enhances this book's value. (A valuable archive, although it may have appeared too late in 2014 for consultation, is not cited: Mike Segretto's The Who FAQ. Otherwise, Blake blends smoothly many standard sources.)

The albums themselves gain short shrift; track-by-track commentary is not Blake's intent. He emphasizes the band's nature more than their recordings, although Lambert's suggestions get due credit, as does the input of Roger, John and Keith to what seems soon after the start Pete's band.  Blake depicts vivid scenes: touring with Herman's Hermits, sparring at Monterey with Jimi Hendrix, making money from and losing even more for Track Records. The "financial profligacy" of the Who grew as troubled, feckless Lambert gave in to the addictions which would eventually consume first Keith and much later John. This hedonism met with Roger's disdain and Pete's ambivalence. Amidst hippie excess, the guitarist "felt like a workman in a lunatic asylum, come to fix the plumbing." But both Pete and Roger celebrated the onstage energy of the band, which reached its peak, in the studio and in concert, as ornamented productions on Tommy warped into massive assaults, performed live.

Even muddy Woodstock worked, despite three-quarters of the band accidentally on acid. Shunted aside to open their set at 4 a.m., luck came their way. They started "See Me, Feel Me" as dawn broke.

Blake ducks out as the story gets good, for the decade ended before the band sustained or perhaps surpassed its 1969-1970 breakthroughs in albums and on tours. Blake provides a brief coda summing up the next decade, but one closes this narrative hoping for the author to return, and to follow this with a complete look at the next seven or eight years. The book ends in 1970, not 1969. But as many claim along with the author, "The Sixties" did not begin until nearly mid-decade. That period of creativity and chaos arguably ended nearly ten years after The Who as we know them assembled, to make their unsteady climb to near or at the top of British rock. There, they won their war, amid very strong competition, during what remain the best years of that music, and more, as this book proves. (In edited form, to Spectrum Culture; as is above, to Amazon US 3-1-15.)

Pete Townshend's "Who I Am"" Audiobook Review

I heard this all the way through the acknowledgements, where Pete thanks his editors for assisting in cutting this down from 750 to 450 pages. As it is, it certainly abounds in tiny detail, drawn from Townshend's archives and journals kept for many years, as well as, I am sure, anecdotes with which he has regaled many fans for decades. I liked his genial presence, and listening to his London accent energizes what can be at times a slow narrative. He tends to chuckle or chortle a lot as he tells his tale. This can annoy sometimes, as when one sounds self-satisfied for being clever, but it also can be endearing. Over 17+ hours spent in Pete Townshend's company, not only The Who come alive, but his childhood, art school in Ealing, his schoolboy friendship with John Entwistle, and the hidden truths behind a troubled upbringing and his parents' own discontent. All this looms in his adulthood.

It's rousing to hear of Keith Moon's "liquid drumming" and John's "loquacious bass" driving the band in their Maximum R+B period, capped by Roger Daltrey's "howling like a black prisoner." Certainly, Pete loves his bandmates, and those who preceded The Who get their fair mention too. So do hundreds of others, as mentors, rivals, managers, staff, engineers, producers, friends, lovers, and fans, as Pete takes pains to credit many who made him and the band able to pursue "the best day job ever."

He shares the stories one expects. But some of the albums with the original lineup get but passing mention, such as "Sell Out" and "Who By Numbers;" much attention on the other hand is expended unsurprisingly on "Tommy" and "Quadrophrenia" in their best-known as well as subsequent iterations in concert, in film, and as musical theatre. In fact, I lost track of their variations, as on these and other solo and band projects, Townshend keeps returning to them as his skill and the technical equipment evolve, and he immerses himself perhaps like none of his peers into the possibilities of computing.

This leads him into one well-publicized run-in with the police, and he explains his side carefully. You will come away more clearly understanding what Pete set out to investigate, and the mistake he made. He also is forthright about his long addictions, his troubled marriage and affairs, family life,  and his determination to assist those less fortunate by charities and performances. This material again can weigh the telling down in its pace, but it's only fair to him that he balances his most famous period with his later life. Still, for all his enthusiasm about boats, he offers a lot of minute description.

All in all, I enjoyed hearing this, and I probably would not have if another reader recited this book. You get a truer sense of the intellectual, irascible, and introverted sides of this performer, who out of the limelight appears to have relished solitude (in his many homes), but who for the sake of his band mates and his fans (and perhaps The Who's accountants and labels), made the shows and tours go on. (Amazon US 4-21-15 and 6-26-15 to Audible.)

Son Volt's "Trace": Music Review

						I asked the record store clerk what was playing, the fall of 1995. She answered with a mumble. "Some Dolt?" "Sun Bowl?" What was she saying, I wondered? I looked confused, so she repeated the name, this time pointing to the cover. Son Volt's debut, Trace, sounded familiar even if the band was new to me. It seems that I had heard that singer before. I vaguely recalled that after Uncle Tupelo fell apart, both of the singer-songwriters were forming bands. Jay Farrar was recording his own album.  So, this was it. "I like it," I told the clerk. She shrugged. "Me too, but his voice gets to me after too long." Farrar's former partner, Jeff Tweedy, brought the sunnier side to their pioneering alt-country-punk blend. He played McCartney to his co-singer and bassist's Lennon. No surprise that Tweedy's new lineup, Wilco, continued the mix of rock but with lighter tunes, along with Americana and, later, electronics. Son Volt, its name combining two historic studios, hearkens back. It roams up and down alongside the Mississippi River, near Uncle Tupelo's hometown of Belleville, Illinois. It may be a looser version of a concept album, loneliness on a muddy bank. Its forty-two minutes alternate rock crunch with honky-tonk swagger, and feature desolate ballads followed by slamming power chords. It's starkly produced by the same producer who worked with Tweedy and Farrar before and after their new band's debuts, Brian Paulson. Similarities endure. Unsurprisingly, Trace continues where Uncle Tupelo's last album, Anodyne, left off. But it lacks evidence that Farrar had progressed or dared more. This commitment, over Sun Volt's career, Farrar's solo albums, remains the strength and weakness of Son Volt. I prefer them to Wilco, but I remain in the minority, given Wilco’s great success since. "May the wind take your troubles away," Farrar sings as the album opens with "Windfall." It is lovely, thanks to Dave Boquist's fiddle, but it risks right away exposing the heart of Farrar's approach.  Coming out of his teens singing with Uncle Tupelo, he already sounded jaded, world-weary, and about to fall into the grave after endless heartache and repeated resignation. Are such lyrics a sign of a young talent adept at channeling traditional tropes? Or, as Robert Christgau, who never liked Uncle Tupelo either, sniped in a take-down of Trace, a sign of stagnation? These tracks compliment night rides, gloomy mornings, lazy afternoons. For all their amplified attitude, bolstered as on "Live Free," "Route" or "Drown" by original Tupelo drummer Mike Heidorn, many of the brasher tunes don't leap out as much as they should. Yet, "Tear Stained Eye" steps forward gracefully. Farrar laments: "St. Genevieve can hold back the water/ Saints don't bother with the tear-stained eye." It chugs along steadily, between a banjo and pedal-steel backing. It deserves to be covered by many a bar-band ever since. Similarly, "Ten Second News" crawls along appealingly, if full of despair. "Catching On" sounds most like Tupelo, and balances emotion with verve the best. Jim Boquist’s bass moves this along forcefully. "Too Early" adroitly adds accordion to the mid-tempo arrangement. A concluding cover of Ron Wood's "Mystifies Me" recalls a Rolling Stones' outtake from their early-1970s country-blues period. With tracks laid down in the early winter of late 1994, this may reflect Farrar’s confusion after his alliance with his longtime friend Tweedy splintered. At least Heidorn had returned. In closing, this album holds up respectably. Son Volt's next two albums pursued this same style if to diminishing returns. I had to stop my wife from throwing out that pair of CD's, as she admitted boredom. Perhaps not by accident, Farrar then abandoned the Son Volt name by the end of the 1990s for even less inspired solo records. He then tellingly revived the more reliable band name in 2005. That ensemble issues decent albums. Their latest, titled Honky Tonk, pays tribute to the C&W Bakersfield sound. But it often feels indistinguishable from its inspirations from decades earlier. Whether this is progress or complacency, I continue to admire Farrar's voice. Yet, I find myself, like that record store clerk two decades ago, tired of such dogged consistency. I still wait for Farrar to take more chances, as Uncle Tupelo, and punks, did. And, as a canny Wilco led by Tweedy has done since 1995, to critical and popular acclaim. I'm not expecting Farrar or the reconstituted Son Volt to play stadiums, or jam-band festivals. There's a place for their more stolid, starker, roots-oriented music that challenges complacency and unsettles listeners. But when I play my hometown L.A. heroes such as X, The Gun Club, The Blasters, and Los Lobos, I hear how punk and Americana joined forces to innovate. I think Uncle Tupelo blew doors open. Wilco sauntered forward. Farrar and Son Volt snuck in that barn door behind. (Published 3/15: Holy Hell! Spectrum Culture series of looking back at albums 20 years earlier.)

"The goodness of privacy in a warm room with books"

In books as in music and I reckon all my daily life, I favor the inevitably flawed rather than the perfect. While some of these picks betray a lapse of narrative flow or structural stability, I recommend them, for in such moments, they remind us of our human predicament and our own gaps. PopMatters gives 9's to nearly perfect and 10's to perfect, but while twelve selections below were reviewed by me for PM and none scored quite that high, they all will grace a warm room. Of those three not reviewed here, two delve into ideological concerns which, although beyond the scope of this publication, invite speculation or consideration of worthy topics, by wise writers. And certainly George Saunders' increasingly deft navigation between satire and sentiment merits a special mention.

The range spans rock music, belief systems, mind-altering possibilities, suppression and liberation. It starts in Manchester, moves around Britain and Ireland, sides Stateside, and takes in places as different as Prague, Ceylon, Jerusalem. Tellers tend to focus on the near-present, but many look back.

Shifting from song to print, Steven Patrick Morrissey keeps his suave air and deepens his cultural allusions. His raw but sometimes reticent Autobiography ** drawn from popular and erudite sources will appeal to his fan base, but this uneven if spirited contemplation of five decades deserves a wide readership. Morrissey’s decision to let the flow slacken as his fame grows and the albums, from the Smiths and solo, accumulate may reflect the verisimilitude of how he views his later life, one more gig, one journalist after another to spar against, one more star to share his sorrows and joys with.

Similarly, his Manchester colleague Peter Hook skirts the typical rock-star's telling of his tale as Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division. ** While chronological, Hook mixes humor and history in a sly but sensible fashion. (Morrissey appears more than once.) Joy Division's timelines feature comments on gigs, album tracks, and studio work among chatty chapters narrating the band’s fortunes. Hook shepherds us rapidly along as punk bursts and fades as quickly into a cold future.

Any British child of that punk generation grew up with rock on the radio. Beatles vs. Stones ** captures the battle for #1. The conventional wisdom claims both bands loved each other; any rivalry was only hype. Historian John McMillian marshals evidence, gleaned from chronicles, biographies, interviews, and his own expertise as a scholar of the underground press, that suggests the contrary.

Even a humble English product conveys the burst of pride that nation enjoyed during the 1960s, as well as the gloom that permeated Morrissey and Hook's childhood before Beatlemania, and the 1970s decline of their homeland after that band broke up and left the Stones as claimants to the title of the world's greatest band. Chris West in A History of Britain in Thirty-Six Postage Stamps ** documents how the Beatles boosted revenue. West’s fondness for a “true Summer of Love” during 1966, when Revolver appeared, while the Kinks’ “Sunny Afternoon” provided the season’s theme for Swinging London, makes England’s World Cup triumph proclaimed on a stamp all the more splendid.

Certainly Psychedelia: An Ancient Culture, A Modern Way of Life ** as Patrick Lundborg's massive study testifies to another source of energy during that Summer, and many before and after. Hefty if unwieldy as a paperback, it’s a solid resource on what’s been too often left for silly flights of fancy or sophomoric pronouncements an ephemeral topic. Lundborg, as a diligent tour guide through his theme in theory and practice, keeps moving forward in time and space. But like his swirling subject, he cannot help pursuing byways, tracking trains of thought, and wandering off on rewarding detours.

In related distortion, what may appear as a footnote expands into its own revealing dimension. The impact of the East on the West and vice versa finds welcome exploration in Buddhism in Ireland: From the Celts to the Counter-Culture and Beyond. Sociologist Laurence Cox applies theories of social movements and Marxist humanism to reveal how Ireland and the wider world intersect, in a dimension beyond the stereotypical limits of sectarian belief and cultural practice, there and abroad.

Those limits conspire to preoccupy John Banville. Writing under the name of Benjamin Black for the sixth in his Quirke series under the suggestive title of Holy Orders,** the connivance of a compliant, cowed government with the lordly Church in this oppressive era of postwar Irish history looms; it’s very difficult to shake the sensation that this novel of a pathologist-playing at detective is not happening over a half-century later, amidst continued revelations of clerical abuse and conspiracy.

While the Ireland of this postwar era may not appear ideal to many overseas, the Midwestern writer J.F. Powers moved there, and back again, four times during that period. His daughter, Katharine Anne Powers, tells in Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life--the Letters of J.F. Powers, 1942-1963 ** how her mother and siblings coped with her willful father's combination of idealism, thrift, and stubborn determination to resist Ike's American war machine and capitalist propaganda through an appeal to Catholic, pacifist resistance. J.F. conveyed his radical conservatism subtly in stories, many about priests, and in his own headstrong refusal to make an easier living.

Rebellion in that same generation, for Ivan Klíma in Nazi- and Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia, represented a danger that captured more Jews than Catholics, no matter their personal irreverence. He begins My Crazy Century: A Memoir ** by noting how most young people like to rebel, and how this mood led to the Stalinist takeover of his homeland, where, having survived the Nazis as a teenager, he came of age bristling against another regime as an underground novelist, dissident, and gadfly.

Contrary to persistent promotion of the inspiration for such Communist regimes as a relevant prophet, Jonathan Sperber in Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life. ** argues his ideas have run their course. More a product of the French Revolution and Hegel, early English industrialization and political economies of the emerging modern age, than any avant-garde inspiration, Marx “is more usefully understood as a backward-looking figure”, who from his own century’s first half took the facts "and projected them into the future”. We may credit Engels more than Marx for much of our "Marx".

Another founding figure boasts as wide a reach as Marx, at least, and certainly for far longer duration. While the gist of Reza Aslan's popularization of critical biblical scholarship in Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth  may not be that revelatory to those who have studied these arguments in academic or theological circles, his engaging telling of how a human Jesus transformed by re-branding via market research, so to speak, through ancient contexts, into an elevated and divine Christ merits inclusion for its ability to maneuver between arcane and accessible arguments deftly.

Power once claimed by Christians or Communists in a post-9/11 decade appears dispersed into more accessible if no less domineering channels. In Bleeding Edge ** the networks of DeepArcher beckon as “a virtual sanctuary to escape from the many varieties of real world discomfort. A grand-scale model for the afflicted, a destination reachable by virtual midnight express from anyplace with a keyboard”. From this appeal, this being Thomas Pynchon, a shaggy-dog tale set in 2001 Manhattan unfolds. Another curious sort plays detective. She finds, loosely unraveled, conspiracies that stretch far beyond the scope of a Catholic Irish hegemony or even a Czech totalitarian system. They span the wires you and I share to read this review. And they contain "inside them forces of destruction" for all.

Merging a compatible view of corporate conformity and social commentary with satire, George Saunders' stories in  Tenth of December sustain his trademark style. He mixes send-ups of how Americans think and speak in a commodity culture full of pop psychology and catchphrases with sensitive subjects which edge into sentiment. As a funhouse mirror of our fragmented nation, he reflects back how we keep evolving, to resemble the caricatured citizens in a Pynchon saga itself.

This psychic dislocation, as people relentlessly must sell themselves or be sold, wears down the characters from two Southern California-based chroniclers. The King of Good Intentions ** conveys  what it could have been like for John Andrew Fredrick to try to make it in the early-90s indie music scene in Los Angeles, when college radio mattered (a bit). At a party full of star-struck wannabees, pursuing a comely lass, the probably only slightly fictionalized John reflects: “Tonight I am lost and have eyes like a spirograph in the hands of a child on methamphetamine and utterly out of my head on good drugs and bad alcohol.” Poetic or introspective registers carom off John’s R-rated vernacular, the usual Angeleno’s articulation, or its lack. Infusing this spirited or spiteful melange of mundane rants and muttering satire, the novel celebrates an egghead’s low-life lived at the margins of celebrity.

Finally, at those same margins after a career ranging from plumbing sales to an assistant on Jeopardy!, Jim Gavin portrays the predicament of Angelenos caught between fame and misfortune. In this insular, congested, dirty, and sunny terrain, his characters, stuck at start-ups or peddling goods, wonder what keeps them there, and makes them face another day on the freeway. Gavin’s driven the same roads and done the same tasks, and his short story debut Middle Men ** dramatizes, in odd or mundane circumstances, the surprises that quiet epiphanies can present to the attentive wanderer.

Morrissey begins his Autobiography with a strongly Joycean evocation of post-war Manchester. Hook wanders the same streets. Both form bands as influential for such as Fredrick or Gavin's post-hippie cohorts, arguably, as the Beatles or the Stones for West. Then, allure of Jesus, Marx, or Stalin diminishes, even if the blowback to Aslan's book betrays the refusal of some true believers to accept as gospel truth the gospel's truths via scholarship. Powers' letters, Cox's study, and Black's story share an Irish tension as concepts filter in from the wider world to challenge cohesion and resist coercion, when reform and radicalism seep in to weaken theological verities. Against ideology, Klíma, Pynchon, or Lundborg who welcomed the 1960s and liberating sounds attest to the control exerted by popular culture pitted against political convention. Yet, Saunders warns of the subversive backlash which newer forms of technology and surveillance possess, able to spur us into submission.

Collating this list of fifteen books, fiction and otherwise, and some in-between, connections form. We all search for escape, and while music, drugs, radicalism, or fame may ease the monotony, the protagonists of so many of these tales find themselves at the end of their narratives still constrained. Echoing Pascal's complaint that "all men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone", let Morrissey in this nod to revelation by reading conclude this 2013 culling. “Finally aware of ourselves as forever being in opposition, the solution to all things is the goodness of privacy in a warm room with books.” Restless as many of these characters prove, lots of them wind up reading.

(PopMatters 2-4-14; Photo: c/o Tom McLaughlin, Electronic Distraction)