Happy for a While (2023)

Phil Dellio’s sixth book—most of them in collaboration with Scott Woods—sees him going solo and focused primarily on one thing: the song “American Pie” by Don McLean. The book was originally intended for the Duke University Press “Singles” series—Joshua Clover, Roadrunner; Chris Molanphy, Old Town Road; and more on the way. Much like the 33-1/3 series with albums, these short books focus on more or less hit singles, “distributed to and heard by millions that create a shared moment [that they are] bound to outlive.” I’m not entirely sure “Roadrunner” has been heard by millions, but it’s been around nearly 50 years and is much beloved, including by me, so maybe. Happy for a While was subsequently declined after news came to light of McLean pleading to domestic violence charges in 2016. At that point, Phil (full disclosure: a friend) returned once again to the self-publishing well of his last three books, expanded this one beyond “American Pie” into a fuller meditation on early-‘70s pop music, specifically 1972, and appended some long perspective on life, pop music, social media, and other matters in an epilogue (hence the subtitle “American Pie,” 1972, and the Awkward, Confusing Now). The result may be the best thing Phil has written yet. He expertly argues for the unique mitigating factors that could produce such an odd hit as “American Pie,” including the ’50s nostalgia that started in the late ‘60s, the rise of singer-songwriters in the early ‘70s (by far the most successful commercial period for these various troubadours), and the increasing acceptance of longer songs on hit radio and in general. Writing 50 years after the fact—not unlike McLean writing a dozen years after his central fact, the plane crash that took Buddy Holly—Happy for a While inevitably trucks in nostalgia to some degree. When I characterized it on social media as “a great treatment of how the '50s became the '60s became the '70s in music,” I stopped and realized that’s old. The frequent sadness of Phil’s writing accommodates the nostalgia well, but it is also countered by the clinical precision of his analysis. He charts with exquisite detail, for example, how the average length of #1 hits grew by approximately 61 seconds from 1966 to 1972. He loves what he’s talking about and he knows what he’s talking about. My only complaint about this book, aside from the usual small quarrels over tastes—he likes the Carpenters more than me and I love “Superstar”—is that Phil had to self-publish it. It’s already essential for any collection of books about 20th-century music. Hey, publishers. If you want it, here it is. Come and get it.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

You Should've Heard Just What I Seen (2020)

Phil Dellio makes a wide-ranging survey of movies and TV in this book focusing narrowly on the uses of pop music. I say "narrowly," but Phil's discursive conversational style, strewn across dozens of review-style pieces, covers a lot more than just pop music. More than just pop music, but he is reasonably exhaustive on the music. And it's a lot of fun to read, even when you want to argue with him about things, the music or the movies or both. His center of gravity and touchpoint is the TV series Mad Men, which full disclosure I still have not seen, anticipating rightly or wrongly too much David Ogilvy for my taste. Phil reaches back to The Graduate, Martin Scorsese, and Quentin Tarantino, as one must—it had to start somewhere. He acknowledges The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, with oddly nothing to say about Deadwood or The Wire—no pop music or bad pop music, maybe. No Lost either, which did have good pop music, though The Leftovers is mentioned several times. From about 2015 on, since Phil's blog of the same name started (with Scott Woods contributing), he has stayed well abreast of the latest in peak TV, or prestige TV, or premium TV. Call it PTV. His long list at the end makes apparent how deep into the weeds of TV series he has gone. He can pull rabbits out of his hat too. His argument for the Jackie DeShannon song at the end of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice has resigned me to looking again at a movie I recall as insipid. To be honest, though, that's why I read books like this, and Phil is really good at it. I learned a lot, have 15 or 20 titles to go looking for, and that's a lot more than I get from a lot of the books I read. I've come away even more sensitive to the way music and a narrative moment can build on each other to create something unique and memorable. It's still cinema, even if it's on a TV screen, and it's something only cinema can do. (Further full disclosure, Phil is a friend and kindly mentions my name in this book.)

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

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Interrupting My Train of Thought (2014)

Phil Dellio is a friend, so I better start there. He has also taken a route of self-publishing and as such been a bit of a role model for me, though he is more the age of Grant Hart and I am more the age of Elvis Costello. His '90s zine Radio On inspired me to do one of my own back then. I was thrilled to join him and Steven Rubio in 2011 for a Facebook countdown exercise of our 50 favorite movies. And this self-published collection of Phil's pieces culled from his online writing inspired me again to do something like it. Interrupting My Train of Thought is organized thematically—Phil has written about pop music, movies, baseball, American politics, the year 1972, and more. Among other things he works well within the bounds of the personal essay. His own life is suffused through everything he writes. He is never mawkish, only self-deprecating, and his insights and opinions are sharp and clear. He is soon impatient with fools, in his unassuming patient way—his day job for years was as a grade-school teacher. A lot of the pieces here came originally from postings on the ILX forum and Facebook. As he stitches the pieces together, he has a wonderfully discursive style that circles and approaches his subjects from different angles, often taking vaguely skeptical positions but capable of devotional flights, sometimes wandering well afield, but invariably pulling it together convincingly. In a way it's like a tightrope act—a literary form made out of fragments of culture and the glue of himself. At the same time, his quiet confidence makes him feel more authoritative as you go. His obsessive regard for Neil Young (and Richard Nixon, and Coppola movies) has also made him something of a useful scholar. In 2007 he whipped up a definitive and impressive catalog of Young covers by other artists to date, published in Stylus (available here). It's so straightforwardly thorough and comprehensive you can't be anything but impressed. It often feels like Phil writes with a great deal of intuition—that's a key part of the pleasure in this collection—but his instincts are true. He is no acquired taste. All you have to do is read his stuff. I encourage everyone to start immediately.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.