Dreaming the Beatles (2017)

Rob Sheffield takes possession of the Beatles in a deceptively effortless way. He's a little defensive on some of his points, forcefully turning his 1966 birthdate into an advantage rather than disadvantage (a little like me arguing for possession of Louis Jordan, but OK). His starting point, much like Greil Marcus's for Elvis Presley in Dead Elvis, is that the Beatles never stopped growing and being important just because the band broke up. His most persuasive argument for me was simply pointing out that the album 1, released in 2000—a collection of the Beatles' 27 #1 hits, which everybody who cared had to own by then—has been the best-selling album for most of this century so far (it's now #2 after Adele's 21, which only overtook it this year). Sheffield covers all the familiar ground here: Ed Sullivan, the movies, Bob Dylan, Rubber Soul and Revolver, Jesus, the White Album, etc. He is particularly good on Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, with one of the best analyses of that album and its place I've seen. Then, without so much as a speed bump, he carries on talking about the solo careers in the '70s and early nostalgia products such as the Red Album and Blue Album. This was the most surprising and even refreshing view for me—every time he casually zigged and zagged between '60s Beatles and '70s Beatles I had to reorient a little. I like many of the solo Beatles albums (and I like Double Fantasy a good deal more than he does) but I have always seen a bright line between the Beatles and what came after. But I'm convinced now he's right. The Beatles were unimaginably huge in their time. We've seen nothing like it since in popular culture. Yet they have become even bigger since. By the one obvious measure, for most of the 21st century, which started 30 years after they broke up and one of them dead, they owned the #1 album. Getting down to cases with this book—which is a pleasure to read—I find myself closer to Sheffield than I would have imagined, but often with strong disagreements too. He's a John Lennon / Rubber Soul partisan whereas I had made him for Paul McCartney / White Album. He actually went down the anti-Paul road with the rest of us, turning it around finally (as the new majority coalition coalesced) in the '90s (I was a little slower). I like George more than he does and he likes Ringo more than I do. He is vastly more versed on the lore, the bootlegs, and YouTube videos. There was a lot for me to learn here. I had already learned, maybe with Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head (on which Sheffield sounds a little dubious), that there's always more to learn with the Beatles, and infinitely more variation in taste on specific cases. Ultimately I think Dreaming the Beatles is a bit of an odd duck—I worry that like 1991's Dead Elvis it is actually heralding the beginning of the end—but it definitely belongs in the canon of Beatles literature.

In case it's not at the library.

On Bowie (2016)

I enjoyed Rob Sheffield's long eulogy to David Bowie, or short biography, or letter to the world. It made me think a lot about how much Bowie meant to me and it made me sad again when it came to the part where he dies. Although the book is poetically riddled with lines from Bowie songs in practically every paragraph, Sheffield still manages enough critical distance to judge him on the fine points. I didn't always agree—Sheffield has little use for the movie The Man Who Fell to Earth, or more generally for director Nicolas Roeg, whereas that picture ranks high among the more important inflection points for me, and Roeg has his place too. Sheffield thinks Labyrinth is Bowie's most enduring and significant movie—no. I appreciate that Sheffield acknowledges the long-term enduring Bowie haters as it's such a common experience, for example turning up a quote by Keith Richards from about 2009 ridiculing even the idea of taking Bowie seriously, as a musician or anything. That's a common view I've encountered all my life, from oldest friends to major rock critics. They're wrong, that's all. Sheffield stakes out some bold stances here, such as arguing for the album run from Station to Station to Scary Monsters as one of the all-time greatest. Maybe—it is really great. But so is The Man Who Sold the World to Aladdin Sane, and has the advantage of not including Station to Station. Sheffield's passionate case for the Thin White Duke phase did send me back to Station to Station, where the only song I connect with there remains "Golden Years" (admittedly, I love it) and it reminded me again the thing has only six tracks (a sure sign of bloat). (In fairness, I may be in the minority on the album, as Scott Miller was another vocal champion of it.) Mostly I liked On Bowie because there was something cathartic about reading it. It made me wish there were something like it on Prince—2016 was a tough year for losses of all kinds. Sheffield is just plain a Bowie fan and that's what does the trick. He loved Bowie for all the right reasons. He knows an amazing amount about him, not just the glory years 1970 to 1980 (he pushes that out to 1983 and Let's Dance but I can't agree), but also the fallow time, which he separates into a dreck phase (1984-1995) and a revival from the mid-'90s on. He's harder on the later '80s stuff than me and easier on the 21st-century stuff (except the last two, in a class by themselves as everyone seems to agree). He knows all those albums with one-word titles, like Hours, Heathen, and Reality. So I learned a lot reading On Bowie too, found plenty of tracks and YouTube clips well worth chasing down. Sheffield always feels fair to him—he's well aware, for example, of Bowie's lifelong "laughing gnome" problem (which is exactly where I put Labyrinth, by the way)—and he's fair to David Bowie fans too. In a way, On Bowie feels like a gift, a rare quality.

In case it's not at the library.

Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time (2007)

Back in the '90s I published a zine devoted to the various arts and sciences of mix tapes; it went by the somewhat unseemly name of "Tapeworm." I also had a good deal of interest then in writing personal essays, which I occasionally practiced in that zine and various others percolating along at the time (notably Frank Kogan's "Why Music Sucks"). I had the great good fortune to attract Rob Sheffield to contribute to "Tapeworm," which is neither here nor there, maybe more like an exercise of name-dropping and beside the point. The point is that, with this memoir, Sheffield has taken both those strains and virtually run circles around anyone else who has ever tried or even contemplated it. That's partly because he has such a sad and harrowing story to tell—in 1997 his wife of less than 10 years, Renee Crist, died suddenly at home with him from a pulmonary embolism—and partly because he's such a damn good writer, charming and witty and warm and knowledgeable. Crist was not just his partner in life and marriage, she was also an able music journalist in her own right (I was working on her to contribute to my zine back then too). They lived close to the bone in Charlottesville, Virginia, on the wages of the work and all their money went to sensible things such as music, shows, and clothes. Naturally they were consummate mix tape artists too. Sheffield opens up a box of his old mix tapes here, many made for Crist or with her in mind, a few with her direct input, others that preceded or followed her, and he listens and he remembers. There are 22 chapters, each featuring a tape, out of which Sheffield builds the story of a romance, a relationship, and a tragedy, weaving all through his encyclopedic knowledge of pop music and his good taste and his even better nature. It's hard to read in places—anyone who has ever lost anyone can expect to find Sheffield probing painful places one way or another. But it's amazingly light-hearted too, even as it never shrinks from anything. In the end, Sheffield does a good deal toward making something substantial out of what too often seems among the most inconsequential and silly career choices imaginable: the rock critic. He makes something substantial out of it, and brings the dignity too. This is a very nice book.

In case it's not at the library.