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!

Music Book Review: The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth by Michael Spitzer

The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth
by Michael Spitzer (Music 780.9 Spi)

When we talk about music history books, we’re usually not going particularly far back in history. Most general music histories only trace back to the earliest history we have of written music, which is to say western civilization’s written music history, and there just isn’t a lot of written music that’s survived that’s much older than the most recent millennium. Music, which is of course literally made of sound and dissipates immediately after it is played, relied on oral history before that, and although we can find the occasional ancient flute-like instrument, we know almost nothing about the music that might have been played before notation. And written music is lacking, too: the further you go back, the less we understand the notational systems that were used, and there are likely rhythms and ornamentations associated with some of the earliest plainchant music that we simply don’t know about. Yet we know that music is an important part of our society now, and that it seemed to have a similar cultural weight in previous eras, so it’s likely that it played an important role farther back than we can normally look, even if it remains invisible to us, unlike early tools and cave paintings.

 

If music is anything like other forms of expression, from painting to poetry to sculpture, it seems likely that it played important roles in the lives of early humans, too, but how do we look for it? Professor Michael Spitzer from the University of Liverpool has published a book that attempts to look for signs of music further back in time than other music histories have dared to tread. It’s called The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth, and you can borrow it from Polley. There’s nothing quite like it, and the writing style keeps things engaging, too, while we search for the musical mysteries in our collective past.

 

The book is divided into three main parts: “Life,” History,” and “Evolution.” The first chapter, named “Voyager” after the spacecraft carrying a record of sounds from our planet deep into space, acts as somewhat of an introduction to the book and its format. We’re about to take an unusual path into history, dipping further back into time in three stages, rather than the typical history book that starts in ancient times and progresses toward the present. This is because of the problem I mentioned earlier — we simply can’t look very far into music history using our conventional methods of historical research. There is no physical remnant of music other than instruments and music notation in more recent times and mostly western parts of the world, and then the occasional instrument (or what appears to us to be an instrument or two) further into “prehistory,” or the pre-civilization part of our past. In “Voyager,” Spitzer starts by identifying what a person can discern about how our music sounds from looking at music notation, going increasingly further back in time. The further you go, our forms of notation lack descriptions of tempo, dynamics, phrasing, expression, rhythm, and harmony. It’s likely that there were performance practices in place for the music contained in these written documents that accounted for some or all of these missing nuances, but we’ll likely never know. This is going to be a challenging subject.

 

So Spitzer has chosen three general lines of attack. In Part One, “Life,” he explores the present-day conditions of music, and what we understand about music’s global commonalities and regional particularities. In this section, he stays mostly within the “recording era” of the last century or so to find important principles and associations that we can travel further back in time with in Part Two, “History.” So what are a few of these important principles? In terms of interrelationships between people, he finds that group creativity is generally more common than individual creativity in the creation of music: outside of the Western composer tradition, music generally seems to come from group effort, which we see in various forms of world music and within our own pop bands today. The social implications of music reach farther than composing and performing, of course: he observes the various ways which music accompanies all of us through our days in modern life, whether we are making it ourselves or not. Young folks making music with the latest digital technologies still find it to be a social activity, connecting with people in person and online. Music becomes the soundtrack in our workplaces and stores. In folk traditions of recent history, we had various kinds of songs made to lend themselves to different situations, from religious ceremonies to work songs to songs about romantic relationships or mourning that we can all identify with at different times, and contemporary music still contains these messages and impulses, even if it’s marketed under different kinds of contemporary genre names.

 

Other parts of Spitzer’s speculations into deeper history will require examining some biological concepts, so he introduces the present-day understanding of some of these ideas, too: Music can influence our emotions, and in doing so it also has measurable effects on things changing the collective heart rates of audiences. We perceive musical pitches as going “up” or “down,” while there isn’t really a physical correlate for the idea, but he looks for one in the development of the Organ of Corti in our ears, which he presents as a functional refinement of the lateral line found in fish. Now we can say that music relates to motion and emotion!

 

The writing style of the book appeals to me, but it might not be for everyone. In attempting to dive into musical prehistory, the author draws from anecdotes throughout human experience and musical traditions, and in doing so, it can feel like you’re in the narrative equivalent of a street race course. I enjoyed speeding around all of these cultural corners, but if you ever start to feel lost, he occasionally slows down to summarize where we’ve gone so far, and where we’re about to go with what we’ve learned.

 

Keep this in mind as you dive into the middle part of the book, “History,” where the book travels between different places and eras at breakneck speed. By music history standards, this section starts mostly in prehistory, where we’ve tried to make sense of what music might have been like by looking at remnants of musical instruments (concepts like the harp being developed out of the hunting bow, for example). Here, Spitzer looks for distinctions in the kinds of music that might have been made by different kinds of human societies like hunter-gatherers that traveled versus early agricultural areas that were settled, mostly by looking at the kinds of instruments and literary or pictorial representations of music they left behind. For readers who (like me) have mostly a background in the history of the Western musical tradition, there is a lot of material here about music from the historical record that’s totally new information. From there, we move around a lot, but gradually pull toward present time again, collecting cycles of information that show how music was used by different cultures and conquering empires over time, what changed and what remained the same.

 

The final section, “Evolution,” is somewhat speculative by nature, but it’s a fascinating look into the truly ancient past of music, when it might not have been “music” in the way we think of it now, but instead a spectrum of useful sounds for various animals. Spitzer attempts to find the point at which early humankind might have embraced music in a manner that would still be recognizable to us. Then he takes us into the speculative future as well, where perhaps machines or artificial intelligences will make music that transcends our current conception of its possibilities.

 

He ends with a kind of summary of the threads that have come through this whirlwind of a book, “eleven lessons on music’s nature.” If you’ve found yourself occasionally lost amidst the many anecdotes in this book, you’ll find Spitzer’s intended takeaways presented here in a more direct format. I found it fun that he boiled things down to eleven “lessons,” which presumably would start to repeat again at the octave if there were a 12th. Even though I felt like I was comfortably following along throughout, there are so many concepts afoot that this is an effective way to draw out some primary themes for final consideration.

 

Back to the beginning of the book, Spitzer lays out a “Big Idea” that he intends to argue for throughout the book. This is mostly about the idea of the “nature of music” and humankind’s relationship to — or betrayal of — that nature. And in the end, I don’t know that he successfully makes his case, at least for me. Truth be told, I don’t especially care about a fundamental “nature of music,” and to the extent that music is an extension of the human experience, I don’t think we can betray it, either. But for me, reading through the many historical twists and turns in this book is more satisfying than discovering a unified field theory of music would be, anyway.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity by Gary Tomlinson or Music: A Subversive History by Ted Giola.)

 

( publisher’s official The Musical Human web page ) | ( Wikipedia entry for Michael Spitzer )

 

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!

Music Book Review: Titans of Bass: The Tactics, Habits and Routines From Over 130 of the World's Best by K.J. Jensen

Titans of Bass: The Tactics, Habits and Routines From Over 130 of the World’s Best
by K.J. Jensen (Music 787.878 Jen)

 

Musical instruments sometimes get associated with certain personality types. This happens in both classical and pop music worlds to some extent, and I don’t know that there’s really that much truth to those stereotypes, but nevertheless they persist. Let’s look at a typical rock band’s instruments by personality, for example: we expect the singer to be charismatic and a leader, of course. Guitar players probably come next in terms of charisma, often expected to play impressive solos. Drummers may be in back, but they have such a full-body physical job that we often notice when they’re flashy. Keyboard players are maybe thought of as kind of nerdy or subdued traditionally, but that’s changing now that so much music is based on laptop electronics.

 

And then we have bass players: they seem to be associated with a pretty quiet personality, the calm in the center of the proverbial storm. And maybe they go unnoticed by a lot of folks. Again, this is a stereotype, and there are lots of bass players who have been prominent bandleaders, from Les Claypool, Sting and Meshell Ndegeocello in rock and pop, to Charles Mingus, Esperanza Spalding and Stanley Clarke in jazz, and many more. But it’s true that bass players have an all-important focus on keeping time and setting the pulse and feel for the whole bands they’re playing with. Where other instrumentalists get to play with time, pushing and pulling against it, bass players are the foundation making that possible.

 

Here at the Polley Music Library, we have lots of books on how to play bass, bass technique, approaches for different styles, and biographies of many bass players across lots of genres. But there’s a great book on our new arrivals shelf that I want to highlight today that takes a fresh approach to the instrument. It’s called Titans of Bass: The Tactics, Habits and Routines From Over 130 of the World’s Best by K.J. Jensen, and while it’s a great book for beginners or folks who have just been thinking about playing bass to get started with before they even find an instrument, there are also a lot of great ideas in here for more experienced players to consider.

 

The book’s structure is kind of unique, building on the system of printed books with online supplementary content that’s starting to become common with instructional books for music. There is a “How to Use This Book” instruction found just after a short foreword by bassist Tony Levin, and it’s pretty simple to follow: the author has created a website (bassguitarbeginner.com), a “Titans of Bass” Facebook group, and a “Titans of Bass” YouTube channel. The premise of the book is that you follow a series of daily prompts that will direct you to these other resources, and the book will take you through two weeks of thinking about and learning about the bass at an elementary level. In Chapter 1, author Jensen explains his intentions with this system: “This journey is not to make you a bass virtuoso like Victor Wooten overnight. I want to see if the bass is for you. I don’t want you to buy thousands of dollars of gear that collects dust and never gets used.”

 

Some of the supplementary material might not be quite ready, though. I went to the website and there doesn’t seem to be a live registration section yet like the book describes, nor is there a download of the bass part for “Midnight Special,” which would be an important part of following the two week goal laid out in the book. Looking at the Titans of Bass YouTube channel, as of this writing (August 16), several of those videos for the book appear to have been uploaded only yesterday, so maybe the supplementary material rollout is ongoing. The Facebook group referenced in the book exists, but has had no real activity yet, other than a couple of people asking if they’ve made it to the right place.

 

In general, though, even if all of the web-based material was ready, its focus is entirely on those new to playing bass. Over the course of the two weeks, the goal will be to learn how to play one tune, “Midnight Special,” record yourself playing it along with a backing track, and play a “mini-concert” for friends and family on the 14th day. The tune only requires three notes, so it’s mostly about getting comfortable handling the instrument and trying to groove, which of course are the key elements for being a solid bass player. From this perspective, this is a good book to read if you’ve been thinking about playing bass but haven’t made the commitment yet. A couple of weeks with this book should help you to decide if you’re ready to fully pursue the instrument.

 

While the structure of the physical book guides readers through this 2-week program, with 15 chapters that correspond to the 15 videos, I think the book has a wider range of appeal than just beginning bass players. If you ignore the online material, this isn’t an instructional book, but more of an inspirational book that celebrates bass playing and some of the greatest living bass players. Jensen’s strength as an interviewer is what makes the book interesting to me. He conducted interviews with 131 of his favorite bassists — organized in groups throughout the book as the “Titans of Bass” — and most of the book’s contents are made by Jensen asking questions in his own narrative, which are answered by a series of quotations from the many bassists interviewed for the book. The “Bass Titans” themselves are featured in blocks throughout the book, with photos and brief biographies for each player, and these sections alone are a great way to find out about some cool bassists you might have missed over the years. It’s a pretty good mix of artists from rock, jazz, blues, pop, folk, and metal genres, though the list is somewhat limited by those the author was able to conduct interviews with. One can find out a little about more bassists in Chapter/Day 11, though, which discusses the “bass heroes of the Titans,” where we can finally read a little bit about folks like Jaco and Bootsy.

 

While the questions that Jensen has posed to his many interview subjects all tend to be aimed at beginners, discussing things like choosing a first bass, whether or not to use a pick, and the basics of tone and groove, I think these also have an appeal for bass players at any level. And in particular, there’s many pages of quotes in the Day 12 section that address the question, “What’s the best advice anyone has given you regarding learning the bass?” The answers are generally looking at big-picture concepts, but it’s a lot of great advice that has helped many of the best players in the world with their own progress. There are some great ideas in here.

 

So even if you’re already a skilled bass player, there’s some useful inspiring material in here. It’s like getting to hang out with some of the best players in the world for an afternoon for some mutual support. And for those just thinking about picking up a bass, you’ll get a sense of what it will be like to get started for a two-week trial period. I wish more instruments came with some similar kind of 2-week immersion into the general fundamentals and culture around playing them!

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Beginning Bass for Adults: The Grown-up Approach to Playing Bass by David Overthrow, Bass 101: A Contemporary Approach to Playing Bass by Ron Manus or Play Bass Today! by Chris Kringel.)

 

( publisher’s official Titans of Bass web page )

 

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!