A concise, Dylan-heavy history of the American relationship between race and music.
A combination of cultural history of American popular music and race relations and a fan’s notes on Bob Dylan, whose story consumes the final 100 pages.
The author, who has published previously about the Beats (Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America, 1979) and about the Grateful Dead (A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead, 2002), offers an extensive analysis of and tribute to the popular music that grew along Route 61, from New Orleans to Wyoming, Minnesota, paralleling for much of its length the course of the Mississippi River. McNally begins with Thoreau and abolitionism and then segues to Mark Twain and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (the author joins the debate about that novel’s controversial final chapters) before beginning his story about the founding fathers and mothers of our popular music. Readers will recognize many of the artists he discusses. Scott Joplin, W.C. Handy, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Benny Goodman, Lead Belly, Duke Ellington, Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, Dizzy Gillespie, Elvis Presley, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker—these and numerous others form the first three-quarters of McNally’s story. Lesser-known names and narratives are here, as well (Charlie Patton and Buddy Bolden among them). The author also offers a summary of key events in American racial history: the era of lynching, the Freedom Riders, the rise of Martin Luther King Jr., Selma and much more. He notes the transitions from blues to jazz to folk to rock and the emotions each emergence occasioned (he mentions that Pete Seeger wept when Dylan went electric at Newport in 1965). In 1965, Dylan released his album “Highway 61 Revisited,” and McNally’s praise for Dylan is unrelenting—and a tad disproportionate.
A concise, Dylan-heavy history of the American relationship between race and music.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61902-449-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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