Music Book Review: Rock Stars on the Record by Eric Spitznagel

Rock Stars on the Record: The Albums That Changed Their Lives
by Eric Spitznagel (Music 781.66 Spi)

Whether you’re a musician or an avid listener, one of the best ways to find out about music that you might enjoy is to look into the favorite music of your own favorite artists. While we find ourselves surrounded by new and relatively asynchronous ways to find music, like the algorithms of Spotify or Apple Music, this old tried and true method has the advantage of helping you to find some historical context for music that you like, which in turn will help you uncover musical eras and scenes that really appeal to you. This is kind of like the old school practice of chatting up record store clerks, who have a deep knowledge of music and often love to connect those historical dots, but even cooler coming directly from your own favorite artists. And there’s something special about getting to know the influences of your own favorite artists more deeply, too — since we already admire their music so much, we can get a sense of what the early building blocks in their own music were like, what aspects of music initially commanded their attention, and make more sense of exactly how they built on their influences. Sometimes this can give us a clearer sense of where our own musical interests come from.

 

But where does one find this kind of information? Sometimes the subject comes up during interviews, especially longer in-depth interviews, so that’s a place to start. Then of course there are biographies of so many artists, and early influences are a pretty common subject in all of those. But there’s a great recent book by Eric Spitznagel that gets directly to the point of asking various rock and pop musicians about their favorite records. It’s called Rock Stars on the Record: The Albums That Changed Their Lives, and you can borrow it from Polley.

 

In his brief introduction, Spitznagel reflects on how everyone, not just celebrity artists, tends to have some album that just feels like “home” to them, or represents the beginning of feeling like an adult, or like the album “saved their life,” something along these lines. We may talk about other albums with each other, but these album origin stories are part of us all. It’s a great setup for reading about what first inspired all of the successful musicians that follow in this book, because they were just like all of us when it came to these important early albums.

 

After the introduction, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious organizational system afoot through the rest of the book. The artists interviewed here don’t appear in alphabetical order or by era, but instead they seem to come together in a way that just makes for an overall pleasant flow, shifting between musical styles and eras. The first featured artist is Angelo Moore of Fishbone, a favorite band of mine growing up. His interview reflects the way many of these interviews go — there is a general discussion about the music he remembers from his youth, some of which is more about the music in his household instead of just music he selected for himself. And of course these early sounds find their way into musical thinking, too: his father was a jazz musician, so there was a lot of jazz in his house, but also rock music like the Doors and Led Zeppelin, and comedy rock like Cheech and Chong. If you think of even just those influences, you start to get a picture of where Fishbone came from. And then he talks about someone handing him the first Bad Brains album at a bus stop, which really blew his mind. And as a black musician starting to work with rock music influences, that early mixture of punk and reggae in Bad Brains makes total sense as a major inspiration for where Fishbone started, since they used a lot of reggae and ska sounds with the energy of punk in their earliest albums.

 

To name another specific example, Moore’s interview is followed by a chat with Alice Bag, of early LA punk band the Bags. She grew up with ranchera and Mexican pop music around the house from her parents, and soul music and the Beatles from her sister. She describes really getting into music in a more serious way after hearing David Bowie’s “Hunky Dory,” whom she felt that magical bond with immediately through the album. She also talks about being really into Elton John and Bessie Smith, but again, you can hear elements of all of these people somewhere in her music, which still features that kind of punk energy of that era of Bowie with soulful singing and compelling melodies.

 

These kinds of humanizing stories appear across a decent survey of the modern rock landscape, with interviews featuring folks like Jane’s Addiction singer Perry Farrell, Fugazi’s Ian Mackaye, Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh, Weird Al Yankovic, Donnie Osmond, Laura Jane Grace, Verdine White, and many more. There are even musicians from younger generations like Marisa Dabice and James Petralli whose stories demonstrate how this phenomenon of feeling changed or understood by records continues to be an important process for folks of all ages.

 

When it comes to books like this, I think many readers may be inclined to look up the interviews with their own favorite artists first, but in truth I think even reading about the influences of folks you aren’t familiar with (or aren’t a huge fan of) is still a powerful experience. Taken as a whole, the book is a real celebration of those early moments of inspiration that help to define who we all become as people, regardless of whether we pursue music or not, and just basking in such sacred reminiscences feels good for the soul.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try The Vinyl Dialogues by Mike Morsch or The Worst Gig by Jon Niccum.)

 

( publisher’s official Rock Stars on the Record web page ) | ( official Eric Spitznagel Twitter feed )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!