book Archive
11 Jul 2022
Bay Area Book Tour This Week
The Disturbing the Peace book tour is coming to the Bay Area this week. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it: Three events in two days. Come join the fun. Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase, and at some events (see below) real-life characters from the 415 Records story will be in
10 Jun 2022
Book Review: Wicked Game
San Francisco and the Bay Area have long been fertile creative ground. Even confining the discussion to music, there’s been a staggering volume of important music coming out of the Bay Area: jazz, psychedelia, folk rock, punk, metal, new wave…on and on. Among the long list of luminaries, the name Chris Isaak deserves mention. His
03 Jun 2022
The Residents: The Eyes Have It (Part Two)
Continued from Part One… That meeting in late 2020 was the first time Tanner and Flynn had met, but the groundwork for the project was already laid. “Since we started this project one month before the pandemic hit, it took a lot longer than we were initially hoping,” Tanner says. “I opted to wait nearly
02 Jun 2022
The Residents: The Eyes Have It (Part One)
Inscrutable art/music collective celebrates its 50th anniversary with the first in a series of books chronicling its history Surveying the landscape of 20th and 21st century music, one is unlikely to encounter anything stranger than the body of work credited to The Residents. The intentionally anonymous collective has been charting its own path – in
12 Apr 2022
BOOK EVENT! Thursday 4/14 @ 7pm EDT
Readers of this online mag are unlikely to have escaped the news that I have, indeed, written and published my second book. Disturbing the Peace: 415 Records and the rise of New Wave came out this winter, and I’m currently doing what I can to promote it. It’s a fascinating story, both as a piece
11 Feb 2022
Book Event! Me! In Person, Even!
My latest book, Disturbing the Peace: 415 Records and the Rise of New Wave, gets its official release this week (of course you can already order it direct from HoZac Books, from a certain mega-online retailer, and from your local independent bookstore via Indiebound). I’m celebrating the release with a book event here in Asheville,
23 Dec 2021
Book Review: Brian Atkinson — True Love Cast Out All Evil
Though he left this dimension a few years ago, Roky Erickson continues to fascinate and inspire. I was fortunate enough to see him more than a decade ago onstage at the Ponderosa Stomp; my own bootleg recording of that performance is a searing document of the man’s music, presented at a time long after most
22 Dec 2021
Book Review: ‘Beyond the Printed Page’ by Alan Niester
Niester has had a long career, writing for mainstream papers about music; that proud tradition is, sadly, one that no longer exists. Good luck finding a daily that covers live music. Even altweekles have scaled back their coverage; reviews of concerts are increasingly rare. But beginning in the early ‘70s, and working primarily in Canada,
09 Jul 2021
Progress Report #5: Disturbing the Peace in Fall ’21
The book is complete and off to the publisher! In the end, my research for Disturbing the Peace: 415 Records and the Rise of New Wave encompassed 96 interviews (plus untold email exchanges), and the final manuscript clocks in at 55 chapters, plus a foreword (more news on the latter soon). Not counting the six
22 Jun 2021
Book Review: The White Label Promo Preservation Society
It’s happened to me, and I’d imagine it has happened to you. You’re out in public somewhere – a bar, a food court, a record store, outside a music venue waiting for the doors to open – somewhere you’d encounter strangers. And being a not-unfriendly sort, you find yourself drawn into conversation with one of