It's Only Rock 'n' Roll

Just lately I've been making use of the library at the Esplanade rather than the one at Marine Parade as the Esplanade version focuses on the performing arts so there's a good collection of plays and a wide range of lively material on music and film. On Saturday I came away with a couple of books on the making of what are now regarded as classic albums (Miles's Kind Of Blue and Dylan's Blood On The Tracks, since you ask) and they proved very readable, as evidenced by the fact that I've now read them.

Over the last fifteen years or so I've noticed an increasing amount of material in this sort of genre, not the classic albums thing, which is a fairly new development, but simply books in some sense about the world of rock music, written by reasonably well-informed, literate sort of chaps (the authors are nearly always male. Chaps rather like me, I suppose.) It's a bit odd then that, as far as I know, there's not a lot that's outstanding in this line, in terms of literary quality or musical insight. Mind you, I have to be a bit wary here as I'm not particularly well-versed in the field. But having said that I'm not aware of having particular works of great merit drawn to my attention - so I suppose they are not so thick on the ground, if they exist at all.

I say it's a bit odd since, given the sheer breadth of music on offer, from quite a span of time, and the passionate interest it naturally evokes, you'd expect something special from someone. But what you get tends, in my experience, simply to be a kind of extended journalism rarely rising above the obvious limitations of its subject.

I suppose this all sounds a bit jaundiced and maybe I can put that down to my disappointment over the book on the Dylan album, despite its readability. I'd heard of the book a few months ago and felt vaguely excited, I suppose because the concept seemed appealing and a review I read assured me that the book had been excellently researched. And so it proved to have been, but rather like a good feature article than something worthy of a full volume. That's the way I read it, I suppose, like a good feature article, worth glancing through but nothing to go back to. The tome in question: A Simple Twist of Fate: Bob Dylan and the Making of Blood on the Tracks by Andy Gill and Kevin Odegard.

More anon.