I’m predisposed to like a work such as Jeff Gold‘s new book, 101 Essential Rock Records: The Golden Age of Vinyl from The Beatles to the Sex Pistols. Anything that connects with my interest in music and words-about-music has a better than even chance of finding favor with me.

But this book is special beyond that. A lovely coffee-table book with high-quality color printing throughout 101 Essential start off on the right foot: it looks fantastic (great cover art) and feels substantial. So before it even gets opened, it impresses.

Then we get to the table of contents, and discover that the essays – and there are lots of ‘em – are penned by some of rock’s more serious thinkers. People who are primarily recordings artists (Graham Nash, Iggy Pop, Robyn Hitchcock, David Bowie, Johnny Marr, Devendra Banhart, Suzanne Vega and more) weigh in on some of their personal favorites (these tend toward the usual suspects – Beatles, Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd – but for good reason). And luminaries in the rock biz and/or rock journo biz (Elektra’s Jac Holzman, Joe Boyd, Jon Savage) have interesting things to say about some less-covered critical favorites (Nick Drake, Moby Grape).

And it’s hard to quibble with most of the hundred-and-one selections: while serious rock fans (this writer included) could likely predict at least half of these without peeking, the brief mini-essays help make the case for any stray doubters.

The photography and layout are peerless; there’s plenty here even for those (like me, again) who have the majority of these vinyl records on their home shelves. For the more casual fan – the type of person who loves The Who, Stones, Cream and the Grateful Dead – some of the albums mentioned here may send them to their nearest used record store (or, less wonderfully, Amazon, iTunes, or Spotify). It’s nice to see Davy Graham, The Butterfield Blues Band‘s landmark East-West and The Damned get coverage. For every The Dark Side of the Moon and Pet Sounds, readers will find Faust and Skip Spence‘s Oar.

Sure, one can imagine some of the editorial meetings that must have occurred when storyboarding 101 Essential: “Okay, we know we have to include a Zappa/Mothers album, but which one? Freak Out? Hot Rats? Roxy and Elsewhere?” (They chose Freak Out.)

For hardcore types, there will be a small tinge of smug satisfaction (“See? I told ya Nursery Cryme was great!), and those same types (like me, yet again) will probably shudder at the inclusion of at least one perceived unworthy release (for me it’s Fleetwood Mac‘s Rumours). But the book will spark memories and conversation. It’s a real winner. A few surprises are in store in its pages, but I’ll leave those for you to discover on your own.

If you haven’t blown all of your holiday cash, you’d do well to pick up a copy of 101 Essential Rock Records.

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As someone who (a) is a writer and (b) grew up immersed in the pop culture of the 1960s, Ken Levine would seem ideally suited to write a book about that decade. That he’s a comedy writer (M*A*S*H, Cheers, Frasier and host of other well-known shows) would suggest he could deftly weave humor into such a book. And in fact those assumptions are not too wide of the mark. Levine’s new book The Me Generation…By Me: Growing Up in the ’60s is a first-person account of Levine’s experiences in that legendary decade. He grew up in suburban Los Angeles – one of pop culture’s epicenters during that era – and went to school with any number of people who would go on to fame of their own.

Early on – Levine’s three-page introduction is one of the best things about the whole book – the author sets out his unique point of view: he asserts (correctly, of course) that he, like most people who lived through the 60s did not in fact “…attend Woodstock, move to Haight-Ashbury, protest the war by burning [...] bras or banks, or form a band that played Woodstock.” Levine’s story is told from the point of view of Everyman. Every man who grew up in Los Angeles, worked at a college radio station, and had a schoolboy crush on classmate Ann Jillian, that is.

Perhaps surprisingly, given his professional background, Levine’s writing style is rarely laugh-out-loud funny. He has an acerbic tone not completely removed from the approach of Bill Bryson, but his writing in The Me Generation rarely crackles with wit. Instead, it’s a solid, mildly/occasionally humorous account of his formative years, a time filled with frustration, rejection, missed opportunities and a clutch of memorable episodes. In other words, The Me Generation is a lot like real life: sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes more interesting than others.

Levine throws in the occasional provocative aside – he wasn’t impressed, for example, with many of your favorite groups from the 60s; instead The Mamas and the Papas were just about his favorite act. But mostly, he strings together a chronological narrative of the era from his personal point of view as a young man. He’s neither Zelig, Forrest Gump, nor a character in a 1970s John Jakes novel series: The Me Generation is not filled with tales of Levine meeting – let along hanging out with – Jim Morrison, Rodney Bingenheimer or Kim Fowley. Instead, the young Levine does cross paths with a number of radio jocks, experiences that would influence his subsequent career choices.

Though The Me Generation is told in mostly chronological order – no Ken Kesey he – readers can pretty well open the book to any page and read from there. The book is broken into dozens of vignettes, most of which run no more than a few pages. True, it’s more enjoyable to follow Levine’s tale from beginning to end (well, end of the decade, at least), but The Me Generation works well as a series of quick, episodic reads as well.

It’s a bit sad in the 21^st century to realize that a worthy book such as The Me Generation…By Me couldn’t find a publisher. (At least that’s the assumption I’m making about this self-published tome.) A writer with an established name and reputation has a good story to tell; in previous years, a book deal would have been a distinct possibility, if not a foregone conclusion. Well, there I go getting all nostalgic for days gone by. If you’ll pardon me, I’m off to write my own book about growing up in…the 70s. (Not really, but I am working on a book.)

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I’m decidedly old-school about any number of things. I prefer vinyl records to CDs (and CDs to mp3 files), and real books to e-books. But when I learned that famed and legendary guitarist/composer Dick Wagner had penned a book about his life in music, and that Not Only Women Bleed would be available only in digital format, I scoured my local Craigslist for a used Kindle.

I found one, and took Wagner’s e-book along on a recent road trip from my home in Western North Carolina to metropolitan New York City and back. (My adult kids did their share of driving, giving me plenty of time to read on long stretches of highway.)

The book’s title refers, of course, to Wagner’s most famous co-write, Alice Cooper‘s blockbuster hit “Only Women Bleed.” Now, beyond that, Wagner’s choice of title has precious little to do with the book’s content. Definitely not a traditional autobiography, Not Only Women Bleed is, instead, a collection of brief vignettes – something like 180 of them – arranged in a loosely chronological order. And by “loosely,” I pretty much mean, “Not.” These chapterlets – some only a mere page or two in length – have the feel of sitting-at-the-bar anecdotes, of the “Did I ever tell you the one about…” variety. Which isn’t to say they’re not fascinating. Many of the stories are quite entertaining, and most are valuable thanks to being told by the guy who lived ‘em. But a few do suffer from the author’s occasionally score-settling point of view.

Readers looking for sex, drugs and rock’n'roll won’t come away empty-handed. Admirably, Wagner has put his self-described addictions behind him, but one can often imagine him sporting a sly grin as he recounts lurid tales with this or that groupie. Fair enough. Not Only Women Bleed is unalloyed in Wagner’s recounting the ups and downs of his personal life, and if he has any temptation to blame others for any poor decisions he might have made in his sixty-plus years, he keeps it firmly in check.

Those interested in the nuts and bolts of song composition, recording techniques, live performance etc. might be disappointed a bit with Not Only Women Bleed; it’s more of a personal non-chronological chronology. There are chapters on Wagner’s early bands (most notably The Frost), but when one sees that there’s a one-page chapter titled “Alice Cooper,” it’s clear Wagner’s not going in-depth. He touches on his time with Lou Reed – the period in which Wagner and Steve Hunter created one of the greatest and most thrilling instrumental pieces of rock, the transcendent guitar-duel intro to the live version of “Sweet Jane” that appears on Rock’n'Roll Animal – but readers never get much of a sense of what it was like for Wagner to work and tour with Reed.

It’s important to state once again that I enjoyed the book, enjoyed the stories, and for the most part enjoyed Wagner’s style of telling those stories. But the book’s fragmentary nature, and the gaps that a journalist would have sought to fill and/or connect – left me wanting much more. In the end, the self-published Not Only Women Bleed may cause some readers to say to themselves, “Wow. That was cool. He really should get with an author and write a book about all this stuff.” With those caveats, I still recommend Not Only Women Bleed to anyone interested in Wagner’s work, life, and/or storytelling.

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Every now and then, I’ll find myself engaged in a conversation with someone who laments the fact that “they don’t make movies like they used to.” In the old days, the argument goes, they had good guys and bad guys, and you usually knew who was which. Sure, there might be a plot twist where a supposedly white-hat character is revealed to be a villain, or a redemptive moment in which a villain makes a turn toward the good. Many modern films, the argument continues, have few or no redeemable characters. Antiheroes, maybe.

One could argue that in many ways that shift represents a truer depiction of life, at least within some contexts. I’m reminded of this as I work my way through the book Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped. This staggeringly well-researched tome by Dean Budnick and Josh Baron sets out to cover the entire history of concert ticketing, and while it’s an engrossing story, it’s not a pretty one.

Those readers who attended concerts in the 70s will recognize many of the names and outfits in Ticket Masters‘ early pages: Alex Cooley, Jerry Weintraub, S.E.A.T.S, Bill Graham, Cellar Door Productions. Early on, a number of entrepreneurial types got into the ticketing game, and some of them even did so with relatively lofty goals. Some (not many) of these men and women truly wanted to level the playing field, as it were, for fans attempting to secure seats at shows. But in nearly every case, those idealistic young people eventually went over to the dark side, or were co-opted into the system. As Ticket Masters chronicles in astounding detail, the history of ticketing is one of mergers, acquisitions, lawsuits, betrayal, maneuvering, regret, recrimination and…higher and higher ticket prices. The book could just as well have been titled Welcome to the Machine.

Ticket Masters elucidates a point that may seem counter-intuitive: the ticketing business is unique in that competition has the effect of raising – not lowering – prices. And the entire concept of who-is-the-customer figures into the mix as well: it’s not merely a cases of shareholders vs. consumers (though that dynamic does exist, and as you might guess, the shareholders come out on top). No, it’s more often than not down to the idea that concert venues and ticketing companies view each other as the customer. And neither has anything like artistic goals; it’s all about the dollar, about maximizing revenues. The ticketing industry story is one of unfettered Gordon Gekko-styled corporate greed; as such it’s not altogether shocking that one Mitt Romney even plays a minor (yet key) role in the story.

Which isn’t to say that the performing acts mentioned in Ticket Masters come out looking good. With precious few exceptions, they do not. While Jimmy Buffett and Rod Stewart are singled out for their especially greedy practices, the list of artists willing to (in this reader’s opinion) screw over the fans for a few more bucks is dismayingly long and familiar. Said list probably contains several of your favorite acts. (It certainly does mine.) The only artists (or artist’s organizations/management) who earn anything approaching a white hat are the String Cheese Incident and – no surprise here – The Grateful Dead. Even Pearl Jam‘s highly publicized battle against Ticketmaster is described in a way that calls into question the band’s motives for their fight.

If you’re at all familiar with two books of investigative journalism from the modern era – the Pulitzer Prize-winning America: What Happened? and Eric Schlosser‘s Fast Food Nation – then you know what good, solid journalism can do to tell a tale worth telling. In Ticket Masters, Budnick and Baron have crafted a work every bit the equal of those books. True, it does wander into the weeds on several occasions — explaining the intricacies of software development, sketching out the relationship between brokers (where I’m from we called ‘em scalpers) and “primary ticketers” – but these detailed explanations are essential to a full understanding of the story as a whole.

The authors do an admirable job or researching both (or multiple) sides of each issue, and their agenda – if any – is clearly only to get the story right. There’s no self-aggrandizing “In our extensive research, we discovered…” or any such thing; the authors tell the story, based on literally hundreds of interviews, but they themselves remain absent from the story itself.

Ticket Masters is a dense volume; perhaps not poolside reading. But it’s a page-turner in the tradition of the best fiction, and it pulls back the filthy rug of the industry to reveal the bug infestation under it. You won’t like what you learn reading Ticket Masters, but you’ll be a better-informed consumer for knowing. You’ll still pay too much for most concerts, but at least you will have a clearer idea why it is so. Ticket Masters is recommended in the highest terms for anyone who wants to know how and why things really work in the ticketing industry.

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When I heard the title, I was immediately hooked: Bruce Pollock‘s If You Like the Beatles sports the irresistible tag line/come-on, “Here are over 200 bands, films, records and other oddities that you will love.” That intro positions the book – in my mind, at least – as something of a modern-day Rock Book of Lists, a consumer guide for the 21^st century music enthusiast who’ accepts the argument that there’s still great music being made, but who’s not altogether sure exactly where to find it.

The book itself is actually a bit different from what I had expected. Though it’s divided into fourteen chapters, as I read through it, the book sort of divides itself neatly into three unstated sections. First, there are a number of chapters that concern themselves with the creative forces that informed and influenced the Beatles‘ music. Chapters on rockabilly and the Great American Songbook are especially good, covering ground that hasn’t been trampled to dust by previous writers. Pollock makes a number of interesting observations, and connects some heretofore unconnected dots. He even manages to give this reader – not exactly a Beatles scholar, but quite well-versed in most aspects of their story – a few “aha” moments.

At his best, Pollock’s writing style exhibits peerless timing: it would read well out loud. He knows the value of a single-sentence punchline paragraph. After a breathless and convincing description of the early Beatles’ street-level cred, he starts a new line with this rejoinder: “And Mick Jagger was an economics major.”

The middle section of the book bogs down a bit, though pointedly not for reasons having to do with the writer’s knowledge nor ability to convey it. No, the problem is – and it’s an all-but-inescapable one – that the book’s midsection covers the Beatles themselves, the what-they-did and when-they-did-it and so forth. This story has been told so many times, and in so many ways, that it’s quite difficult to bring a fresh and new perspective to bear. For a Beatles novice, If You Like the Beatles does an admirable job of summing up the Beatles’ mid-period and dissolution, but for the reader who knows the story, those chapters may seem less compelling.

The third section of the book picks up where the Beatles left off, and aims to fulfill on the promise that the cover laid out: to show how the group’s approach (culturally, stylistically, musically, etc. etc.) influenced countless artists. The challenge here is that there’s so much to say. What it means is that occasionally, Pollock’s writing is reduced to lists upon lists upon lists, all in paragraph form. He touches on the most obvious suspects (Badfinger, the Raspberries, Todd Rundgren, ELO, Oasis, Crowded House) but also discusses the legacy that (to his thinking) the Beatles gave to groups such as The Long Ryders, REM and Throwing Muses. At times the reader might lose the thread, being left to wonder why exactly Madonna gets a paragraph, or why on earth The Pussycat Dolls are mentioned. But overall, Pollock manages skillfully to weave those artists (sic) into his narrative.

There’s the occasional dubious assertion in the pages of If You Like the Beatles. The most notable one is Pollock’s argument that George Harrison was some sort of father of the modern synthesizer. This reader views Harrison’s music and legacy as significant enough that one need not push the envelope. I mean, I enjoy my Zapple Records copy of George’s 1969 Electronic Sounds as much as does anybody, but I’d hesitate in calling it a “landmark” release. Still, Pollock’s good-natured tone and his clear, vast and deep knowledge makes his occasional overreach completely forgivable.

The consumer guide portion of the book finally shows up 179 pages in, under the heading “Suggested Listening.” It might have been more helpful had Pollock provided the reader some sort of direction as to how one might actually lay hands or ears on the songs; a number of the titles mentioned exist only as unauthorized/bootleg recordings, but the casual reader wouldn’t know this. And – again this is no fault of the author – a rundown of an intriguing 4CD set called The Beatles Day by Day: The Originals – will leave the reader frustrated. This set attempts to track the deep treasure trove of covers that the Beatles ran through during their January 1969 sessions for the ill-fated Get Back album. Day by Day collects the original (or, influencing) version of each song. Beatleologists would definitely want to get their hands on this 2009 set. Alas, the frustration: it’s out of print; good luck finding a copy.

Still, as a compendium of thought-provoking rundowns of music that a Beatles fan would enjoy, it’s fair to say that if you like the Beatles, you’ll like If You Like the Beatles.

 
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In the 21^st century, it’s a bit of a challenge for a writer – even a very good one – to write a book about one of rock’n'roll’s early leaders. Because, of course, it’s all been done before. What could anyone possibly have new to say about such an oft-covered artist as Jerry Lee Lewis?

Quite a bit, if the writer is Joe Bonomo. I first discovered his writing while researching my own Fleshtones interview/feature: I read his book, Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band. I was mightily impressed with that tome, and on several levels. One, it was quite in-depth, not an airport terminal read but rather an exhaustive chronicle of the band. Two, it was revelatory. For an authorized bio, it went into some pretty personal areas. Bonomo handled those deftly, maintaining journalistic ethics while not unduly dishing dirt.

Yet when I learned about Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, I wondered if a similar approach would work, or would even be possible. Lewis isn’t known for giving open access (or any access) to writers, so how could Bonomo get material? A lesser writer would merely rehash and rephrase the work of authors previous: hey, I’ve seen it done, and often. And in this case, there’s good material to work with. Lewis’ so-called “child bride” Myra Lewis wrote Great Balls of Fire in 1982, and the book was developed into a film in ’89. (As luck would have it, Myra’s co-writer was Murray Silver, who would go on to influence me to no end when I took his college class American Popular Music: Stephen Foster to Present in the mid 80s. Silver went on to serve as technical adviser for the biopic).

There was also Jerry Lee’s own autobiography, as well as the inimitable Nick Tosches‘ work Hellfire. But I never expected Joe Bonomo to simply regurgitate those works. And he did not. Instead he’s crafted a look at the critical rise and fall (and rise, and fall) of Lewis’ career. And he’s nestled this chronology within a personal story of his own discovery of Lewis’ music. To many readers of a certain age (those who were pre-teens at the dawn of the 1970s) Bonomo’s story will likely ring familiar and true.

It’s walking a fine line to write a book that (a) tells the story one wants to tell and (b) uses lovely and descriptive language to do it but (c) writes in a way that doesn’t attract undue attention to the writing style. Bonomo wins on all three counts with this book. Here’s a representative sample of the heartfelt, rhapsodic and colorful writing found in this book’s pages. Describing Lewis’ early trio on the 1958 track “Lewis Boogie,” Bonomo writes:

As is the case with Jerry Lee’s great early Sun recordings, Van Eaton and Janes don’t so much accompany Jerry Lee as they come along for the ride – the rhythm track swings beautifully, and Van Eaton’s and Janes’ participation is crucial to the sound and vibe of the tune, much in the way that the shotgun-rider and backseat clowns are crucial for any drunken joyride.

Damn, I love that imagery: you can almost hear the music while reading the pages.

Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found mostly concerns itself with Lewis’ landmark album Live! At the Star Club Hamburg in 1964, and with Lewis’ eventual turn toward country and western music toward the end of that decade. But those major turning points are placed into the needed context – musically, chronologically, etc. – so that they make sense. Though Bonomo’s story is ultimately a personal one, the reader need not be well-versed in Lewis’ life story to gain a great deal from reading.

In fact, hours spent with Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found (as of late 2011, out in paperback) will almost surely send the reader to his or her choice of media to listen to the Killer’s best work. And ultimately, that’s one of Bonomo’s primary goals with this book.

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There are a few characteristics that – when present – enhance the quality and readability of a book. When the subject is a band, figure or personality in the rock idiom – though in fact this is something of a global truth applicable to much more than rock music – if the author has an angle, a point of view that’s fresh or somehow unique, that can help the book to no end. Further, a little bit of controversy rarely hurts: if the author can set forth a provocative assertion or two, that can get people talking.

Brett Callwood seems to understand these truths. His new book (and by new I mean expanded, edited and revised from a 2007 book published only in the UK) The Stooges: Head On takes a look at one of Detroit’s (and the world’s, for that matter) most notorious and legendary bands.

But from the beginning of the project, Callwood’s approach would be different. He knew that plenty of ink had been spent already covering Jim Osterberg a/k/a Iggy Pop. He knew that a perhaps inordinate part of that ink covered Iggy’s time in Berlin with David Bowie. Callwood had little interest in retracing the steps of authors who had gone before him.

Because, you see, Callwood is a fan of the Stooges, of the band the Stooges. This meant not only that his interest expanded beyond the colorful front man to the musicians in the band, but that as an author he would seek to bring balance to the story from his point of view.

So with Head On, readers get a book that gives equal – if not the preponderance of –weight to the lives, stories and (where available) perspectives of the Asheton brothers Scott (drums) and Ron (guitar). And, taking care to point out and explain the difference (as he and many fans see it) between “The Stooges” and “Iggy and the Stooges,” Callwood goes in successful search of James Williamson.

All this means that Head On approaches the Stooges saga as having several mileposts upon which to hang a tale: the group’s origins; the first self-titled album; Fun House; the semi-dissolution of the band; Raw Power, and the 21^st century re-formation(s) of the band(s).

But Callwood doesn’t stop there. After starting out by chronicling the young pre-Stooges lives of the members (especially the Ashetons), he moves into the main Stooges story. But rather than treat the work that Ron Asheton (and to a lesser extent his brother Scott) did post-Fun House in a cursory manner, Callwood dives into this period in detail. And he does so in a way that weaves those stories into the main narrative. What could have come off as a series of tangents instead reads as another important angle of the overall story arc.

Musically, the New Order and Destroy All Monsters (to name two of several projects with Asheton involvement) had perhaps little in common with the Stooges beyond some personnel overlap. Indeed, the skill set that Ron Asheton brought to these bands often required something different of him than had the Stooges records and shows. But especially since those bands’ histories interweave the stories of other Detroit music legends (including a pair of ex-MC5 musicians), their coverage in Head On makes plenty of sense.

The second quality that can help a book – controversy — is here as well, but perhaps not in the form one might guess. Rather than focus on the Stooges’ onstage antics and debauchery (refreshingly, the generally over-covered subject of peanut butter is mentioned hardly at all in Head On, by the way), the controversy is this: Callwood asserts – both implicitly and explicitly — that the Stooges somehow rose from the mists fully developed; that they bore and displayed little if any influence from other musical acts. Callwood seems to be trying to sell readers on the idea that the group’s elemental approach, their rudimentary mastery of their instruments – meant that they were originals, true and pure. Influenced by no one, Callwood would have us believe, the Stooges went on to influence generations of other musicians.

I’m not at all sure that I’m completely buying that assertion, but Callwood does a yeoman’s job backing up his argument. And whether one believes that the Stooges owe nothing to their forebears, Callwood deserves props for going out on a limb to make the argument.

In this revised/expanded edition, Callwood tells us that he has cut a good bit of his own personal odyssey out of the pages, adding in instead material gleaned from eleventh-hour interviews with the principals. Still – and especially near the book’s beginning and end – Head On is a personal story, one that benefits from the perspective of its author.

A few minor criticisms do merit mention. I don’t know if it’s a British thing – I’ve seen it in other recent books by UK authors – but I do take issue with the technique of including long and seemingly unedited quotes from interview subjects. My issue isn’t with the shift in perspective; it rather has to do with inconsistency. Now, when we speak, we often drop asides and parentheticals into our conversation. Sometime we circle around our point, fail to make it, try again, and succeed. That’s all well and good. But if that speech is presented verbatim in print, it can make for some odd and not especially illuminating reading.

To wit: when Destroy All Monsters member Niagara relates first seeing The Stooges, she starts out saying, “I was in eighth or ninth grade.” At the tail end of the same quote, a mere hundred words later, she says, “I think I was in tenth grade.” A more careful writer or editor would have gone back and nailed down which-is-it, or pared it down some other way. Note that this is but one example of a problematic thread that runs through the book. Callwood can – and does – write well. Many of his interview subjects, however, cannot and do not. Readers are subjected to their unedited verbiage nonetheless. The result is a ride that’s bumpier than it needs to be.

Still, Callwood has done history and music a great service by researching and writing Head On. He’s wholly successful at one of his stated primary objectives: to present the story of the Stooges as the story not of Iggy and his pals, but of Iggy and the Ashetons, Dave Alexander, James Williamson, Mike Watt, Scott Thurston and Steve Mackay. For that alone — though its other virtues are many — Head On is worth reading.

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Disclosure of Material Connection:

I recently had a conversation with a friend and fellow writer/editor, and the subject of that discussion was the dwindling opportunities to tell compelling stories from pop music history. So much ground has been covered; many of the major artists have had books – or at least chapters – written about them, and that sort of writing is likely to continue (though the choice of delivery medium is by no means a sure thing). When it comes to ultra-obscure artists – one-hit wonders or even no-hit wonders – interested readers will turn to blogs and print magazines such as Ugly Things for the stories.

But it’s those in-between artists – the ones who didn’t enjoy fame on a level of, say, Led Zeppelin, but who did find commercial and critical success – who make up the “sweet spot” for music journalists. And Susan Whitall, former editor of Creem magazine (among her other notable achievements) has found one of these. Her latest book, Fever: Little Willie John – A Fast Life, Mysterious Death and the Birth of Soul takes up the story of a largely forgotten (if quietly influential) figure from the earlier days of pop music.

Willie John is most remembered for the first recorded version of “Fever,” but he scored fourteen hit singles on the U.S. R&B charts, and – perhaps more surprisingly — thirteen on the pop charts. No mean feat, that: in the years during which he was most successful (1955-1961), making inroads to the pop charts was no sort of given for an African American recording artist.

Whitall’s book (co-written with John’s son Kevin) traces the singer’s life from birth to death at age 30. Whitall deftly straddles journalistic and scholarly approaches, making sure throughout to focus on the story. That story – like Willie John’s life – moves quickly across the middle third of the 20^th century, and pulls in a remarkable number of famous names. These well-known artists didn’t simply interact with Willie John in that sort of peak-of-fame backstage hello sort of way; they were his friends, musical rivals, neighbors. Whitall seamlessly weaves their connections to Willie John into the pages of Fever, including quotes whenever possible.

Possessed of a voice a bit like Sam Cooke — but with an astoundingly effortless approach and an impressive range – Willie John knew just how talented he was, and his cocksure attitude may have contributed in some ways to the troubles that beset him in the 1960s. Whitall is careful not to paint John as some sort of saintly figure, but neither does she set out to dig dirt. Pulling together a narrative where one barely existed before is no easy task: since more than forty years have passed since John’s death in 1968 (officially listed as a heart attack, but more likely a prison murder), the surviving witnesses to his life are not always the most reliable. Whitall is careful to note this, often applying Occam’s Razor and offering that (in absence of proof) the most common-sense explanation is usually the correct one.

John’s family was extremely cooperative with Whitall’s research, and the family’s archive has been opened to share a number of previously unpublished photos of Willie John. For those photos alone, Fever is well worth the price of admission. That it’s an economically-written, fascinating story makes it even better. Even if your knowledge of the man’s music doesn’t extend beyond knowing that he’s the guy who first cut the song that would revive Peggy Lee’s career, Fever should be essential reading. Anyone interested in the development of soul, R&B and/or the Detroit music scene of the late 50s and early 60s will find much of value within the pages of Fever.

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