Music Book Club | Books about your favorite music, bands, and musicians

The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band

Motley Crue

What comes to mind when you think of Motley Crue? Eighties hair metal anthems that were only slightly better than those by Poison or Warrant? Or their reputation as one of the wildest rock bands ever?

If the second answer is a better description of Motley Crue for you, then you have The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band to thank for it. This is the tell-all semi-autobiography of a band that somehow seems to live on in popularity, despite being generally mediocre and overshadowed by many other bands of their generation.

With the help of an editor/writer, the book is written by the band members themselves, switching perspectives between the four of them, although bassist and songwriter Nikki Sixx gets the most time.

You will hear all about Sixx’s heroin addiction, guitarist Mick Mars’ chronic back problems, how singer Vince Neil killed another hair metal musician in a car accident, and way too much about drummer Tommy Lee’s Baywatch/Playboy relationships. The band members don’t exactly come across as likeable, but they certainly are interesting.

I was in middle school when Dr. Feelgood came out. At the time I wouldn’t have been caught dead listening to it. They weren’t nearly heavy enough for me at 12 years old – I much preferred Metallica, Iron Maiden, the Misfits, or Black Sabbath.

But I read The Dirt when it came out long after Dr. Feelgood came and went. Anyone who wasn’t a fan had already forgotten about Motley Crue. I enjoyed the book a lot and, yes, it even made me appreciate the band a little more. They aren’t Mozart, but decent rockin’ strip club music.

If you have the slightest interest at all in Motley Crue or rock and roll debauchery, then don’t miss The Dirt.

The Real Frank Zappa Book

I have to admit that I read The Real Frank Zappa Book a long time ago. I still remember it as being one of the best books by a musician that I have ever read. Zappa was a wild guy who surrounded himself by wild people – musicians, artists, creeps and just plain weirdoes.

Zappa’s music is very hit-or-miss. Some of his albums, especially the jazz/rock of Hot Rats or the comedy rock of Apostrophe, appeal to the masses, while others are just plain peculiar, like the classical music he made in his last years, such as on the Yellow Shark, his last album before his death. Or, some of it is just plain terrible, like his do-wop excursion Cruisin’ With Ruben and the Jets or the very promisingly titled but ultimately disappointing Jazz From Hell. (I’m sure that many people love these albums, however.)

Unlike Zappa’s musical output, The Real Frank Zappa book is pure gold. He was a sharp, inquisitive man who embraced weirdness while sticking to a someone rigid value system. As odd as his sensibilities were, he tolerated no drug use whatsoever, much like he had no love for religion or conservative politics.

His musical journey and legacy is legendary. And, like his music, humor plays a major part in the book. You have characters like Bill the Mannequin F***er and the guy who was addicted to electricity.

You don’t have to be a Frank Zappa fan to like this book, just like how you don’t need to be a Frank Zappa fan to enjoy Hot Rats. You just have to give the man a chance.

The Phish Book

In these times of internet-readiness I’m not sure why anyone would spend money on a book of photographs. Especially of a band. It seems like you could download any photo you want for free. Photos are promotion, after all, much like how the music itself is evolving into promotion for concerts, an activity that was always more lucrative for the band than for oft-exploitative record companies.

Now a huge exception for this argument is that, if you love Phish the band and you have a coffee table that lacks a coffee table book, then you will probably love Phish the book.

Phish – love ‘em or hate ‘em, you can’t deny that they have made a huge impact on American music. And especially live music. The Phish Book documents their foray into massive popularity – 1996-1997, the years of their first major radio airplay - “Bouncing Round the Room” from A Live One - and their awe-inspiring 1997 summer tour which culminated in The Great Went, a three day music festival that included a giant nude photo and stellar musicianship.

The year The Phish Book came out was sometime around 2000. That summer I saw Phish’s three night run in Deer Creek, Indiana. The last night was a grand occasion in the history of this vastly experimental band. They reworked one of their signature songs, “Chalkdust Torture,” and frequently teased “Moby Dick” by Led Zeppelin. During the show singer/guitarist Trey Anastasio gave the band a tongue-in-cheek introduction, greatly pleasing those of us in the crowd who still felt a close connection to this now colossal, sensory-overload-inducing kick-ass rock band. “We are the Phish, buy the book, and see the movie.”

If you saw them during those years or wish you had, then you will delight in thumbing through the pages of The Phish Book.

The Math Behind the Music

If you aren’t a musician then this book will bore the hell out of you. Unless of course you love math. Then the book has a fighting chance to be interesting.

I’m a musician. I also can barely do basic math like long division. I read The Math Behind the Music, and it was interesting. Turns out math and music go hand in hand, like music and dancing. Well, maybe not the relationship isn’t quite that close, but the principals of mathematics form some of the fundamentals of the creation of music, if that makes any sense at all.

For example, have you ever wondered about the relative thicknesses and lengths of piano strings? Why some are longer than others? Well, they are divided mathematically. It’s the same with guitar strings. When you put your finger on the string and pluck it, you are dividing the string mathematically and changing the tone in a mathematical way. The layout of the fretboard is determined that way.

The Math Behind the Music also goes into some of the musical applications of math, such as the patterns used in change ringing, long passages of church tower bell ringing. It sounds like total chaos, but the old folks yanking those chords are actually following a set algorithm, if it can be called that. I told you I don’t really know what I'm talking about. But the cool thing about the book is that if you are a musician, you don’t really have to know much about math to understand the concepts of how math is used in music.

Fretboard Logic

An Excellent Guitar Method

I’m going to depart from the usual reviews of biographies and autobiographies of famous musicians and review one of the only books I can wholeheartedly recommend to any guitarist.

Traditional guitar teaching methods, like traditional methods for teaching almost anything, seem to focus only on parts of the big picture. In a way, guitar learning methods are designed to force the student to continue taking lessons. Most teach songs, melodies, or just guitar licks. You learn them one by one and are somehow supposed to put them all together by the time you become a real musician.

It’s rare for a book to teach the big picture. Yes, like any discipline, there is a “big picture” to guitar – a logical organizational system that ties it all together.

When I hear so-so guitarists play live, I can hear that they don’t really understand this “big picture.” They are recycling blues licks or running through scales without actually knowing what they are doing or playing anything original. Does this sound like your guitar playing?

If so, then I highly recommend Fretboard Logic by Bill Edwards. Now, there are many ways to look at the tuning system on the guitar, the least efficient being the traditional song-learning methods I described above.

The system in Fretboard Logic is to analyze the repeating patterns of different scales and the chords derived from them and then see how they are repeated everywhere on the guitar neck. Every note is accounted for and fits into this system.

This may mean nothing to you. Or you may have already figured out some of the patterns of the guitar on your own but have gaps in your understanding. Either way, if you are a guitarist and someday want to be a good guitarist who actually creates music, and you are confused about the relationships between scales, chords, and individual notes, then you should absolutely get your hands on this book.

Willie: An Autobiography by Willie Nelson

Shotgun Willie

Last week I reviewed Cash: The Autobiography by Johnny Cash. A logical follow up to this is to review another autobiographical book by another country music legend and superstar, Willie Nelson.

Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson were both part of the “outlaw country” movement, which also included Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, Merle Haggard, and more. Willie, Johnny, Waylon, and Kris formed the country music supergroup The Highwaymen, a great band that, although it may not have fully lived up to its promise, is well worth a listen if you like this kind of music.

Even better than the highwaymen are the duets performed by Willie and Johnny Cash, one of which was recorded for the VH1 Storytellers show. Besides the fantastic musical interplay between the two, you can hear some great stories.

Similarities between Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash continue, seeing that Willie has also written an autobiography, creatively titled Willie: An Autobiography. His engaging personality shines throughout. He came up in Texas out of poverty and undoubtedly paid his dues, playing some vividly described dives and having funny adventures. His first real fame came from his songwriting, especially when he sold “Crazy” to Patsy Cline.

Then through the seventies Willie slowly reached fame and then superstardom. He describes the madness of these times and the colorful personalities of his band members. He even smoked a joint on the roof of the white house while visiting President Carter!

Any fan of Willie will enjoy this book, and especially fans of country music in general, because he describes his meetings and collaborations with many of the central figures in country (and especially outlaw country) music.

So who do you like more, Johnny or Willie?

Cash: The Autobiography by Johnny Cash

The Man in Black

Johnny Cash was a total badass. The lyrics of many of his songs will tell you that. Just listen to the lyrics of “Folsom Prison Blues.” Or better yet, listen to the compilation “Murder” from his boxed set “Love, God, Murder.” Each CD is organized thematically. You can imagine what “Murder” is about.

Or even better yet, read Cash: The Autobiography by the man himself. This book was the inspiration for the popular movie Walk The Line. It was a great movie for sure, but Walk The Line wasn’t even half of it! In the book you read about Johnny’s rise to fame, his time at Sun Records where he met Elvis, among many others, the way he met future wife and fellow country star June Carter, family stories, stories of the music business, drug stories, everything, even up to the recent (to the publication of the book) robbery of his house in Jamaica. There’s no denying that the man had quite an interesting life.

The best story in the book, which I have to retell, is when Johnny Cash is so depressed and desperate that he tries to kill himself by climbing into a huge network of caves. He figures that he will get so deep and hopelessly lost that there will be no way out, and he will be forced to die. Needless to say, he sobers up and regrets that decision.

If you are a Johnny Cash fan and you like to read, but the story above doesn’t convince you to read his book Cash: The Autobiography, then there’s no hope for you.

The Dark Story of Eminem

How dark is it?

If you are a fan, you might not learn anything new about Eminem when reading The Dark Story of Eminem by Nick Hasted. It’s a decent book – fast-paced, full of stories, and complete in the telling of a rise to fame, straight from poverty to superstardom.

Eminem’s dissenters cite nihilism, obscenity, and glorification of violence in his songs, but any of his fans know that he is playing a character: Slim Shady. Eminem himself has pointed out that his songs do nothing more than what many modern movies do – tell a story, often a graphic one. However, Eminem uses only words, not the violent or sexually charged visuals common in movies and television.

He raps in character, and really there are three: Marshall Mathers, Eminem, and Slim Shady. Slim Shady is the sometime lunatic from Eminem’s rawer songs, like “97 Bonnie And Clyde” or “Cleanin’ Out My Closet.” His public persona is the Eminem character – struggling rapper, misunderstood genius. He’s the likeable loser of 8-mile: hardworking, down and out, sensitive yet tough. This is more or less the impression of Marshall Mathers (the real person, supposedly) that you get from reading The Dark Story of Eminem.

Where the story diverges from the Eminem legend of 8-mile is during Marshall Mathers’ rise to fame. He travels to LA to be a guest on a radio show, Dr. Dre happens to be listening, and the rest is history. It’s a dream come true for any artist, but it certainly doesn’t bring him happiness.

What follows are huge tours, drug abuse, family conflict (all sorts of long lost relatives come out of the woodwork), but not satisfaction for the protagonist. So is it a dark story? Sure it is, but it got him out of the trailer park.

Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead by Phil Lesh

A Dead Story from the Inside

Deadheads have never been starved for reading material. Countless band biographies, tour companions, song lyric books, photo books, newsletter compilations, and even encyclopedias of song statistics have been published. How do you even begin to choose what to read about this iconic American band?

Well, you could start with a band member himself, Phil Lesh. Bassist and mad musical genius, he was with the band from the start, meeting Jerry Garcia in a San Francisco coffee shop as part of its growing pre-hippy folk scene. He didn’t even play bass then – just trumpet – and composed weird electronic music influenced by avant-garde classical composers.

No one plays bass like Phil – his lines are like solo passages, counterpoint to Jerry’s guitar. He brings an unselfconscious intellectual wackiness to the sometimes-dour group; from the neck up he looks like a nerdy music professor, from the neck down he’s all tie-dyes and tight jeans, with striped sweat bands on his wrists.

In Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead, Phil Lesh writes a personal, compelling, and honest story. He doesn’t try to make this Dead history all things to all people, but focuses on his own observations and anecdotes. Refreshingly, he doesn’t make or dispel controversy, but offers cool-headed insight.

In this book, the stories shine: the ups and downs of and band who, like them or not, are an undeniably fascinating bunch. From their beginnings playing Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests, into the seventies with their innovative wall-of-sound system, through the success of eighties, and into the nineties and the death of leader Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead’s story is quite a read. In his book, Phil Lesh gives us all the craziness, drama, lineup changes, deaths, and funny moments of one of the USA’s most enduring musical legacies.

Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N’ Roses

Stories of the Rise to Fame and Related Craziness

Why would anyone read the biography of a band they don’t like? Guns N’ Roses – I could take them or leave them. I think they have some catchy songs but would never buy or even download their music.

However, I read the biography Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N’ Roses by Stephen Davis and thoroughly enjoyed it. It is the story of down-and-out losers who get successful, but their crazy, out-of-control behavior just gets worse. Several of them self-destruct and ruin their lives. Now is that success?

Obviously if you are a fan then there is a lot to enjoy in this book, but even if you have no interest in Guns N’ Roses or the mid eighties L.A. glam rock scene, this is an entertaining book.

At 448 pages, Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N’ Roses is chock-full of stories. A teenage Axl Rose travels to New York City, where after getting off the Greyhound he meets a bum who tells him, “You know where you are? In the jungle baby!”

Then in Hollywood, Axl sleeps behind dumpsters in Hollywood outside glam rock clubs. Once the band forms, combining from two other bands, L.A. Guns and Hollywood Rose, they all sleep in the same cramped rehearsal space, sharing drugs, groupies, and general craziness.

Finally Guns N’ Roses has their first out-of-town gig in Seattle, where the car breaks down and they are stuck there, broke and drunk. Then, after massive success, Axl locks himself in hotel rooms before concerts, making them start hours late. Original drummer Stephen Adler becomes a hopeless junky while bassist Duff McKagan drinks a gallon of vodka a day. These stories and the characters that drive them make Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N’ Roses a quick, engaging read.

If you love Guns and Roses, you will love this book. If you hate them, it will fuel your hate. But if you are like me and indifferent to their music but like a crazy story, then you will probably enjoy it too. However you feel about the band, Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N’ Roses by Stephen Davis is a worthwhile read for any fans of music or its related craziness.

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