The most recommended rock and roll books

Pamela Des Barre's incredible history as rock and roll’s number one famous groupie helped her create her incredible memoir! Her extremely well-written book features many super cool personal stories about her involvement with several famous musicians/rockstars that nearly all of us women who are rock fans would have loved to have been in close, loving contact with ourselves! 

Pamela was definitely my biggest inspiration when it came to memoir writing. She digs my book as well, writing a complimentary comment that appears on its back cover!

Want to write about music and musicians? You’ll need to understand the world in which they live. And if you’re writing about jazz and rock ‘n’ roll in the middle of the last century, that means a segregated, ugly world where even the most talented were treated as less than human. This was the world of the Chitlin’ Circuit. A dangerous, exciting, lawless network of nightclubs and juke joints from Memphis to New Orleans, Houston to Indianapolis, this topography spawned the popular music we love today. And nobody brings it to life like Lauterbach, whose reporting and language are as intense and musical as the era itself.

Beth Fowler examines the connection between rock and roll and the civil rights movement.

Drawing on scholarly studies, newspaper and television reports, speeches, and oral histories, Fowler presents about as thorough a study as possible in one volume. The research is thorough and compelling.

It may not always be an easy read, but it is an important book, especially as its closing chapters deal with present times and America’s struggle to fulfill its promise of equality for all. Fowler gives us a new perspective on the power of music.

For me, it’s the ultimate snapshot of what it’s really like to be a writer on the road with a band (in this instance Bob Dylan’s remarkable Rolling Thunder Revue of 1975). Sloman documents it all: the editorial pressures, the hassles of trying to gain access to Dylan, the egos, the enablers, the claustrophobic hotel rooms, wacky ole’ Alan Ginsberg — and the exhilaration of seeing a legend, on a creative high, from close range, night after night. Not a bad gig, all things considered.

Szalay sort of exposes—in the most subtle of ironic ways—how men delude themselves with respect to their intentions, their character, their attitudes towards work and women, and all the concomitant notions of competition contained therein.

He's got, it seems to me, a quite Hobbesian worldview going—and that, to me, is refreshing! Of course the writing is for the most part beautiful; but not too beautiful, not too embellished. A bit plangent. A bit lapidary.

One thing I would say is, reading him, I am sometimes tempted to cut the last sentence of his chapters. He often ends with a note, as it were, that strikes me as bathetic. I wonder if in some way he doesn't trust the reader. 

Cutting the last sentence:  that's an old New Yorker magazine trick and I think—even though this may sound presumptuous—his prose'd benefit… show more.

The Bible as far as I am concerned. As I was becoming a rock and roll fantastic in the early 80s, this was my go to source whenever encountering a new act that I hadn’t heard of. I would look up the new act, get an overview of their career and then dive in. It was always fun to see how they reviewed each album, using a scale of 1 to 5 stars. I bought every edition of this book (and will continue to do so, if they keep publishing them) and it was also interesting, and great feature of these books, that in each subsequent edition they would revisit their reviews and often change them, along with their star ratings.

I’ve been a tremendous fan of Lucinda Williams since seeing her perform on nearly a weekly basis back at the Barndance at the Palomino in the late 80’s and early 90’s–she’s an incredibly talented singer and musician, and it turned out she’s a great memoir writer too, able to describe how she came up from traumatic childhood in the Deep South, to her years of being overlooked in the music industry, to her eventual successful country and pop music career which includes being a three-time Grammy winner!

Of all the legendary bands that are part of the history of Rock and Roll, Pink Floyd is the one that appears to have the least amount written about them. That is why this book is so important and so good. Other books had touched on their history, but none of them went as deep and thorough as this one.

We need a documentary made from this exquisite history of how rock and roll came to Great Britain by the redoubtable Pete Frame, best known for his intricately calligraphed and intensely researched Rock Family Trees. He walks readers through the rise of Tommy Steele and the 2I’s club in Soho, where Cliff Richards, England’s Elvis, and other nascent stars of the new sound were discovered. He skillfully entwines the strains of skiffle, trad jazz, and early British r&b into his narrative and brings to life early British rock and rollers such as Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, Vince Taylor, and others who never made their way across the Atlantic, setting the stage for the emergence of the Beatles and nothing less than an explosion of British culture on a global scale after the many long, dark years following World War II. This brilliant book is stuffed full of original research and… show more.

I found this to be one fo the best of the never-evening parade of rockstar autobiographies. Townshend is very honest about his complex personality and his shortcomings, and reading this, you can easily trace how this informed so much of The Who’s amazing music — and the stories of all the craziness of the early days of The Who are a blast, to boot.