Evening’s Empire by Bill Flanagan

In the world of rock n’ roll novels, Bill Flanagan (A&R, New Bedlam) has got the most butt-kicking blurbs. Ev-ah. Dream up the two most perfect blurbers for this book and you won’t pull these two names. Ready? Bono (who says the book “feels truer than what really happened”) and Bob Dylan. You don’t need to go further than that. (Even though Flanagan does, with a blurb from book-writing, history teaching rock journalist, Sean Wilentz.)

Evening’s Empire (Simon & Schuster) looks behind the Faustian deals of the music industry and exposes a generational-saga-like tale of 40 years of life behind the curtain with fictional rock band, the Ravons, and their manager, Jack Flynn, our narrator on this journey.

We follow Jack and the Ravons from London in the sixties right through to the inevitable present day reunion tour. Oddly enough, though, it’s just not as fun as it sounds. This has nothing to do with Flanagan’s voice -- which is assured -- or his knowledge -- which is complete. It’s just that Evening’s Empire is a little... relentless. Where Flanagan’s landmark 2000 novel, A&R, had a certain raw energy and an undeniable muscularity, Evening’s Empire -- which in some ways covers similar ground -- is sometimes dark and dreary enough, you just want to throw up your hands or close your eyes. For me, this comes from the place Flanagan has chosen to stand in order to tell this story. Admittedly, it’s a place that might really work for some readers, but it did not do it for me at all.

Flynn narrates as though he were telling a rock biography. And not the kind of rock biography that makes you think you’re reading a novel, but the type penned by non-writers who have somehow ended up with a book contract to tell someone else’s story from a place that is nearby. I suspect that this rock biography voice is part of Flanagan’s art: that it’s a choice he’s made but, again, I found it distancing. I like the lines between fiction and non-fiction well-defined. I don’t ever want to have to wonder, or be lulled into thinking I’m reading something I’m not. In fact, if those lines are to be blurred, I’d prefer if go the other way: I sometimes like lyrical, poetic creative non-fiction. But fiction should sound... well... fictional. It should be a story that I ride away.

All of that said, those who enjoy seeing behind closed doors in the music industry will like Evening’s Empire. I might quibble with the way Flanagan has chosen to tell this story, but on every page of his novel, you know that the notes this author has hit are authentic and that the story he’s chosen to tell engages at a lot of the important levels.

Nine gets a 2

By Tony Buchsbaum

I'm reminded of a recipe for oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. I gave it to a friend who loved the cookies. Then she used white chocolate chips instead—and they weren't as good.

Somewhere along the way, between its briliant original Broadway staging and the recent film, the recipe for the musical Nine was similarly screwed up. And I can't imagine how it could have happened.

Nine is about movies. Its love of them, the making of them, the way filmmakers pull from their pasts to create vital images in the present. It's about how all those images intertwine, again like some elaborate recipe, and get pulled through the prism of script, acting, and cinematography, to emerge as something even greater than the recipe could have predicted. Yet despite its subject matter, Nine somehow gets it wrong.

The 1982 musical, which starred Raul Julia as Guido Contini, was a marvelous look at filmmaking. Based on Federico Fellini's landmark film 8-1/2, it exploded that story and brought a poignancy and a simplicity that the film didn't have. Now, all these years later, director Rob Marshall has made a film of Nine that unfortunately recrafts the musical so that it harkens back to the original Fellini instead of doing justice to his source material. To me, if Marshall had wanted to remake 8-1/2, that might have been a interesting film. But he chose to make Nine—and ruined it.

Many of the songs from the musical have been cut, and while one might argue that they didn't propel the plot, someone else could argue that they gave the material depth. Then again, three songs have been added, none of which propel the plot any more than the orignal songs did. Instead, they add more of the same.

What's happened is that Marshall has made a movie of Cats, with all the trappings of Nine. Instead of creating a deep, meaningful musical about how one blocked filmmaker works, he's created a parade of the women in that filmmaker's life, and the result is like Cats, with so many felines telling individual stories as they compete for the prize (whatever that might be). I might also say that this Nine is like A Chorus Line, but not in a good way. A Chorus Line is meant to be about each character telling his or her story, and the irony is that they end up anything but individuals, in a chorus line at the end where they're virtually photocopies of one another.

Nine should never have been like either of these. What RobMarshall has done is to strip the story of its real resonance. He's re-created Guido Contini as a self-centered, unfeeling cad, and how any woman could lust after him is beyond me. Daniel Day-Lewis plays him with honesty and a fierce sense of purpose, but there's nothing, really, to play. On film, he's a conflicted, self-indulgent artist, but on the stage he was a conflicted artist who, fearful of losing his wife/anchor, realized how to use his past to create the film he longed to make, one informed by his past but that doesn't simply pilfer it.

On film, Nine's conceit doesn't make much sense. It doesn't allow the characters to genuinely interact, and this robs them of the chance to act, as well. The climax, which has seen a fundamental change from the original, is left banal, trite, boring. On stage, the young Guido (who's nine years old) sings a simple song, "Getting Tall," and equates some of a boy's life lessons with a man's: tying shoes, scraping knees, and such are the same, in a way, as what Guido must learn, that in trying to have them all (all the women he loves), he may very well end up with no one, not even the one he professes to love most, his wife Luisa. Instead, the film ditches this essential song is favor of a two-year flashforward that has Guido realizing he can win her back by filming their past. Interesting? No. (a) We've seen it so many times before, and (b) we know that Luisa already despises Guido for doing just that in an earlier scene. Was anyone paying attention?

What's so frustrating about Nine is that the potential was already there. The material was already rich, and the filmmakers— the late great Anthony Mingella and Marshall—either ignored it or decided it was beneath their vision of the film. I wonder hwo much blame can also be laid at the feet of Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit, who created the musical and were involved in the film. Didn't they sense their legs being pulled out from under them?

I could go on. but the damage has been done. Nine was a film I have looked forward to for years. When I heard that Marshall was making it, I thought it was in good hands, perfect hands. I couldn't have been more wrong. Instead of rethinking what Nine might be, I wish he had considered what Nine already was.

P.S. The CD? That's why we're here, after all. It features Daniel Day-Lewis, Penelope Cruz, Judi Dench, Marion Cotillard, Kate Hudson, Fergie, Sophia Loren, and Nicole Kidman singing their songs. Day-Lewis does a sort of half-singing, half-speaking thing, much like Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, and it works. Kidman can't sing and shouldn't have tried; in an interview she all but confessed that she herself didn't really go for her performance. Loren does the Rex Harrison thing but not as well as Day-Lewis. Fergie's brilliant take on one of the show's signature songs, "Be Italian," is a showstopper. Hudson's take on one of the new songs, "Cinema Italiano," is great fun. Her character and the song were both added—and shouldn't have been—but I still like both, especially the song's snappy remix by Ron Fair (next to the remix, the version used in the film is dull). All in all, the CD's not a bad buy, but you'd probably do better doing some selective song-downloading instead.

The Indie Rock Coloring Book by Yellow Bird Project

This is not so much a review as a mention: a great project for a great cause that makes a great gift!

The Yellow Bird Project is a Montreal-based non-profit organization who have, since 2006, worked with a number of indie rock acts to create T-shirt designs that, in the end, benefit a wide range of charities.

The Indie Rock Coloring Book takes it to the next level, offering up 28 coloring and activity pages by created for the project by UK-based artist, Andy J. Miller. Each page represents an indie icon, including Rilo Kiley, Devendra Banhart, MGMT, The New Pornographers, Broken Social Scene and a bunch more.

A quibble (seems like I can’t not do something reviewish each time out): like the T-shirts, it would have been nice to have seen at least some of these illustrations created by the indie artists themselves. Some of them are multi-talented and would have been up to the task. It’s a small quibble, though: Miller’s illustrations are mostly bright and innovative and would be lots of fun to color.

A foreword, hand-lettered by Rilo Kiley’s Pierre de Reeder sets the tone and the intent: “This wonderful coloring book,” writes de Reeder, “is yours to enjoy and be inspired by, and is a great example of how you can turn your love for music and art into something that can really help.”

The Yellow Bird Project Web site is here.

Precious Metal

Understand going in that this is a book for the already converted. If you -- or the person you’re trying so hard to find the perfect gift for -- is not already deeply infected by heavy metal music, then Precious Metal (Da Capo) is not for you. Or them. But if they are... if they are this is seriously the best gift a metalhead could get.

And why? These are the untold stories. Okay: that’s not strictly true. These are the selectly told stories, originally told in Decibel Magazine -- the voice of extreme music. The 25 tales collected in Precious Metal are the best of the best of Decibel’s Hall of Fame pieces. As a result, they’re pretty great. If you’re unfamiliar with Decibel’s Hall of Fame and how it works, in the words of editor Albert Mudrian, it goes like this:

Take a classic extreme metal record (as determined by our staff) released at least five years ago, track down and interview every band member who played on it, and present them questions exclusively about the writing, recording, touring and overall impact of said album.

The result is, well... obvious, right? There’s a reason Decibel is simply the best in its field. It pushes itself beyond the readily apparent, beyond the everyday and comes up with stuff like this.

So who did Mudrian determine should be included in this round up of best of the best? Well, as I said, there are 25, so I’ll just hit some of the albums that I feel are the highlights: Black Sabbath’s Heaven and Hell, Morbid Tales by Celtic Frost, Napalm Death’s Scum, Paradise Lost’s Gothic, Eyehategod’s Take As Needed. It’s an incredible list and since it combines not only some of metal’s top stories, but also some of the top writing about metal around, it’s just an incredible win-win.

Precious Metal is an absolute must for the metalhead on your list.

Best Music Writing 2009

2009 marks the tenth anniversary of the Best Music Writing anthologies edited by music journalist and scholar Daphne Carr and published by Da Capo. As befits an anniversary edition, this anthology is stunning with contributions from some of the very top names in music writing, and letters, as well.

As guest editor Greil Marcus points out, Best Music Writing 2009 is not meant to be an almanac:

It is not a record of the best or worst or most important what-happened-in-music of 2008, the year from which all of the pieces here were drawn …. I distrust the notion that something has to happen in any given year that in the future we will look back upon as a portent of something or as an example of something else.

What we have, instead is, quite simply, the best. The most passionate, the most deeply felt, the most well-crafted and stated and sharply rendered. Over 30 pieces reflect all aspects of the music business and all types of music. You’ll recognize some of their names. Jonathan Lethem. Aidin Vaziri. Carrie Brownstein. David Remnick. Stanley Booth.

If you appreciate reading about music, you’ll enjoy Best Music Writing 2009. It does not get better than this.

Glee Full

By Tony Buchsbaum

We've all seen the endless news reports about H1N1. But there's another epidemic sweeping the country: Glee.

I caught the Glee bug early on, when I watched the pilot last May. Since then, there was first a groundswell, then real momentum, and now an almost religious devotion to the show that's not only redefined what a sitcom looks and feels like, but also what a sitcom sounds like. Glee, you see, is a musical—and as a rule, musicals don't work on television.

Rule broken.

Take five high school losers—an ultra-talented Jewish girl, a chunky black girl, a wheelchair-bound nerd, a not-quite-out homosexual boy, and a confused football player—and put them in a glee club whose only life support is the school's Spanish teacher, a mid-30s hunk who was, himself, in the same school's glee club in its hayday. Add a ton of peer pressure from the football team and the cheerleaders, whose coach is a razor-tongued, nails-tough beeyotch, a kewpie doll of a guidance counselor, and a princippal more interested in funding than extracurricular activities, and you've got a small sense of Glee.

Created by Ryan Murphy, the guy behind Nip/Tuck, Glee doesn't just sound new. It is new. It puts things on primetime network TV that just haven't been there before. Aside from the some of the language and situations, Glee was responsible for one of the most arresting things I've ever seen: Kurt, that homosexual kid I mentioned, comes out to his dad. It's the hardest thing the boy's ever done, and he's terrified his dad will reject him. But instead, the father says, "I know. I've known since you were three and all you wanted was a pair of sensible heels." The dad says he's not thrilled with the idea, but that if that's who Kurt is, he loves him just the same. It's a short scene, never foreshadowed, just sort of stuck in at the end of the fourth episode. But it lifts Glee from an unlikely teen comedy musical to a much more profound look at the lives high school kids are leading today.

But one teen's coming out isn't the only complication Glee so gleefully offers. There's also the pregnant cheerleader (but who's the daddy?). There's the love rectangle between glee club supervisor Will, his devious wife, the guidance counselor who's got a mad crush on Will, and the football coach who knows he's not attractive enough to interest the guidance counselor but loves her anyway. And there's a second love rectangle (triangles are for sissies) between footballer and glee-singer Finn, his cheerleader (and pregnant) girlfriend Quinn, glee club singer Rachel, and Puckerman, the mohawked football player with a serious crush on Quinn but who also secretly lusts after Rachel.

And on top of all this tasty cake is a luscious layer of music. Glee has created such pandemonium that the songs—all covers of big-time hits—are posted on iTunes and downloaded like mad. In the pilot's finale, the kids triumphantly sing "Don't Stop Believin," and I read somewhere soon after that their version had sold more copies than Journey's original.

No matter what song they tackle, from Kanye West's "Gold Digger" to Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline," from Rihanna's "Take a Bow" to Cabaret's "Maybe this Time," Glee's cast (sometimes the students, sometimes the faculty) brings a freshness to these songs, an innocence that feels real, not cheesy. The music has become so popular that two song CDs are slated for release one in November and another in December. And the first half of season one is due for release on DVD before year's end.

Glee could be the show of the year. It's certainly the most inventive thing on television this season. But more than that, it's a culture-changing phenomenon that has everyone talking. I think it has Emmy written all over it. The cast—including Matthew Morrison as the teacher, scene-stealing powerhouse Jane Lynch as the cheerleaders' coach, Lea Michele as the singing ingenue Rachel, Cory Monteith as Finn, the football player with the voice of gold, and Chris Colfer as now-out Kurt—is nothing less than miraculous every week, delivering lines with both a knowing wink and a sincerity that breaks your heart.

As I said, I'm a fully infected Gleek—and happy to be. If you're late to the party, expose yourself to all the episodes on hulu.com—and catch the bug.

How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘N’ Roll by Elijah Wald

It’s important to know going in that How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘N’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music (Oxford University Press), doesn’t really have much to do with the Beatles at all. Or maybe it is more accurate to say that it has everything and nothing to do with them.

What the book really does is take on everything we think we know about popular music because, as author Elijah Wald tells us, “the past keeps looking different as the present changes.”

In many ways, Wald looks at music from a new and surprising place: the various spots where it is seen and felt. From those who make it and those who, individually, groove to it. This passage explains the title -- and in some ways the book itself -- most succinctly:

If you are not aware of the Beatles, you cannot hope to understand any music of the 1960s, because they are ubiquitous and affected all the other music. Even if some musicians remained free of their influence, those musicians were still heard by an audience that was acutely conscious of the Beatles. They were the dominant, inescapable sound of the era.

And though you might disagree with those words -- or, at least, some of them -- the fact that they are worth arguing is... well... inarguable.

Wald is a musician and writer who has authored six previous books on music including Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues and Global Minstrels: Voices of World Music. How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘N’ Roll is highly readable. Wald adds something new to a field most of us thought had been over planted. The book is lucid, innovative and richly worthwhile.

The Supremes by Mark Ribowsky

As a culture, we just don’t seem to get sick of epic Motown girl group, The Supremes. We’ve had movies and television shows and, of course, books and books and books. None of this diminishes the pleasure of author Mark Ribowsky’s The Supremes (Da Capo). Nor, in some ways, does it diminish Ribowsky’s hubris: for himself and his chosen subjects. “[The Supremes] are the most important modern American music act after Elvis Presley, and this may well be the first real biography of them,” Ribowsky writes in his Introduction. Fair enough. Especially as he points out that this might have something to do with “the geology of female acts and gender-based assumptions of what is a ‘serious’ subject matter.”

As hinted at in these words, Ribowsky’s biography is no lightweight fan fluff. Rather, this is an intelligent biographic retrospective, worthy of any university press, but arguably more gripping. This is, after all, good stuff. From the girls’ 1960 audition for would-be starmaker Barry Gordy, to playing the Apollo and “living their dream” to the famous -- infamous -- riffs between the Supremes themselves that eventually led to their break-up.

As Ribowsky points out, “the Supremes’ saga has produced a good many fables, a convenient fallen dream girl in Diana Ross, and a heavy in Barry Gordy.” Good stuff, well handled. The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal is a terrific book.

Travelin' Music

By Tony Buchsbaum


You gotta love a soundtrack whose cover art is a photo displayed on its side. But it's the perfect image for the film, which certainly turns the love story on its side. The Time Traveler's Wife, based on the bestseller by Audrey Niffenegger, is one of those stories that you just know will make a spellbinding movie. And as a filmmaker, you sort of know, going in, that you want someone like Thomas Newman to write the score. After all, Newman's work is sometimes quirkily devoid of melody and other times transcendently rich with it. This particular tale would offer a bit of both, something he rarely does. Perfect.

But for The Time Traveler's Wife, they didn't get Thomas Newman. They got Mychael Danna. Doing a Thomas Newman impression.

His score is a bed of lush melody built of strings, soft percussion, and odd-sounding instrumentation, and it's got a sprinkling of synthesized sounds laid on top. The story, clearly weird but intriguing, involves a guy who flits about time and the wife left at home. It's got nothing but dramatic potential, and Danna does a great job of bringing the romance, heartbreak, and oddness of the story to life through music. The CD also includes a couple of songs, both of which I forgot the moment after I heard them. But the score has stayed with me—always a good sign.

The more I listen to it, the more I wonder if, indeed, Thomas Newman could have done a better job with this score. He's a brilliant composer, but I'm pretty sure he couldn't have. He would have dialed up the extremes of this work—the lushness and the quirkyness—but that wouldn't necessarily have served the film any better. It might have been distracting. If Danna's music is any indication, this is a thoughtful, even quiet film; anything too heavy-handed, too romanic, might have smothered it.

So, bravo to Mychael Danna. He's delivered one great score, one that brings out the themes of the film musically, in such a way that's easy on the ears, evocative of the story, and in its quiet way wholly original.

Biography: Black Tooth Grin: The High Life, Good Times, and Tragic End of “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott by Zac Crain

Unsurprisingly, Black Tooth Grin (Da Capo) begins at the end. December 8, 2004, 24 years to the day that John Lennon died. “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott killed onstage, mid-song. The founder of the metal cover band Pantera, Abbott was not well known outside of his own metal community. However according to author Zac Crain, no one who knew the musician ever wondered why so many people called the act “the 9/11 of heavy metal.”

Of course, Black Tooth Grin doesn’t just tell the story of Abbott’s death. Much more time and detail is spent on the doomed musician’s life. Does D Magazine senior editor and music scribe heavyweight Crain sometimes move Black Tooth Grin towards the maudlin? Maybe only slightly. For the most part, though, Crain seems to hit all the right notes, skillfully blending fact with educated fancy, filling in the blanks and also imagining the what-might have beens and the nearly-weres.

Metal fans will, of course, find Black Tooth Grin to be a must-read but even those who had only barely heard of Abbott will find Crain’s book compelling. It’s a portrait of the music industry exactly as you always suspected it was... and yet entirely different. Fascinating.