What nonfiction music book should I read?

I read Our Band Could Be Your Life a couple years ago, and I really enjoyed it. I’d never really listened to the bands that Azerrad covered in that book before then, and now some of my favorite music comes from Mission of Buma, Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth, etc.

What other kind of music chronicles might I enjoy? I was thinking maybe something on hip hop, punk rock, or perhaps something that covers early-to-mid 80s British bands (e.g., Joy Division, Jesus & Mary Chain, Echo & Bunnymen, Orange Juice)? It’d be great if it was a book covering several related bands such as OBCBYL, but I wouldn’t be opposed to reading a history of a single band/artist.

So, what you got for me, SD?

The book I’m reading right now, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84 by Simon Reynolds mentions several of the bands you listed. If you go to its website and scroll down there’s a list of what each chapter covers (the chapter order is different in the U.S. version).
I’m liking it so far. Worth a read.

If you’re into punk, I highly recommend Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. It mostly covers the New York scene. It’s assembled from interviews and the order they do a really good job ordering the segments into a narrative. I’ve read two other books by authors that were inspired to write the same way: Fool The World: The Oral History of a Band Called Pixies and The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting: An Oral History, and both are good if you’re a a fan of their respective bands, but they aren’t nearly as good as Please Kill Me.

I have a book on Echo and the Bunnymen called Turquoise Days. I’d have to read it again to give a definite judgment but I think it was good. It’s an official book so it might be a little one-sided. One thing that’s cool is that it has commentary from the band on just about every one of their songs.

I remember reading a book in high school called Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise and Fall of Rock or something like that. At the time I liked it and I remember it being a decent history of rock & roll, but one thing that bothers me about it is that it repeats the story of Robert Johnson making a deal with the devil, but I learned later that that story was actually supposed to be about Son House and that it was only later told about Robert Johnson because people got mixed up about it.

I love the Azerrad book, too - and **Talon **makes excellent suggestions. I have gone on record a buncha times plugging Please Kill Me; just great. I am not as big of a fan of **Rip it Up **- it came across as fragmented and almost a reference tool; it didn’t have the cool-scene(s) narrative of Please Kill Me, and only a few of the players, such as John Lydon and Green ?? (the guy from Scritti Politti) come across as people I want to know more about. With all of the amazing music, bands, personalities and stories the book is trying to cover, I wanted the words to jump off the page a lot more than they did. Say, as withThe Dark Stuff, by Nick Kent - a fun read about a variety of messy rockstars…
In another recent thread on Rock Biographies, I plugged Andy Summers’ One Train Later and Dylan’s Chronicles, Volume 1. Top of mind, I would also recommend From theVelvets to the Voidoids - another book on punk, but it does such a good job showing how different factors and influences worked together to merge into punk that you get a different view than Please Kill Me. Someone else in that thread offered the Elvis Bio Last Train to Memphis, and I would agree. And I have mentioned Al Kooper’s Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards a few times - great overview of life in the music business from about 1960 to the 1980’s with a guy who was in a number of the right spots.

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung is essential reading if you want to be up on rock criticism. He was the first dean of rock critics - well, along with about a dozen other guys like Jon Landau, Christgau (who now annoints himself the current dean), Robert Palmer (not the singer; wrote Deep Blues), etc. His stuff is great when he lines up his energy with the topic or band he is writing about. A legendary Clash fan, his notes from their small club tour around the UK is essential reading.

I have plenty of others, but something you didn’t ask for comes to me: another chance to recommend Tom Dowd: The Language of Musicon DVD. Tom Dowd was the engineer at Atlantic Records and recorded the music of everyone from Ruth Brown, to John Coltrane, Tito Puente, Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin there. He then moved South and tracked the rise of Southern Rock with the Allmans and Skynyrd. He is an amazing man with a wonderful, important story in the history of music. And its cool; check it out.

You know - I just went back and re-read your OP, you are looking for a specific era; sorry dude. Rip it Up is the book most focused on that era that I know of in a broad sense, but again, I didn’t find it great…lemme ponder that. I know there’s been stuff on Joy Division, Factory and Creation records…

Oh - and if you haven’t picked up any of the 33 1/3 books, an ongoing series of small books, each written by a different auther and featuring an essay/overview of a single CD by an artist. Some of them are pretty good; the one on My Bloody Valentine’s Lovelessis great, but some are hit and miss…they have ones on stuff by Sonic Youth, Joy Division, Pixies, etc…

Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming covers British punk from its roots through the late 70s; Savage has a great eye for detail and tells a fascinating story – it’s not all the Pistols and the Clash, and I discovered a lot of great early punk from his discography (which is a great read in itself). There’s not many music books that I’ve read twice.

Similarly, in Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the twentieth Century, Greil Marcus takes the social critique aspect of punk and looks at in in the same context as Dada, medieval religious heresy, and near-forgotten art movements such as the Situationists and the Lettrists. It sounds hopelessly pretentious, but Marcus is a rock critic not an academic, and somehow the whole thing hangs together.

I’d agree with this. Rip It Up is very detached compared to Please Kill Me. I don’t know that it’s necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not as fun. And I normally like artsy stuff and people doing different things, but in the book just about everyone seems insufferably pretentious in some way or another. My least favorite group mentioned so far is probably Throbbing Gristle. I did really like the parts about Joy Division and Devo, and it got me into Gang of Four, who I listened to a few years ago and didn’t like but am really liking now.

I’m going to check out the other books mentioned in this thread.