book Archive
30 Nov 2022
Book Review: The Who: Concert Memories from the Classic Years, 1964 to 1976
Author: Edoardo Genzolini Schiffer Publishing 2022, 306 pp. $59.99 (and well worth it) In the third decade of the 21st century, it’s challenging to come up with a book that sheds any new light on the music of the 1960s (yeah, says the guy whose first book is about Pink Floyd, ha). And there have
21 Oct 2022
Taping the Grateful Dead (Part 3 of 3)
Continued from Part Two… Complete as Can Be It’s not as if Rodriguez is any kind of a newcomer to the Grateful Dead and their work. “I’ve been researching the Grateful Dead in whatever capacity I could since I was 14,” he says. (He’s 40.) And while images provide much of After All is Said
20 Oct 2022
Taping the Grateful Dead (Part 2 of 3)
Continued from Part One… Tale of the Tapes Rodriguez made sure to maintain an open mind while researching for the book, but he admits that he began with at least a vague thesis. “I was trying to figure out if the members of the Grateful Dead intentionally sought to reinforce [the notion] that taping was
19 Oct 2022
Taping the Grateful Dead (Part 1 of 3)
After All is Said and Done: Mark Rodriguez and Taping the Grateful Dead Deadheads didn’t invent audience recording of concerts. As Clinton Heylin chronicles in his exhaustive 1994 book, Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry, individuals were making unofficial/illicit recordings of music performances right from the dawn of recording technology. Using crude
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,