Punk Rock Boox

I don’t read a lot of rock & roll bios anymore at my age; how many more times can you read about such & such band got wasted and tore apart some club blah blah fucking blah. I’m not a teenager any more so I’m not as interested in the hagiography a band has built around itself, which of course you major-to-fanatical fans will remember from 2007:

Every time some fuckwad band is releasing an album now, they sit back in interviews and MARVEL at how this record “came together.” They’re mystified, wowed at how this magic happened. “Yeah, I mean, how this record was made, I mean it just somehow happened, came together, like magic, you know?” ummm...you mean you wrote some songs, some people came and played them and you recorded it? Wow! What a MYSTERY!!! Shut the fuck up. And then there’s always the jagoff who’s gotta take time out to let us know that while recording gee, I dunno, he just doesn’t really trust “technology.” He’s a luddite, all about the music! Shut the fuck up. You play electric instruments and record mostly onto a computer after which you pray that 15 year olds download your songs onto their iPods. So quit this stupid act; quit acting like if it were up to you you’d whisper your songs into blades of grass until the ghost of Robert Johnson heard your amazing, ethereal cuts and somehow made them available at Starbucks.

I’m much more likely to get lost in a more technical about actual writing or recording songs, such as this one.

But right now I'd like to give a shoutout to what are still, after 30+ years, THE definitive books on the punk rock era, three books I wore the print off with my grubby paws reading & rereading, and will still be held dear in my heart until the day they bury me in the CB's bathroom (even if it is in a museum somewhere.)

On a side note, England's Dreaming was THE reference book I used in my famous "I called Rolling Stone" paper:

I'm so old that while in college I actually called Rolling Stone magazine and told them I wanted to write a college paper on the Clash. They were so baffled that they actually SENT mimeographed copies of every article on the Clash that had been in RS, along with a personal note "Greg - hope this helps, let me know how it goes." I still have the stuff they sent me; doing something like that in today's internet age is pretty unthinkable.