You’ve got to think that books on twentieth century popular music will eventually get less frequent and authoritative as the originators pass on and first-hand info gets less accessible. That’s certainly not the case yet, given the wealth of volumes on major and minor figures that continue to pour out. The sheer range of performers and styles covered seems wider than ever, as does the kind of books getting generated. Memoirs, photo compilations, day-by-day diaries, discographies, genre and label overviews – all those and more are here. If superstars like the Beatles and the Doors are well represented, so are figures you’d never expect to get covered in full-length book form, from Keith West and Dana Gillespie to Jimmy McCulloch.

1. Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice: 1967-1975, by Richard Thompson with Scott Timberg (Algonquin). As the subtitle makes clear, this memoir by the esteemed guitarist only covers the first decade of his career. Which is fine: that’s the decade in which I’m primarily interested, when he was original lead guitarist of Fairport Convention through the early ‘70s before starting his solo career, as well as playing on numerous interesting records as a session man. This hits all the bases, covering the records, tours, and musicians with whom he collaborated with detail, wit, and clarity. If you’re on the lookout for bits of info you might not have read before, they’re here, like the memory of Fairport learning Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It With Mine” from Judy Collins’s non-LP B-side; Buck Owens and his band harassing Fairport for their long hair and hippie dress, only for Thompson to humble them by asking for their autographs by names, making it clear he admired their music; or Thompson sneaking a look at Joni Mitchell’s notebook when they shared a bill in the late 1960s.

He’s embarrassed about that incident now, and expresses regret about some other youthful behavior, especially fathering a child (at the woman’s request, with no demands he be involved in the upbringing) but failing to participate in his son’s life for the first dozen years. But the book’s much more about the music and the sparks behind his stylistic blends and shifts, some form of mixes of folk and rock usually serving as the foundation. He neither romanticizes nor complains about the ups and downs of the life of a musician who can maintain a career without stardom, the downs including the crash where Fairport drummer Martin Lamble lost his life (as did Thompson’s new girlfriend) and a truck crashing into the pub where Fairport were living in the early ‘70s (though Richard was not there at the time).

There are also insightful memories of Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, Linda Thompson, and other Fairporters, and it’s a quick-paced narrative that doesn’t linger overly long on any part of the story. The Thompsons’ embrace of Islam in the ‘70s is explained, though the book doesn’t quite get to the point where they left that faith, or the disintegration of their marriage. An afterword and epilogue quickly offers a condensed summary of his post-mid-‘70s experiences, and while it might disappoint some fans that this period is barely covered, that leaves room for a sequel if Thompson’s up to it.

2. Paul McCartney: The Lyrics, by Paul McCartney, edited with an introduction by Paul Muldoon (Liveright). The most well known book, perhaps by far, on this list, as it was a #1 New York Times best-seller. Just because it was commercially successful, however, doesn’t mean it isn’t good—kind of like the Beatles themselves. Crucially, it’s not just a book that prints the lyrics with some illustrations, though the lyrics of 154 of the songs he wrote or co-wrote are here, and there are lots of graphics. There’s also a lot of text in which McCartney discusses composing the specific tunes, often throwing in a lot of observations about influences, inspirational incidents and people and his life, and life in general. Most of the really well known songs he wrote (with the odd exception like “Hello Goodbye” and “Magical Mystery Tour”) are included, and there are some really obscure ones from both the Beatles days and his solo career, even reaching back to a late-‘50s number (“Tell Me Who He Is”) that was never released, and for which McCartney doesn’t remember the tune.

While some of these stories have been told a fair amount (and a few are even repeated with variations in the text), the commentary’s almost unflaggingly absorbing and entertaining, both for the information and the lively, witty way McCartney tells it. I’m not overall interested in much of his post-early-‘70s solo career, but even the notes on those are usually worth reading, as they usually have noteworthy stories and perspectives not specifically related to the songs themselves—quite a few of which from the previous decades, I admit, I’m not familiar with. Here’s one of the better examples of his wisdom, in discussing a character in “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window”—“She found a ladder lying outside my house in London. As far as I recall, she stole a picture of my cotton salesman dad. Or robbed me of it. But I got the song in return.”

This doesn’t nab the #1 spot on my list since it does spotlight a good number of songs from a period of his career that doesn’t interest me (even if, as previously noted, the stories accompanying those usually do). A few (not many) notable Beatles songs in which he was the main writer—“I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “I’m Looking Through You” are a few others—are missing. And there are a few, if not many, factual mistakes that I’m surprised made it through the editing process. For instance, Paul remembers getting the title for “Sgt. Pepper” from a remark Mal Evans made on a plane ride back from visiting Jane Asher on her 21^st birthday in Denver, although that was in early April 1967, and the song “Sgt. Pepper” had largely been recorded on February 1. There are many, many Beatles fans besides myself who could have spotted such errors, and the essence and primary points of the stories could have been retained if they’d been fixed. Was it unimportant to McCartney and the publisher to make the relatively modest effort necessary to catch those?

To get back to the book’s substantial pluses, the photos and illustrations are really good, and sometimes rare and unseen (though the absence of captions on some is frustrating). Besides pictures dating back to his childhood, there are plenty of McCartney’s handwritten lyrics, drawings, and letters. Most interesting to me of all were a few very early Beatles setlists, from around the late 1950s and early 1960s, listing some songs they haven’t been documented as performing. And yes, this is an expensive (though not massively so) book, but it’s worth owning.

3. Set the Night on Fire, by Robby Krieger with Jeff Alulis (Little, Brown). Ray Manzarek and John Densmore issued memoirs quite a few years ago, and now Doors guitarist Robby Krieger finally weighs in with his. As a book, this might not be as polished or rigorously researched as some of the others in the Top Five. It’s not strictly chronological, weaving back and forth in an episodic fashion, largely though not wholly focusing on his years with the Doors. As a big Doors fan, however, I found this on the whole more interesting than almost any other rock book of the year, and better than the books by Manzarek and Densmore.

Krieger goes through a lot of details that intense Doors fans want to hear and that aren’t explored as thoroughly in other books, like the nature of his songwriting collaborations with Jim Morrison (which were more frequent than are usually reported); how he won the audition for the Doors, in significant part, with his adept bottleneck style of playing; and how their early residency at the London Fog, far from being the near-bust it’s often portrayed as, was invaluable to honing the group’s playing and songwriting, allowing them to craft new material without pressure. “Every band should be lucky enough to have a London Fog,” in his estimation.

Krieger also puts the kibosh on some long-standing mythic incidents. To his memory, the Doors weren’t fired from the Whisky a Go Go for playing a profane version of “The End”; in fact, he doesn’t think they were fired at all, just moving on to different and bigger gigs. He writes they didn’t think the suggestion from the Ed Sullivan Show people to change the lyric to “Light My Fire” was serious, and that they just casually disregarded it rather than using the original lyric as an act of defiant rebellion. Contrary to John Densmore, he recalls the band starting to work on post-L.A. Woman material in anticipation of Morrison’s return from Paris, not in preparation for a career without Jim. The notorious Miami concert that caused Morrison such legal hassles was, at the time, just another raucous show they didn’t expect to invite prosecution, if more disorganized than usual. He acknowledges the singer’s alcoholism and frightening behavior, but also his sensitive and polite behavior when not drunk. He wonders why the group didn’t think of recording in their office (as they did for L.A. Woman) before that album was done as a way of getting around Morrison’s unreliability, since Jim was often there and sometimes sleeping overnight in the space anyway.

There’s some coverage of the post-Doors years that’s expectedly less interesting, but not wholly uninteresting. For those who want to know about the strange and sad conflicts between the members when a Doors reunion band of sorts was assembled without Densmore in the twenty-first century, that’s here too, though only given a chapter. Krieger comes across much as you’d expect, given his low-key image and onstage presence in the Doors: a nice fellow without an outsize ego who isn’t above poking irreverent and self-deprecating fun at himself and the group, though some of his comments about tension with the one surviving member, Densmore, might strain their at-present intact if tenuous friendship. If you’re wondering about the black eye Robby sported when the Doors played “Touch Me” on The Smothers Brothers, the story behind how he got that is here too, and more shocking than you’ll expect.

4. All or Nothing; The Authorised Story of Steve Marriott, by Simon Spence (Omnibus). This isn’t a standard biography, though it has about as many details about Marriott’s career and personal life as the most thorough bio could have. It’s mostly an oral history, with extensive comments from many people who were in his bands, family, management, or personal life. These are linked together by fairly frequent text from the author filling readers in on the background of Marriott’s trajectory, through his days as a child actor and his peaks with the Small Faces and Humble Pie. This is “authorized” (US spelling) because much of Marriott’s family authorized the book, and many of them participated in interviews, including two of his ex-wives, some of his children, and his sister. That’s just a partial list of the people who are heard from, the most famous including Kenney Jones, Humble Pie drummer Kenny Shirley, Ian McLagan, Peter Frampton, early Small Faces manager Don Arden, and Andrew Loog Oldham (who worked with the Small Faces and Humble Pie at Immediate Records). The late Marriott himself is represented by numerous quotes from interviews he gave.

With almost 450 pages, this not only has as much info as you might want to know. It might have more info than you might want to know, considering how boorish Marriott’s behavior often was. Arguably, it could have been better served by drawing upon the interviews for a standard narrative format. It’s certainly readable, but the many incidents in which Steve was drunk, coked up, obnoxious toward bandmates and partners (and many others), and a general screw-up can be hard to take in such a large dose. This is a big part of many rock and celebrity biographies, of course, but it’s bigger in Marriott’s case than usual. And the decline from fame and a musical peak is longer here than usual – almost twenty years, as really, he didn’t make notable music after Humble Pie’s brief stardom in the early 1970s. He kept trying, the trail leading through numerous bands, abortive reunions with guys from the Small Faces and Humble Pie, and a chaotic personal and business life that saw him move from the UK to Santa Cruz, Atlanta, and back again. For much of his later years, he was slogging it out in pubs or with bands with connections to Humble Pie, without writing or recording significant material.

There is a lot of coverage of the music and records along with the volatile personal tribulations, and the Small Faces and early Humble Pie properly get the most in-depth treatment in that department. As for why he spiraled downward so violently and endlessly, the usual suspects – cocaine, alcohol, reckless spending – are most to blame. It seems like he might have had mental problems as well, so erratic was his behavior; bipolarity is mentioned as a possibility. As usual for such biographies, plenty of people around him put up with this because he could be lovable and had a lot of talent – though the average reader wouldn’t have stood for this kind of stuff from anyone. Here’s one question that isn’t answered, and might not be possible to answer: how did he manage to get such lucrative contracts (the amounts are often reported in the book) after the early 1970s, as he never sold many records after Humble Pie’s hit albums? Was the music industry that naive as to what Marriott was capable of, artistically and personally, given his poor results and poorer reputation for not delivering good recordings and generally being almost impossible to deal with much of the time?

5. Janis Joplin: Days & Summers: Scrapbook 1966-68 (Genesis Publications). Like many Genesis Publications books, this is a limited edition, this one only running to 2000 copies. And like many of their books, it’s expensive, costing £325. I’m not going to pretend that’s not beyond what many readers can afford, and that quite a few don’t want to pay that amount for any book. Should you be able to read this, however, it is very interesting for the Joplin fan, with much material that has never been published. Most of that material’s visual, covering her entire life, though as the subtitle signifies, it’s built around her scrapbook spanning the years 1966-1968. There are photos, letters, newspaper and magazine clippings, and memorabilia dating back to her childhood, though the bulk of it’s from her ’66-68 years with Big Brother & the Holding Company. There’s also a lot of oral history text, taken from close associates like Peter Albin and Dave Getz of Big Brother; her sister Laura and brother Michael; and Jorma Kaukonen and Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane.

There’s some unusual, interesting info, like Joplin writing about of Big Brother making a film (apparently unmade) in 1966, an offer (not taken) to sign with ESP Records, and describing the rigors of their first recording sessions. She wrote quite a bit, and in much detail, about her personal and professional lives to her family in the letters reproduced here, though they decrease in number as her success grew. The clippings include some that would be pretty hard to dig up even through library research, and even from her period of stardom, including ones from short-lived or relatively obscure magazines like Eye. Albin and Getz have a lot of good stories, not all of them common to Joplin biographies, like noting how her vocals were double-tracked on their first album, and how the first Tim Hardin LP was a big favorite of Big Brother’s. There aren’t nearly as many visuals or as much text from when she went solo the last couple years of her life, which unbalances the book’s overview, and some of those interviewed for the text stretch things with general observations of the era that aren’t specifically related to Joplin. 

6. The Beatles: Get Back, by the Beatles (Apple/Callaway). The coffee table companion book to the Peter Jackson documentary of the same name features photos from the Beatles’ January 1969 sessions by Ethan Russell and Linda McCartney, as well as dialogue recorded of the Beatles and associates while Let It Be was being filmed that month. To intense Beatles fans, this won’t be as much of a revelation as it will be to much of the public. Some of this dialogue, for one thing, was included in the book that came with initial editions of Let It Be back in 1970 in some countries (including the UK, but not the US). Much of it was paraphrased or summarized in Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt’s book Get Back: The Unauthorized Chronicle of the Beatles’ Let It Be Disaster about 25 years ago. The dialogue has been selectively chosen, and some of the less flattering bits that are heard on bootlegs aren’t heard.

This isn’t too heavily sanitized, however. It contains some frank discussions about tensions within the group, John’s relationship with Yoko Ono (when both were absent), George leaving the Beatles for a few days, and whether they have long to go before splitting. There were will be some surprises even for those who’ve previously read some dialogue or about the material, like the presence of early quasi-manager Allan Williams at one session; John enthusiastically promoting Allen Klein as a manager to George Harrison the day after meeting with him, and just as enthusiastically recounting watching the Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac on TV a few days before that; and; and shots of Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, and others checking out the roof as a possible concert location five days before the show, though it’s often been assumed this wasn’t considered until the last minute. In all it’s a valuable historical record of what the Beatles were up to in one of the most confusing – possibly the most confusing — junctures of their career. If the text is more interesting than the pictures, the photos are still good to see, and many of them haven’t previously been accessible. It’s also much sturdier than the slim paperback book that came with some editions of Let It Be in 1970, which is notorious for falling apart due to its loose binding.

7. Those Were the Days 2.0: The Beatles and Apple, by Stefan Granados (Cherry Red). This is an updated version of a book whose first edition was published nearly twenty years ago. It’s not a superficial update; there are nearly a hundred more pages, and although some of this covers Apple’s twenty-first century activities as stewards of Beatles/Apple catalog, other material has been added. True, Granados didn’t talk to most of the principal figures who’d interest readers most, like the Beatles, Allen Klein, Yoko Ono, Derek Taylor, Neil Aspinall, Mary Hopkin, Billy Preston, and James Taylor. But he did interview more than eighty Apple artists and employees, some high-ranking, like Peter Asher and Joey Molland of Badfinger. While most of the others were in obscure recording acts or were Apple workers barely or unknown to the general public, that ensures they had a lot to say and fresh perspectives, having seldom if ever talked on the record about the company.

The book doesn’t just cover the Beatles’ releases and the high-profile ones by the likes of Hopkin and Badfinger. There’s lots of ink on the many songwriters they published, who often didn’t record for Apple and sometimes never even got to the point of making records. Much attention’s also paid to artists who did put out little-noticed discs on the Apple label, like the Sundown Playboys, Bill Elliot and the Elastic Oz Band, and Lon and Derrek Van Eaton. There are colorful tales of the Apple organization’s more chaotic incidents, but it’s emphasized that for much of the time it functioned as a more or less conventional record company, if one that made some bizarre detours and was subject to the tensions rocking the Beatles as they split and sued each other (and Klein). Also out around the same time as this book is the five-CD compilation Good As Gold: Artefacts of the Apple Era 1967-1975. It complements this book well as it features many of the songs that are associated with Apple but didn’t come out on the label, including publishing demos and tracks recorded at the company’s studios.

8. Hollywood Eden, by Joel Selvin (House of Anansi). Taking students at University High School in West Los Angeles in the late 1950s as its launching point, Hollywood Eden looks at how L.A. developed a regional rock sound based around the surf-car-sun Southern California lifestyle from then until the mid-1960s. Jan and Dean and Nancy Sinatra were students at University High School, but the book’s focus widens to include other L.A. high schoolers who’d soon make their mark on the rock world, among them Phil Spector, Sandy Nelson, Kim Fowley, and the Beach Boys. Although the concentration is on the late 1950s and early 1960s, it edges into the folk-rock era with the Byrds and the Mamas and the Papas before Jan Berry’s terrible car accident in 1966—and Spector’s retirement after the failure of Ike & Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High”—signals the end of a relative age of innocence.

Many of these details have been covered in a few previous books like Barney Hoskyns’s Waiting for the Sun, Dean Torrence’s memoir Surf City, and books on the Beach Boys, Spector, Byrds, and Mamas and Papas. Still, it’s interesting to have them woven together with a lot of attention to interrelationships between the acts. Selvin’s style, not just here but in his numerous other books, is to tell the story rather than use direct interview quotes, but there’s still a good number of stories that aren’t so well known, or are told in greater detail than usual. Such as, for instance, the botched kidnapping of Frank Sinatra, Jr., in which Torrence somehow played a not-wholly-unwitting part. And there’s definitely more material on a few interesting figures than makes it onto most books, like Nelson (whose drum style and accident that cost him a foot are thoroughly discussed); Jill Gibson, who briefly replaced Michelle Phillips in the Mamas and the Papas; and Terry Melcher, who made a mark as a surf/hot rod performer/producer before his most famous work with the early Byrds.

The book has a lot of the behind-the-scenes action, not all of it sunny, in the Los Angeles rock scene at a time when opportunities for hustlers were far more rampant than they’d be when Hollywood became one of the top centers of the music business. Given that strength, it’s not too important in the big picture, but the chronology of Fowley’s 1965 comings and goings is shaky. If this goes into another printing, that section’s note that he caught one of the Yardbirds’ “first performances” in England in 1965, when they’d already been around for about a couple years, should be corrected. The same for a timeline that has him returning to L.A. in December, but somehow meeting with the Mamas and the Papas just days after the August Watts Riots.

9. The Double Life of Bob Dylan: A Restless, Hungry Feeling (1941-1966), by Clinton Heylin (Little, Brown). Heylin has issued a few books on Dylan, and while they’re not flawless, his status as one of the leading authorities on the man is unquestioned. Why another one, considering he’s covered Dylan’s career in depth already, with specialized volumes on his recording sessions and songwriting in addition to the more standard biographical overview Behind the Shades? He’s been able to do a lot more research in the last few years, particularly since he had access to the personal archive Dylan sold to the George Kaiser Family Foundation in 2016.

So this is kind of an expanded retelling of the first 25 years of Dylan’s life, focusing on the six or so first years of the ‘60s, when he rose from unknown Minnesota folkie to one of the world’s biggest stars. Those who haven’t read many other Dylan books, however, might feel lost by the crush of information, not all of which goes through his songs and career path in a standard fashion. There’s a lot of space given to previously undocumented material that illuminates or challenges the familiar storyline, like between-take session chatter, unreleased concert recordings, personal and business correspondence, and (less interesting) his writing as he worked toward the book eventually published as Tarantula.

For someone like me who knows the core story well (even if Dylan isn’t one of my very favorite artists), that’s pretty interesting, even if some of the detail is still rather extraneous. Others might find the scope disorienting, especially as the chapters don’t proceed in a strictly chronological fashion, jumping between his boyhood and his early career in the early sections. It’s a bit like a fill-in-the-blanks of what’s known by knowledgeable fans, though Heylin pays some attention to the singer’s general career arc, ending with the famous July 1966 motorcycle accident that pretty much put his public career on hold for a year and a half. One would guess that there will be volumes covering his subsequent career, though this is the era that fascinates fans and readers the most.

Like some of Heylin’s other books on Dylan and other subjects, this has occasional smug putdowns of other authors and critics. In the introduction, they’re more than occasional. Far from elevating the stature of his own work, they diminish it. His efforts would be better appreciated if he let the quality of his research and appraisals speak for itself.

10. Always a Song, by Ellen Harper with Sam Barry (Chronicle Prism). Harper is not a well known musician, though her son Ben is. She hasn’t even made many records, and didn’t until she was well into middle age, sometimes recording with Ben Harper. But even if you haven’t heard of her, or for that matter aren’t interested in Ben Harper, this is a good memoir of coming of age in the ‘60s folk music revival, with a lot of coverage of the years before and afterward. Her parents ran the Folk Center (which she eventually took over) in Claremont, California, not far inland from Los Angeles. Through them and the center, she met some of the folk boom’s leading figures, like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. She also had fleeting interactions with other famous artists, some of whom don’t come off too well, particularly Joni Mitchell (who stubbed out a cigarette on the Folk Center’s floor when it wouldn’t give her a free guitar), Guy Carawan, Baez, and Bob Dylan.

Of more note, however, is Harper’s own tale, which is much like many semi-pro musicians of her generation, but well told here. Her parents moved from Massachusetts because her father lost his job in the McCarthy era, and she often felt like an outsider both because of her background and bohemian interests. The Folk Center’s growth from hole in the wall to major destination for musicians and fans is itself interesting. But so is her rocky upbringing, struggles for identity as she shifted from adolescence to adulthood, and a marriage to a man who unfortunately turned abusive and alcoholic. The story’s told with a firm even hand even when the going gets tough, and brings to life some of the hard tasks of raising a family as a single mother while attempting to make a living at the margins of the folk community with some integrity. Is her role in popular music nearly as important as, say, Dylan’s, as documented in Clinton Heylin’s new book? No, of course not. Is this a better read than Heylin’s The Double Life of Bob Dylan, which contains much more in the way of valuable historical research? Absolutely, demonstrating that the lives of faces in the folk crowd have their place in history too.

11. Motor City Underground: Leni Sinclair Photographs 1963-1978, edited by Cary Loren and Lorraine Wild with a contribution by Kristine McKenna (Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit). Leni Sinclair took many photographs of the Detroit rock, jazz, and leftist political scene. She was married to activist and MC5 manager John Sinclair for much of that time, though she was already entering the circle of Detroit alternative/underground artists and radicals before that, shortly after moving to the city from East Germany. This 400-page or so coffee table book has lots of her pictures – some of which postdate 1978, to be technical, and most of them from the decade starting in 1963. Rock fans might be most interested in her photos of the MC5, whom she knew very well, along with some other stalwarts of the late-‘60s Detroit rock scene like Iggy Pop and the much lesser known band the Up. But there are also plenty of images of local and touring jazz icons, as well as demonstrations, riots, and confrontations with authorities. John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s concert to benefit efforts (ultimately successful) to free John Sinclair from jail, where he was serving time for marijuana possession, is documented too.

There might be things to criticize if you’re looking at the photos from an aesthetic perspective. They’re good overall, but some are grainy, and all could have benefited from being reproduced on higher-grade paper, though that likely would have added significantly to the price. What’s more important, however, are how they serve as a record of key events and people from a very interesting scene that hasn’t been covered nearly as much as what was happening in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and London at the time. The captions often include interesting memories or descriptions of the characters and incidents depicted, as well as generally less interesting excerpts from publications of the period that can lean toward rhetoric. There’s an informative, fairly lengthy overview essay of Sinclair and the milieu in which she worked, as well as a recent interview with Leni conducted by journalist Kristine McKenna. This volume hasn’t gotten much attention or media coverage, and is worth the substantial investment if you’re interested in the ‘60s Detroit underground. And if you’re interested in my story based on my recent interview with Sinclair, you can read it here.

12. Mike McCartney’s Early Liverpool, by Mike McCartney (Genesis Publications). Mike McCartney, younger brother of Paul, took a lot of pictures in Liverpool in the early 1960s, often though not always of the early Beatles. Many of his photos have been included in other books and publications. But with a little more than 250 pages, this is by far the biggest and highest-end collection of his work from that era, with numerous images that will be unfamiliar even to many big Beatles fans. Like many deluxe productions from Genesis Publications, the price is on the high end too—£295, which works out to about $400, for one of the 2000 copies in a limited edition.

Should you be able to look through this, there are a wealth of interesting shots of the Beatles, mostly from around 1961 through mid-1963, with both Pete Best and (less often) Ringo Starr. Some of the pictures are fairly well known, like John Lennon and Paul McCartney huddling with Gene Vincent at the Cavern in 1962, and John and Paul writing “I Saw Her Standing There” at the McCartney home late that year. Others are less so, and they span a gamut from private rehearsals at the Cavern with Ringo to Paul’s twenty-first birthday party, unused scenes from Help!, and a couple color shots of John, Paul, and George Harrison playing in 1958 in the Quarrymen days (although almost everything else is in black and white).

There are also some non-Beatles photos of Liverpool at the time; the theatrical/poetry crowd that Mike McCartney fell into when he joined the Scaffold, though obviously some of the pictures with Mike from this and other times were taken by other people; and visiting American rock’n’roll stars like Vincent, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Chuck Berry. Although there’s not an abundant amount of text, Mike supplies some succinct and witty commentary on most of the pictures, sometimes with obscure behind-the-scenes info, though not so much that it unearths a trove of unknown stories. For those serious Beatles/British rock fans who access this, it’s a worthy supplement to the historical record, from someone who was actually very much on the inside of the story as it unfolded. And if you’re interested in my story based on my recent interview with Mike McCartney, you can read it here.

13. Decades: The Bee Gees in the 1960s, by Andrew Môn Hughes, Grant Walters, and Mark Crohan (Sonicbond). The Bee Gees’ career has been covered in a few books, though those for the most part lose my interest after the 1960s, as I’m largely only concerned with their early work. If you feel the same way, this will be a worthwhile read, cutting off at the end of 1969. Everything they did before that is covered in detail, focusing, refreshingly, on their songs and records, and not so much on their celebrity and personal/family lives, though that’s also incorporated. All of the recordings they made during this fertile period are documented in exacting but very readable depth, and while the authors might be bigger fans than many general rock listeners, both the strengths and weaknesses are aptly criticized. Refreshingly, their 1963-66 Australian  records, some of which were very good (if more derivative than their later material), get almost as much attention as their far more famous 1967-1969 ones.

The authors also delve into, with less but satisfactory depth, the many cover versions of  songs written by the brothers Gibb. These include quite a few the Bee Gees themselves  didn’t release or record – an astonishing number, actually, even if not many of those compositions were on par for what they kept for themselves. While this book is far shorter, and far less meticulous, than Andrew Sandoval’s Monkees day-by-day bible (reviewed below), it ranks just a bit higher here both because I like the Bee Gees better and it’s a zippier read owing to its less completist/encyclopedic nature. There’s some overlap (in the focus, not in the actual text) between this and a couple other worthwhile books: The Ultimate Biography of the Bee Gees: Tales of the Brothers Gibb, which one of this volume’s co-authors (Andrew Môn Hughes) also co-wrote, and Sandoval’s own Bee Gees: The Day-By-Day Story 1945-1972, which is far shorter than The Monkees: The Day-By-Day Story, but also has much valuable info.

14. The Monkees: The Day-By-Day Story, by Andrew Sandoval (Beatland). To be clear, if this list was ordered by how much research and hi-quality production went into a book, this would be near or maybe even at the top. Its modest position in my ranking is due much more to my relatively un-fanatical interest in the Monkees (though I do like some of their music) than the merits of the writing, which is very good, and the depth of detail, which is phenomenal. Sandoval wrote a 300-page day-by-day book on the Monkees published in 2005 that was itself impressive, but this one actually physically dwarfs it in comparison. The near-coffee-table-sized 740-page volume is so large it must have been hard to even bind together. Besides meticulous coverage of the Monkees’ professional activities through the end of 1970, emphasizing their recordings and performances, there are loads of photos, quite a few in color, and quite a few rare. The photo credits alone take up eleven columns and three pages of tiny print.

All of the studio sessions for the Monkees’ recordings—and there were many—are documented with extreme thoroughness. Interviews all four gave—many from obscure sources like small daily papers and fan magazines, as well as to Sandoval himself—are often and effectively quoted. Sandoval also interviewed quite a few of their associates, like songwriters Bobby Hart and Tommy Boyce; producer Chip Douglas; and publisher Don Kirshner. Their live shows get a lot of attention too, as does the context in which the group formed and functioned—not just their TV series and Headmovie, but also the business and publishing machinations behind their conception, management, and financial affairs.

The author might be more generous than some critics in assessing their work, but he gives the tracks plenty of description, and is not reluctant to criticize their subpar product, such as their 1968 TV special 33 1/3 Revolutions per Monkee. Their solo activities prior to the birth of the Monkees in late 1965 are thoroughly covered, as are their solo projects while the Monkees were going, like Michael Nesmith’s outside productions and early solo albums, and Peter Tork’s post-Monkees band Release (which, ironically, didn’t release anything). Unlikely connections between the band and many of the era’s top icons are uncovered, from the Beatles and Neil Young (who played on some of their sessions) to Donovan, who wrote a song for them, “Saint Valentine’s Angel,” that they didn’t release.

While this won’t be a surprise to serious Monkees fans, it’s astonishing how many recordings were done (aside from their 1967 album Headquarters, very much a self-contained band project) with participation by only one Monkee, or none in the case when backing tracks were laid down without any of them. Nuggets of little known info are plentiful, like Peter Tork having accompanied folk singer Peter La Farge in concert not long before the Monkees started, or Tork having spent wads of royalties on recording his composition “Lady’s Baby,” which (though it was one of his best songs) didn’t even get issued in the 1960s. Through no fault of the author, the book does get less interesting in the 1969 and 1970 chapters after Tork’s departure, with the exception of sections on Nesmith’s early solo country-rock album sessions in 1970. The layers of detail on the recording sessions for their LP filler, while commendable in their thoroughness, might be taxing to plow through for non-completists. If you’re a big Monkees believer, however, this might be your #1 book of the year, or close to it.

15. The History of Bones, by John Lurie (Random House). The memoir by the musician and actor most known for the Lounge Lizards and Jim Jarmusch’s early films only goes to the end of the 1980s for the most part, but it’s still 435 pages. Most of it’s pretty interesting, though it’s somewhat exhausting. While there’s a lot about his music, and a fair amount about his acting, there’s more about drugs, sex, and general debauchery. Lurie doesn’t have the image of being nearly as prolific as New York punk and new wave musicians in these categories, but based on what he’s written, he gave the most blatant of them a run for their money. These excesses didn’t quite cripple his career, but they made it more difficult to conduct, as he acknowledges with wry humor.

Those looking for in-depth sequential details of his compositions and recordings might be disappointed, since they’re fitful and take a backseat to documentation of his lifestyle, though plenty of info about them is here. What comes across most strongly is how difficult it was for Lurie to make a living and maintain sanity as an alternative musician who might have been pretty well known as such figures go, but wasn’t making a ton of money, or even always able to find a record deal. The stories of tours, sessions, equipment, and business transactions gone wrong in all manner of improbable ways are abundant, as are the accounts of entertainment business and arts figures who screw artists and colleagues over. Jarmusch comes off worst in this regard, but there are negative lights cast upon some other associates like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Arto Lindsay (whose departure from the Lounge Lizards isn’t thoroughly investigated), though their talents are acknowledged. He also praises some he’s worked with for their character, and discusses some of his own flaws, principally his lack of aptitude and skill at working within the music and film businesses.

Although Lurie isn’t exactly a rock musician (or easy to categorize in any genre), there are passing anecdotes aplenty about other notables in the New York scene, like Debbie Harry and David Byrne. While Down By Law and Stranger Than Paradise get more coverage (if not a ton) than his other movies, there are also stories of his lesser roles in films by Martin Scorsese and David Lynch. There’s also a lot about the general squalor of living in the New York underground at the time, when crime and rough residential conditions were common. They can overwhelm the more art-focused segments, though Lurie makes it clear he was willing to put up with all manner of irritations to do the music he wanted, even if he sometimes alienated those he worked with or lost a lot of money. There are also insights into the specifics of scoring for movies, though they’re just part of a mix that’s something of a helter-skelter ride from his boyhood to the trip to Africa at which the book ends, though he was only at the beginning of that adventure.

16. Nonbinary: A Memoir, by Genesis P-Orridge (Abrams). Most known for pioneering industrial music with Throbbing Gristle, P-Orridge died in 2020, this memoir appearing posthumously. It’s not certain from reading the text whether he finished his intended draft, but this is pretty long (about 325 pages) and covers most of his life, if in uneven concentrations. Those wanting a Throbbing Gristle book might be a little disappointed; they do get a lot of space, but don’t even form until after the book’s halfway point. There’s a lot about his pre-Throbbing Gristle years, including difficult school days and general counterculture mayhem with his performance art project COUM Transmissions and other activities. There’s also discussion of Psychic TV and his post-Throbbing Gristle years, though the last 35 years of his life don’t get much more than 35 pages, and the depth gets much more fitful.

P-Orridge is a notorious and in some ways polarizing figure, and not everyone, even in the underground, will agree with his philosophies. But it’s usually an interesting narrative, with more wit and humor than you might expect from a guy determined to push the boundaries of socially acceptable behavior and constantly brush against authorities. His flights into meditations on pandrogyny, the occult, and other such matters are less interesting than his stories about struggling to survive as an outsider not just in society, but often in the underground itself. There are also interactions, some surprising, with other famous figures, including Ian Curtis, William Burroughs, and (when he was a teenager in the ‘60s) the Rolling Stones, among others.

Although he usually comes across as an articulate and thoughtful sort, be aware that a much different portrait of his personality is given by Throbbing Gristler (and, for much of the 1970s, his girlfriend) Cosey Fan Tutti in her 2017 memoir Art Sex Music. In fact, P-Orridge often comes off monstrously in that book. Which is the more accurate one? There’s no way to tell, and not much reason for those of us outside their circle to agonize about it.

17. Riding the Carousel: A Biography of the Hollies, by Malcolm Searles (Dojotone Publications). There was a fairly slim and perfunctory bio of the Hollies a half dozen years ago, and drummer Bobby Elliott wrote a fairly mediocre memoir that came out last year. This bio isn’t perfunctory or mediocre. It’s almost 600 pages, covering the career of this major British Invasion band in both extreme detail and a very readable fashion. Although there’s not much inside first-hand interviewing of the Hollies or major associates, a great of info was collected from many sources, from top British music papers to fan club newsletters. There are stories that won’t be known unless you’ve followed their career very closely, like their classic 1965 #1 UK single “I’m Alive” being given to the obscure group the Toggery Five by Wayne Fontana before getting taken by the Hollies when producer Ron Richards played the song to them. The odd shuffle of Allan Clarke leaving shortly before “Long Cool Woman (In a Black Dress)” unexpectedly became a huge US hit, and then quickly returning to replace his replacement Mikael Rickfors, is also explicated.

It nonetheless can’t be denied that the Hollies weren’t the most personally colorful of top groups, Graham Nash excepted. It also can’t be denied that they got less interesting when Nash left at the end of 1968 (the reasons are thoroughly traced), and the Nash years only take up 235 pages. After their mid-1970s hit “The Air That I Breathe,” the Hollies’ music got that much less interesting, and steadily less so over the last 45 years. Those years take up the final two hundred pages, and that’s a pretty long string to play out, though the author does his best to find whatever interest he can in their sporadic attempts to record new material, reunite with Graham Nash, and navigate the loss of lead singer Allan Clarke. 

18. There and Black Again, by Don Letts with Mal Peachey (Omnibus Press). As a filmmaker, DJ, and musician (if of limited skills, as he admits) with Big Audio Dynamite and some other acts, Letts has played notable roles in British punk, new wave, reggae, and rap since the 1970s. His memoir traces his journey from a music-obsessed boyhood in London as the son of Jamaican immigrants to immersion in the UK punk explosion and beyond. He crossed paths, and often worked closely, with a load of notables—most famously the Clash, for whom he directed videos and documentaries, but also the Sex Pistols, the Slits, a bunch of reggae icons, and a host of others. There are an abundance of behind-the-scenes stories from gigs, film shoots, and more, some quite unexpected, like when Joni Mitchell invited him and John Lydon to her place in Jamaica. These are interwoven with observations about operating as a filmmaker, musician, and collaborator in a music business, and society, that often discriminated against and hassled blacks such as himself. One incident in which MTV backed out of an interview with him after discovering (in person) he was black is especially galling, but there are others along the same lines.

It isn’t the most consistent read, each chapter introduced by a film script-formatted scene that isn’t as interesting as Letts telling his story in his own voice. Some general detail about musical and social movements isn’t as specific to his experience as the personal stories recounting what he went through directly on his own. The post-‘70s chapters get less and less detailed and fly through the years with increasing speed, though this does cover his life through 2020. However, almost anyone with an interest in the incubation of UK punk and new wave, as well as the overlap between those scenes and reggae (for which Letts was probably the most active generator), will find material they’ll want to digest. There’s also some wit in the unlikely anecdotes, like that visit to Mitchell, where Letts complained about a record she was blasting, only for her to calmly inform him it was her new album.

19. Sonic Boom: The Impossible Rise of Warner Bros. Records, From Hendrix to Fleetwood Mac to Madonna to Prince, by Peter Ames Carlin (Henry Holt). Warner Bros., as the official spelling goes, has been one of the biggest record companies of the last half century. It’s impossible for a 250-page book to include stories of all their interesting artists, or stories on all the interesting records their artists did. Still, this is an informative overview of how the label evolved from a near-afterthought to the film studio to the biggest record company, and one that launched or peaked the career of many, many acts. It’s rather amazing considering the label was on the verge of being shut down in its early years, though the Everly Brothers and then Bob Newhart kept it afloat so it could grow and absorb Frank Sinatra’s Reprise label. Major acts not mentioned in the book’s subtitle also include Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Randy Newman, the Kinks, and Van Morrison, for starters, up to R.E.M. near the end of the twentieth century.

The book’s focus is more on the executives who helped Warner Bros. not just survive, but also innovate and keep abreast of or help inaugurate musical trends. These include Mo Ostin, Joe Smith, Lenny Waronker, and Stan Cornyn, and the author interviewed numerous such figures for the book, which has inside information on the wheelings and dealings necessary to both make a profit and cultivate an atmosphere of musical freedom. Warners’ willingness to underwrite near-experimental projects by the likes of Van Dyke Parks, as well as stick with unconventional talents who didn’t immediately pay off like Mitchell and Newman, is also covered. So is their relative demise in the 1990s, when Ostin left the company after some changes at the top.

However, there are some minor errors serving more evidence that many music history books go through the editorial process without being checked by people with deep knowledge of rock in this era. Ricky Nelson did not sign with MCA Records in the late 1950s; the label didn’t start until years later. Van Morrison did not live in Los Angeles in the late 1960s. Captain Beefheart’s Safe As Milk album was on Buddah (sic) Records, not Warner Bros. Joe Boyd was (briefly) Pink Floyd’s producer, not their manager. The Sex Pistols trashed an A&M office in London, not Los Angeles. Crosby, Stills & Nash were on Atlantic Records, not Columbia.

20. Thinking About Tomorrow: Excerpts from the Life of Keith West, by Ian L. Clay (Hawksmoor). Most known for his big 1967 UK hit “Excerpt from a Teenage Opera” and for being lead singer of the late-‘60s British psychedelic group Tomorrow, Keith West is one of the more interesting cult figures of his era. It’s still kind of a stretch to get a nearly 300-page biography out of his life, especially as he hasn’t put out many records since the late ‘60s, and wasn’t on all that many records in the ‘60s. Nonetheless, this book has its points of interest, covering West’s life and career in quite a lot of detail. There are plenty of first-hand recent interview quotes with West, as well as numerous people with whom he’s worked—most notably Tomorrow guitarist Steve Howe and Tomorrow drummer Twink, though also other members of his previous groups the In Crowd and Four + 1. Tomorrow’s sole LP, released in early 1968, rightfully gets the most attention, with a good amount of comments from producer Mark Wirtz (who also produced West’s early solo singles) too.

Going back to his mod/R&B days with Four + 1 and then the In Crowd, there are the odd unusual and unexpected stories, such as how the In Crowd almost got into the Blow-Up film, or West seeing Led Zeppelin rehearse just as they were getting together. There are also some mundane stories, especially regarding his sporadic post-‘60s musical projects, which never got much traction. Not that it seems to bother West much, as he wasn’t as serious or dedicated to becoming a success as many of his peers – for instance, Howe, who’s remained friends with Keith for all these years.  

21. Weren’t Born a Man, by Dana Gillespie (Hawksmoor). Dana Gillespie had about as interesting a career as you could have in the 1960s and 1970s without having hit records. She had intimate relations with David Bowie and (much more briefly) Bob Dylan, among quite a few others; was with Bowie’s MainMan management organization, and thus his inner circle, in the 1970s; started in folk as a teenager and moved to folk-rock-pop, glam, blues, and (after the ‘70s) Indian music; had bit parts in numerous movies, including Bad Timing with Art Garfunkel; and generally circulated and globetrotted among a great deal of people who were more famous than she became. She was even a waterskiing champion as a teenager. Her memoir isn’t quite as interesting as you might hope from her resume, but she covers all of this, as well as giving an overall rundown of being close to the center of the action in Swinging London and the glam era.

There’s a somewhat unapologetic matter-of-factness to her recount of the many people she and those she knew slept with, though she’s also a little coy about revealing the kind of sensationalistic details some readers might want. As she acknowledges, some of the behavior might be considered unacceptable these days. One story about Atlantic Records executive Ahmet Ertegun is gross enough that I’m not going to repeat it here, though Gillespie seems to shrug it off as just part of the business in the early 1970s. Her assessment of controversial MainMan  main man Tony DeFries is generous, even though litigation meant she was unable to record for a few years; as she notes, she never would have gotten to experience the highs of the glam era without him, and wouldn’t give up those years for anything.  In common with many a memoir, it gets less interesting and comprehensive after the 1970s, with a lot of commentary about her devotion to Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba, which she notes might not be everyone’s cup of tea. There is a lot of attention paid to her music and records, even as far back as her teenage late-‘60s debut Foolish Seasons, making this worthwhile for those familiar with the discs of this intriguing if minor musical artist.

22. Shindig! America’s Flat-Out Ass-Kickin’ Rock’n’Roll TV Show, by Peter Checksfield (www.peterchecksfield.com). Maybe not everyone would describe Shindig! in as enthusiastic a sentence as this subtitle, but it was the best US rock TV show in the mid-‘60s. This is more a reference guide than something you might want to sit down and read (though you can, in one sitting). But it’s pretty useful if you have an interest in Shindig!, or in ‘60s rock in general. All of the 85 episodes that were broadcast between September 1964 and January 1966 (as well as three pilots) are documented with lists of the performers and songs they played. Brief comments on performers in each episode give basic background—useful for the many obscure ones who were on the show, though most fans will known the scoop on the many stars that were featured, from the Beatles and Rolling Stones to the Beach Boys and the Supremes. There are also some notes on what made some performances particularly good, weird, or otherwise noteworthy. A half-dozen screen shots, a bit blurry but quite viewable, are also presented from each program.

I wouldn’t have minded more extensive commentary on some of the performances, or background information on the show’s production. But clearly the author’s seen them all and provides some of the most essential information. It’s amazing just how many stars appeared – not just the aforementioned superstars, but plenty of early rock’n’roll pioneers too, like Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers, and Chuck Berry. It seems like very few of the biggest artists from the time didn’t appear on the program – the Four Seasons were one. Solid UK connections gave airtime to some notable British acts who didn’t tour in the US hits or have hits there when the show was active, like the Who and the Pretty Things. A brief appendix details all the clips that were issued on Rhino VHS compilations in the early 1990s.

23. Having a Rave Up! The Definitive Guide to British Beat Albums in the Sixties, by Peter Checksfield (www.peterchecksfield.com). Another of the prolific Checksfield’s books devoted to cataloguing various aspects of early British rock, this one lists, rates, and describes a wealth of UK LPs from what’s called the British Beat era there, and the British Invasion in the US. The concentration is the mid-1960s, though early-‘60s albums predating the Beatles’ breakthrough in the US at the beginning of 1964 are thoroughly covered too. In its favor, this includes almost every album that could qualify through 1966 or so, with release date (usually down to the month), label, and complete track listing, including a good number of LPs only released outside of the UK, whether in the US, Canada, Germany, Japan, or elsewhere. Checksfield’s brief descriptive reviews tend toward the more enthusiastic and generous as far as historians of this era go—not many other writers would give the Fourmost’s sole LP five stars, for instance—but at least make for an interesting contrast to more established critical party lines. Photos of the album covers are here too, if in basic black and white reproduction.

Note, however, that this doesn’t include many post-1966 albums, as acts that didn’t start releasing LPs until the late 1960s aren’t included – even the biggest, like Pink Floyd and Cream. A few omissions will puzzle and frustrate some British Invasion fans, particularly Donovan, who’s only represented by a listing of his Greatest Hits compilation. Lists of post-‘60s compilations for further listening are useful but inconsistent, usually but not always listing the best best-ofs, complete works anthologies, and BBC collections. Obsessives will find rare errors here and there; it’s not noted, for instance, that the Yardbirds’ US Over Under Sideways Down LP is missing two tracks that were on its UK counterpart Yardbirds. Galactic Ramble is a bigger, more comprehensive, and more critically acute reference volume covering British albums (including jazz and folk) from approximately the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, though this has some info and perspective not found in the other book.

24. Strat! The Charismatic Life & Times of Tony Stratton Smith, by Chris Groom (Wymer). Not such a well known name these days even among those who pay attention to the history of record labels and their executives, Stratton Smith was head of the British Charisma label in the 1970s and first half of the 1980s. With Charisma, and sometimes also as a manager (although that was in retrospect a conflict of interest when he handled Charisma acts), he’s most known for his vital role in the career of Genesis. Charisma was also home to some other noted acts, including Van der Graaf Generator, Monty Python (for their LPs), and Lindisfarne. This is his story, and by extension much of the story of the Charisma label, drawing on a lot of first-hand interviews (though none with the late Stratton Smith, who died in 1987) with his artists and employees.

This is more niche even than the average among books that appeal to fans of niche figures in rock history, but it has its share of interesting stories. Stratton Smith was a generally beloved, if erratic, figure who’s usually praised by his clients as a generous and fair man, and one whose decisions were driven by personal enthusiasm as much or more than business. As is often the case with such guys, he had less business sense than artistic judgement, though most of those who worked with him are forgiving of his at times reckless spending and uneven bookkeeping. Some of the most interesting anecdotes are about the numerous Charisma acts that aren’t so well known (Audience, Clifford T. Ward) or never made it at all, as well as some he managed before Charisma launched, including the Creation, the Koobas, and the Nice.

The narrative does jump back and forth chronologically more than it should, and some of the chapters on Stratton Smith’s non-musical ventures, such as his pre-rock work as a journalist and horse racing, can be skimmed or skipped. There’s some coverage of successes he had with acts that emerged in the 1980s, like Julian Lennon and Malcolm McLaren, but the bulk’s devoted to the heart of Charisma’s catalog in the ‘70s. Like other colorful figures of his sort, Stratton Smith overindulged in alcohol and was often disorganized in general, contributing to his early death.

25. A Consumer Guide to the Plastic People of the Universe, by Joe Yanosik (self-published). Czech band the Plastic People of the Universe’s story was, for many listeners, more interesting than their music, though that was interesting too. It’s a very involved story, but they survived many years of harassment from authorities in the former Czechoslovakia to make underground rock music from the late 1960s through the late 1980s. Although this 132-page book is billed as a consumer guide, it also has a fair amount of general history of the group, from their origins in the psychedelic era when they were inspired by the Velvet Underground and the Mothers of Invention. This is particularly valuable as while there was a fair amount of press about them in the English-speaking world (including a chapter in my book Unknown Legends of Rock’n’Roll), there wasn’t to my knowledge anywhere you could read a fairly detailed overall general history of the Plastic People.

The backbone of the volume, however, is formed by detailed reviews of their albums, as well as numerous ones by acts that had Plastic People members or connections. The Plastic People’s avant-rock will never be broadly accessible, and some of the evaluations might be over-enthusiastic, but the author does differentiate between their best and subpar work, criticizing their flaws when warranted. Their are also reviews of more DVDs and books related to the band than almost anyone would be aware of, though unfortunately the books are in Czech, not English. There are quite a few high-quality reproductions of record covers that in themselves are interesting to see, as well as some good photos of the Plastics from throughout their career, including some amazing early ones where they sport striking onstage costumes. 

26. Top of the Pops: The Lost Years Rediscovered 1964-1975, by Peter Checksfield (www.peterchecksfield.com). Top of the Pops might be the most famous British pop music TV program, though it wasn’t the best, featuring a lot of mimed performances and middle-of-the-road acts. Still, most of the major UK acts appeared on the show in its first decade or so, along with many one-shots and also-rans. This 650-page reference book lists all of the material aired on each episode, including not just artists performing (if often lip-syncing) songs, but also the clips that were videos sent to the program and segments that just showed dancers or crowds dancing.

Although this is mostly listings, it’s spiced up by numerous first-hand soundbite recollections of performers (some famous, some quite obscure) of the program. Some of these are brief and dry; some are entertaining, like Move drummer Bev Bevan remembering watching the Tremeloes do “Here Comes My Baby” and calling it a terrible song, only for Cat Stevens, who was also on the bill, letting Bevan know he’d written it. Sadly, most of the Top of the Pops footage from this period doesn’t survive, but Checksfield notes when it does – much of it getting preserved owing to rebroadcasts on TV programs in different countries, or to BBC videotape engineer Bob Pratt surreptitiously privately copying performances he liked, although he could have been fired for it. Numerous black-and-white stills from Top of the Pops program break up the basic design.

27. Little Wing: The Jimmy McCulloch Story, by Paul Salley (Lotown). Dying in his mid-twenties in the late 1970s, Jimmy McCulloch had an interesting career without making a name for himself that would be recognized by most general rock fans, though he played in one of the most popular groups in the world. A child prodigy of sorts, the guitarist was already recording in his early teens with One in a Million, who put out a superb flop British psychedelic single. His most creative playing was probably with Thunderclap Newman, the enigmatic band that scored a #1 UK hit (and substantial US one) with the anthemic “Something in the Air” in 1969, but only made one LP before splitting. After a short spell in Stone the Crows after their guitarist Les Harvey died, he joined Wings and was their lead guitarist for several huge hit albums and singles in the mid-’70s. After leaving Wings in murky circumstances, he drifted in and out of a few groups, including for a brief time a mostly reunited Small Faces, before dying from causes that remain mysterious.

It’s a real labor of love to put together a self-published 270-page detailed biography stuffed with pictures and memorabilia illustrations, as Salley has. He spoke with many people who worked with Jimmy (especially McCulloch’s brother Jack, a drummer in some of Jimmy’s bands), and the book’s a very professional-looking and competently written volume. Still, McCulloch wasn’t the most colorful figure, and never really stood out as a songwriter or bandleader/solo artist. Really interesting inside anecdotes are outweighed by general (sometimes bland) praise from colleagues, and the text could have used some more detailed description of the records. It’s most interesting in the Thunderclap Newman and Wings sections, and the Newman part in particular will likely stand as by far the most detailed account of that group’s short lifespan. Intense British ’60s/’70s rock fans will appreciate that level of detail, even if McCulloch’s life and output wasn’t among the most exciting of those in the circles he traveled.

The following books came out in 2020, but I didn’t read them until 2021:

1. When Can I Fly? The Sleepers, Tuxedomoon & Beyond, by Michael Belfer with Will York (Hozac). Although he’s not a name known to much of the general public, guitarist Belfer played a notable part in the early San Francisco punk and new wave scene in his stints with the Sleepers and Tuxedomoon. He also played with various other acts in and out of San Francisco, including Rhythm & Noise, Blaine Reininger, Rhythm & Noise, and Black Lab. His memoir might well be of interest even if you know little or nothing about those artists, as it’s a fairly gripping and entertaining account of coming of age in a volatile scene as a teenager and young adult. He conveys the excitement of playing in a new style as clubs and audiences were just opening up to the music, with stories of collaborations with the Sleepers (especially their disorganized singer Ricky Williams) and Tuxedomoon in a tight but tiny local network.

There’s also plenty of downside — not just in the sort of expected tales of drug deals and abuse, but also in the theft and violence that sometimes almost literally ran Belfer out of town. As just one example, a Hell’s Angel demanded the keys to his car after being falsely told Belfer was selling it; Belfer hotwired it back; and a friend of the Angel forcibly shot him up with speed, Belfer catching hepatitis from the overdose. It’s not the only incident of the sort in the book, which also follows Belfer’s trail to New York, Toronto, Belgium, Seattle, Los Angeles, and other places as he tries to gain something of a foothold as a professional musician.

Even more disturbing, perhaps, are the accounts of betrayal and deceit that aren’t drug-related. As he tells it, Belfer was denied songwriting credits and other official contributions to which he was rightfully entitled. That of course also led to him being financially ripped off a number of times, even if on some occasions the total money involved was probably modest, most of his projects being pretty underground in nature. Although he relapsed into drug abuse and sometimes lapsed into poverty and homelessness, Belfer tells his story with wry (at times gallows) humor and a lack of self-pity. Fast-moving and episodic, it’s a quick read that doesn’t waste words, enhanced by numerous vintage photos, posters, and graphics. Too bad the reprint of a lengthy Sleepers interview in Search & Destroy is reproduced in such tiny print that it’s nearly impossible to read, though. My story on the book, based on a recent interview with Belfer, can be read here.

2. Right Place, Right Time: The Life of a Rock & Roll Photographer, by Bob Gruen (Abrams). A top rock music photographer since the 1970s, Gruen’s issued several books of his pictures. This is different from those; although there are plenty of photos, most of it’s devoted to autobiographical text. He snapped an astonishing range of musicians over the last half century, and this concentrates on his life and work through the early 1980s, though there’s a little on what he did since then. Although it’s told in a rather matter-of-fact style, there are plenty of stories, most fairly to very interesting, of working with his clients. Those included the most famous of the famous, like John Lennon and the Rolling Stones, but also quite a few underground or at least alternative artists. As he was based in New York, he got to see and shoot lots of the city’s early punk and new wave acts as they were getting off the ground, and not just the ones that became pretty successful, like Blondie. He also interacted extensively with the New York Dolls and some bands that never even got too big an audience on the underground level, like Suicide.

Apparently Gruen was about as interested in working with superstars as underground acts, and took it in stride to shoot the likes of the Clash and the Sex Pistols one week, and Elton John and KISS another. Aside from the sheer variety of artists he captured on film, it’s striking how relatively easy access seemed decades ago – not just for photo sessions, but also hanging out with the musicians on tour, in the studio, and in other non-professional situations. It’s also kind of amazing how, in his accounts, coincidence seemed to open up a lot of opportunities for him, whether it was running into some of the people he wanted to photograph at airports and venues, or happening to be around when there were chances to tour or find outlets for his work. Working at close quarters with his subjects sometimes gave him insights into their lifestyles, not all flattering, that would seem more heavily guarded in the next century – his tales of Ike Turner’s operations and drug use stand out in that regard.

3. View from the Bottom: 50 Years of Bass Playing with Bob Dylan, The Doors, Miles Davis and Everybody Else, by Harvey Brooks with Frank Beacham and Bonnie Brooks (Tangible Press). Harvey Brooks played bass with lots of people, the most illustrious of whom are namechecked in this memoir’s subtitle. Some of the others include the Electric Flag (of whom he was a full-time member, not just a session man), Jim & Jean, Richie Havens, Cass Elliot, Karen Dalton, and John Sebastian. The book’s a pretty breezy, straightforward read, divided into short chapters that are more or less (though not strictly) chronologically ordered. Some of this is rather matter-of-fact, but some of the stories are juicier and more insightful. His accounts of very notable sessions with Dylan (for Highway 61 Revisited; he also played a couple early electric Dylan concerts in 1965) and Davis (for Bitches Brew) leave the impression those guys operated by intuition rather than instruction, though Brooks was fine with going with the flow and the stars were pleased with the results. The Doors weren’t as pleasant, since he remembers business and personal disputes causing a lot of tension within the group (mostly between Jim Morrison and the others), though he still cites “Touch Me” as one of the favorite bass lines he played.

There isn’t too much in the way of surprising info, but there’s some, like his memory of getting a deal for Jimi Hendrix with Verve Folkways before Jimi signed with Chas Chandler—something not reported in standard Hendrix histories. While tales of drugs and excess aren’t as prevalent here as they are in many a memoir, they’re certainly present—Brooks didn’t indulge as much as many of his colleagues did, but he puts the Electric Flag’s demise down to drugs for the most part. Disappointment on the business end is here too, most interestingly in Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s decision to cut him loose after rehearsing with him shortly before they formed, Stills wanting to dictate what Brooks played.

I was still hoping for some more in the way of truly nitty gritty detail. For instance, he remembers writing Jim & Jean’s “One Sure Thing” with Jean Ray for the duo’s underrated Changes album shortly after Joni Mitchell opened for them at a Detroit club where Neil Young was en route to Los Angeles and Buffalo Springfield, but doesn’t offer any more details of note. The book’s worth the few hours it’ll take for rock nerds (especially ’60s fans) to digest it, though it’s too specialized a corner of that era for more general listeners. It’s too bad this has some of the chronological inaccuracies found in too many rock books, like John and Beverly Martyn’s Stormbringer album being recorded around late 1965, about four years before that actually happened.

4. John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band, by John Lennon & Yoko Ono with contributions from the people who were there (Weldon Owen). Like 2019’s Imagine John Yoko, this is a well-designed coffee table book celebrating an album, this being John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, though Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band (also issued in 1970) is also discussed. The focus isn’t so much on the album itself as what John and Yoko were up to in general in 1970, and in the second half of 1969, when the Plastic Ono Band concept came into being with the “Give Peace a Chance” and “Cold Turkey” singles. There are plenty of interesting graphics from the era, some not often seen, including handwritten lyrics, vintage advertisements, and Klaus Voormann drawings of scenes from the Plastic Ono Band sessions, as well as many photos.

The text is largely devoted to excerpts from interviews Lennon and Ono gave, which range from extremely interesting to rambling philosophical discourses that wouldn’t be of note had they been uttered by someone else. They do discuss their songwriting and recordings at points, and interviews with musicians who played with Lennon during this period (Voormann, Ringo Starr, Billy Preston) and others who were associated with his work and life (including Primal Scream therapist Arthur Janov) fill out the picture. There actually isn’t too much to learn here if you’re very familiar with Lennon’s life at the time and his Plastic Ono Band album, but it’s a nice-looking supplement to the period.

5. Small Hours: The Long Night of John Martyn, by Graeme Thomson (Omnibus Press). As I noted when I reviewed a reprint of a previous John Martyn biography (Some People Are Crazy: The John Martyn Story) on my previous best-of list, I’m not the biggest fan of this folk-rock-jazz guitarist. His connection to big British folk-rock names like Nick Drake and producer Joe Boyd makes me interested in his general story, which this book covers fairly thoroughly. I don’t care too much at times for the author’s style, which can get kind of unnecessarily ornamental. But he did speak with quite a few close associates of Martyn’s, including Boyd, first wife Beverley, Island Records chief Chris Blackwell, and sideman Danny Thompson. All of Martyn’s recordings from the 1960s and 1970s are discussed, and his post-‘70s work is rightfully assessed as relatively unimportant and unimpressive.

It won’t come as a surprise to those who’ve read about Martyn before that his personal life was tumultuous, and his behavior often offensive. This is never justified by someone’s artistic talents, and there’s a sizable list of things he did that were objectionable, most prominently his abuse of Beverley Martyn. There was also alcoholism and assorted violent incidents, as well as generally erratic behavior that most people would find hard to be around, but some associates put up with in exchange for the opportunity to play or be around his music. His final years, where his excesses caught up with him and resulted in serious health problems (including an amputated leg and obesity), are covered but not dwelled upon, the bulk of the book getting devoted to his prime output.

6. The Folk Singers and the Bureau, by Aaron J. Leonard (Repeater). The subtitle’s long, but goes a long way toward explaining the thrust of this book: “The FBI, The Folk Artists and the Suppression of the Communist Party, USA—1939-1956.” During this period, the FBI and other government authorities targeted many in the US who were perceived to be a threat because of their affiliations with the Community Party. Hollywood movie figures get the most attention in historical overviews, but some musicians, especially folk ones, were victimized too. This looks at how several key figures in the early folk revival were trailed by the FBI and often called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Among them were Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Woody Guthrie, Josh White, Paul Robeson, Oscar Brand, and Alan Lomax.

This kind of subject is often treated in a dry academic fashion in book form. This might not excite folk fans as much as, say, reading books on the aforementioned notables (and there are books on almost all of them). But Leonard tells the story in an accessible manner that’s plainly stated and fairly easy to follow – rarer in such projects than one might think. He accessed a lot of FBI files, some of which had to his knowledge never been previously written about or referred to before this book. It is striking the degree to which branches of the government found these folkies’ doings a possible subversive threat, and also how incompetent they often were in documenting them.

The author contends that these folkies had stronger ties to the party than were often acknowledged, either by themselves or historians. He also supplies a lot of contextual information about the general anti-Communist climate of the era that isn’t strictly music-related, but of use and interest for understanding why this harassment took place. Instances in which artists cooperated to at least some degree with the investigations are detailed, particularly those of White and Burl Ives. So are the dubious dealings of Harvey Matusow, an informer whose unreliable accounts helped damage the careers of numerous Communists or supposed Communists. Leonard doesn’t accept the views of some historians and takes a nuanced approach, with informed speculation, of the extent to which these folkies acknowledged their leftist associations and tried to avoid prosecution without compromising their beliefs or causing problems for others in the folk community.

7. Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest, by Ian Zack (Beacon Press). Odetta was a major figure of the folk revival; unusual in that scene as she was an African-American who was not, for the most part, a blues artist; and influenced many musicians who went on to become more famous, including Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan. Somehow, however, this biography is blander than expected. It’s not especially through flaws in the writing, as it’s thoroughly researched by an author who wrote a good book on Reverend Gary Davis. Odetta’s life just didn’t seem overly dramatic, and she wasn’t the most loquacious interview subject, at least as she’s quoted here. This follows her life from her humble upbringing (largely in Los Angeles) and rise through the folk world in the 1950s and first half of the 1960s, which saw her become manager Albert Grossman’s first notable client. Her activism and involvement in the civil rights movement is noted, though it wasn’t as extensive as those of some other figures.

Her recordings are also detailed, with some (though not a great deal) of comments from musicians and others with whom she worked. The biggest surprise, perhaps, is that before recording one of the first albums devoted solely to Dylan covers (1965’s Odetta Sings Dylan), she had suggested an album of songs by Buffy Sainte-Marie; Dylan also visited the sessions, though she told him to leave after she corrected some words from the demos from which she learned the songs. It’s also reported that Paul Simon offered her the chance to record “The Sound of Silence” before the Simon & Garfunkel original was reworked for their first big hit, though she turned it down. As expected, the coverage of her life and work after the folk revival waned following the mid-1960s is much less in depth than what’s given to her previous years, though her comeback with blues albums late in life is detailed.

8. Cuba Music and Revolution: Original Album Cover Art of Cuban Music, compiled by Gilles Peterson & Stuart Baker (Soul Jazz). Like numerous other Soul Jazz books, this is a coffee table volume largely devoted to reproductions of album covers. There’s also some text explaining the basic history of and developments in Cuban popular music from the 1950s to the early 1990s, the period covered by this work. Largely unknown outside of Cuba (though there were occasional acts that were exceptions, particularly Irakere), these sounds were enclosed in LPs with interesting and wildly varying artwork. Some of them recall private or vanity pressings in more affluent countries in their homemade feel and snapshot photos, though they’re usually more artfully and colorfully done. Some have accomplished modern designs that are on par with those on noted North American and European modern jazz labels. A few have images explicitly reflecting the socialist ambitions of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, though most of them aren’t political in nature.

This is something more to browse through via a library copy rather than buy if you’re not a Cuban music specialist or vinyl graphics aficionado. But certainly the sizable audience for quality volumes of LP reproductions will like this, no matter what their tastes. Most of the sleeves get full-page reproductions, and more than a hundred others get smaller ones in a final section of this 256-page book.

9. Shut Up You Animals!!!: The Pope Is Dead: A Rememberance of Dirk Dirksen: The History of the Mabuhay Gardens, by Dirk Dirksen, edited by Ron Turner and James Stark (Last Gasp). Yes, I know “rememberance” is spelled “remembrance”; that’s how the word’s spelled in the title. More about typo problems later. First, you want to know what the book’s about, not about the kind of things that English majors notice. Dirksen was the main promoter/emcee behind the Mabuhay Gardens, which from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s was San Francisco’s most famed venue for punk, new wave, and other alternative music and performance. Although he gets a byline, actually he only wrote a short introductory chapter, dying in 2006, long before this volume was published in 2020. It’s more a scrapbook than a biography (or certainly than an autobiography), the text largely given over to short memories (or should that be “rememberances”) of Dirksen from several dozen musicians and scenemakers who interacted with him, as well as a few interviews. Almost as much space is given to vintage graphics, especially posters of Mabuhay shows.

Testimonies emphasize that although Dirksen had (and seemed to cultivate) an image of a hardnosed crank who delighted in insulting performers and audiences, underneath it was a heart of gold that could be generous and thoughtful. Similar points are made often enough that they can become redundant. Most of the brief oral histories have a different colorful tale or more to illustrate the points, whether it’s Dirksen breaking his nose in fights with obnoxious parts of the audience or how he gave breaks to all sorts of performers who didn’t have much promise on the surface. The unglamorous side of early punk is discussed as much as the exciting one, and Dirksen seemed to get more fun than profit out of the enterprise, almost as though he saw himself as being as much of a creative act as the entertainers he booked. The text is rambling and erratic enough that if it wasn’t augmented by numerous poster repros, as well as a day-by-day list of everyone who performed there from December 1976 to June 1982 (though the club kept operating for a few more years), it wouldn’t have made this list.

Now for more about typos. There are an extraordinary number of them in this book, so much so it seems like some of the chapters were just pasted into the layout without anyone having looked at them, let alone done any copyediting or proofreading. The mistakes are hardly all things only fussy reviewers would notice, even leaving aside the misspelling of a word in the book’s title. “Punk rock” is spelled “ptink rock” at one point, as if the text was scanned by an optical reader and never actually read by a real person. That’s in a chapter that is printed twice, one nearly complete version immediately preceding the complete one. This kind of sloppiness isn’t “punk.” It’s being rude to the reader.

Last year in this space, I wondered if there might be a slowdown in music history documentaries, considering the more limited access to many of the resources needed to produce them. Although there were still limitations on what we could do in all areas of life in 2021, these don’t seem to have affected either the quality or quantity of such docs. In some ways, the genre seemed healthier and to carry more weight than ever. Three of the top four films on this list—Get Back, Summer of Soul, and The Velvet Underground—were not only major achievements and popular movies, but also received a wealth of acclaim from the mainstream media and many viewers who weren’t even too familiar with the subject matter. A good number of the others got pretty big audiences and many positive reviews, if not quite as many as the aforementioned movies.

This doesn’t mean there wasn’t room for documentaries on more niche subjects, even if the upper part of my list probably doesn’t have many surprises. There were films on esoteric non-rock styles, like free jazz and experimental women composers, that were interesting even if those aren’t the kinds of sounds you usually listen to. Others spotlighted performers you would never have suspected to get the full documentary treatment just a few years ago, whether on the cult side (Poly Styrene, Lydia Lunch, Eric Andersen) or hitmakers who’ve long fallen out of fashion (Trini Lopez). And there were worthy efforts on non-musicians who’ve made an impact on the scene (Ben Fong-Torres), as well as ones focusing on record labels and radio stations.

No, I didn’t see everything that might have been considered for this list. I never do, and who does? There is, for instance, a new one on Dionne Warwick that has not yet been too accessible. Ones I like that I catch up on in 2022 will be a supplement to my list next year, as a few from 2020 that I didn’t see until this year are to this list.

1. The Beatles: Get Back. No documentary—possibly any documentary, let alone a music documentary—got as much attention this year as Peter Jackson’s eight-hour, three-part series dedicated to the January 1969 sessions that produced the Beatles’ Let It Be movie and the bulk of their Let It Be album. He took more than 60 hours of film—little of which was used in the original Let It Be movie—and condensed it into a day-by-day look at what the Beatles were doing during that crucial month. The coverage, and acclaim, it received were deserved, if as much for the vast historical importance of the footage as what Jackson did with it. There is no other music documentary that gives us such a detailed look at the creation of a project, in this case a celebrated and sometimes infamous one by the world’s greatest group.

To get a little snobbish, though Jackson can’t be faulted for this, it isn’t as revelatory or now-known-for-the-first-time as some reviews believe it is. Virtually all of the music and much of the dialogue have been heard for many years on about 100 hours of bootlegs that were largely taken from the sound recorded on the original filmmakers’ equipment. Much of the dialogue, including some of the most crucial passages, was printed way back in 1970 in the book that came with the original UK edition of the Let It Be LP. Most of the music and dialogue was effectively summarized and analyzed more than twenty years ago in Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt’s book Get Back: The Unauthorized Chronicle of the Beatles’ Let It Be Disaster. I did my own part to disseminate some descriptive analysis of these sessions in my 2006 book The Unreleased Beatles: Music and Film. (Plug: Still available as a revised/updated/expanded ebook, with about 50,000 more words than the print edition.) Viewers, however, can’t be faulted for greeting much of this as new information, since only a relatively small percentage of Beatles and general rock fans have waded (as I have, I admit) through all of those 100 hours.

This is different and in some ways superior to these previous documents, however, and not just because it’s naturally going to be more entertaining and impressive with accompanying visuals (which are in excellent quality, and notably superior in clarity and color to the original Let It Be film). Numerous images without speech (especially facial expressions) convey some emotions that don’t transmit with mere transcription or audio-only recordings, like when Paul McCartney seems to nearly choke up into tears when it seems like John Lennon might not be coming into rehearsal after George Harrison quits about a week into the sessions. (John does make it, Paul getting called to take his phone call just as it seems like McCartney might break down). John, Paul, and Ringo Starr seem to have a let’s-stick-through-this-together bro-hug of sorts shortly after George (temporarily) quits.

Although dialogue sans visuals gives the impression Lennon callously thinks Harrison can be replaced by Eric Clapton after George walks out, an audio-only conversation between John and Paul secretly recorded by a hidden microphone tells a different story, with both obviously urgently concerned to get George back in the band. When George returns when sessions resume at Apple Studios, the way he and the others are joshing around make it obvious no serious grudges are being held. When Billy Preston joins in shortly after the filming moves to Apple, the whole band’s relief and joy at the lift he gives the sessions (the exact word “lift” is used by one of the Beatles) is palpable.

Jackson also effectively zeroes in on highlights of the numerous multiple versions of songs from rehearsals, especially bits that notably vary from the familiar versions, like a cha-cha pass through “The Long and Winding Road” and the numerous funny accents used on different takes of “Two of Us.” Subtitles tell us what the many brief snippets of unreleased songs they perform are, even if it’s just a line or two (or even a word or two), including not only some way-obscure covers, but also early Lennon-McCartney compositions and jams that only seem to have been officially titled with the making of this film. Subtitles also quickly identify the many associates and friends who are seen at points, from engineer/producer Glyn Johns to Paul’s brother Mike and Apple doorman Jimmy Clark (who has a more extensive and colorful role during the rooftop concert sequence than you might guess).

Much of the media spin on the Get Back film has been that the Beatles weren’t fighting as much or having as miserable a time during these sessions as most biographies have usually contended. It’s also been pointed out that many, maybe even most, bands have these kind of arguments and ups and downs in the course of extensive rehearsal and recording. That seems to be generally borne out by the film, but it’s not like this month wasn’t without its significant problems and tensions. One of the members—of a band in which each guy was crucially important—quitting less than ten days into the sessions was a major, even grave problem, although it was basically solved within another ten days. Some of the words, exchanged glances, and expressions make it apparent at various points that each of the Beatles have some differences of opinion that might not be fully expressed.

On the brighter side, Ringo–largely silent throughout the proceedings—has a “to the rescue” moment when he quietly but firmly lets it be known he wants to play on the roof, at a point where some of his bandmates seem undecided. When they finally do make it to the roof (for a concert that’s shown in full, if sometimes in split screen and with bits of dialogue from the crowd on the street and police), it’s exhilarating to see the laborious and sometimes fraught weeks of rehearsal paying off with an excellent live show, even if you’ve already seen much of it in the Let It Be film. The original Let It Be movie, incidentally, is not made redundant by this film—most Let It Be’s scenes are not repeated in Get Back, whether complete performances of songs like “The Long and Winding Road” and “Let It Be,” or their highly amusing tongue-in cheek cover of “Besame Mucho.”

It’s a tough call as to whether this or Summer of Soul (reviewed below) is the best music documentary of 2021. Summer of Soul is definitely more enjoyable and (owing to its much shorter two-hour length) accessible, and also of vast historical importance. Even some major Beatles fans might find the eight-hour length of Get Back to drag at times, especially when they’re continuing to rehearse some of the songs they’ve already worked out. But these sessions were of such historical importance, and documented in such unprecedented depth here, that I’m giving this the top slot, without any slight intended toward Summer of Soul.

You want some mild criticisms? Here are a couple. The last day of the sessions (January 31, the day after the rooftop concert) could have been represented more fully; scenes from these are shown in part of the screen while the end credits roll. (To be fair, much material from those sessions is in the Let It Be film.) And some of the very first subtitles read, inaccurately, that Paul was fourteen when he joined the Beatles (he was fifteen) and that George was thirteen (he was fourteen at the youngest, or could have just turned fifteen, when he joined sometime in early 1958). These dates are very well documented by numerous books, and not just known to hardcore obsessive historians. How does such a high-profile and well done project get them wrong?

2. Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). In the summer of 1969, the Harlem Cultural Festival held six days of music in Harlem’s Mount Morris Park. The talent at these events was astounding, and much of it was filmed. Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson has assembled this nearly two-hour documentary around these semi-forgotten concerts, including footage of enough greats to fill up a paragraph. Among the performers are Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Sly & the Family Stone, the Fifth Dimension, the Chambers Brothers, Abbey Lincoln with Max Roach, Sonny Sharrock, Ray Barretto, Gladys Knight & the Pips, the Staple Singers, B.B. King, Hugh Masakela, David Ruffin, Mahalia Jackson, Herbie Mann, and the Edwin Hawkins Singers. Clips of all of these onstage are embellished with interviews from event organizers, members of the audience, and a few of the artists, like Wonder, Family Stone drummer Greg Errico, Mavis Staples, and two of the Fifth Dimension. The only drawback is one that might be considered a compliment: the performance excerpts are pretty short, and one wishes there were more, and at least some complete songs, even if that would have meant greatly expanding the film’s length. The cuts between artists and clips can be pretty fast, though there wasn’t much alternative to fit everything into two hours.

When I saw this through online virtual cinema streaming, there was an additional forty-minute interview with Questlove. Among his interesting observations were that there were more than forty hours of footage to draw from, although these weren’t totally unscreened prior to this film, since specials based around the concerts were aired on New York television. Asked if more of the footage might be made available, he said there would be enough to generate subsequent special editions, which would be valuable for those who want to see quite a bit more. Among the other notable parts of the interview were Questlove’s revelation that the footage might have been thrown out had the documentary gotten underway just a few weeks later, and that he’s working on a Sly & the Family Stone doc.

3. McCartney 3, 2, 1. Even as a huge Beatles fan, I’m not as over the moon over this three-hour, six-episode Hulu series as a few of my friends are. That’s a quick explanation as to why this isn’t #1, but this won’t be a bad news review, since the series is very good. Paul McCartney discusses many aspects of his music and his career with producer Rick Rubin, who’s wise enough to let Paul do most of the talking; ask him reasonable questions that often focus on the process of writing, playing, and performing music; and do so, unlike a good many media figures, in an understated fashion that’s not overly sensationalistic or sycophantic. Shot in moody black and white in a studio, the pair often isolate specific parts of Beatles (and a few post-Beatles) tracks as they discuss tunes, a big boon both for musicians/producers/engineers and general big fans. While they go over a few of his most famous early-‘70s solos songs (and a bit that postdate those), the emphasis is almost wholly on the Beatles, which McCartney seems fine with.

It’s true that many of these stories will be familiar if you’ve seen other documentaries and read a lot about the Beatles. Some of them will be familiar even if you haven’t experienced too many of those. But it’s always fun, and interesting, to hear Paul voice them with his usual ingratiating enthusiasm and knack for engaging storytelling. Some of the tales aren’t so oft-told. Just a couple of my favorites include how Phil Spector wondered why the Beatles bothered to put good songs on B-sides, since he never did; their response was that as record buyers themselves, they wanted to provide maximum value and not make listeners feel like they were cheated. The Moog synthesizer on “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” in Paul’s telling, was used in part because Robert Moog himself happened to be working with one in Abbey Road. Beatles experts will spot some stories he doesn’t remember accurately, such as recalling how John Lennon praised “Here, There, and Everywhere” when they played back the album it was on while in Austria to film Help!; that album, Revolver, wasn’t recorded until the following year. If you know enough to catch that, you’ll catch some others. But you likely won’t be bothered by occasional clinkers like that in what’s overall a highly entertaining and often insightful series.

4. The Velvet Underground. As a disclaimer, I am listed in the “thanks to” part of the credits for this Todd Haynes documentary, though my involvement was just a long phone call with a co-producer, and several follow-up emails with notes that might have been considered helpful. I’m also particularly close to the subject of this film, as one of my books, White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day, covers the group’s career in detail.

In about two hours minutes, this does colorfully convey many of the essential facets of this legendary band’s significance. There’s barely any surviving footage of the group and, sadly, no quality footage with sound from live performance. But Haynes did as much as possible with the source material, with plenty of photos (some rare); some scraps of film footage that to my knowledge have never been previously available, such as black-and-white (if silent) images of the Doug Yule lineup; and even a few bits of unreleased 1965 demos. There weren’t tons of interviewees, in part because some members and numerous associates are no longer around. Yet there are good memories from John Cale, Maureen Tucker, and others in the VU circle like Jonathan Richman, Lou Reed’s sister, guys from Reed’s pre-VU groups, Jackson Browne (who played and recorded with Nico around the time of her first album), and Sterling Morrison’s wife. Reed, Nico, Sterling Morrison, Doug Yule, and some others who weren’t interviewed are represented by spoken excerpts from tapes. And the entire 1965-70 period is covered (along with much pre-VU history), though it’s weighted toward the Andy Warhol era.

Even with two hours, it’s not possible to cover all or even most of the Velvet Underground’s interesting accomplishments. Still, there are some shortcomings to this documentary that should be noted. Original drummer Angus MacLise is just mentioned a couple times in passing. Billy Yule, drummer for a couple months in summer 1970, isn’t mentioned at all. Neither is the live Max’s Kansas City album he drums on, or for that matter the VU’s fantastic 1969 double live LP. The Doug Yule era, which saw some of their greatest performances (including those on 1969 Velvet Underground Live) and their great third LP and not-as-great 1970 album Loaded, is represented, but given far less space than the Cale lineups. The band’s birth is overcontextualized as part of the overall New York avant-garde arts scene, with quite a few minutes devoted to activities in that world that weren’t directly VU-related. A good deal of stock footage of ‘60s scenes and images not at all directly VU-related is used, at times trying too hard to keep a fast pace and fill up time and the screen.

It must also be pointed out that some chronology is juggled. Whether some events were sequenced out of order because it was felt to work better cinematically, I can’t say. However, if you were from Mars and didn’t know anything about the Velvet Underground before seeing this film, you might think the first LP was released before they played the Dom at St. Mark’s Place (though the album came out almost a year afterward); that Nico left the band after, not before, White Light/White Heat; and that Sterling Morrison left the band before Lou Reed did. Maybe there aren’t many people who care about such things. But it would have taken only some minor resequencing, and maybe a couple more minutes of running time, to put things right without diluting the quality of the viewing experience.

The preceding two paragraphs of criticisms might create the impression that the film isn’t worth seeing, particularly if you’re particular about VU details. That’s not the case. It’s entertaining and vividly illustrates some key aspects of the group’s enormous significance. You’d need a few more hours to tell the story with the thoroughness it deserves, and that’s not possible for a theatrical release, with a PBS multi-episode series probably even less likely. And for all those other details and more pinpoint accuracy, there are books that tell that story—mine, for instance, but others as well, lest this review seem like an infomercial.

5. 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything. The title, as well as some of the approach, of this eight-episode, approximately six-hour Apple TV Plus series might overstate the impact of the rock and soul music of 1971. There were a number of years where music had a big impact, some with a bigger impact, like 1964, 1967, and 1956. But there was a lot of interesting music being made in 1971; a lot of turbulence in the surrounding world; and a fair amount of interaction between those two camps.

This series covers a lot of it, from superstars like Marvin Gaye, the Rolling Stones, and the Who to acts who were just emerging (David Bowie) or whose influence was felt more in the innovative quality of their work than record sales (Gil Scott-Heron). There are tons of excerpts, if seldom too extensive, from vintage interviews and performances, and lots from non-musical events of the time, again spanning the famous/infamous (Richard Nixon) to less predictable junctures in African American activism, feminism, and censorship. Refreshingly, there are no talking heads. There are plenty of spoken interviews both vintage and recently done for this project, but these are heard on the soundtrack over period film clips, a la one of the top other recent music documentaries, Laurel Canyon. If this is a trend, here for once is one I can get behind, letting words and action speak for themselves instead of constantly cutting to static close-ups of people talking about what happened.

Sure, you can learn lots more about any of the musicians, albums, and sociocultural developments covered in other books (and sometimes documentaries) than you can here, since this covers so much but doesn’t linger on any one topic for too long. But if you’re okay to go with the flow and just appreciate seeing so many interesting and incisive bites in a binge—and not get agitated about some musicians not mentioned or included, whether Paul McCartney or Nick Drake—there are plenty of unfamiliar clips and interviews. The list could be long, but there aren’t many, if any, other places you’ll, for instance, see Mick Jagger being interviewed in the early 1970s in French or footage of Sly Stone working in a home studio, or hear comments by rarely interviewed Bowie manager Tony Defries. Much of the 1971 music heard on the soundtrack to complement some of the non-performance images is likewise hardly cliched, whether tracks by cult artists like John Martyn and Gong, or deep cuts by the likes of Curtis Mayfield and Stevie Wonder. 

6. Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché. The story of X-Ray Spex singer/songwriter Poly Styrene is interesting beyond her pioneering role in early British punk music. There are some gaps in this documentary; her brief pre-X-Ray Spex career as reggae singer Mari Elliott isn’t mentioned, and there’s not much discussion about how X-Ray Spex formed, their relationship with their record label, and how their discs were recorded. While I would have liked more of that, what’s here does a very good job of conveying the essence of her music and personality. Her daughter, Celeste Bell, provides much of the narration, often drawing upon her own mixed and volatile experiences having Styrene as a mother, without overdoing it. There’s quite a bit of vintage footage, ranging from sharp color to blurry black and white, of Poly in performance. And there are interviews—refreshingly, heard in voiceovers rather than the more standard talking heads—from a wealth of people who knew or were influenced by her, including Paul Dean and Lora Logic of X-Ray Spex; Poly’s sister and ex-husband; and members of numerous early punk and new wave bands like the Selecter and Special AKA.

In an hour and a half, the film covers many facets of her music and life, some of them disturbing. These include her songwriting, and frequent focus upon identity and consumerism (though her daughter notes she was a shopaholic for clothes); the inspiration she provided for other women of color in the punk/new wave scene; and her feeling an outsider owing to her mixed-race ancestry. On the more distressing side, also documented are her mental problems, which resulted in a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia rather than acute bipolar disorder; how X-Ray Spex’s trip to New York and well received gigs at CBGB’s nonetheless spurred some inner turmoil; and her entrance into the Hare Krishna community after X-Ray Spex split. Her return to musicmaking years later, and rapprochement of sorts with her daughter after she was largely raised by others, gets the bulk of attention in the final minutes, though it’s not unduly drawn out.

7. The Who Sell Out: Classic Albums. I’m not sure what the precise title of this is, but you’ll be able to find this documentary on The Who Sell Out album by using these words or some combination of them. Although it only lasts a little less than half an hour, it’s a good overview of this great 1967 record. There’s a good case that it’s their best one, though Tommy, Who’s Next, and Quadrophenia get more critical reverence and attention. By the time the superdeluxe edition of the record appeared in 2021 in conjunction with this film, lots of people involved with it were gone. But fortunately Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey weren’t, and give good and fairly detailed comments about The Who Sell Out’s conception and individual songs. Townshend notes, with amusement, that composer Speedy Keen pointed out the title of “Armenia in the Sky” was supposed to be “I’m an Ear Sitting in the Sky,” and declares “I Can See for Miles” was the best song he wrote, though his opinion’s been known to change multiple times on such matters.

There’s some period footage of the Who and managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp on and offstage, some seldom or never seen in other documentaries. A few surviving associates and journalists offer remarks, and parts of some tracks are isolated so you can focus on specific members’ contributions (though John Entwistle’s bass isn’t honored with any). My only reservation is that some of the songs aren’t commented upon, including standouts like “I Can’t Reach You” and “Sunrise.” Nor is it explained why the commercials linking the tracks petered out shortly after the beginning of side two of the original LP, though their placement and purpose are discussed. This was made available for free viewing on YouTube when the superdeluxe box of The Who Sell Out was released, though I don’t know if it’ll be up there for good.

8. Tina (HBO). HBO’s Tina Turner documentary is more oriented toward her personal life than her musical career, but doesn’t neglect the music she made on her own or with her ex-husband Ike. Although Turner’s long been retired, she was interviewed recently and fairly extensively for this picture, speaking about life both with and without Ike. It also benefits from a good number of interviews with other close associates, my favorite being Jimmy Thomas, who was in the Ike and Tina Turner Revue a long time. There are also plenty of vintage performance and interview clips (including some with the late Ike Turner) stretching back to the early 1960s, some of them rarely if ever before seen, though mostly pretty brief. It’s a pretty solid overview that doesn’t avoid the tough issues of Ike’s abuse of Tina, but doesn’t dwell unduly on them either. 

As is par for the course for me on many such projects, I wish there had been more about the music. Her influence on Mick Jagger is fleetingly mentioned a couple times, but there aren’t specific details about this or their tours with the Rolling Stones, let alone any footage from those tours (although a sequence of Tina performing on the 1969 tour is in Gimme Shelter). The Turners’ success with soul covers of rock hits like “Proud Mary,” “Honky Tonk Women,” and “Come Together” isn’t discussed, and even the records from her spectacularly successful solo comeback in the 1980s aren’t covered in much detail, with the exception of the hit “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” The final segments kind of drag in a way common to how many documentaries of legacy figures get less interesting toward the end, though otherwise it’s a worthwhile watch.

9. Like a Rolling Stone: The Life and Times of Ben Fong-Torres. Best known as a writer and senior editor for Rolling Stone in the late 1960s and 1970s, Ben Fong-Torres has had a long career as a journalist, writing primarily though not exclusively about music. This documentary does focus on his Rolling Stone years, highlighted by audio excerpts from tapes of his interviews with major stars like Jim Morrison, Tina Turner, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye. Fong-Torres himself is interviewed extensively, as are some Rolling Stone colleagues and musicians. There’s also some interesting material about his background growing up as a Chinese-American in the Bay Area, and the murder of his older brother Barry, an activist in the Chinese-American community. The film conveys how fortunate he was to be on the ground floor of rock journalism when access to stars was considerably greater, and how seat-of-the-pants rock journalism was when Rolling Stone was the first widely circulated national publication to cover the music with seriousness. But it also conveys how Fong-Torres’s personable skills at making his subjects comfortable sharing information was an asset to his writing.

10. Born in Chicago. Although this bears a 2020 date, it didn’t premiere in North America until 2021, and I hope it doesn’t bother anyone that I’m putting it in these 2021 listings. This focuses on the 1960s Chicago blues scene, but particularly on how a young generation of white listeners emerged who played blues, sometimes becoming quite famous. Proper attention is paid to how electric blues became a Chicago trademark with the emergence of giants like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf in the middle of the twentieth century, but then the young white blues (sometimes blues-rock) guys get the primary attention. 

The basic history laid out by the film and narration (by Dan Aykroyd) doesn’t offer new information for those familiar with the scene. The movie’s main value is found in excerpts of archival footage and, more notably, interviews with many of the principal figures that tell the story in largely interesting and colorful ways. Those interview clips span the mid-1960s to recent times, including comments by Mike Bloomfield, Elvin Bishop, Barry Goldberg, Steve Miller, Harvey Mandel, Nick Gravenites, Sam Lay, Buddy Guy, Charlie Musselwhite, and others. Also heard from are some rock musicians from other regions who have something to say about the movement, like Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, and Carlos Santana. The point’s made that the music served as a means to bring people of different races and artists together, though Chicago blues had very few white listeners when the 1960s started.

11. Sisters with Transistors: Electronic Music’s Unsung Heroines. In the twentieth century, numerous women were in the forefront of the development and creative application of electronic music. This documentary focuses on about ten of them, some of whose names might have some familiarity beyond the world of specialists of this field, like Wendy Carlos, Pauline Oliveros, and Theremin player Clara Rockmore. Some of them have been heard by wide audiences even if their names might not be well known, like Bebe Barron, who with her husband Louis composed the score for Forbidden Planet, and Delia Derbyshire, who arranged the theme for the Doctor Who television series. Others are more apt to be primarily known to followers of the avant-garde, like Maryanne  Amacher and Elaine Radigue. 

Even if, as it is for me, electronic music is not a big interest of yours, this is a pretty interesting film, and certainly well done. A considerable amount of vintage footage was unearthed of the artists in performances, and occasionally talking about their work. There aren’t any talking heads, but voiceover interviews, from both the artists talking about their work and other musicians discussing these figures, are featured, with narration by Laurie Anderson (whose own music isn’t covered in the film itself). Some of the clips are quite entertaining in their own right, like Suzanne Ciani performing live in the mid-1970s with a huge bank of equipment with intersecting wires; Rockmore playing the Theremin; and Amacher filmed in the early 2000s in a home that’s accurately described in voiceover as in frighteningly bad shape. Although the significance and struggle of women establishing themselves in the field isn’t emphasized as much as their actual music, important points about these are made, such as Carlos noting how few women score major Hollywood movies, and Amacher’s feeling that she wanted to do something more original and creative than push around notes by dead white men.

12. Fire Music: The Story of Free Jazz. Free jazz has been around since the late 1950s, but it’s the peak of the form—the 1960s, spilling over a little to the 1970s—that’s the focus of this film. Unlike free jazz itself, the format of this documentary is pretty conventional, mixing bits of choice archive footage and photos with interviews (both archival and done specifically for this project) with many of the key performers. That’s fine—although this doesn’t dwell on any one or several figures long enough for some specialists, it covers a lot of ground in satisfying fashion. The musicians represented by footage and/or interviews is pretty long, but includes such key players as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Carla Bley, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, and Don Cherry. Plenty of others are seen and heard who might not have as high profiles, like Prince Lasha, Sonny Simmons, Burton Greene, Bobby Bradford, and critic Gary Giddins.  The interviews are occasionally vague and rambling, but for the most part insightful.

As in any such project, you might wish some of the excerpts were longer, as they include some downright entertaining clips like Sun Ra’s band in colorfully gymnastic action; the Art Ensemble of Chicago in their striking onstage makeup; and Gato Barbieri playing outdoors on a rooftop. Although the New York scene understandably dominates the proceedings, to its credit the free jazz communities in Chicago and St. Louis are also covered, as are the pockets of free jazz players that emerged in Europe after US musicians had laid the groundwork. Also explored are the attempts by musicians, with varying success, to create organizations and collectives that gave them more artistic control than the standard music business often allowed, including the loft performances spearheaded by Sam Rivers. Of course this doesn’t cover everyone, and there might be fans that lament the absence of people from Sonny Sharrock to Pharoah Sanders, though some relatively un-famous figures like the percussion group M’Boom do appear. Although it’s not a notable flaw, perhaps a few minutes could have been added discussing the contributions of record labels like Impulse and ESP to documenting free jazz, as well as the ventures of more mainstream companies like Atlantic and Blue Note into the format.

13. The Songpoet. How refreshing for PBS to broadcast a nearly two-hour documentary on a singer-songwriter who’s never sold many records, or even been widely claimed as a huge influential cult artist. His name’s not in the film’s title, but it’s on Eric Andersen, who’s been making folk, folk-rock, and country-rock records since the mid-1960s. As befits his music, this documentary is way lower-key and calmer than most retrospectives of careers by someone not hugely known to the general public. Besides interviews with Andersen and wives/girlfriends, peers of his from the ‘60s New York folk scene like Tom Paxton, John Sebastian, and Happy Traum also pitch in with memories. There’s not much vintage film of Andersen to draw from, but there are a good number of excerpts going back to a CBC mid-‘60s clip of “Thirsty Boots,” as well as lots of photos from the ‘60s to the present. Also noted are Brian Epstein’s plans to manage him before suddenly dying in 1967, and his brief appearances in Andy Warhol films.

While this does cover his whole career, more attention is paid to the ‘60s and early ‘70s than other eras, which is appropriate as that’s when his most popular work was done. “Popular” is relative; he never broke through to a wide audience, and although his most respected album, 1972’s Blue River, is referred to as a big seller, that’s not an accurate way to describe an LP that peaked at #169 in the charts. There could be more about his origins and his music; certainly some periods are barely or undiscussed, though Blue River benefits from stories from producer Norbert Putnam. The mystery of how his follow-up Stages was lost by the record company (and eventually discovered nearly two decades later) is also discussed, with hints that it was deliberately lost because Andersen had

displeased someone or some people at Columbia. This does build Andersen up more than non-cultists might find justified; his singing (which became a hoarse growl in recent years), compositions, and recordings are simply not as distinctive as Bob Dylan’s or Leonard Cohen’s, to name a couple high bars to match.

There’s a horrifying story in here, incidentally, and not one that reflects badly on Andersen, but on the ‘60s folk scene as a whole. He remembers playing the Philadelphia Folk Festival in 1967, where noted folklorist Kenny Goldstein announced Epstein’s death and declared he was happy the Beatles’ manager was dead, as the Beatles were bad for the folk scene. Not only that, according to Andersen, much of the crowd agreed with him. That’s way worse than purists yelling about folkies going electric. That might have been rude and wrong-headed, but they weren’t cheering a young man’s death. In his typically laconic and mild-mannered way, Andersen notes the incident led him to distance himself from that folk scene.

14. My Name Is Lopez. Trini Lopez is not a name that gets dropped by many hipsters these days, though he sold an enormous amount of records between 1963 and 1965. While not many would claim his sort of go-go fusion of rock, folk, Latin, and pop as markedly significant, he made some moderately enjoyable music and was truly significant as a Latino star in an era when there were few. Even if your interest in Lopez is moderate, as mine is, this documentary is worth seeing, as it’s very well done. Excerpts (admittedly very brief) from dozens of filmed performances in the (mostly) 1960s and 1970s are blended with extensive recent first-hand interviews with Lopez. While there’s a lot of footage of a recent modest-scaled concert, this has more purpose than most such things do in documentaries, since an historical Q&A Lopez did live on stage at the event is intelligently excerpted. For what it’s worth he’s in decent voice in that show, which has some added poignancy as Trini died of COVID-19 not long afterward, in 2020.

This isn’t just the story of his hit records, as Lopez recalls his family’s struggles growing up in Dallas, and the prejudice he suffered as a Latino entering the music scene. His climb to stardom included interesting interactions with Buddy Holly, Holly producer Norman Petty, the Crickets, Frank Sinatra, and the Beatles, whom he shared a bill with in Paris for a few weeks in January 1964. (He confesses he told an interviewer at the time that he didn’t think the Beatles would make it in the US, as the country already had a great rock group in the Beach Boys.) There are also unlikely snippets of duets with the likes of Vikki Carr; just a few comments from peers and associates like Dionne Warwick and Tony Orlando; and some coverage of his short acting career, which could have been bigger had he not left The Dirty Dozen when the production of that movie went beyond schedule. There’s nothing on his post-1970s activities save that recent concert, which is okay, as too many documentaries extend their coverage beyond the period in which an artist is truly of interest.

15. Buddy Guy: The Blues Chase the Blues Away. This American Masters PBS special on the blues great, like many episodes in the series, won’t tell you everything, or even a great deal, about the ins and outs of Guy’s career. There’s a book, Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues, and various liner notes for that. Which doesn’t mean this documentary isn’t without value, though there’s a lot it doesn’t cover about his recording career in particular. Its best feature is Guy himself, who talks extensively about his life in segments filmed pretty recently, when he was 84. These are interspersed with a very few vintage interview snippets, some choice (if too short) performance clips going back to the 1960s, and a few interviews with peers, associates, and acolytes, including Eric Clapton.

The perseverance he needed to get a foothold in the Chicago blues scene after moving there from Louisiana when he was a young man is covered in interesting detail. So is, with less detail but interesting memories, his mixed if overall positive experiences recording and touring with another blues great, singer and harmonica player Junior Wells. There is too much exposition on what the blues means by some of the interviewees, like John Mayer and Kingfish. I would have preferred more space for performance clips; sometimes it’s felt, here and in some other documentaries, like the producers are afraid viewers will switch channels if the excerpts last more than twenty seconds or so. Guy comes across as a humble but determined man, grateful for his eventual wide recognition but confident of the his talents, on vocals and guitar, that took quite a while to make a broad impact.

16. Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over. Directed by veteran underground/experimental filmmaker Beth B, this is a full-length documentary on the no wave musician/spoken word-performance artist that’s more straightforward than many of Beth B’s other movies (some of which have featured Lunch) and Lunch’s own projects. Lunch speaks extensively about her life and career in recent interviews, with a lot of performance footage going back to Teenage Jesus & the Jerks through shows from just a few years ago with Retrovirus. A few other people chip in with comments, like Thurston Moore and members of a few of her many bands, but Lunch is the main voice. Her pretty straightahead, if occasionally profane, and calm commentary contrasts, though not negatively, with the usually confrontational and explosive nature of the performance clips. Those include bits of 8-Eyed Spy and her work with Roland Howard, in addition to the bands previously mentioned.

As expected, Lunch speaks candidly about sex (including some early family abuse), power dynamics in relationships, and her urges to shock and oppose what’s expected of music and art in both the mainstream and underground. There’s more humor than you might expect from her standard public image, as when she observes that she and Nick Cave had nothing in common, but she and Rowland Howard (who was in the Birthday Party with Cave) had everything in common. There’s also some humor from the other interviewees, including Jim Sclavunos’s account of being deflowered by Lunch as a prerequisite of being allowed to join Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. It’s not the place to go if you want an easily digested linear overview of what she’s done; it jumps around chronologically, with too much attention and space given to Retrovirus, though the concluding segment with them is easily the best of the recent performance clips. It’s rather on the short side at 77 minutes, and if you wish it were longer, the companion oral history book (also titled Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over, reviewed in my best-of list for 2020) has way more detail, including quotes from many figures who aren’t in the film.

17. WBCN and the American Revolution. Although the official release date of this documentary was 2019, it doesn’t seem to have been widely seen until it was broadcast on PBS in late 2021. It also seems like the PBS version was substantially lengthened from the original to almost two hours, though it’s hard to know what to believe when you look for info about things like this online. At any rate, I’d rather include something like this that barely anyone seems to have seen before 2021 than leave it out because of its technical initial release date. 

WBCN was the first underground FM radio station in Boston, and one of the most famous such ones in the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Music wasn’t the sole focus of the programming, and isn’t the sole focus of this documentary, which gives at least as much time to its news reporting and the explosive sociopolitical context in which the station operated. But there’s a lot about the music it played, and its alternative news coverage, which dove into plenty of important and controversial subjects, is also worth knowing about. The very well, if conventionally, done film is heavy on talking heads from the period, including many of the station’s DJs and employees, as well as its founder Ray Riepen, also a key figure in the establishment of the city’s leading rock club, the Boston Tea Party. There are excerpts of WBCN interviews and radio broadcasts with Patti Smith, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, and Jane Fonda. And a couple of the talking heads who pop up are unexpected inclusions for documentaries like this: Noam Chomsky and (if very briefly) colorful Boston Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee. A companion book was published in late 2021.

18. Mr A. & Mr M.: The Story of A&M Records. Mr A. was Herb Alpert and Mr. M Jerry Moss, who founded A&M Records in the early 1960s and ran the label for the next thirty years. This two-part, nearly two-hour documentary debuted on Epix near the end of the year, and covers the history with extensive interviews with the pair, as well as lots of archive footage of the company’s biggest stars. There’s some overlap—not in actual scenes, but in subjects covered—with the 2020 documentary on Alpert himself, Herb Alpert Is…. Understandably there’s plenty of attention paid to Alpert’s early records, which were crucial to launching the company. Otherwise the emphasis is very much on a handful of A&M’s biggest acts from the 1960s through the 1990s: Joe Cocker, Cat Stevens, the Carpenters, the Police, Suzanne Vega, Styx, Sergio Mendes, Janet Jackson, Peter Frampton, Carole King, and Supertramp. Not many listeners will be big fans of all of these big sellers from disparate styles, but that’s the kind of diversity that’s needed to become a power in the record business, and A&M didn’t have as much of a stylistic identity as other big indies like Motown, Stax, Elektra, or Atlantic.

The points are repeatedly made—too often, really—that A&M was an artist-friendly label and a great place to work, certainly at least for Alpert and Moss. Some of these could have been dropped or reduced for room on some of the more interesting cult artists or even commercial failures who recorded for the label, especially in its early days, like Phil Ochs, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Steve Young, and (very briefly) Captain Beefheart. A&M’s shrewd moves in picking up American rights for important late-‘60s British acts like Procol Harum, Fairport Convention, and the Strawbs are noted, but not detailed in depth. Some of their notable mid-sized acts who had some hits are barely present, like Chris Montez. Any big company must have had some interesting tensions accompanying pivotal decisions that could have worked both for and against the success and quality of its product, but these aren’t much of the story here, though the bittersweet fallout from its sale to PolyGram in the ‘90s is discussed. The result is a passable but rather bland overview of an important record company.

19. In Their Own Words: Chuck Berry. This nearly hour-long episode in the PBS series is kind of like a condensed version of 2020’s fuller-length documentary Chuck Berry, without the schlocky re-enactments that weakened that release. That means this shorter overview is actually superior, though neither one goes into the kind of depth a major pillar of rock like Berry deserves. There are exciting, but frustratingly very brief, archive clips of him in performance throughout his career, as well as some bits of interviews he gave for cameras. Family members (including his longtime wife) chip in with memories, as do Marshall Chess and Keith Richards, as well as some more peripheral figures. As for specifics about most of his many hits and classic compositions, well, you’ll have to do the more time-consuming but rewarding work of going through biographies, rock histories, and liner notes. This has some of the basics of his importance and creativity as a guitarist and songwriter, as well as hitting some key incidents of his career, including the jail stints that derailed him at several points.

The following documentaries came out in 2020, but I did not see them until 2021:

1. Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President (Kino Lorber). Jimmy Carter, it’s fair to say, had a greater passion for music, and better musical taste, than most presidents of our lifetime. This well done documentary examines those, with recent interviews with Carter, who remains well spoken and lucid well into his nineties. His admiration for Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, and the Allman Brothers is the most noted aspect of his pantheon, and Dylan, Nelson, and the late Gregg Allman are also interviewed. Not everyone Carter liked and engaged in his campaigns and causes was as critically esteemed; Jimmy Buffett and Garth Brooks are also heard from. It’s also true that he didn’t champion (if he was aware of them) edgier acts like Neil Young, Patti Smith, or Sun Ra. But he overall gravitated toward big names of good quality, and not just rock musicians (or even exclusively liberal musicians), as his fandom of several musicians who played at his rallies or government functions are also covered. Those included Dizzy Gillespie, Loretta Lynn, and Charlie Daniels, as a few examples.

It’s not always remembered that some of these musicians played a crucial role in raising funds for Carter’s presidential campaigns, especially the Allman Brothers, but also others. It’s certainly not often remembered that Carter actually sang, or more accurately chanted, the brief title lyrics to Gillespie’s “Salt Peanuts” at one event, as seen in a clip here. And it’s not often revealed, as Willie Nelson does in an interview, that Nelson smoked pot with one of Carter’s sons in the White House. The film is stretched a bit to feature length with some general coverage of Carter’s political accomplishments and struggles, with some comments by non-musical figures like Madeleine Albright, Andrew Young, and Carter’s son Chip. But the focus is mostly on the musical connections, and overall it’s a calmer and more even-handed assessment of the subject matter than the slightly hype-ridden approach many films bring to such topics. Also seen in vintage Carter-related performances and/or interviews are Paul Simon, Nile Rodgers, and Rosanne Cash.

2. The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart (HBO). This was among the most popular documentaries of 2020, but without HBO or a safe convenient way to watch it with others, I didn’t see this until spring 2021. The pluses are the standard ones for fairly lengthy music documentaries on big acts with plentiful resources. There are interviews with all three of the Gibb brothers in the group, though only Barry’s were done specifically for the movie, Robin and Maurice having died some years back. There are clips, if usually pretty short ones, going back to home movies and TV appearances in Australia before their move to London in 1967. Several close associates also speak, including, refreshingly, guitarist Vince Melouney, though it sometimes isn’t mentioned that the Bee Gees were a quintet when they rose to global fame in the late 1960s. Tensions between the brothers (which even led to them briefly splitting in the late 1960s) aren’t glossed over, though they realized then and almost always that they were worth a lot more together than apart.

While their late-‘60s pop hits get a lot of attention, more time’s given to their disco years. To strike a sour note that might annoy some fans, not everyone likes both phases, or certainly equally likes both phases. The late-‘70s were certainly their years of peak commercial success, but it’s my view that their earlier work from the 1960s and early ‘70s was not just better, but so dissimilar to almost be the sound of an entirely different act. Their stylistic transition is discussed at some length, which could make the later sections of interest even to some who aren’t fans of their later music. Or conversely, I suppose, make the earlier sections of interest even to some who aren’t fans of their earlier music. The film loses momentum after the ‘70s as there isn’t too much to say about their work afterward, though that final section isn’t too long, leaving their earlier years as the movie’s main focus.

3. The Go-Go’s (Universal/Polygram). This hits all the points that should be required of decent, responsible documentaries. There are interviews with all five Go-Go’s from their most famous lineup, as well as the two early members who weren’t on their big hits, and the bassist (Paula Jean Brown) who joined for a while after Jane Wiedlin left. Also heard from are their manager (who got edged out after they became big stars, to the band’s eventual regret), Miles Copeland from IRS Records, and producer Richard Gottehrer. There’s a wealth of vintage footage dating back to their early punk years, though some fans might wish the excerpts were longer, and some live (if sometimes lo-fi) recordings form part of the soundtrack. Their problems are neither ignored nor highlighted at expense of the music, including Charlotte Caffey’s drug addiction, disputes over songwriting royalties, and fractious personnel changes. Wisely, just a few minutes are given at the end of their reunions, with the concentration on their half dozen or so years from their formation through the mid-1980s.

4. Streetlight Harmonies (Gravitas Ventures). Reversing the more common good points-bad points review sequence, let’s start with how some aficionados might pick on this doo-wop documentary. The style has a pretty extensive history, and especially as many of the notable groups only had one or two hits, many of them aren’t mentioned—some of them big ones, like the Diamonds. It jumps back and forth chronologically, and doesn’t present a linear history of how the style originated and developed. There are some excerpts of vintage clips, but they’re very brief, not numerous, and usually presented as crooked inserts in a larger graphic, where full-screen images would have been preferable. The last fifteen-twenty minutes stretch this out with some comments by doo-wop influenced artists from decades after the genre’s heyday, and a recording session from a few years ago in which some of the originals participated.

The good points make it worth viewing, however, mainly the interviews with a couple dozen or so figures. These include members of the Flamingos, Coasters, Crystals, Chantels, Five Satins, Drifters, Beach Boys, Little Anthony, and others, along with some knowledgeable historians and DJ Jerry Blavat. If the journey’s a bit haphazard, numerous topics are touched upon—not just the music itself, but also the difference between African-American and Italian-American groups; the difficulties in getting properly paid; the hardships of touring in the south; and the overlooked influence of doo-wop on surf music, with comments from Beach Boys Brian Wilson and Al Jardine. These stories, and the ingratiating way they’re told by these veterans, are the film’s strengths, though there’s much territory (like record labels and recording sessions) that could have been more thoroughly covered. In many regions, this can be seen for free on kanopy.com with a current library card.

5. Harry Chapin: When In Doubt, Do Something. The intensity of the devotion of Chapin’s considerable fan base might only be matched by the distaste many critics have for the singer-songwriter’s long-winded story-songs. Whatever side you’re on, this is a pretty accomplished documentary, and might hold some interest even for those who don’t admire his music. That’s both because he was a significant figure on the 1970s pop scene—certainly as a commercial force, even if he wasn’t to everyone’s liking—and since he did more than almost any other celebrity, let alone popular musician, to work for progressive social issues.

There’s plenty of archive footage going back to his mid-‘60s folk days with siblings in the Chapin Brothers, as well as interviews with relatives, accompanists, Elektra Records chief Jac Holzman, peers like Billy Joel and Pat Benatar, and (though taken from a concert) memories from Bruce Springsteen. The enormous time and energy he spent lobbying politicians and doing benefits for progressive causes are detailed, as is the struggle to combine those with a commercially viable career and family life. The drawn-out concluding part on his death in a car accident and legacy might leave the impression the time couldn’t otherwise be filled with more coverage of his music and records. Even if your interest in Chapin is mild, as mine is, take heart—you don’t have much to lose by checking it out, since it can be viewed for free (with a current library card) in many parts of the US on kanopy.com.

6. Fat Boy: The Billy Stewart Story. Airing on PBS, this short (less than one hour) documentary covers the soul singer known for both his large size and unique phrasing. He used an almost stuttering sort of scat style and elongated buzzing noises, sometimes on popular standards. It’s not just short, but slight, and only gets on this list by virtue of giving some attention to a ‘60s soul vocalist who isn’t too well known, although he had some fairly big hits (with his radical interpretation of “Summertime” reaching the Top Ten). There are excerpts of just a couple vintage clips/interviews, and while there’s some silent color home movie-type footage of Stewart in concert, these short bits are often repeated, as if to cover the absence of other source material. A few people who knew and worked with Billy are interviewed, as are a critic and a musician of a subsequent generation, but they don’t say much of substance. The general point’s made several times that Stewart was unique and distinctive, but there’s surprisingly little specific detail or analysis of why that’s so, though at least it’s pointed out that he was significantly influenced by calypso. 

A couple interesting stories do emerge, though one wonders if they might be somewhat exaggerated. It’s recalled that Stewart wanted songwriting royalties and credit for his version of “Summertime,” though it’s hard to see how that could have been obtained, even if he did a highly original arrangement. It’s also reported that he went to New York to try to get this through direct action, but was given an address that turned out to be composer George Gershwin’s grave. An exchange of gunshots between Stewart and Wilson Pickett on a bus is also reported, and one wonders what kind of argument could have been serious enough to risk death. The documentary’s worth catching if it airs on your PBS outlet, but isn’t nearly as significant as Stewart’s actual discography. 

Once in a while a reissue comes out that isn’t good enough to make a best-of list, but is kind of interesting, if only for the strangeness of its concept. One such item from 2021 is The Roy Orbison Connection: 34 Roots and Covers of Roy Orbison, on Bear Family. All of these tracks were either covers of songs Orbison did, or versions of songs that Roy covered. Bear Family’s done similar collections for Elvis Presley and Bill Haley.

None of these postdate the 1960s, and include a wealth of big names, among them Bobby Fuller, Bobby Vinton, Gene Pitney, the Everly Brothers, Wanda Jackson, Bruce Channel, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Lee Lewis, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Del Shannon. If you’re wondering how they could come up with 34 tracks, there must have been way more than 34 that would qualify.

The British group the Four Pennies, for instance, did “Running Scared” in the 1964 film Swinging UK, and it’s not here (nor is it especially worth tracking down). The Beatles did a far better and more historically significant cover of “Dream Baby” on their first BBC radio appearance (when Pete Best was still drummer) on March 7, 1962. It’s often been bootlegged, but never been officially issued, most likely because of its taped by a cheap recorder next to a radio speaker fidelity.

There are a bunch of no-names, or at least ones that will be unfamiliar if you’re not a huge collector. Vernon Taylor, Don Duke, Mike Redway, and the Schneider Sisters, anyone? And there are names that are primarily familiar to rockabilly aficionados, like Narvel Felts, Sid King, and Janis Martin. Ken Cook recorded Orbison’s composition “Problem Child” for Sun Records in 1956, but it didn’t come out until 1976. Joe Melson won’t be a name recognized by many, but he had an important role in Orbison’s career as a co-writer (with Roy) of much of Orbison’s material in Roy’s prime in the first half of the 1960s.

These kind of collections are seldom great listens all the way through, let alone as good as the most familiar versions. That’s even true of the very best artists, like the Beatles, or songwriters, like Carole King and Gerry Goffin. A lot of these cuts are more curiosities than quality efforts, or even too interesting. 

That applies to The Roy Orbison Connection, where there are few cuts that stand out as particularly worthwhile, though few are subpar. Often they’re rather unimaginatively close to Orbison’s version, and unsurprisingly not as good. This could be said of Del Shannon’s “Oh, Pretty Woman,” Waylon Jennings’s “The Crowd,” or Bruce Channel’s “Dream Baby.” Bobby Fuller’s “Rock House” is pretty good, but not notably different or leagues above Orbison’s rendition. Johnny Cash’s “You’re My Baby” (which Roy could cover) is just weird, Cash almost sounding like he’s forcing himself to do rockabilly, especially on one chorus where he emits a bizarre yelp.

Amidst the generally run-of-the-mill, or sometimes worse, variations are a few good performances. Wanda Jackson sounds sexy (and rather like Brenda Lee) on “Candy Man,” though Roy and for that matter Fred Neil (who co-wrote the song with Beverly Ross) did it better. Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Down the Line” is solid and better than Orbison’s original; he did a good “Mean Woman Blues” in 1957 too, though Roy both did it better and made it his own when he had a Top Five hit with the song in 1963.

Dalida’s French-language treatment of “It’s Over” stands out in this company just because it’s different than anything else, both in the language and the European orchestrated arrangement. You don’t have to be fluent in French to catch that its retitling as “Je T’Aime” (“I love you”) isn’t an exact translation.

The clear winners as Orbison’s most important interpreters are the Everly Brothers. Before Roy had a big hit of his own, they took a rousing run through his composition “Claudette” into the Top Thirty in 1958 (as the B-side of the chart-topping “All I Have to Do Is Dream”). It’s considerably superior to the version Orbison later did on his 1965 LP There Is Only One Roy Orbison.

The Everlys also did a superb interpretation of Boudleaux Bryant’s “Love Hurts” on their 1960 album A Date With the Everly Brothers, itself one of the best-pre Beatles non-compilation rock LPs. They used a pretty straightforward mild rock arrangement with a gingerly swelling electric guitar. Orbison put the song on the B-side of “Running Scared” and opted for a much more orchestrated approach that could have been a big hit as an A-side. It’s close to a tie as to which track is better; I guess I’d go with the Everly Brothers, though they’re so markedly different that each can be appreciated as a highly worthwhile production.

There’s one selection on The Roy Orbison Connection that stands out as a recording that’s both obscure and better than Orbison’s original. “I Like Love,” written by Sun producer Jack Clement, was Roy’s last single for the label in 1957. An average, even generic Sun rockabilly number, it made no commercial impact, but was picked up across the Atlantic by Vince Taylor, one of Britain’s few notable pre-Beatles rock singers. Actually he couldn’t sing too well, but made it for it with oodles of enthusiastic attitude and some good studio backup musicians. In that respect he had much in common with another of the UK’s few pre-Beatles rockers of consequence, Screaming Lord Sutch.

Taylor’s most remembered for “Brand New Cadillac,” covered much later by the Clash, and for supplying part of the inspiration for David Bowie’s Ziggy character. He wasn’t remotely close to Orbison in either the quality of his music or his historical significance. But his 1958 single “I Like Love” has frenetic energy and is decisively better than Orbison’s rather unmemorable prototype. 

There’s some more historical significance to Taylor’s “I Like Love.” It has some of the best guitar on any 1950s British rock’n’roll single, and indeed some of the only good guitar in 1950s rock, especially in the manic if brief solos. That guitarist was Tony Sheridan, who’d go on to fame, of sorts, as a mentor in Hamburg in the early 1960s to the Beatles, who’d back him on some recordings in Germany before they started their own recording career. Now there’s a Roy Orbison connection that echoed way beyond the rather specialized niche of who did Orbison songs, or whose songs Orbison did.

As time goes on, it seems like there are more and more tribute/covers albums than ever before by acts known mostly for doing their own material. Songs from the 1940s, x superstar interprets compositions by x songwriter, an all-blues covers session – there are plenty of examples. In fact, such projects have been a part of rock from its start, whether it was Elvis Presley doing a Christmas album or Ray Charles doing Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. Del Shannon even did a Sings Hank Williams LP in 1965, though like many such combos, it looks more interesting than it sounds.

Arguably, the first such post-Beatles detour by an established star known for doing original material to gain wide attention was David Bowie’s Pin-Ups, devoted to classic British Invasion covers in 1973. Around the same time, the Band did their oldies record, Moondog Matinee, and Bryan Ferry his all-covers LP, These Foolish Things. A little more than a year later, John Lennon put out his oldies covers collection, Rock’n’Roll.

Sometimes these records seemed to mark time when a band had run out of inspiration or fresh material (Moondog Matinee). Lennon’s Rock’n’Roll was at least partly cut to settle a legal dispute over song copyrights. The motivation behind other projects seemed kind of inscrutable—Bowie kept pumping out original material shortly after Pin-Ups, and maybe just wanted a break from the pressure to deliverable more compositions after his ascent to glam superstardom. 

With this post, I’m listing my favorite such sort of side endeavors predating Pin-Ups. Even considering there weren’t as many such projects back then, it’s a little surprising how few of them excite me. There are a good number such attempts by artists I like very much that basically leave me indifferent. I’ll list a few of these with brief notes at the end.

The clear winner—the only one that sounds very good, makes for a good album-length statement, and doesn’t sound like a novelty or a distraction from the main course—is:

Laura Nyro and LaBelle, Gonna Take a Miracle (1971). Nyro is most known as a songwriter, and mostly for songs that were big hits for other people, like “Eli’s Coming,” “And When I Die,” “Wedding Bell Blues,” “Sweet Soul Picnic,” and “Stoney End.” She was also, however, a very good singer, with a bigger soul influence than most musicians put in the singer-songwriter bag.

So she was well suited for doing an album of soul covers, most of them fairly big hits, although some of the older and more doo-wop-flavored ones (“The Wind,” “Desiree,” and “The Bells”) weren’t as familiar. And while temporary teams of well known performers usually aren’t special, she also blended well with LaBelle as backup singers for the sessions. Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, who produced the album as they were rising to prominence in the Philly soul sound, don’t lay it on as lush as they did on many of their hits, which also works well with Nyro’s approach.

Gonna Take a Miracle doesn’t sound like a novelty or side project, but a strong album on its own merits. I wouldn’t say any of these versions surpass the originals, but they’re appreciably different, and moving enough that you aren’t mentally comparing them to superior renditions. The 2002 CD reissue enhances the product with four previously unreleased soul covers (none of them on the studio LP) from a 1971 Fillmore East concert, though a couple of those are pretty brief.

Why did Nyro do this at a time when few other artists of her stature were embarking on similar studio projects? It’s harsh, but the best of her songwriting was already behind her, although she was just 23 when this was recorded in June 1971. Indeed, most of her songwriting was behind her. Her next album didn’t appear until 1976, and there weren’t many others before her 1997 death. Maybe she had dried up and had few notable new compositions to offer. As she’s already done some soul covers in concert, it could have been seen as a way of marking time until she had new material. Instead it ended up being her last album of note.

Odetta, Odetta Sings Dylan (1965). While some albums in this post are by artists who wrote most of their own material, some aren’t. By the admittedly loose standards I’m applying, I included some where noted artists did something different than what they usually did, even if they wrote few or none of their songs. Here’s one instance, from early 1965, with folk legend Odetta presenting an entire album of Bob Dylan compositions. This was, to the best of my knowledge, only the second such Dylan cover LP—there was a very obscure one by Linda Mason (How Many Seas Must a White Dove Sail) in 1964, but neither that album nor that singer are very good. 

Odetta Sings Dylan, however, is very good. Her singing is expectedly strong, her interpretations sensitive, and her accompaniment—by guitarists Bruce Langhorne (who’d played on some Dylan albums) and Peter Childs, and Les Grinage—is excellent. While the songs include a few that were already well known (“The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”), a number of them wouldn’t be released by Dylan in the ‘60s (“Baby, I’m in the Mood for You”; “Long Ago, Far Away,” “Tomorrow Is a Long Time”; “Walkin’ Down the Line”; and “Long Time Gone”). The ten-minute version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” might have been released before Dylan’s own rendition, if only very shortly before that.

The 2000 CD on Camden adds two worthwhile bonus tracks from previous Odetta albums, both Dylan covers (“Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Paths of Victory”). One reason this isn’t #1 is that it’s a folk album, not a rock one, though it has close connections to an artist at the time he was making the transition from folk to rock. Dylan cited Odetta as one of the biggest influences in his changing focus from rock to folk as a teenager.

Various Artists, Phil Spector’s Christmas Album (1963). How does a various artists compilation make a list like this? It does if you consider Phil Spector the artist on this LP of Christmas songs by acts on his Philles Records roster, including the Ronettes, the Crystals, and Darlene Love. For the record, originally it was titled A Christmas Gift for You from Philles Records, and then A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector.

Generally I don’t like Christmas music, but this is an exception that proves the rule, mostly because Spector held nothing back in laying his wall of sound on these tracks. So they sound more like Phil Spector records than Christmas ditties, though the singers perform them with praiseworthy passion, especially the Ronettes on “Sleigh Ride.”

It’s well known by historians that this was released on the day JFK was assassinated. While it’s been written that the album was heard by virtually no one because the United States wasn’t in the mood for such a record, that’s not entirely true. For what it’s worth, it made #13 on Billboard’s Christmas album sales chart in December 1963, though I don’t think records on that chart sold in huge numbers. It’s reached plenty of listeners through subsequent reissues, however, even making the charts at various points—including a #12 on Billboard’s pop chart quite recently at the beginning of 2021.

The Beach Boys, Beach Boys Party! (1965). No, this isn’t as good as the Beach Boys’ next (and best) album, 1966’s Pet Sounds. It’s not even as good as most of their previous LPs. It wasn’t really recorded at a party, either; it was done in a studio, with some of the party sounds overdubbed later. It’s seen as a stopgap to satisfy Capitol Records’ demand for more material as they, and particularly Brian Wilson, prepared to embark on their most serious project, Pet Sounds.

Still, there’s an inviting loose and casual atmosphere to this collection of largely acoustic covers. Most of them are far from the same league as the originals, including a couple songs by their chief rivals, the Beatles, and even Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” But despite the artificial pretense of eavesdropping on an actual party, they sound like they’re having fun, and it’s kind of like a bootleg that got released. And it was quite successful – Party! got to #6 in the US, and #3 in the UK.

There was one cover that did match and, commercially certainly, surpassed the original. That was “Barbara Ann,” which soared to #2 in the US and #3 in the UK, with a lot of help from an exuberant co-lead vocal by uncredited guest Dean Torrence of Jan & Dean. That alone made the album session worthwhile. Greil Marcus’s claim in the Stranded book that “Barbara Ann” “feels better than anything on Pet Sounds—or Sgt. Pepper” is not so much revisionism as extremism, however. 

Call me behind the times, but I wasn’t aware until writing this that there’s an 81-track expanded edition of Party! from 2015, titled Beach Boys’ Party! Uncovered and Unplugged. Some of it has alternate takes, but there are also a good number of covers that didn’t make the original LP. Much if not all this had been bootlegged, and it’s fair to say it’s probably too much even for many listeners who enjoy the core album, though it’s out there if you want it. 

The Temptations, The Temptations Sing Smokey (1965). As another example of how loose this category can be, here we have an act who wrote none of their own material filling up an LP with compositions by a guy who wrote (or co-wrote) most of their early hit songs anyway. Still, it was unusual in the mid-1960s for rock or soul stars to prominently bill an album as having been written by, or at least entirely comprised of songs by, a specific songwriter. A couple of the tracks, “The Way You Do the Things You Do” and “My Girl,” had already been big hits. Some of the others had been big hits for others—“You Beat Me to the Punch” by Mary Wells and “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” by Smokey Robinson’s main group, the Miracles. Others had been previously released by the Miracles, even if they hadn’t been big hits (“(You Can) Depend on Me” and “Who’s Lovin’ You”). 

“The Way You Do the Things You Do” and “My Girl” are easily the best items here, and I’m not as big on this album as some other soul critics are. Still, it’s fairly solid and was certainly a big hit with customers at a time when Motown (and soul) performers didn’t prioritize LPs, hitting #1 on the R&B charts. Motown used a similar strategy on a release by their biggest female stars, 1967’s The Supremes Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland, spotlighting material by the songwriting-production team who’d penned and produced all their hits.

Here are some brief comments on similar detours by other notable artists, some of which are valued much more highly by some others than I rate them:

The Everly Brothers, Songs Our Daddy Taught Us (1958). I wish I liked this album more than I do, since I’m a big Everly Brothers fan and the concept is kind of interesting. But this collection of folk songs—an audacious move at a time when the Everlys had just ascended to rock’n’roll superstardom—is kind of dull, with only minimal accompaniment. They harmonize well, but it accentuates how great their early hits (and, for the most part albums) were, with superb catchy songs boasting rock and pop influences that are missing from these tunes.

Skeeter Davis, Skeeter Sings Buddy Holly (1967). I like Skeeter Davis, and I love Buddy Holly. But this album’s just okay, with country-rockish backing, occasional light strings, and competent straightforward, upbeat interpretations by Davis. It was a bit weird to be doing an album like this in 1967, when Holly wasn’t in the forefront of pop and rock consciousness.

The Hollies, Hollies Sing Dylan (1969). This album’s most famous, or infamous, for helping spur Graham Nash’s departure from the Hollies at a time when he felt they, and artists in general, should be writing their own material. The album itself isn’t discussed that much, although it did reach some listeners at the time, making #3 in the UK (though, titled Words and Music By Bob Dylan, it missed the charts entirely in the US). Despite the group’s frequent skill at interpreting material by others, it’s not too memorable and doesn’t suit their strengths, particularly their rich vocal harmonies. Give them points at least for tossing in a song, “Quit Your Low Down Ways,” that hadn’t appeared on a Dylan release, though Peter, Paul & Mary did it on their 1963 In the Wind album.

Rolling Stone, by the way, offered a couple radically different assessments of the results in a couple books bearing its imprint. In The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock’n’Roll, Ken Emerson wrote the group “stood Dylan on his head with brilliant rearrangements that made no sense but produced ravishing music.” In The Rolling Stone Record Guide, however, John Milward countered, “When [their] formula was applied to more serious-minded interpretations, as on the Dylan album, the effect could be disastrous.”

Harry Nilsson, Nilsson Sings Newman (1970). I like Harry Nilsson a lot; I’m not a fan of Randy Newman, much less so than many critics are. There was some courage in doing an entire album of a song by a different composer at a time when Nilsson had just one big hit, “Everybody’s Talkin’,” and when Newman wasn’t too well known, though some stars had already scored some success (and, in the UK, big hits) with his songs. But these songs, and this record, leave no lasting impression on me. Nilsson sings well, but a lot of these kind of albums are sung well. You need a lot more to happen to make a good LP.

Booker T. & the MG’s, McLemore Avenue (1970). I like Booker T. & the MG’s a lot, and the Beatles are my favorite act of all time. So what could go wrong with an album that covered Abbey Road? Nothing wrong, exactly, but nothing nearly as special as Booker T. & the MG’s’ best instrumentals, let alone Abbey Road itself. This is often described as an instrumental version of Abbey Road, but it’s not quite that. All of the songs are combined into medleys in different order than the Beatles used, and “Octopus’s Garden” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” aren’t here at all.

And a footnote for an album that was considered, but never completed: When the Beatles were recorded what was initially titled the Get Back album in January 1969, one idea was to make a record comprised entirely of oldies covers, perhaps as a partner to an LP with original material. As many hours of bootlegged material from the month reveal, they jammed on many, many oldies during the sessions. However, most of those covers were pretty bad, and many of them incomplete, or afflicted with poor memories of the lyrics. Maybe they could have been capable of an interesting such disc had they focused on it, but that focus wasn’t there during the Get Back sessions.

Ever since rock started top songwriters, whether soloists or in bands, have had some of their compositions covered by other artists without releasing their own versions. Sometimes the same guy or guys have covered more than one such surplus tune, as Billy J. Kramer, the Fourmost, and Peter & Gordon did with Lennon-McCartney songs the Beatles didn’t release while they were active. But it’s rare that an artist covers half a dozen such extras at once, none of which had been released by anyone.

The 1970 self-titled album by Yellow Hand might be the most extreme example of an act giving so much of a rock LP over to such items between the mid-‘60s and early 1970s. The group covered no less than half a dozen Buffalo Springfield outtakes that had never been issued by the Springfield or anyone else. Among them were two Neil Young songs (“Down to the Wire” and “Sell Out”) and four Stephen Stills compositions (“Come On,” “Hello I’ve Returned,” “Neighbor Don’t You Worry,” and “We’ll See”). These weren’t even accompanied by other songs by the same writers that had been released.

Although a Buffalo Springfield version of “Down to the Wire” came out on Young’s 1977 triple-LP Decade retrospective, Springfield versions of the other five didn’t come out until the twenty-first century (though most of them circulated on bootlegs). Basically, Yellow Hand got access to the outtakes because Buffalo Springfield’s original manager/producers, Charlie Greene and Brian Stone, had the publishing on the songs and wanted to make a little money off of them.

I told the whole story of Yellow Hand—based on recent interviews with the group’s guitarist, Pat Flynn, and their singer, Jerry Tawney—in a lengthy (nine-page) feature in the spring 2021 (#56) issue of Ugly Things magazine. Then a teenage guitarist, Flynn was actually given a literal shoebox of cassettes of Buffalo Springfield demos to learn the songs, the band Yellow Hand subsequently forming and recording their LP for Capitol.

Are there any other examples of, as my unwieldy headline for this post reads, “Multiple Covers of Unreleased Songs by Major Acts on the Same Album, From the Mid-’60s to the Early ’70s?” None that are as extreme, but here are a half dozen albums that made the most of someone else’s vaults:

1. Coulson Dean McGuinness Flint, Lo and Behold. McGuinness Flint, featuring ex-Manfred Mann bassist/guitarist Tom McGuinness and ex-Bluesbreakers drummer Hughie Flint, had a couple big UK hits in the early ‘70s without making much headway in the US. Teaming up with Dennis Coulson and Dixie Dean, their 1972 album Lo and Behold was devoted entirely to interpretations of then-obscure Bob Dylan compositions. None of the ten songs had appeared on official Dylan records, though his versions have subsequently appeared on archival releases.

At a glance that seems to outdo Yellow Hand, but not all of the ten tunes were previously unissued by anyone. The Byrds, for instance, put “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” on their second album, and Jim & Jean put out their version soon afterward. Happy Traum had done “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” back in 1963 as “I Will Not Go Under the Ground.” John Walker, Thunderclap Newman, and others had done “Open the Door, Homer.”

One of Dylan’s own versions of “The Death of Emmett Till,” though recorded in the early 1960s, came out on a Folkways compilation in 1972 credited to the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt, though it’s difficult to tell whether that LP appeared before Lo and Behold. So points off for mixing in songs that had already been available, if you keep tabs on that sort of thing.

As Tom McGuinness told me in his interview for Ugly Things #49, “I was lucky because I got a lot of the acetates from the time of the Band. Because Albert Grossman came to London with the Basement Tapes and played them to Manfred Mann, the whole group. So I had all these Dylan acetates lying around. Then McGuinness Flint, we were published by Feldman’s, who were Dylan’s publishers in the UK at that point. A guy up there gave me like fifty cassettes of Dylan demos. So I just had this idea of doing some of the little known Dylan songs that were on these cassettes. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever done in my life.”

2. Hamilton Camp, Paths of Victory. Playing the Dylan card much earlier than Coulson etc., Camp’s Paths of Victory, issued around late 1964, had seven songs by the man. No less than six of them had yet to appear on Dylan’s own albums, though “Girl from the North Country” had been on Dylan’s second LP, and Bob had done “Only a Hobo” under his Blind Boy Grunt alias for the 1963 compilation Broadside Ballads Vol. 1. Again, Dylan’s own versions of the other five of his compositions here have all come out on archival releases.

Of those other five, “Walkin’ Down the Line” had been on Jackie DeShannon’s self-titled 1963 album, and “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” on a 1963 LP by Ian & Sylvia. Release dates have been variably reported for early-to-mid-‘60s folk LPs, but Camp seems to have beaten Odetta to the punch with “Long Time Gone” and “Paths of Victory,” which appeared on Odetta Sings Dylan, probably issued in early 1965. That left just one of what we might call an “exclusive,” as “Guess I’m Doin’ Fine” doesn’t seem to have been covered by anyone else. 

Camp was an interesting figure who already had a solid reputation in the folk world for his recordings (under the name Bob Camp) as a duo with a bigger name from the early folk revival, Bob Gibson. He also wrote “Pride of Man,” his original version highlighting this LP, a few years before Quicksilver Messenger Service did a great rock cover. But this is a folk album, not a rock one. And while he deserves points for scouring for half a dozen of Dylan’s more obscure tunes at a point before Bob was quite as iconic as he’d be in a year or so, not all of them had been previously unissued by anyone.

As for how Paths of Victory got so Dylan-heavy, Camp told me in an interview nearly twenty years ago, “Dylan was hot, so [Elektra Records chief] Jac [Holzman] thought it was very smart to put more Dylan tunes on there, much to my regret. I originally had done a kind of very eclectic collection. I don’t think any tunes [that didn’t make the final LP] were original, but there were different interpretations of a lot of kinds [of] folk songs, [like] ‘Railroad Bill.’ I liked the album that way.

“But he didn’t like that. He said he wanted more Dylan tunes. So they sent me a tape out of Dylan’s, it was reel-to-reel. I learned three or four tunes, and slapped them on, much to my regret. Because I really got hit for it, in especially the Minnesota folk scene. A magazine called The Little Sandy Review that came out of Minneapolis — it was all Dylan cronies — they just hated it!”

3. Nico, Chelsea Girl. An underrated baroque-folk production, Nico’s first album, released around the beginning of fall 1967, showcased obscure or wholly unreleased songs by a wealth of fine songwriters. Among them were Jackson Browne, Bob Dylan, Tim Hardin, and no less than five tracks—half the LP—of compositions by fellow Velvet Undergrounders Lou Reed and/or John Cale (with Sterling Morrison getting a co-credit on one and Nico herself on another).

All of these were fine and generally folkier than most of The Velvet Underground & Nico, on which Nico had of course sung a few classics. A few were really fine, namely the epic “Chelsea Girls” and the haunting “It Was a Pleasure Then,” which is a Velvet Underground recording in all but name, as Nico’s backed by Reed and Cale. None had been previously released by anyone, though a 1965 VU demo of “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” would appear on a 1995 box set. 

But this is in a way more a Velvet Underground spin-off album than a record by an artist who digs up a batch of otherwise unrecorded songs by an unrelated major act. Nico had sung with the Velvet Underground, albeit only on a few tracks; Reed, Cale, and Morrison all played on the Chelsea Girl sessions, though it can’t be pinpointed what they did on each cut. This doesn’t take anything away from the LP’s considerable status. But it isn’t quite as, to use the word again, “extreme” as Yellow Hand’s Buffalo Springfield homage.

4. The Pretty Things, Philippe DeBarge. Any excuse to put the Pretty Things in as many places in Ugly Things as possible, right? But seriously, this 1969 album was seriously teeming with previously unheard Pretties originals. True, three of them (“Alexander,” “Eagle’s Son,” and “It’ll Never Be Me”) had been done by the band without credit on the Even More Electric Banana album, and one (“Send You With Loving”) for a May 1969 BBC session. But not many people knew about that then, and frankly not many do now, especially if you don’t count Ugly Things readers. Otherwise this is pretty fair psychedelic pop that got an even smaller audience than Even More Electric Banana, since it didn’t get released back then.

And what’s it doing here, if it’s a Pretty Things album with Pretty Things songs? The story’s been told by Ugly Things editor/publisher Mike Stax in his magazine and the liner notes to UT’s CD of the recordings, but basically this was a Pretty Things album with a singer who wasn’t in the band. French fan Philippe DeBarge took the lead vocals, though usual Pretties vocalist Phil May co-wrote all of the songs. 

May was diffident about the project when I interviewed him in 1999. “Wally [Waller] and I just wrote a bunch of songs for this French millionaire,” he told me. “No kind of falseness about, ‘He was a musician.’ He just wanted to make a record with the Pretty Things, and he was prepared to pay.”

Added May in Mike Stax’s liner notes for the Philippe DeBarge CD, “I don’t think any of us had great expectations, but we didn’t approach it in that way. We approached it like it was another record to make, and we were getting stuff out of it for ourselves, apart from the finances. It was a good stepping stone between S.F. Sorrow and Parachute.”

In the same notes, Waller also acknowledged the sessions had some value. “For me it was a chance to be the boss in the studio for the first time. I had always been really involved with the production process on all our albums. And I just loved to have the chance to write a few songs and see them through to the end. I think the project put us in a much better shape to tackle something like Parachute.”

As for DeBarge, speculated Wally, “Quite what he was going to do with it I don’t know. I don’t think there would have been any interest from the British music industry, and being in English it wasn’t really suitable for the French market. I think it was a grand indulgence on Philippe’s part. To be honest I was not surprised that nothing became of it.”

This is certainly a worthy adjunct to the Pretty Things discography, and as dedicated to otherwise unavailable songs by a major artist as anything here. But while it’s not quite a Pretty Things album, it’s a Pretty Things album in all but name, with even the guy (May) who didn’t take his usual position playing a major role as writer and backing singer. So it can’t quite be considered a record with “covers” of someone else’s songs, as interesting as it is.

5. The Everly Brothers, Two Yanks in England. Recorded in 1966, this decent LP looked a little like a Hollies tribute at a glance. Eight of the twelve songs were written by the Hollies, credited to the “L. Ransford” pseudonym for Allan Clarke, Tony Hicks, and Graham Nash. The Hollies also played on the sessions, and none of the songs the Everlys covered were well known.

While you had to be (and still have to be) a pretty big Hollies fan to know it, five of these eight songs had already been released on the group’s LPs and B-sides. Three of them would come out on Hollies releases over the next couple years, though you had to be a damned dedicated follower to know that “Like Every Time Before” surfaced on a 1968 B-side in Germany and Sweden.

So – good though not great concept, good though not great results, yet not teeming with previously unheard numbers by their benefactors. The last album on this list has even less such material, though it could have had more.

6. The Rose Garden, The Rose Garden. Like Yellow Hand, the Rose Garden had just one self-titled LP, though they’re far better known as they had a #17 hit at the end of 1967 with “Next Plane to London.” Even people familiar with the single usually didn’t hear their album, which meant that few realized ex-Byrd Gene Clark wrote a couple songs on the disc that hadn’t appeared anywhere else. The young band had developed a friendship with Clark, who offered them “Till Today” and “Long Time.” Both songs found a place on the LP, which had little original material by the group. 

Two songs isn’t that much, and there are other examples of acts getting first crack at a couple tracks at once, like Silver Metre did with some Elton John-Bernie Taupin efforts on their 1969 self-titled album, and Jim & Jean did with a pair by their friend Phil Ochs on 1966’s Changes, before Ochs put out his own versions. What puts The Rose Garden over the top in this specialist competition is that they actually could have done more Gene Clark exclusives. Clark gave Rose Garden guitarist John Noreen a five-song acetate of songs to choose, but the band took only “Long Time” from that batch. They also recorded an unreleased version of Neil Young’s “Down to the Wire,” and passed on a few other songs by Young and Stephen Stills that were offered to them by Greene and Stone, including “Come On.”

So The Rose Garden could have been half-full of previously unheard Gene Clark songs – but wasn’t. (For that matter, it could have been half-full of previously unheard Clark compositions and half-full of previously unheard Buffalo Springfield leftovers.) If you’re fretting that those other Clark songs on the acetate are lost forever, fear not. The entire acetate (including Clark’s version of “A Long Time”) was issued in 2018 as bonus tracks to the CD reissue of a different eight-song acetate Gene cut in 1967, Sings for You.

The recent Joni Mitchell box set Archives Vol. 1: The Early Years (1963-1967) presents no less than five CDs of previously unreleased material. All of it predates her first album. I’ve written about the box, which is very good, elsewhere. But it not only has fine music. What it contains seems in a way unique among performers of her significance and era. As I’ve written, “No other performer of Mitchell’s stature wrote and performed such a rich and impressive wealth of music before making their vinyl debut.”

That doesn’t mean that Mitchell was the best artist of all time, or even the best at the beginning of a career. This bountiful pre-vinyl output seems as much a product of circumstance as talent. If she’d made her debut in 1964, she would have recorded a pretty good Judy Collins-style album of traditional folk songs that would have been a considerably above-average LP in the style (much like Collins’s first albums were), if dated.

If she’d recorded an album in late 1966, it would have been a pretty strong singer-songwriter folk album of original material. And it would have had some standout songs she’d already composed by this point (“The Circle Game,” “Night in the City,” “Urge for Going,” “Eastern Rain”), though not as many strong ones as were in her repertoire by the time of her 1968 debut Song to a Seagull.

Why didn’t she start her official discography earlier, especially considering pretty well known artists like Ian & Sylvia, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Tom Rush, and George Hamilton IV were already covering some of her songs by 1967? There’s no easy pat answer, but it seems to come down to a couple factors. She wanted much more control over her work than most artists do who sign her first contract, extending to being able to draw and design her own album covers. That probably put off some labels who otherwise would have signed her before she got her contract with Reprise.

Also, unlike almost every other folkie of note in the mid-‘60s, she didn’t go electric, not starting to use full-band accompaniment on her albums until the early 1970s, well after she was a star. That might have made her seem outdated or at least commercially unpromising, though her actual compositions, guitar playing, and vocalizing were modern and innovative. And as hard as it might be to believe now, at her outset she might have been considered more of a songwriter than a singer or performing artist, and someone whose value primarily lay in having others cover her songs. The first artists to have hits with Mitchell tunes, after all, were not Joni, but Hamilton IV (who had a country hit with “Urge for Going”) and, of course, Collins with “Both Sides Now.”

There’s your fairly condensed explanation/speculation as to why Mitchell ended up with such a backlog of good material before her first album. Fortunately it was often recorded in live concert tapes, radio and television programs, and home demos, many of which are heard on the Archives Vol. 1 box.

What about, however, the pre-vinyl output of some of her peers? How does that measure up to Mitchell’s? Was there anyone whose pre-official discography work was anything like this?

Here’s a survey, by no means all-encompassing, of the “pre-“ work of a dozen top 1960s acts, weighted toward my personal favorites. No one had as extensive and impressive entries in this department as Mitchell did, but almost all made some noteworthy recordings during those formative times, now often (but not always) commercially available. Some made some early recordings that were great, if not as great as their famous classics. Some made barely any recordings, or barely any notable ones. But as the cliché goes, it was a place to start.

The Beatles. Why not start at the very top, with the greatest musical act ever? There are a fair number of Beatles recordings predating their debut “Love Me Do” single. The most significant by far are their fifteen demos at their unsuccessful audition for Decca Records on January 1, 1962, when Pete Best was still their drummer. There are also a half dozen lo-fi songs they did with Best for the BBC in the first half of 1962; a couple tracks, again with Best, for their June 1962 audition for EMI; and a fiery August 1962 live version of “Some Other Guy” at the Cavern in Liverpool with Ringo Starr. 

Yes, there are various other odds and ends, going back to a 1957 very lo-fi Quarrymen performance; shambling lo-fi 1960 rehearsal tapes; and their sessions backing Tony Sheridan in Hamburg, at which they managed to lay down a couple tracks on their own. Except for those two tracks (“Ain’t She Sweet” and the instrumental “Cry for a Shadow”), those other pre-1962 recordings are too rough and unrefined to merit much listening, other than for their historical value.

Although I like their Decca demos, they’re way less mature, and far less impressive, than what they’d be writing and recording by the “Please Please Me” single in November 1962, and the Please Please Me album in February 1963. For one thing, only three of the songs are Lennon-McCartney originals, and none of them were deemed strong enough for the Beatles to record when they signed with EMI, though all of them were given to other artists (“Like Dreamers Do” to the Applejacks; “Love of the Loved” to Cilla Black; and “Hello Little Girl” to the Fourmost). But also, the group sound much less confident, and their musical skills rather skeletal compared to where they’d be in a year or so. I write much more—almost 10,000 words, in fact—on the Decca sessions in my book The Unreleased Beatles: Music and Film, and you can read that section online here.

My basic stance is that although the Beatles were crushed to fail the audition, it might have been the best break they ever got. It gave them considerably more time to write songs considerably better than what they had at the beginning of 1962. It gave them time to replace Best with Starr. It gave Paul McCartney time to find his own vocal style—he often sounds like he’s imitating Elvis Presley at Decca. And maybe most crucially, if they had signed with Decca, they wouldn’t have been produced by George Martin, who was the best possible producer for the Beatles.

The Beatles sound better on their BBC sessions in March and June 1962. In fact, they sound pretty good, and definitely a band that should have been signed, even if the surviving tinny tapes were recorded by putting a player next to a radio speaker. But only one of the songs, “Ask Me Why” (later the B-side of “Please Please Me”), was original. Only on the August 1962 live performance of “Some Other Guy” at the Cavern—raunchy and hard-hitting, despite the thin audio—do you get a pretty full sense of the magic that would overwhelm the world.

That magic isn’t at all present on the Tony Sheridan sessions. “Ain’t She Sweet” is a pretty perfunctory version of a Tin Pan Alley standard, if run through Gene Vincent, and with an identifiably John Lennon vocal. “Cry for a Shadow” is a kind of cool, haunting driving instrumental, but not at all the sort of stuff in which the Beatles would specialize. The two June 1962 tracks from the Decca audition are rather tame takes on “Love Me Do” (with erratic drumming from Best) and “Besame Mucho” (done better by the band at Decca and on the BBC).

So the brief verdict: plenty of promise on this pre-official debut material, but no match for what they were doing even by their second single.

The Rolling Stones. In contrast to the Beatles’ Decca demos, the Rolling Stones’ rough equivalent—five demos recorded at IBC in March 1963, just a couple months before they cut their debut 45—show them virtually fully formed. These covers of Bo Diddley, Jimmy Reed, and Muddy Waters songs are brash and exciting, and rearranged substantially enough to rise above mere imitations of the originals.

It’s not a universally popular opinion, but I’d say these don’t just qualify the Stones as the best blues band in Britain at the time—not a huge accolade, since there weren’t yet that many. I’d go as far to cite them as the best white blues/R&B band in the world at that point. More controversially, I feel they sound as good as any blues/R&B band in the world at that point, white or otherwise, in the UK or North America.

But there are reasons this batch falls short of being as significant as Joni Mitchell’s box. First, it just isn’t that big—five songs, as good as they are. For the record, there’s a fragment of a recording from around late 1962 (of Bo Diddley’s “You Can’t Judge a Book By Its Cover”) in circulation, as well as some lo-fi home tapes by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ pre-Stones group Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys from around 1961. They’re not substantial enough to merit much serious listening, other than for historical purposes.

Here’s another strong consideration to keep in mind—as good as the demos are, none of them are original songs. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wouldn’t start writing for almost another year, and wouldn’t consistently write great songs for about another two years. By contrast, most of Mitchell’s 1965-1967 tapes are of her own compositions. Even the Beatles had a few early Lennon-McCartney songs in their pre-“Love Me Do” batch. 

Long bootlegged, all five of the Stones’ March 1963 demos were finally officially released on the “super-deluxe box set” edition of the 2012 compilation GRRR! It’s too bad the group didn’t record more around this time (though it’s been reported a sixth track was done at IBC, and also some recordings done for a short film of the band that hasn’t been found). As reprinted in his memoir Life, Keith Richards’s diary entries from early 1963 confirm several other covers were in their repertoire of which no recordings circulate, including “Bo Diddley,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Who Do You Love,” and Bo Diddley’s “Bring it To Jerome.”

Bob Dylan. Backtracking a bit chronologically, there are numerous tapes from 1960 and 1961—mostly in friends’ homes, some live—that predate Dylan’s sessions for his self-titled debut LP in November 1961. They show him to be a rapidly improving singer and musician who was becoming a distinctly earthy, bluesy folk song interpreter by the time he approached his Columbia deal. The big “but” is that at this point he was an interpreter, not a composer. Even on his debut album, he’d only write two songs. And even those (and many of his early compositions) were very derivative of previous folk songs and styles, especially Woody Guthrie’s.

The pre-album recordings have their place as performances of considerably historical importance, and do show seeds of his style and much promise, if some primarily evident in hindsight. But they can’t stand up to either Mitchell’s box or what Dylan was doing by the time of his second album, Freewheelin’.

The Beach Boys. This bends the rules a bit, but before signing to Capitol Records, the Beach Boys released just one single, “Surfin’”/“Luau,” recorded in late 1961 for the small Candix label. Its appearance wasn’t insignificant: although the production wasn’t much more elaborate than a demo, it was a substantial regional hit in the Los Angeles area, and #75 nationally.

Still, during that brief pre-Capitol period, the Beach Boys did quite a bit of recording that might be considered a “pre-“ body of work. A double CD of this material, Becoming the Beach Boys: The Complete Hite & Dorinda Morgan Sessions, came out in 2016, though there are just nine separate songs. There are 63 tracks, but a whole lot of multiple versions/takes.

The Beach Boys hadn’t been together too long (and had barely played at all in public), and sound pretty tentative compared to even their first Capitol single, “Surfin’ Safari”/“409.” Still, the best songs here— “Surfin’” and early, tentative versions of “Surfin’ Safari” and “Surfer Girl,” both of which of course became big hits in re-recorded Capitol versions—are really, really good. The others are pretty flimsy and forgettable, but certainly their distinctive brand of vocal harmonies are well in evidence, if quite callow at this stage.

As basic as these are compared to what they’d be recording by the time of their second Capitol LP (1963’s Surfin’ USA), it seems insane that no Los Angeles record company was shrewd enough to pick them up after they lost their deal with Candix. Capitol did after a while, of course, but only with the help of much badgering from the Wilson brothers’ father/manager. It’s easy to say in hindsight, of course, when armchair critics don’t have to invest thousands of dollars in a young and unproven band with little stage experience. But it’s obvious that even at this early stage, they didn’t sound like anyone else, and deserved more record company interest and investment.

The Byrds. Although they weren’t together that long before recording their first single in January 1965, the Byrds produced a body of pre-debut tapes more impressive than anyone on this list. Shortly after they formed, around late 1964 and possibly into early 1965, they made a lot of tapes in World Pacific Studios in Los Angeles, where early manager Jim Dickson was able to get them a lot of rehearsal time. Some of them were issued in 1969 on the Preflyte compilation; while these had most of the very best tapes, there were other good ones, and eventually a double CD of material was made available.

To quote from a previous blogpost, as I can’t particularly say it any better here: Even if you know nothing about the Byrds or don’t care much about tracing their pre-“Mr. Tambourine Man” evolution, these are hugely enjoyable primordial early folk-rock efforts, from a time the ex-folkies were just learning how to play together as an electric rock band.

This batch of tracks does include a few early versions of songs from their classic 1965 debut LP Mr. Tambourine Man, but also features some really fine originals they never put on their mid-‘60s albums and singles, mostly (but not all) written by Gene Clark. “You Showed Me” would be a hit for the Turtles in 1969. Like the other previously unheard originals, it shows the band trying to emulate the Beatles, but instead starting to forge a distinctive brand of melodic, harmony-laden folk-rock.

It seems like the Byrds themselves had reservations about making this stuff available, as they were only intended as rehearsals/demos of sorts. But many of the tracks are excellent, and most of the others at least decent. 

For sheer listening pleasure, I’d place this material #1 on this list, even ahead of Mitchell’s (and ahead, if not by much, by the much slimmer slice of work by the Rolling Stones). However, as significant as it is to both the Byrds’ career and the development of folk-rock as a whole, it does only cover a few months. The Mitchell box covers four-to-five years and considerably greater evolution, and of course many more original compositions.

The Yardbirds. Returning to the top British Invasion bands, the Yardbirds did a few demos before their first single in 1964, with Eric Clapton in the band. Live recordings of them at the Crawdaddy Club from December 1963 were also issued, though not until almost two decades later. 

Just a few of the demos have circulated, with the Yardbirds covering John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom” and Chuck Berry’s “Talkin’ About You,” as well as performing an original in a similar R&B/rock style by lead singer Keith Relf, “Honey in Your Hips.” “Boom Boom” and “Honey in Your Hips” were also issued on rare European singles in the mid-‘60s, considerably later than when they were recorded. The demos are decent early British R&B, but kind of restrained compared to both the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds’ later work. “Honey in Your Hips” is actually a decent Diddley-influenced original, but the Yardbirds would never develop into consistently good prolific songwriters, though they wrote some great stuff.

The live tracks from the Crawdaddy are more lively, but also more basic compared to what they’d record with Clapton in 1964, both live and in the studio. It’s not all that different from their debut album Five Live Yardbirds (recorded at London’s Marquee in March 1964)—versions of “Smokestack Lightning” were performed for both sets of recordings—but not as assured, fiery, and imaginative. It’s definitely not as good as the two 1964 singles they cut with Clapton, and while some seeds of their improvisational rave-ups are heard, their great innovations lay a ways in the future.

The Kinks. Although it’s not so widely known, the Kinks recorded some material before they were the Kinks. Well, at least if the packaging on an obscure EP on the 1960s label is accurate. Issued in 2017, the four-song disc Ravensize Session: The Pre-Kinks Regent Studio Demos has early versions of three Ray Davies originals they’d soon record for Pye as the Kinks: “You Still Want Me” (the A-side of their second single), “”You Do Something to Me” (the B-side of their second single), and “Revenge.” The fourth, “Ooba Dooiba,” would not show up in the Kinks’ subsequent discography. Mickey Willett would have been on drums, Mick Avory not having yet joined.

Because more polished versions of “You Still Want Me” and “You Do Something to Me” were recorded in 1964 for Pye, these aren’t as surprising or revelatory as they might otherwise have been. These Ray Davies compositions, issued on the second of the two flop singles preceding “You Really Got Me,” find him and the Kinks imitating the early Beatles and Merseybeat groups. Rather enjoyably, actually, but not with great distinction, and certainly not in line with the far raunchier style they’d hit on with “You Really Got Me.” 

That R&B-flavored raunchiness is more in evidence on the basic “Revenge,” where you can hear their early trademark power chords starting to emerge. It’s also heard a bit on the beyond-basic “Ooba Dooiba,” which has energy but almost embarrassingly formulaic songwriting and simple lyrics. Like all of the British Invasion groups listed in this post, the Kinks wouldn’t take long to find their forte. But it’s no more than a glimmer here, though this EP is reasonably entertaining in its documentation of their birth pangs.

The Who. There’s not much Who predating their first (and fine) single, “I Can’t Explain,” even if you count the 1964 single they issued as the High Numbers. That single was kind of an embarrassment, as early manager Pete Meaden lifted the tunes of “I’m the Face” and “Zoot Suit” wholesale from Slim Harpo’s “Got Love If You Want It” and the Dynamics’ “Misery.” He grafted new lyrics onto them paying rather blunt homages to the mod lifestyle. “I’m the Face” is rather tepid early British R&B/rock; “Zoot Suit”’s actually has a pretty cool minor-keyed melody, but little of the Who’s personality comes through, aside from Roger Daltrey’s fairly deft lead vocals. 

An outtake of Bo Diddley’s “Here ‘Tis” from the sessions for the High Numbers single is fair, but no match for the Yardbirds’ exhilarating, and far more recklessly daring, cover of the same song on Five Live Yardbirds. Demo covers from late 1964 of two songs by Motown’s premier Holland/Dozier/Holland songwriting team, “Leaving Here” (also done at the High Numbers session) and “Baby Don’t You Do It,” are respectable but not arresting. (Both surfaced on the expanded CD of Odds and Sods.) Only in “Baby Don’t You Do It”’s unexpected, though brief, feedback break do they suddenly sound like the groundbreaking early Who.

A live recording of the Who at London’s Railway Hotel in 1964—some sources give the date as October 20, 1964—has long been bootlegged. Here too they sound like an average, or slightly above average, R&B/rock band with hints of something that might make them stand out from the pack. But only in Pete Townshend’s dive-bombing, distorted intro to “Pretty Thing” do they sound idiosyncratically different from everyone else. Daltrey’s vocals range from fine to embarrassingly out of character when he affects a low Howlin’ Wolf growl. Keith Moon’s drumming is fairly active, but not nearly as wild as it would be in 1965. There are unpleasantly meandering blues jams around the real songs, which are all covers, with no originals.

Studio instrumentals purporting to be from a Who audition at Abbey Road in 1964 have also been bootlegged. It’s kind of unfathomable why the Who, or any British Invasion band, would have only been playing instrumentals at an audition. These too are kind of formless and undisciplined. 

If you get the impression from this entry that I’m not a Who fan, rest assured that’s not at all the case. They’re one of my favorite groups. But I do believe that—unlike the Rolling Stones, Yardbirds, Animals, Them, and some of the other greatest heavily R&B-influenced ‘60s bands from the British Isles—they would never have made it as a blues/R&B/soul cover act. The truly original moments on their pre-1965 recordings are when Townshend suddenly uses distortion. The key to quickly lifting them to a front-line British Invasion act was the emergence of Townshend as one of British rock’s best songwriters in 1965, combining their manic energy and avant-garde inclinations with concise power pop and incisive lyrics.

The Velvet Underground. Turning to the US, and the only act on this list that would not experience significant commercial success, the Velvet Underground made some recordings before the spring 1966 sessions that yielded all but one track on their debut LP (though that album wouldn’t be issued until early 1967). No less than 80 minutes of these were issued on the 1995 box set Peel Slowly and See, all drawn from July 1965 demos. Actually these were probably at least as much home rehearsal tapes as demos. They weren’t recorded in a professional studio, but in a residence on Ludlow Street in New York, though the sound is clear and good.

Although the Velvets do early versions of a few songs from their first album, these tracks aren’t exactly the VU as they sounded by the time of the debut LP sessions. Drummer Maureen Tucker had yet to join the band, whose drummer at this point was Angus MacLise. More importantly, MacLise isn’t even on these tapes. In fact, there’s no drummer at all. Only Lou Reed, John Cale, and Sterling Morrison play on these recordings, giving the proceedings something of a folky unplugged feel.

So although “Heroin,” “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Venus in Furs,” and “All Tomorrow’s Parties” are all here, they’re not nearly as powerful or fully formed as they are on The Velvet Underground & Nico. Cale and not Reed sings “Venus in Furs,” which sounds almost like a gothic folk ballad. “I’m Waiting for the Man” is almost a hillbilly stomp. “All Tomorrow’s Parties” also has an ill-suited country-folk feel.

Despite the 80-minute length, there are only six songs on the tape, as there are a number of multiple versions. Among the others, “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” would be done by Nico on her 1967 debut album Chelsea Girl, and again has Cale on lead vocals and a pronounced folk feel. “Prominent Men,” never to be recorded in a studio by the Velvets, is the least impressive composition of the batch, as a blatant aping of Bob Dylan’s early protest songs.

The tape is of enormous historical significance, proving that the Velvets were writing great and innovative songs (“Prominent Men” excepted) well before their official debut. Compositionally, the songs are barely different from their later incarnations. The key, and very significant, difference is that the sound of the band lags far behind the songwriting at this point. Going full-band electric, adding Tucker and Nico, and overhauling the arrangements so they were harder rocking and crossed rock with the avant-garde—all of those were necessary to elevate the Velvet Underground to greatness. 

As relatively unimpressive as these earlier versions are in comparison, it really didn’t take all that long to happen. Only nine months separate them from most of the sessions for The Velvet Underground & Nico. There are a few other scraps of lo-fi early 1966 rehearsals that predate the first album, but those too aren’t in the same league as what was laid down for the LP.

The Doors. The Doors were another group whose songwriting developed faster than their musical arrangements, and whose first recordings weren’t done with the lineup that would become famous. It wasn’t too long after Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek decided to form a band that they cut a half dozen demos in September 1965, about a year before they made their classic debut LP. All of them would be re-recorded for their albums, and one of them, “Hello I Love You,” would be a #1 hit. True, “Go Insane,” the weirdest of the lot, only resurfaced as part of “The Celebration of the Lizard.” The others were all good-to-great: “End of the Night,” “My Eyes Have Seen You,” “Moonlight Drive,” and “Summer’s Almost Gone.”

But at this point, guitarist Robby Krieger hadn’t joined, although drummer John Densmore’s there. That absence alone makes a big difference. But also, Manzarek is on piano, rather than the organ that he played much more often on Doors records. Fleshing out the group were a stand-in bass player and, more problematically, Manzarek’s brother Rick on guitar. Guitar barely makes itself felt on the tapes, and what’s there is of no consequence. Another Manzarek brother, Jim, adds some harmonica, again to no notable effect. And Morrison’s vocals aren’t nearly as forceful or charismatic as they’d be within a year.

I wouldn’t go as far as to call the demos “raw and empty,” as James Riordan and Jerry Prochniucky did in their book Break on Through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison. But I see their point; certainly they’re far less full and kaleidoscopic than the records they made with producer Paul Rothchild (and, at the end of Morrison’s life, without Rothchild, but with engineer Bruce Botnick as co-producer for L.A. Woman). They really benefited from having another year to work on their sound; to write more good songs, though the songwriting was already on a high level; for Morrison to gain more vocal confidence; and to refine their lineup with Krieger on guitar and Manzarek on, mostly, organ.

Until a few years ago, these were the only Doors recordings in circulation preceding their self-titled debut album. Recently May 1966 live tapes from the London Fog club became available. These have the Krieger lineup, and are a good eight months after the demos. But they’re not that good, in part because five of the seven songs are R&B/rock’n’roll/soul covers. Surprisingly, there’s also the bluesy original “You Make Me Real,” which they wouldn’t record in the studio until their fifth album, 1970’s Morrison Hotel. Only on “Strange Days” does their unique approach come through. 

If the Doors had stuck to being a blues/R&B-oriented band heavy on the covers, they never would have made it. They weren’t nearly as good as the British bands who started with that kind of repertoire, or even as good as the best of the relatively few US bands with a similar orientation. And while I’m a big fan of John Densmore’s drumming, it’s surprisingly substandard on the London Fog tapes. 

If a good tape of the Doors during their legendary 1966 summer residency at the Whisky A Go Go somehow emerges, maybe the value of their pre-debut LP sessions can be reassessed. But like several others on this list, their pre-official work has lots of promise without living up to the standards of their core catalog.

Neil Young. Most of the pre-1966 Young recordings that have circulated are on disc one of his Archives Vol. 1 box. You can also throw in a few mid-’66 demos on the Buffalo Springfield, though a few were done in July, the same month sessions started for the first Buffalo Springfield album. 

The 1963-64 recordings with the Squires (two released on a rare 1963 instrumental single) aren’t of much consequence, as they’re heavily derivative of the Shadows and the early British Invasion. A few October 1965 tracks with Comrie Smith show more of his songwriting voice starting to emerge, especially on the yearning “There Goes My Babe,” though they’re still no great shakes. 

It’s really on his batch of Elektra demos in December 1965 that a recognizable Young surfaces, especially as they include a couple songs he’d put on official releases, “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing” (with Buffalo Springfield) and “Sugar Mountain.” Part of “The Rent Is Always Due” would be recycled for “I Am a Child” on the Springfield’s third album.

Although the solo guitar accompaniment is bare and Young’s vocals not as confident as they’d be later in the 1960s, the best of the Elektra demos clearly show a fine singer-songwriter, even if the other songs don’t measure up to the ones listed in the previous paragraph. The genius most of us can apply in hindsight makes it seem obvious Elektra, or some label, should have signed this guy up, whether as a solo act or someone that could develop a band or get placed in a group. He didn’t get an Elektra contract, and it’s not even clear how seriously, or if, anyone at the label listened to the demos.

Young wasn’t as nervous for his mid-1966 demos, when he was already part of Buffalo Springfield and just shy of starting to record an album with them. The standouts are the two songs that made their debut LP, “Out of My Mind” (on which fellow Buffalo Springfielders Stephen Stills and Richie Furay sing backup vocals) and “Flying on the Ground Is Wrong.” “I’m Your Kind of Guy” isn’t memorable, but “There Goes My Babe” has a heartrending melody, even if there’s no way Young would have recorded it as was, since it’s sung from a woman’s point of view. That’s because it was reportedly a demo for Sonny & Cher (presumably to have been sung mostly or wholly by Cher), fellow clients of the Springfield’s original managers and producers, Charlie Greene and Brian Stone.

Overall I like Young’s early demos, though the best of them are the songs that were re-recorded for official release, and the later versions are substantially better. But he didn’t record too much before Buffalo Springfield’s first album, and what he did record was uneven, though the signs of his future brilliance are clearly there.

Pink Floyd. Considerably in advance of their early-1967 debut single “Arnold Layne”/“Candy and a Currant Bun,” Pink Floyd recorded a half dozen demos in 1965 when they were still a five-piece with guitarist Bob Klose. These were issued on the extremely limited 2015 EP 1965: Their First Recordings, and then made more widely available as part of the very large and expensive box The Early Years 1965-1972.

Although original leader/lead singer/main songwriter/lead guitarist Syd Barrett wrote four of these songs, only the manic “Lucy Leave” hints at their brilliant, teetering-on-madness early psychedelia. It’s by far the best of the batch, marking a transition from their clumsy R&B origins (as heard here on an average cover of Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King Bee”) to a more sinister freakbeat sound anticipating elements of the brilliant 1967 recordings they made with Barrett. “I’m a King Bee” were in wide circulation before that. The other four originals, three composed by Barrett, are a bit twee and tame in comparison, and far poppier. Roger Waters’s “Walk With Me Sydney” is of note, however, not only as the bassist’s first composition to be recorded, but also for featuring Juliette Gale (Rick Wright’s first wife) sharing lead vocals with Syd.

There are also a few early versions of “Interstellar Overdrive” in circulation that are different from the one on their first LP. The one for the soundtrack of Tonight Let’s All Make Love in London is pretty cool, though unfocused after the first few minutes. Cooler yet is a hyper-jittery pre-record deal unreleased 1966 fifteen-minute version of “Interstellar Overdrive,” recorded for the soundtrack of Anthony Stern’s 1968 avant-garde short film San Francisco. Not so cool is the meandering “Nick’s Boogie,” also done at sessions for Tonight Let’s All Make Love in London.

In sum, pre-“Arnold Layne” Pink Floyd has a few interesting, even exciting cuts—the alternate “Interstellar Overdrive”s and, less compellingly, “Lucy Leave.” As for the rest, there’s not much, it’s not that memorable, and it’s not much like early psychedelic Pink Floyd, though they’re instructive to hear for insight into their roots.

Of course, just sticking to the 1960s, there are many other notable acts who made recordings prior to their official debuts. As I noted, this is a sampling of some of the most notable.

Of all these, only the recordings by the Byrds and the Rolling Stones are really fine and enjoyable, though there are good moments here and there with almost everyone else. And the Rolling Stones did hardly any such recordings, and the ones by the Byrds span, in all likelihood, just a few months. Joni Mitchell’s the clear winner in the obscure category of best and most extensive body of significant work done by an important 1960s artist prior to their first official disc.

We all know that much less music was performed in 2020 than in any other year in our lifetimes. How did that affect the reissue business? As with music history books and films, not as much as you might expect. In part that’s because it’s easier to reissue old music than it is to record new music this year, even though there are still logistical difficulties in researching, retrieving, and repackaging tapes.

Even with many record retailers closing or drastically cutting their hours and access, record sales haven’t suffered as much as many other businesses have. Those music consumers still lucky enough to have assets and employment have more disposable income than usual, now that traveling and going out to eat and see entertainment are barely or not possible. And with people at home much more than usual, there’s more time to fill with listening.

So there was still about as much reissue output, and variety of same, as there was in most years. The word “reissue” might not be the best term for some of the items on my list (including the one at #1), as some of them partially or wholly feature music that’s being issued for the first time. If we’re talking music from decades past that was presented on worthwhile albums released in 2020, however, that’s what qualifies for this list, whether it’s been around before or not.

I appreciate the visits of many readers to the posts of my best-of lists over the past few years, as well as the interesting and insightful comments they sometimes generate here and elsewhere. I do get occasional comments from readers who seem to expect something different from what I offer. To clarify:

This is a list of my personal favorites of the albums featuring historical rock recordings released in 2020 that I was able to hear. It’s not a list or compendium of what other writers, listeners, publications, and music communities have deemed their favorites, or considered the most important and historically significant. While packaging is a factor in my selections, it’s not the only or main one. Just because a box has all the notable rarities, great liner notes, or a new mix or remastering doesn’t mean I’ll pick it. I won’t select it if I don’t like the music or the artist, no matter how many bells and whistles it has.

Music can be taken as seriously as religion and politics, and omissions from my lists have even generated some anger in the past. If there’s anger about anything, I ask that it gets channeled toward helping to rebuild my native US, and the world as a whole, after the disastrous four years of the outgoing administration. Here’s hoping, to quote the Who, that “21 is gonna be a good year” after the new administration is inaugurated.

In keeping with those hopes, it’s appropriate that my #1 pick hails from a country that has taken a more humane and sensible approach to our current crises than the US has. Here’s to both neighboring nations following a similar path over the next decade.

1. Joni Mitchell, Archives Vol. 1: The Early Years (1963-1967) (Rhino). Before her first album came out in 1968, Joni Mitchell was already a prolific songwriter who’d been performing on the North American folk circuit for about five years. Some of her unreleased material from this era has circulated on bootleg, and this five-CD box contains not only some of that, but much more. Documenting her growth from a traditional folk singer to a superb songwriter, it fills in a big gap in the discography of a major performer. Taken from live performances, radio shows, TV programs, demos, and home tapes, none of the nearly hundred tracks (not counting the couple dozen or so spoken introductions) have been officially released. Many of them haven’t even unofficially circulated.

As the songs on disc one that span 1963 to early 1965 reveal, Mitchell began as an interpreter of traditional songs with a voice and style not unlike early Judy Collins. Even at this point, she was better than most of the numerous women folk singers from the final years of the folk revival, even when she accompanied herself on four-string ukulele on the earliest recordings.

By 1965, she’d already moved toward highly original songwriting with her first outstanding composition, “Urge for Going” (soon to be covered by Tom Rush, and then for a country hit by George Hamilton IV). There were still echoes of trad folk in the cover of John Phillips’s “Me and My Uncle” (quite a good version, actually) and her own ramblin’ road ode “Born to Take the Highway.” But her singing—which on the earliest tapes deploys a high, pristine tone a la Collins, Joan Baez, and their many imitators—quickly developed a wider, swooping range. The ukulele was retired, and her underrated, masterful acoustic guitar work started to bloom, with growing use of unusual tunings and rhythms as the ‘60s progressed.

In late 1966 and 1967, classics like “The Circle Game,” “Night in the City,” “Both Sides Now,” and “Chelsea Morning” entered her repertoire. It’s mysterious that she wasn’t signed to a recording deal earlier, as she was clearly getting on par with the best singer-songwriters of the time, though maybe her failure to branch into electric folk-rock held her back. Early interpreters of her work (also including Buffy Sainte-Marie, Ian & Sylvia, and Dave Van Ronk) covered some of the songs here before Mitchell had a record out, but Joni’s versions here are confident and more definitive.

Although 118 tracks are listed for this set, keep in mind not only that more than a couple dozen are spoken intros, but also that there are a good number of multiple versions. However, there aren’t more than three of any one tune (“Both Sides Now,” “Urge for Going,” and “Night in the City” are all heard three times, for example), and the versions are spaced out widely enough from each other that the redundancy’s not an annoyance. Sometimes you can hear a definite difference or progression between renditions, as you can in just four months between the two of “Eastern Rain.”

The sound quality varies between excellent and okay, and while some hiss can be heard on the tracks with lowest fidelity, none of them are so muffled as to be unenjoyable. And while the sheer number of spoken introductions might sound daunting, they’re actually fairly interesting, and show her a warm and personable (if sometimes a bit flighty) performer even as she struggled to gain a recording contract. Best is one where she bluntly, if accurately, tags David Blue as a Dylan imitator, noting that Blue emulated Dylan’s grouchy side and Eric Andersen Dylan’s humorous side, almost like it was a tennis match between the two.

Best of all, this box has many original Mitchell compositions she never placed on her studio records. There’s a reservation attached to that bonus, however. Almost all of them are interesting and pleasing to hear, but she wisely selected her best work for inclusion in her early records. There are earlier versions about a dozen songs that would crop up on her first four LPs, including six that would show up on her debut album.

Few of the others here stand out as on the level as those that made the cut, and some are preciously lightweight. Exceptions are “Eastern Rain,” which Fairport Convention covered magnificently on their second album, and “Urge for Going,” which only made it onto a non-LP B-side. “Day After Day,” referred to in the liners as her first composition, is pretty strong too. 

Interesting oddities include a May 1967 cover of Neil Young’s “Sugar Mountain,” well in advance of the release of Young’s version; a wordless improvisation that isn’t a mere throwaway, displaying her facility at devising jazz-folk melodies; and two versions of “Dr. Junk,” which as she notes uses a Bo Diddley rhythm at times (this was also done as a very obscure cover by the Ian Campbell Group). “Songs to Aging Children Come” has a plain folk arrangement that’s much different from the one on her second LP, which used extensive multi-track vocals.

There are more pre-1968 recordings in unofficial circulation than what made it onto this box. But this is a well assembled retrospective that presents much or all of the cream without overloading multiple versions. Considering Mitchell’s recent serious illness, an unexpected extra is her recent interview about this era that fills up most of the box’s booklet. (This review will also appear in a future issue of Ugly Things.)

2. Donovan, Live 1965-1969 (London Calling). The title of this double CD could have been more precise; these thirty tracks weren’t from conventional concerts, but from BBC radio sessions. As most of his ‘60s UK peers are represented by a BBC collection or two (or more), it’s a little surprising it took so long for a Donovan BBC compilation to appear, especially as almost all of the tracks have good, clear sound. (And those with the worst fidelity aren’t much worse than the best.) If this was fully authorized, it seems like it would be on a major label, not on a relatively unknown one. But it’s available for sale in major outlets, and so should be considered a “real” release, if a somewhat gray-area one.

In common with most BBC collections, it’s a mixture of good performances that stick closely to the studio arrangements with some interesting variations and choice rarities. Of most interest will be four 1965 performances from his folk phase of songs that never appeared on official Donovan discs. “Who Killed Davy Moore,” one of two Bob Dylan compositions here that Dylan himself didn’t release in the ‘60s, is more melodically interesting than Dylan’s arrangement, with a minor-keyed tune that probably follows the version Pete Seeger put on the 1963 album Broadside Ballads Vol. 2. “Daddy You’ve Been on My Mind,” while a little less striking, is Donovan’s take on Dylan’s “Mama You’ve Been on My Mind,” the title changed as he modeled it on Joan Baez’s 1965 cover where “Mama” was changed to “Daddy.” It’s still a strong performance.

There’s also a decent cover of a song by a less celebrated hero of Donovan’s, Bert Jansch, with “Running from Home.” He also does “Working on the Railroad” – not the overly familiar kiddie singalong, but a fairly gutsy folk-blues he likely learned from a recording by American folkie Jesse Fuller.

Some, if not a huge number, of cuts deviate in notable ways from the studio counterparts. “Young Girl Blues” is a real highlight, as the Mellow Yellow LP version is solo acoustic, but this radio reworking has a full jazzy band and some different lyrics. It’s one of the rare BBC performances from rock artists of the time that could be fairly preferred to the studio counterpart, and is a very observational piece where the radio version heightens the moodiness to good effect. “Barabajagal,” actually recorded at Donovan’s cottage, goes the other way by offering a solo acoustic rendition – not as memorable as the rocking hit single, but memorably different and good on its own terms. “Bert’s Blues,” unlike the full-band jazzy baroque setting on Sunshine Superman, is just Donovan on acoustic guitar and Spike Heatley on upright bass; I prefer the studio version by some distance, but this is worth hearing too. “Lalena,” in two versions (one with strings and one without), has some different lyrics in the third verse of the string-backed take.

Even on the songs that aren’t too different from what you’re used to hearing on Donovan’s ‘60s records, the performances are confident and he’s in very good voice, as well as playing acoustic guitar very well. That’s particularly evident on the numerous 1965 tracks (fourteen in all), where he delivers fine and sparsely (if at all) adorned renditions of his pre-rock hits and obscure covers found on his early releases, like “Little Tin Soldier” (written by Shawn Phillips) and “Candy Man.” And there are brief interviews where Donovan offers some thoughts on folk music and his work, though they don’t last long enough to get too deep.

There are things to criticize about this batch of radio sessions. Some of them from post-‘65 sound like at least some of the components might have been lifted from the studio versions. “Jennifer Juniper” and “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” to name a couple, sound extremely similar to the hit singles, and “There Is a Mountain” is mainly differentiated by an additional organ part. There’s a pretty big artistic distance between his best late-‘60s work (like the aforementioned hits) and his more lightweight ditties, a few of which are here, such as “The Tinker and the Crab” (in two versions) and “The Entertaining of a Shy Little Girl.” There’s nothing from 1966 (possibly he didn’t do any sessions that year, when he was caught in a complicated contractual dispute that held up his UK releases), and hence just one song from his best album, Sunshine Superman.

But overall, this reinforces Donovan’s stature as a major performer of the era. Not that he needed this compilation to do that; his reputation has risen steadily over the last few decades, since a low point when he was sometimes unfairly dismissed by historians and critics as a flower-power namby-pamby and/or Dylan imitator. It might not substantially redefine his legacy (few BBC anthologies do), but it’s absolutely a worthwhile supplement to his main body of work, and heartily recommended to fans of his earliest and best years. An excellent track-by-track guide to this collection by blogger Stuart Penney, incidentally, can be read at https://andnowitsallthis.blogspot.com/2020/03/donovan-live-1965-1969.html.

3. The Yardbirds, Live at the BBC Revisited (Repertoire). I’ve lost track of how often Yardbirds BBC sessions have been issued and reissued, even without counting the gray-area and bootleg releases on which some sessions have surfaced. And I’m not entirely sure whether this three-CD compilation marks the first time some of these have circulated, though any that haven’t been previously heard are alternate versions rather than songs that haven’t been available in any BBC performance whatsoever. Still, this certainly marks the most comprehensive package of Yardbirds BBC performances in one place. It also certainly has the best annotation of any Yardbirds BBC collection, Mike Stax’s thorough liner notes including first-hand quotes from drummer Jim McCarty and bassist Paul Samwell-Smith.

Note that just three tracks date from the Eric Clapton era, and these are from a live concert at the 1964 National Jazz & Blues Festival at which Mick O’Neill filled in for ill singer Keith Relf. Over two-thirds of this dates from sessions with Jeff Beck in 1965 and 1966 – not a drawback, since that was when the group were at their peak. A good part of disc three has 1967-68 sessions with Jimmy Page, however, and is well worth hearing, especially for the version of “Dazed and Confused.”

A number of songs they didn’t put on their studio releases are here, including “Spoonful,” “Bottle Up and Go,” the folk song “Hush-A-Bye,” Freddie King’s “The Stumble,” “Dust My Blues,” “The Sun Is Shining,” Curtis Mayfield’s “I’ve Been Trying,” Bob Dylan’s “Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way,” and even a group original (“Love Me Like I Love You”), though that last item an average soul-pop tune. While non-fanatics might not care too much about variations like a greater rhythm guitar presence on “Over Under Sideways Down” or different guitar lines on “The Train Kept A-Rollin’” and “Heart Full of Soul,” they’re the kind of things Yardbirds devotees treasure. The same goes for multiple versions of “Too Much Monkey Business,” “Evil Hearted You,” and “Love Me Like I Love You” that were recorded at the same session; they’re nearly identical, but then they’re among the tracks that have rarely or never circulated to my knowledge.

It should also be noted that if you’re enough of a Yardbirds collector to want a set like this, you’ll probably have a lot of it elsewhere. And, while this is another observation that makes some labels livid, the sound quality, while generally very good, is variable, and the minor sonic deficiencies on some cuts can’t be totally remedied by any amount of expert remastering. This is still a major supplement to their studio work, but the previous availability of much of it means I can’t quite rank it as high as the Donovan BBC anthology, none of which had previously been on the market.

Also released by Repertoire at the same time, by the way, was Blues Wailing: Five Live Yardbirds 1964. Not to be confused with their official debut album Five Live Yardbirds (recorded March 1964), this briefer set was recorded on August 7, 1964 at the Marquee (not July 25, 1964 at King George’s Hall in Esher, Surrey, as previously reported). It’s the same material, however, that was first issued back in 2003 as Live! Blueswailing July ’64, with new liner notes by Mike Stax.

4. The Honeycombs, The Complete ‘60s Albums & Singles (RPM). They might be thought of as a one-hit British Invasion wonder for 1964’s “Have I the Right,” but the Honeycombs actually cut quite a bit of material in their brief 1964-66 career as a recording act. They weren’t a one-hit wonder either, exactly, since “That’s the Way” was a Top Twenty UK hit and “I Can’t Stop” almost made the US Top Forty. Most of what they did remains unknown beyond the hard-bitten British Invasion collector world, though. And while they’re often thought of, with some justification, as kind of wimpy, a good number of their tracks were pretty good, if more due to Joe Meek’s imaginative and at times weird production than the modest talents of the group. This three-CD set—yes, there’s enough to fill up three discs to the gills, totaling 78 songs—has all three of their albums, plenty of non-LP singles, a few unreleased studio outtakes and radio performances, and even some mighty obscure solo 45s by group members Denny D’Ell and Martin Murray.

Really only about half of this is prime stuff, but it’s better than you might think. Meek’s production found a suitable outlet with this band, featuring squealing guitars, sped-up sounding D’Ell vocals, crunching drums, odd glissandos, and a general idiosyncratic squash, sometimes making the backup vocals sound truly fishbowl-generated. Some of their LP-only tracks and flop 45s/B-sides were supremely spooky, like “Without You It Is Night,” the admittedly pretty similar “This Too Shall Pass Away,” and “Eyes.” The original 45 version of “I Can’t Stop” was their greatest moment, enhanced by frenetic D’Ell yells, infectious stop-start tempos, and a general sense of nearly out-of-control euphoria. (The LP version, also here, is a ghastly, far inferior remake). “Something I Got to Tell You,” a rare vocal from drummer Honey Lantree, sounds like it could have been a hit, though the lyric “something’s giving me hell” might have blown any chance of that. Non-LP singles and B-sides like “That Loving Feeling,” “Should a Man Cry?,” “Please Don’t Pretend Again,” and “Can’t Get Through to You” are genuinely worth seeking out. And while “Emptiness” isn’t a great song, it has the distinction of being a Ray Davies composition the Kinks never recorded.

What are the drawbacks? Well, D’Ell’s voice, kind of like a wobbly Gene Pitney, will drive some listeners up the wall. The songs, mainly supplied by managers Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, could be puerile, and not saved even by the best efforts of Meek (who wrote some of their other tunes). The live album In Tokyo might be rare, but it isn’t very good, and dominated by covers of American hits. Those obscure solo singles aren’t memorable; the radio performances and outtakes only somewhat interesting; and the historical liner notes disappointingly shallow, with much remaining unknown about how the songs were conceived and recorded. And if you want to subtract points, the Honeycombs didn’t write any of their own material (though Murray wrote his solo 45), making one wonder if they would have made any impact whatsoever without their producer and managers. More than fifty years later, however, does that matter so much? Their name was on a good number of enjoyable, unusual records, all of which can be heard here, even if the ride’s wildly erratic. For a more in-depth appraisal of the Honeycombs and this box, read my post from earlier this year.

5. Keith Relf, All the Falling Angels (Repertoire). Keith Relf made hardly any records on which he was the solo artist – just two obscure singles in 1966, in fact. Of course, he’s pretty famous as the lead singer of the Yardbirds, and to a lesser degree as part of the first lineup of Renaissance. He might be most (and most justly) noted for his contributions to the fierce British Invasion rock of the Yardbirds, but he also had a folky, introspective, and at times fragile vulnerable side that wasn’t always evident in the records he was involved with that came out in his lifetime. That imbalance is partially redressed by this 24-track compilation of obscurities and demos, spanning the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. Almost half of them are previously unreleased, and most of them didn’t come out before his death in 1976.

When working on his own or as part of the short-lived late-‘60s group Together (with ex-Yardbirds drummer Jim McCarty), Relf usually eschewed blues-rock and psychedelia (at which he was quite good) for more tender outings with an almost nakedly personal aura. There’s a nearly translucent quality to the cuts here that didn’t make it onto discs, as if Relf was not quite of this earth or at home here, with a mystical yearning too ethereal to withstand the everyday pressures of human existence. A few of the earlier tracks will be of special interest to Yardbirds fans, presenting brief demos of two of the better songs from their sole LP with Jimmy Page, “Glimpses” (at this point little more than a haunting chant) and “Only the Black Rose” (which, oddly, has a much more upbeat melody than the studio track). More polished, melodic acoustic folk-rock songs were done by Together; both sides of their rare 1968 single are here, along with a couple outtakes that came out on the 1992 double-CD expanded edition of the Yardbirds’ Little Games, and another outtake in “Line of Least Resistance.”

Of most interest to those who’ve managed to collect the half or CD of this disc that’s come out before are the previously unreleased performances. Fidelity-wise, they’re not up to what would have been considered releasable in the late 1960s and 1970s, and sometimes the sound quality is actually pretty rough or rudimentary. Yet in common with many demos emphasizing guitar and voice, they have a window-to-the-soul feel that would have gotten lost with lots of production, or even much more production, considering these songs work best in a stark state. Although occasionally in an upbeat rock mood (“Try Believing”), more often he favored folky ruminations that verged on crossing the line from melancholy to spooky. “Collector to the Light” in particular sounds almost like a message from a hermit’s cave, with eerie reverb and miscellaneous faint shakes.

A few items are nothing more than sketches or lyric-less scats, but still attractive for their otherworldliness, especially “Roundalay,” which unwinds in jazzy circles as Relf hum-sings the kind of unpredictable minor-keyed melodies he favors. He wasn’t done with far-out experimentation, either, as the closing “Sunbury Electronic Sequence” emphasizes. As its harsh collage of numerous distorted effects goes on for nine minutes, placing it at the end was a good idea, in case you’re not in the mood for extended atonality.

For those needing something more accessible, both sides of his baroque-pop 1966 solo single “Knowing”/“Mr. Zero” are here, as is the yet rarer follow-up solo 45 “Shapes in Mind” (though in just one of the two commercially available versions; more on that in the next paragraph). So is a brooding folk piece from an April 1965 Yardbirds BBC broadcast, “All the Pretty Little Horses,” though that’s come out on previous official releases as “Hush-A-Bye.”

And here are the imperfections that drive label owners mad when reviewers point them out, but should be noted. This has one of the two versions of Keith Relf’s interesting 1966 single, “Shapes in My Mind” (the one that starts with an organ). Why doesn’t it have the other one that came out (which starts with a horn)? Both versions were included on another recent release on Repertoire, the Yardbirds’ Live and Rare box. And the 1968 Yardbirds outtake “Knowing That I’m Losing You” (later the basis of Led Zeppelin’s “Tangerine”) that includes a Relf vocal (the one that has been officially released is instrumental) would have made a great addition. It’s one of his greatest performances, and one of the Yardbirds’ best recordings from the Jimmy Page era. And it was likely unavailable for licensing, considering it’s never come out anywhere, though it’s been in unofficial circulation for quite a few years.

Relf has come in for his share of knocks from rock historians who find his vocals limited or lacking. I’ve always liked them a lot, however; what he lacked in power, he more than made up for in personality. They’re certainly an asset on this release, which is the kind of compilation that might only appeal to a pretty limited niche of fanatics, and be dismissed as marginal frivolity by many. And y’know what? Big deal. I’m one of those fanatics, and other fanatics will dig the hell out of this. For the story behind this release, read my article about this reissue, which includes material from a recent interview with Yardbirds Jim McCarty and Paul Samwell-Smith.

6. The Belfast Gypsies, Them Belfast Gypsies (Grapefruit). The Belfast Gypsies were a spinoff group from Them, including two members (singer/organist Jackie McAuley and drummer John aka Pat McAuley) who’d played on some of Them’s great mid-‘60s records. Their sole album, recorded in 1966 and initially issued by a Swedish label, was much like Them, but yet punkier and rawer, especially in the vocal department. To make a rough comparison, the Belfast Gypsies were to Them like the Pretty Things were to the Rolling Stones.

This was reissued on CD in 2003 with bonus tracks, and this edition is an upgrade, though there’s not much more material. Besides adding single and EP mixes of tracks from the LP, it also has an instrumental from a French EP (though the Belfast Gypsies were probably not involved in that recording). All of those tracks were on the 2003 CD, but this 2020 edition adds a couple of basic February 1966 demos (covers of Graham Bond’s “I Want You” and Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”), which came out on a ten-inch back in 2005. The new CD also has extensive liner notes with some rare photos and memorabilia. Seven of the LP tracks were mastered from newly discovered master tapes, and the others were newly remastered.

All of these bonuses seem to make this the definitive edition, but a reservation has to be expressed. The opening track from the LP, “Gloria’s Dream,” noticeably slows down after the instrumental break. That didn’t happen on the 2003 CD, so this seems to be a flaw. Some labels and compilers don’t appreciate when things like this are pointed out for reissues that have been assembled with overall fanatical care. But like the brief skip in the Honeycombs collection reviewed earlier in this list, it’s something that needs to be noted for the very kind of fanatics who buy these kind of specialist reissues.

To risk losing a few more friends, it seems like the volume level is low on “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (one of the greatest Dylan covers), though that doesn’t happen on my LP reissue. Mitigating the disappointment, the EP mixes of “Gloria’s Dream” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” don’t have these problems, and, to risk more wrath from those who might disagree, aren’t notably different from the LP versions at any rate.

I’m actually not that much of an audiofile, but all told, this would have ranked higher on this list had these quirks not jumped out at me. And the dozen LP tracks that are at the core of this release – the ones that really make it worth hearing – have long been easily available on reissues, as another reason why this doesn’t get an even higher ranking. The music is more important than imperfections, of course, and the Belfast Gypsies album is one of the best British Invasion obscurities, well worth hearing if you like first-wave British R&B/rock. The full, and very complicated, tale of the group is told in my lengthy story on the group in issue #23 (summer 2005) of Ugly Things magazine.

7. Fred Neil, 38 MacDougal (Delmore). As this was a pretty limited Record Store Day release in November, it might have passed unnoticed even by many Neil fans, although a wider CD/LP release is planned for 2021. These eight previously unreleased songs were recorded in 1965 in the apartment of John Sebastian and guitarist Peter Childs, both of whom played on Neil’s second album, the verging-on-folk-rock Bleecker & MacDougal. On both electric and acoustic guitar, Childs backed Neil’s vocals and guitar on this rather brief set, which lasts a little less than half an hour. Five of the songs also appear, in different studio versions, on Bleecker & MacDougal; one, “Sweet Cocaine,” would be done for his 1966 Fred Neil album; and the two others, the traditional folk tune “Once I Had a Sweetheart” and the African-American spiritual “Blind Man Standing By the Road and Crying,” don’t appear on any other Neil record.

Owing both to its brevity and prevalence of alternate versions, this is kind of like hearing bonus cuts to Bleecker & MacDougal that don’t happen to have been used on an expanded CD version of that album. But if you like this underrated folk-rock pioneer, it’s good and worth hearing, in part because Neil recorded just a few albums (and little of consequence after the 1960s). Although the studio versions are more definitive, there’s a pleasing informal vibe to the more familiar material, and the sound is pretty good. Fred’s melodic blues-pop-folk is affecting in these performances, as are his uniquely resonant low vocals, like a more tuneful and on-pitch Johnny Cash. From a historical point of view, the highlights are the two traditional songs that aren’t on other Neil albums. While not as striking as his original compositions, they’re fine spare interpretations, “Once I Had a Sweetheart” being perhaps most familiar to folk-rock fans through Pentangle’s superb version a few years later. He upped his characteristic dolefulness for the more somber “Blind Man Standing By the Road and Crying,” which concludes the set.

8. Neil Young, Archives Vol. II: 1972-1976 (Reprise). This mammoth ten-CD box could inspire a whole magazine’s worth of commentary from Neil-heads. I don’t use that kind of space on my best-of list reviews, so I’m sticking to some of the essentials. Almost half of the 131 tracks are previously unreleased, and many of the ones that were already available—particularly the 1973 live sets in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and the Roxy in Hollywood, as well as the mid-‘70s outtakes from the Homegrown album—were known primarily to Young fanatics. So although this does have a lot of material from mid-‘70s albums like Tonight’s the Night and Zuma that anyone who buys this set will already have, much of it’s unfamiliar, and likely brand new even to committed Young collectors. There are also a few Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young outtakes from their attempts at studio albums during this period.

It’s good to have so much available from a major performer, from peak or near-peak years. But what wasn’t issued at the time isn’t on par with the best of what he released between 1972 and 1976, nor should anyone expect that. Although it testifies to his sheer fertility as a composer, spinning off dozens of rejects that many songwriters would be happy to feature as highlights of their repertoire, there are reasons most of them weren’t selected for his LPs of the era. They’re not as striking or memorable as much of what made the cut. Even one of the best, the wistful 1972 outtake “Goodbye Christians on the Shore,” could have benefited from some trimming and more energetic execution. While it’s cool to hear some different arrangements of well known songs, like a much harder-rocking “Last Trip to Tulsa” (used on a B-side) and a live “The Loner” without orchestration, I wouldn’t put them on the level of the studio originals. Some rarities are more enticing on paper than they are through the speakers, like the rather forced guess-who-this-is-about piano ballad “Sweet Joni” (performed solo by Young at a 1973 concert). The same goes for the so-so rocker “Raised on Robbery,” a previously unreleased version of a Joni Mitchell song from the Tonight’s the Night sessions, which features Mitchell herself on vocals and guitar.

Here are a few observations that won’t be welcomed by all Young fans. He’s at his least impressive when he opts for a straightahead blues-rock groove; he could use bluesiness effectively, but the bluesiest stuff could be routine or even boring. The CSNY outtakes don’t hint that there was a buried masterpiece that never reached fruition as their plans for studio reunions fell apart for one reason or another. And overall Young wasn’t working at as high a standard as he had in his earlier solo years, with much of the best unissued material appearing on the disc with the earliest recordings (disc one, drawn from 1972 and 1973).

9. Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, Sockin’ It to You: The Complete Dynovoice/New Voice Recordings(RPM). Mitch Ryder’s status as one of the great white soul-rock singers of the ‘60s is unquestioned. Like a lot of great rock and soul artists from the era, though, his albums were uneven. They’re certainly not as consistent a blast as a good best-of collection.

But if you’re reading this to consider whether a three-CD, 69-track of everything he did for the label that issued those big hits is worth buying, you probably already have a good best-of collection. You want to know: are Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels worth hearing in bulk? In a package with everything from the five LPs they did for Bob Crewe’s New Voice and Dynovoice labels, along with a few rare non-LP 45s?

Basically, yeah, but only if you’re willing to take a kind of bumpy Ryde. When the first LP leads off with ace covers of “Shake a Tail Feather,” “Come See About Me,” and “Turn on Your Lovelight”—not all of which automatically turn up on Ryder best-ofs—you’re primed for one of the best white R&B comps of all time. But Mitch and his Wheels couldn’t sustain that momentum—hardly anyone could—and there’s a good share of oft-done (sometimes overdone) soul standards that are more on the just-okay side. It didn’t help that they didn’t write original material, something that was always going to keep them out of the league of the best bands of this sort, like the Rascals. Ryder’s vocals are almost always fine, and the Detroit Wheels sometimes inspired, but some of the arrangements are so-so.

The Wheels, whose ultra-tense grooves were never mixed as high as they could or should have been in Crewe’s productions, started to fade more and more into the background as time went on. Crewe partially solved the problem of original material by writing or co-writing most of Mitch’s third album, Sock It To Me!, including the hit title track. Usually it spells trouble when a producer takes such a firm rein. But actually the LP wasn’t bad pop-soul-rock, even when Ryder went afield from his usual forte into almost West Side Story-ish drama (“A Face in the Crowd”) and a sort of soulful Jay & the Americans melodrama (“Wild Child”). He also handled “Walk on By” well, though “Soul Fizz” is an oddity—Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels with a Ryder-less instrumental?

Crewe took his client into more questionable territory with Sings the Hits, which is just a bunch of old—actually just a year or two old—tracks that he remixed and/or overdubbed, throwing in a couple obscure 45 sides that made their first appearance on LP. Again this isn’t as gruesome you might brace yourself for, with the overdubbed horns making for interesting contrasts with the more familiar versions without getting too overbearing. The originals on which you can hear the Detroit Wheels better are, naturally, superior. And they’re all elsewhere on this box, so you don’t have to gnash your teeth over a rip-off.

Then, in true docudrama good-deal-turns-bad fashion, Crewe steered Ryder toward a Wheels-less solo career on What Now My Love, cutting Mitch on some pop standards in the process. This sounds like your basic recipe for disaster, but at the risk of seeming contrarian, it really isn’t as bad as you’d predict. It’s not all standards, with some workmanlike soul and rock oldies covers. And Ryder actually wasn’t so bad at the standards, making a reasonable job of Jacques Brel’s “If You Go Away (Ne Me Quitte Pas)” and going into some impressive (if admittedly rather ludicrous) vocal gymnastics on the modest “What Now My Love” hit. This wasn’t Mitch’s forte, however, and by the end of the ‘60s he was both free of Crewe and hitless.

Also on this anthology is his fine cover of “Too Many Fish in the Sea,” which despite being a fair-size hit was only on the All Mitch Ryder Hits compilation, not one of his regular LPs. Far rarer are seven tracks from mostly post-Wheels non-LP 45s (plus a brief spoken radio spot) that close out disc three, all obscure save possibly “Joy,” which just missed the Top Forty. These were for the most part just fair, though Ryder’s vocals were almost always impressive, and not mailed in even when it was obvious the material wasn’t what he deserved.

The notable exception is the funky “Ring Your Bell”—the one track from the Crewe years that Ryder wrote. It slinks along with a sly confident vocal and cool organ-horn blend, though it’s too bad it (and a few of the other non-LP tracks) has a slight wobble, as if the original source wasn’t used or isn’t pristine. “Ring Your Bell” proved Ryder could develop into a good writer. But with Crewe at least, he wouldn’t have the chance. (This review appeared in the summer 2020 issue of Ugly Things.)

10. The Idle Race, The Birthday Party (Grapefruit). The term wasn’t around back then, but the Idle Race were among the premier exponents of “toytown” psychedelia—story-songs with more than a hint of childhood longing/fantasy, done with enough quirky lyrics and production sophistication to keep it out of the children’s bin. Known (if at all) to the larger public as the first group in which Jeff Lynne recorded LPs, they didn’t make much of a dent on either the charts or the underground before Lynne joined the Move. From 1968, The Birthday Party was their first album, here issued as a two-CD package including the stereo and mono versions of the original LP, along with a bunch of non-LP singles and alternate versions. 

It’s easy to draw comparisons between this and late-‘60s work by bigger and better bands, particularly the Beatles and the Move. The Idle Race, and particularly chief songwriter Lynne, drew heavily on the most lightweight la-la aspects of Paul McCartney’s work, with some of the eccentricity of chief Move composer Roy Wood. Their first single (oddly unissued in the UK), in fact, was a cover of the Move’s “(Here We Go Round) The Lemon Tree.” Almost everything else here was written by Lynne, with fellow Idle Racer Dave Pritchard pitching in a few songs.

As long as you don’t set your expectations for an equivalent to Magical Mystery Tour or the Move’s flurry of ‘60s hits, The Birthday Party’s an enjoyable if slightly twee set of very British pop-rock, even if it sometimes sounds like a kiddie TV show soundtrack gone off the rails. (Lynne amusingly, and not wholly inaccurately, once described the Idle Race as “a cross between George Formby and something or other.”) The tales they tell aren’t especially deep, but they’re fairly witty and unremittingly bouncy, with more than a hint of the helium harmonies that would be a trademark of Lynne’s subsequent projects. Modest orchestration and weird effects take some of the cuts into relatively adventurous arrangements. In view of Lynne’s later fame, it’s tempting to dub them a low-budget, less pretentious foreshadowing of some of his work in the Electric Light Orchestra.

The Idle Race never had hits, but a few of these ditties sound like they could have been with a bit more production/promotion oomph. “Skeleton and the Roundabout” feels like a ride on an arty merry-go-round; “Follow Me Follow” is a rockaballad that will appeal to anyone who likes McCartney facsimiles of the kind Emitt Rhodes devised; and “Morning Sunshine” has very Beatlesque guitar swoops. The non-LP B-side “Knocking Nails into My House” injects a welcome bit of ominous narrative into the mix in its play-by-play detail of a foreclosure. It’s the strongest track here, though not the most typical. Nearly as strong, yet anomalously moody and hard-rocking, is another non-LP flip, Pritchard’s “My Father’s Son,” which ends with a most uncharacteristic blast of feedback.

As the Grapefruit label (and the Cherry Red family to which it belongs) has compiled a lot of ambitious multi-disc sets, it’s a little surprising and perhaps disappointing it didn’t opt to do one collecting all of the Idle Race’s Lynne-era output. That would include not only the group’s second LP (1969’s more mature, yet less impressive, Idle Race), but also a wealth of late-‘60s BBC sessions. Maybe that will be wrapped up with an expanded edition of Idle Race. It would be a welcome supplement to this release, whose 24-page liners include a heap of vintage graphics and comments from Lynne and Pritchard. (This review appeared in the summer 2020 issue of Ugly Things.)

11. Various Artists, Crawling Up a Hill: A Journey Through the British Blues Boom 1966-71 (Grapefruit). Like Grapefruit’s numerous other three-CD curations of major British rock styles spanning the mid-‘60s to the early ‘70s, this mixes big names with cult names and unknowns. John Mayall, the Yardbirds, Fleetwood Mac, Ten Years After, Free, Jeff Beck—they’re all here, usually represented by one of their deeper cuts. So are notable but less popular figures like Graham Bond, Duster Bennett, Savoy Brown, Taste (with Rory Gallagher), the Climax Chicago Blues Band (as they were known at their outset), Stone the Crows, and Medicine Head. And there are early Fleetwood Mac-related solo efforts by Christine Perfect and Jeremy Spencer, as well as Peter Green taking a lead vocal with the Brunning Sunflower Blues Band, led by original Fleetwood Mac bassist Bob Brunning.

That alone’s a choke-a-horse list. But the bigger attraction for collectors is the wealth of tracks by acts only known to those who pore the listings of specialist reference books. The Zany Woodruff Operation (who did a fair cover of the early John Mayall single “Crawling Up a Hill” that gives this comp its name), Shakey Vick, Jaklin, Frozen Tear, Angel Pavement, Levee Camp Moan, Red Dirt, and Blue Blood—it’s doubtful more than a few dozen or so British blues hounds are familiar with all those names. Plenty of the tracks are taken from way-rare LPs and 45s, as well as some recordings that were privately pressed or unissued at the time.

The span is certainly wider than the most famous British blues anthology, Sire’s 1973 double-LP History of British Blues (which includes a good number of the same top names, though there’s no overlap in actual songs). As much as we get our jollies from having a lot of material in one place, the more important factor is how good a listen it makes. And it’s pretty good and diverse, progressing from ace cuts with roots in the mid=’60s British Invasion (Mayall’s “All Your Love” with Eric Clapton, Bond’s non-LP single “I Love You,” a live “I’m a Man” from the Yardbirds’ Jimmy Page lineup) to purer blues and early-‘70s hard rock-flavored outings. The relatively little-heeded British acoustic blues scene gets some airing too, with efforts by Anderson Jones Jackson (featuring future Folk Roots editor Ian A. Anderson), one-man-band Bennett, Jo-Ann Kelly, and Mike Cooper.

The British blues boom—a more purist-minded, less pop-oriented movement than the mid-‘60s explosion of UK R&B-rock bands spearheaded by the Rolling Stones, Pretty Things, Animals, Yardbirds, and Them—has come in it for its share of mockery for being too stodgy, imitative, and bombastic. There’s some of that here, but not too much, and some of the selections venture beyond the straight blues format into more flexible (and, usually, interesting) territory. The Christine Perfect Band’s “It’s You I Miss,” for instance, is a real highlight, and not just for its rarity (broadcast on a November 1969 radio session, this Perfect composition somehow wasn’t included on her 1970 solo LP). Brooding, minor-keyed, and huskily intoned, it’s a real cool tune that will even appeal to those who don’t care for the Fleetwood Mac records after she joined the band.

Some of the other rarer relics show the more workmanlike British blues groups in their best light. The Climax Blues Band’s “A Stranger in Your Town” is fine slide blues variation on “Rollin’ and “Tumblin’” that sounds a bit like a subdued Yardbirds. Savoy Brown weigh in with a ferocious, menacing live January 1970 version of “A Hard Way to Go.” And there are some goodies from names not especially identified with the blues boom. Badfinger’s Pete Ham and Tommy Evans add spooky background vocals to Heavy Jelly’s eerily plodding blues-rocker “Take Me Down to the Water,” written and sung by Jackie Lomax. Linda Hoyle, lead singer of the not-terribly-well-known band Affinity, offers a credibly hard-hitting cover of Nina Simone’s “Backlash Blues.”

And there are some decent tracks by the no-names. Red Dirt’s “Time to Move” sounds rather like Jethro Tull at their earliest and bluesiest. Icarus put a bit of jazzy melody and psychedelic organ into “There’s An Easy and a Hard Way of Living,” which like some of the other better material here is better described as “bluesy” than “blues.” There weren’t many Alexis Korner covers, but Jaklin offer a decent rocky version of one of his best originals with “The Same for You.”

Crawling Up a Hill is also more inclusive than many a similar comp might be, drawing in more or less straight blues offerings from groups that didn’t do much of that thing, like the Deviants (“Charlie”), Love Sculpture (“Wang Dang Doodle”), and even Mungo Jerry (“The Sun Is Shining”). There are also a few irreverent parodies, to remind us that not everyone in Britain took blues purism so seriously. The Bonzo Dog Band’s “Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?” is the most familiar of these, and it’s here. But so are Liverpool Scene’s “I’ve Got Those Fleetwood Mac Chicken Shack John Mayall Can’t Fail Blues,” Jeremy Spencer’s “Mean Blues,” and the Downliners Sect’s rather frivolous Tolkien-blues hybrid “Lord of the Rings.”

Are there significant omissions, whether for licensing or other reasons? Sure, starting with the Rolling Stones, who went into pure blues on some of their late-‘60s recordings. If we’re talking hard rock acts who owed a lot to the blues, Led Zeppelin’s not here either, though Robert Plant’s the featured vocalist on Korner’s “Operator.” There probably aren’t too many people who’d get up in arms over the absence of the Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation, Keef Hartley, or Dave Kelly. But it’s a shame there’s nothing by Duffy Power, one of the finest and most creative cult British bluesmen, who did some of his best and bluesiest stuff during this period.

The small-print, 40-page liner notes by David Wells are jam-packed with info about each track, along with plenty of period record sleeves, pictures, and graphics. There are many more British blues boom highlights besides the ones fit onto this nearly four-hour set, but it surpasses History of British Blues as the best survey of its sort. (This review appeared in the summer 2020 issue of Ugly Things.)

12. Robbie Basho, Songs of the Great Mystery (Real Gone). Similar in mood if not exact style to John Fahey (for whose Takoma label he recorded in his early career), guitarist (and occasional pianist) Robbie Basho constructed haunting music often utilizing unusual minor-keyed melodies, edgy strumming, and a general stormy-cloud aura. He recorded fairly prolifically from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s without achieving much in the way or sales or renown, even compared to a cultish figure like Fahey. So prolific was his output, in fact, that unreleased material continues to pour from his vaults, including this previously unreleased album. Recorded for Vanguard Records in 1971 or 1972, it’s actually a little more than a single LP (at least by vinyl-era standards), adding up to 55 minutes of music with the addition of an alternate take.

Songs of the Great Mystery isn’t too drastically different from other Basho records I’ve heard, which can serve as either a caution or a recommendation. His rather downcast music isn’t for everyone, and his shaking-leaf vocals definitely aren’t for everyone. He usually concentrated on instrumentals, but sings more often than usual in this set, often referencing Native American culture and images of thunder in his lyrics. On “Thunder Love,” you even wonder if he influenced Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” though that seems extremely unlikely. Interesting lyric from “Laughing Thunder, Crawling Thunder”: “America, god has shed his blood on thee.”

Even if it doesn’t stand out as one of his best outings, and some of the songs are fairly similar to each other (and other Basho recordings on different albums), I like the idiosyncratic atmosphere he creates enough to recommend it. His vocals aren’t that great, but at least suitably complement the eerie guitar work and melodies, which are the main assets of this vault find. Also good are the comprehensive liner notes by Glenn Jones, which feature a wealth of detail and description for a batch of tracks whose recording dates aren’t even certain.

13. Robbie Basho, Song of the Avatars: The Lost Master Tapes (Tompkins Square). If you thought nearly an hour of Basho outtakes was specialized, it’s put to shame by this five-CD compilation of previously unreleased material, spanning the guitarist’s entire career. (Technically speaking some of the tracks came out slightly earlier on a Record Store Day LP compilation.) Known to have existed for years before this anthology was assembled, this stretches from approximately the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. “Approximately” is the necessary qualification because there weren’t dates on these tapes, although the songs were titled. Experts involved in the set’s production could make some reasonable estimates as to a rough order in which the material was recorded, but the exact times and dates will never be known.

This collection does in a way serve as a career retrospective of sorts, albeit one that doesn’t have his very best recordings, as those were featured on the numerous LPs he issued during his lifetime. If you do like Basho, however, this Basho-in-bulk has a few notable things going for it. A lot of it’s almost or as good as what made it onto his official releases. The tracks don’t just present different versions of songs that are already available, although a few passages here and there were heard in altered form on his albums. The sheer range of styles is also impressive, from the raga-avant-folk that made his biggest mark to devotional music and, on what are probably some of the earliest recordings, blues.

Of course this isn’t for everyone, and maybe not even for all Basho fans. Be aware that quite a few songs are vocal numbers, which are less beloved by most of his listeners than his instrumentals, as they’re (to quote admirer Pete Townshend) “a cross between a kind of a cantor in a synagogue, the mullah calling from the tower for prayers in Islam, and a kind of a street singer. But also an opera star.” On some selections, he switches from guitar to eerie piano. The final track offers a sixteen-minute cantata and features some other singers. 

Overall I’d put this at something of a tie with the previous entry on this list, but acknowledge that five discs is a much greater investment of time and money than a single CD. So this might be a little less approachable, and is certainly a less uniform listening experience, than Songs of the Great Mystery. But it’s undeniably more diverse, and recommended just as strongly to Basho fans.

14. Various Artists, Tape Excavation (Independent Project/P22). Even if you’re the kind of collector who gets in line for Record Store Day releases at dawn, you’ll be frustrated by trying to acquire this LP-only release if you don’t already have it. It was available only as part of the 350-copy deluxe limited edition of the book Savage Impressions: An Aesthetic Expedition Through the Archives of Independent Project Records & Press, which is already sold out. The book compiles artwork, often using distinctive letterpress design, by Bruce Licher for numerous records, posters, stamps, and other media since 1980 (see review in my post for best 2020 rock history books). The LP compiles fourteen previously unreleased tracks from various Licher musical projects spanning 1980 to 2019, including material from his most famous band (Savage Republic); pre-Savage Republic outfits Project 197, Bridge, and Final Republic; and post-Savage Republic projects Scenic, Lanterna, Lemon Wedges, Bank, and SR2, along with post-Savage Republic Licher solo recordings.

Highly worthwhile on its own terms, Tape Excavation’s selections are actually of similar quality to Licher’s previous official releases, even if the fidelity and polish might not be as high on a few tracks (particularly the earlier ones). Although it covers four decades, there’s a continuity in the eerie instrumental textures, which both use conventional instruments (especially Licher’s unusually tuned guitar) and blend them in unconventional ways. The earlier efforts on side A bear some traces of early-‘80s post-punk dissonance, yet are likely to appeal to people who don’t usually like post-punk, at least if my own tastes are an indication. There’s even some appealingly cheesy new wave keyboard on Final Republic’s “Chase,” though the same group was responsible for the foreboding waves of overlapping reverb dominating “The Unknown.”

Licher focused more on sort of post-punk equivalents to surf music with elements of psychedelia and middle eastern melodies as time went on. His pair of 1997 solo demos are of special note; “Cedar” is worthy of exotically dreamy Ennio Morricone-like soundtracks, and “Tundra” can’t help but sound like an end-of-the-century takeoff on the Byrds’ “Why.” The later excursions on side B might be less edgy and frenetic than his ‘80s endeavors, but maintain his knack for atmospheric instrumentals that are more mature yet not at all wimpy. According to the detailed liner notes, Licher went through dozens of boxes of recordings to cull these tracks, and if even a small percentage of these approach Tape Excavation’s standard, a series of archive releases would be welcome. So would a standalone edition of Tape Excavation itself on LP and/or CD, though given its use as an extra for a deluxe edition, that probably can’t be counted on soon.

15. Jimi Hendrix, Live in Maui (Legacy). If you’ve seen the jaw-droppingly bad film Rainbow Bridge, you know its only redeeming feature is the 17-minute segment in which Hendrix, accompanied by Mitch Mitchell and Billy Cox, play live to an audience of a few hundred in a field in the Maui hills. It’s something of a miracle that a good-sounding album of the July 30, 1970 concert is now available, since the environment wasn’t too conducive for good fidelity. That’s evident in the film, where you see foam covering the microphones to cut down on the wind. But this two-CD set has reasonable sound and enthusiastic, if somewhat loose, performances. Since it’s one of the final US concerts he gave before dying less than a couple months later, it’s also of significant historic value.

As a record, however, it’s not all that different from a couple live albums taped a month earlier (Live at Berkeley) and a month later (Live at the Isle of Wight). The set list is pretty similar, though this has a few songs (“In from the Storm,” “Hear My Train A-Comin,’” “Villanova Junction”) that aren’t on Live at the Isle of Wight. Like that previously available live material, it shows Hendrix starting to ease back toward more focused songwriting on tunes like “Dolly Dagger,” but also prone toward sprawling improvisation. While it’s not too noticeable, purists should know this doesn’t present the show in its entire unvarnished state. Back in 1971, Mitch Mitchell overdubbed drums on the songs featured in Rainbow Bridge, and the original tape did not capture a few numbers in their entirety. 

These CDs are packaged with a Blu-ray documentary, Music, Money, Madness…Jimi Hendrix in Maui. The Blu-ray is reviewed separately, in my list of 2020 rock history films.

16. Phil Ochs, The Best of the Rest: Rare and Unreleased Recordings (Liberation Hall). All but three of the twenty tracks on this archival compilation were recorded as publishing demos for Warner/Chappell in 1964/1965. Plainly recorded with just Ochs’s voice and acoustic guitar, these include some songs from his mid-‘60s Elektra LPs, some of them among his better and most famous, like “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” “Canons of Christianity,” “I’m Gonna Say It Now,” “Bracero,” and “Here’s to the State of Mississippi.” It also has some pretty obscure ones that didn’t make the LPs he issued in his lifetime, like “City Boy,” a very good lilting tune that seems to mark one of his first excursions into non-protest/social commentary writing, “I’m Tired,” and “Colored Town.” And three of these songs have never been on any prior Ochs release (and there are many Ochs releases, especially when you count collections of material he didn’t issue during his lifetime), including “Sailors and Soldiers,” “I Wish I Could Have Been Along,” and “Take It Out of My Youth.”

Also featured as “bonus tracks” are three additional items. “The War Is Over” is taken from a November 20, 1967 broadcast on New York’s WBAI. With joyous background whoops and quite different lyrics from the studio version, it’s the highlight of this CD. Of more purely historical interest, though worth hearing, is a 1970 rehearsal take of his last great composition, “No More Songs,” which has an almost classical feel as the tune is worked out on piano. From 1969, the less memorable “All Quiet on the Western Front” was previously only known via a couple incomplete live versions.

It’s good to have more Ochs in good sound quality, even if the arrangements are rudimentary. Still, this is pretty peripheral to his core work, which is better appreciated on the music he released while an active performer. In his early days, the best of his material was selected for his LPs (“City Boy” being a curious oversight); some of the compositions here are rather generic Ochs in comparison. The packaging is also not clearly annotated. Just six of the songs (including all the non-Warner/Chappell demos) are designated as “previously unreleased,” but I’m not aware of anywhere else these tracks have appeared, and I have a lot of Ochs in my collection.

My guess is that the three mid-‘60s demos marked as “previously unreleased” are the three instances where there are no other versions of those specific songs, and that in fact everything here is previously unreleased. Even in the cases where some songs also appear on the outtakes compilation A Toast to Those Who Are Gone, these seem to be different versions; the performance of “City Boy,” which has a piano on A Toast to Those Who Are Gone, is definitely a different recording. The liner notes do not comment upon if or where any of the tracks were also issued. This is a specialist release geared toward intense Ochs fans, who deserve more than the ambiguous vagueness associated with bootlegs, though this is definitely authorized, as it was produced by his brother (and manager) Michael Ochs.

17. Simon & Garfunkel, Live at Carnegie Hall 1969 EP (Legacy). A low-key streaming-only release that even some Simon & Garfunkel fans might have missed, this has four songs from their Carnegie Hall  shows on November 27 and November 28, 1969. A few other recordings from November at Carnegie Hall have come out elsewhere, but these were previously unreleased. Why only four tracks were dispensed, and only via streaming, is a question only the record label and the duo can answer. But as modest pleasures go, it’s pretty good, if containing no big surprises. Included are acoustic versions of “The Boxer” and, a couple months before their official release on the Bridge Over Troubled Water LP, “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright,” “Song for the Asking,” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” itself. Art Garfunkel’s just backed by piano on the last of these. The way the catalog business goes, it wouldn’t shock me to see a full-length release from these shows in the future, but for now, it’s all there is.

18. Various Artists, 17 from Morden (Top Sounds). In the 1960s, the Morden Park Sounds Studios of R.G. Jones in London recorded hundreds of British rock groups, most notably the Yardbirds for some of their earliest studio work. Many of the groups that passed through there didn’t release records, or only put them out in extremely limited editions. This compilation has seventeen such tracks, none of them by acts that are even reasonably well known to collectors; none had musicians that went on to fame, though a couple did put out discs on bigger labels. A few cuts are even credited to “unknown,” as the musicians remain unidentified. This is only going to appeal to hardcore British Invasion specialists, especially as a good number of the songs are covers of well known tunes.

But if you are that kind of ‘60s British rock nut, like me, you’ll find this an enjoyable swipe of groups that straddled the line between amateur and professional, even if some of its value is documentary as well as musical. All of the groups have brash energy, usually but not always on the R&B/rock side of things. The Cindicate (not to be confused with the Syndicats, with whom Steve Howe made records in the mid-’60s) stand out for their wild rendition of John Lee Hooker’s “I’m Mad Again,” possibly inspired as much or more by the Animals’ cover as the original. Stretched out to five minutes with extended instrumental raveups, it’s the best thing here, even if it sounds like a wind machine’s blowing in the background. The Night Society’s brooding “Play Around with Love” is the best original, in part because it at least tries to do something beyond the standard R&B format, sounding a little like a marriage of the minor-keyed melodies and harmonies of the Zombies with mod rock energy. If nothing else here is too memorable, it’s fun to hear while it’s spinning, and captures the energy of British youth in the wake of the great British beat explosion. And that, combined with thorough illustrated liner notes, is enough to put it on this list.

19. Various Artists, Sumer Is Icumen In: The Pagan Sound of British and Irish Folk 1966-75 (Grapefruit). This 60-song triple disc indeed features British Isles folk, usually of the mildly folk-rock-leaning sort, from the mid-‘60s through the mid-‘70s. It’s a little unclear what fits into the “pagan sound” theme. Much of the material is drawn from traditional folk sources, or clearly inspired by traditional folk sources, that’s colored by myth, magic, and exotic legend. Some of it only indirectly reflects this. Should we even keep score as to what might qualify?

It’s better just to take this as the latest installment of a series of quality three-CD sets on the Grapefruit label devoted to UK folk-rock (also including, on this set, music from Ireland). Preceded by 2015’s Dust on the Nettles and 2019’s Strangers in the Room, all have been overseen and extensively annotated by David Wells. All have a good balance of tracks from the most famous folk-rockers of the region and the most renowned mid-level and cult such artists. There are also obscurities who only put out private pressings, or never even managed to release anything while active. 

Sumer Is Icumen In (sic) doesn’t duplicate any selections from the other two collections, but features a lot of the same artists. The heavyweights are here: Fairport Convention, Pentangle, the Incredible String Band, Steeleye Span, the Strawbs, even a 1975 cut by Mike Oldfield. So are fairly successful acts who didn’t quite make the same impact, like Shirley Collins & the Albion County Band, the Young Tradition, and the Third Ear Band. Then there are plenty who get enthused about in specialized reference books, like Oberon and Stone Angel, even if most people have yet to hear them. And there are names that even those who know the likes of Mellow Candle will probably find unfamiliar, like Shirley Kent and the Minor Birds.

Few genres of the era were as earnest as this strand of British folk-rock. Or as reticent: there’s often an air of devout restraint, whether electric instruments are used or not. It’s not the most varied or exciting stuff, but suits the mood when you want something somber with a touch of the eerie or strange, most often supplied by dabs of unusual instrumentation. The Strawbs’ “Canon Dale”—an alternate version, though the liners aren’t specific about the exact source—is a standout in that respect, backing ominous harmonies with sitar and  Rick Wakeman’s gloomy organ.

There’s not much in the way of hooky tunes here, and some of the more memorable offerings arise when the set goes outside the folk-rock boundaries for tracks by rockers with a folk-rock influence. Traffic’s “John Barleycorn” is not just the most famous effort here; it’s the best. Nearly as good is Fairport’s “Tam Lin,” though it’s hard to imagine that anyone with an interest in this style doesn’t already have it in their collection. Less celebrated but welcome contributors from the rock scene include Kevin Coyne, Mighty Baby, Curved Air (whose “Elfin Boy” is effectively spooky), and Marc Bolan, represented by his 1966 demo “Eastern Spell.”

Even if you count this as part of a series and not just on its own, there are bound to be omissions that will upset some enthusiasts. Now that Ireland’s included in the survey, it’s too bad there’s nothing from Clannad’s fine 1973 debut album, which is far more influenced by Pentangle-styled folk-rock than anything else they issued. Maybe that LP didn’t have anything pagan enough; much of it was sung in Gaelic, so it might not be easy to tell. More obviously, there’s still no Donovan, the only global superstar with some affiliation with this movement. Perhaps licensing is the obstacle.

Of course, it’s easy to access Donovan’s catalog, or Clannad’s for that matter. Where else can you get the likes of Midwinter, Magnet, and Amber, who didn’t even have records? And on the same anthology as outtakes by Bridget St. John, the Sallyangie, and Mighty Baby that you might not yet have hard? For all but the very rare collector who has most or all of this material, it’s a good way to make deep dives into the peak era of British folk-rock, with some familiar faces along the trail to improve the overall listening experience. (This review will also appear in a future issue of Ugly Things.)

20. Carla Thomas, Let Me Be Good to You: The Atlantic & Stax Recordings (1960-1968) (SoulMusic). Carla Thomas was one of Stax’s most consistent hitmakers in the 1960s, and by far the label’s most successful woman performer in that decade. This four-CD set has all of her recordings on Stax and Atlantic from 1960 to 1968, the 94 tracks including everything from her albums and singles during that period. There are also five cuts from the Stax/Volt Revue’s 1967 live albums in London and Paris, and her duets with Otis Redding and father Rufus Thomas. Add the booklet’s 8000-word liner notes, with first-hand quotes from a few who were there (though not Carla herself), and it’s a complete document of Thomas’s prime.

Complete documents don’t usually mean quality that’s as consistent as best-of compilations, and that’s the case here. Her LPs, in common with many ‘60s artists, had a lot of covers of hits and standards. Her girl group-crossed-with-Memphis-soul voice guarantees that none are poor, but it’s hard to get too excited about routine versions of the likes of “What the World Needs Now,” “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” “Let It Be Me,” “I Fall to Pieces,” and “Birds & Bees” (with Rufus Thomas). As much some historians take pains to differentiate Stax from Motown, a few cuts are obviously derivative of the early Supremes, and “Something Good (Is Going to Happen to You)” can’t help but recall Stevie Wonder’s “Uptight.”

While the best of her sides from this time were compiled back in 1994 for Rhino’s 22-track Gee Whiz: The Best of Carla Thomas, this far more extensive collection has its rewards if you’re a big Thomas fan and/or heavily into the Stax sound. That set only had one Carla-Rufus duet, and just a couple Thomas-Redding duets (including their big hit “Tramp”).  This has ten Carla-Rufus tracks (a couple credited to Rufus & Friend), including the 1960 single on Satellite that marked her first appearance on disc. It also has the entire King and Queen album pairing Thomas and Redding, though that has its share of covers of familiar tunes like “Tell It Like It Is,” “Bring It on Home to Me,” and “It Takes Two.”

Although the many non-best-of singles can take on a slightly generic Stax feel, there are some good efforts that will be new to lots of listeners who don’t have complete collections of records on the label. Some have a satisfyingly gutsy feel, like the brassy cover of “Little Red Rooster” and the mid-‘60s B-sides “Every Once of Strength” and “Stop Thief.” The five live Stax/Volt Revue songs have a rawer edge than the more polished studio productions, including renditions of her biggest hits (“Gee Whiz!,” “B-A-B-Y,” and “Let Me Be Good to You”) along with covers of “I Got My Mojo Working” and (less impressively) “Yesterday.”

Just two of these recordings are from 1968, and as Thomas kept recording for Stax until 1972, it’s not a complete overview of her work for the company. Most would agree this covers the best of her time with the label, however. Although a lot of this material’s shown up on other reissues and Stax singles boxes, this is an overdue anthology putting everything of hers from these years in one place. (This review will also appear in a future issue of Ugly Things.)

21. Various Artists, Living on the Hill: A Danish Underground Trip 1967-1974 (Esoteric). Every country had its psychedelic/progressive rock scene in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and Denmark’s small size didn’t keep it from producing lots of records to go with it. Many of them are sampled on this 30-track, nearly four-hour triple CD, plenty of which should be unfamiliar to all but the most dedicated Scandinavian rock hoarders.

Although some of these groups managed to get their discs released outside their native country, really only Savage Rose made much of an impact on English-speaking audiences, what with a few US LPs, Rolling Stone reviews by Lester Bangs, a Jimmy Miller-produced album, and even an appearance at the 1969 Newport Jazz Festival. Bands like Burnin’ Red Ivanhoe (whose 1971 album W.W.W. made it onto John Peel’s Dandelion label), Young Flowers, and Culpeper’s Orchard have gained some modest recognition beyond their homeland in the twenty-first century. Yet for the most part, most of the names on this anthology are pretty unknown in comparison.

Is there a specifically Danish tone to these efforts? Not especially, most of the tracks bearing a heavy British prog influence. Lengthy (not infrequently, too lengthy) soloing abounds, and there’s plenty of organ, sometimes ethereal and classically shaded, to go with the guitar workouts. There are echoes, sometimes loud ones, of major UK prog stars like Pink Floyd, the Nice, and ELP, as well as subtler traces of King Crimson, the Moody Blues, Soft Machine, and the like. There’s a one-or-two-steps-removed-from-the-source feel that adds a bit of strangeness, as though the formula’s been a bit altered or tampered with, though almost all it’s sung in English.

At its best, the cuts lean as much or more toward psych or prog. Beefeaters’ instrumental (aside from some inscrutable mumbling) “Night Flight” (the sole 1967 track) is as much ghostly psych-garage as prog. Day of Phoenix’s “Tell Me” is rather like early Fairport Convention, unsurprisingly so since it’s a cover of the Dave Cousins composition “Tell Me What You See,” which was on the album Sandy Denny recorded with the Strawbs before joining Fairport. Burnin’ Red Ivanhoe’s “Avez Vous Kaskelainen?” is a hypnotic, propulsive instrumental driven by the kind of weedy organ favored by very early Soft Machine. Despite its 1969 release date, the same band’s “Jingle Jangle Man” sounds a little like the heavier parts of David Bowie’s The Man Who Sold the World. That leaves the intriguing, if unlikely, possibility that it actually influenced Bowie.

Too often, however, these outings succumb to bombast. Some of the soloing’s as tedious and overlong as any pedestrian British blues-rock band managed. Roundabout riffs are tossed off with flash, but little hooky melody or soul. On Burnin’ Red Ivanhoe’s “Ksilioy,” the best and worst of Danish psych/prog collide, as the first three minutes of blissful harmony-driven walk-through-the-forest power pop-cum-psych would fit snugly onto the original Perfume Garden compilations back in the ‘80s. But don’t get too comfy, as it then runs aground by repeating the same nagging riff for a full seven-and-a-half minutes. This isn’t daring experimentation; it’s being rude to the listener. I even wondered if my CD player had gotten stuck, but no such luck.

As a more general observation verging on criticism, few of these artists project much of an identity, even if their technique is almost on par with bigger British names. Admittedly the one, two, or three songs you get from each featured band aren’t enough for drawing definitive conclusions. Still, you can immediately tell it’s Savage Rose and no one else from the sound of the swirling organ on “Tapiola,” and Annisette’s freaky voice on “Long Before I Was Born.” No other group here puts such a distinctive stamp on their work.

If you’re in the mood for sounds from prog’s heyday that are a little off-kilter from the norm, however, this has its share of haunting passages and odd ideas. It’s best heard one disc at a time, though, to steer clear of getting overwhelmed by too much somber, ponderous riffage and winding near-epics at once. Esoteric’s dependably in-depth 36-page booklet has plenty of info on the bands, as well as vintage record sleeves and photos. ((This appeared in the winter 2021 issue of Ugly Things.)

22. Neil Young, Homegrown (Reprise). One of the most famous unissued albums of all time, Homegrown was originally planned for release in 1975. Famously, at least among Neil Young fans, it was replaced by another unreleased LP, Tonight’s the Night, after he played both for friends back to back and came to the decision/realization that Tonight’s the Night was stronger. Young’s been more active than almost any major musician in putting out vault material in the twenty-first century, and Homegrown finally made its official bow in 2020. Like many if not most unreleased albums whose mystique grows through the years, its belated unveiling is kind of underwhelming. It’s a mostly (though not exclusively) low-key collection emphasizing his mellower folk-country side.

Not everything fits that description, especially “Florida,” whose weird combination of inscrutable stoned rap with eerie musique concrete puts it on the fringe of the avant-garde. The basic blues “We Don’t Smoke It No More” seems similarly out of place, or almost as if Young is deliberately tweaking his audience with songs that are half-jokes. But the greater hindrance is that most of the tracks are sort of generic mid-‘70s Young, which is admittedly better than most mid-‘70s artists were at their best. Also, the best songs have been available for forty years or more on other releases, including the country tune “Love Is a Rose” (on Decade), “Star of Bethlehem” (on American Stars ’n Bars), and “Little Wing” (on Hawks & Doves). Homegrown was also issued as disc seven of the box set Archives Vol. 2: 1972-1976, which is reviewed elsewhere on this list.

23. Bob Dylan, 50^th Anniversary Collection 1970 (Columbia). 1970 wasn’t one of the most illustrious years in Dylan’s career, but it was a productive one, if you’re just going by the quantity of music he recorded. Outtakes from this year have appeared elsewhere, especially on The Bootleg Series Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait (1969-1971). This very limited edition three-CD set isn’t part of his bootleg series; it’s part of his copyright extension series, with volumes issued near the end of most years as a fifty-year deadline approaches. There are no less than 74 previously unissued tracks here, although most of these are alternate versions of songs from his 1970 New Morning album, or (far more often) tossed off covers and revisitations of compositions he’d already put on his records. These go all the way back to “Song to Woody,” which he put on his debut album.

These aren’t any great shakes, and not just because these are outtakes. The New Morning songs weren’t too good in any version, with the exception of “If Not For You” (six versions are here) and maybe “Went to See the Gypsy.” It’s kind of interesting, though, to hear him running on half-or-less empty or autopilot, bereft of most of the inspiration he’d flashed in the 1960s, but casually keeping on going, even if it feels a little like going through the motions. There are lots of covers, some unexpected; was he doing Jay & the Americans’ “Come a Little Bit Closer” as a joke, or did he really like the song? Other unexpected choices include “Yesterday,” “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” Universal Soldier,” and “Da Doo Ron Ron.” Woman backup singers add some uncharacteristic touches, and Al Kooper plays some characteristically interesting keyboards, though he doesn’t have nearly as much to work with as he did on Dylan’s mid-‘60s sessions. I like how he mimics locust chirps on take 2 of “Day of the Locusts,” though, and the March 1970 take 6 of “Went to See the Gypsy” is fairly good (a different version from three months later was used on New Morning).

While most of the May 1, 1970 sessions on which George Harrison plays guitar and sings some backup vocals has long been bootlegged, note that these aren’t nearly as exciting as they might look on paper. Harrison’s guitar and singing aren’t at all prominent, and these are mostly covers, whether of oldies like “Matchbox” or some past Dylan standards like “I Threw It All Away” and “I Don’t Believe You.” It’s more of a casual jam than a serious session, and it turns out Harrison isn’t on a few of the songs, including some on which he’s formerly been reported to have played. There are no Harrison compositions in the batch, either. Note, by the way, that it was announced that this set will get a wider commercial release in 2021, with—gallingly, for those who’ve already tracked down this version—two additional tracks.

The following albums came out in 2019, but I didn’t hear them until 2020:

1. Lulu & the Luvvers, Live on Air 1965-1969 (London Calling, 2019). Despite the years in the title, actually this two-CD, 35-song set spans BBC radio recordings from December 1964 to January 1969. It’s the kind of flub you might expect from what seems to be a gray-area release. But the sound quality is very good – none of it’s “off-air,” as the term goes for material crudely taped from putting a recorder next to the radio, instead of as a feed from the broadcast or an actual broadcast tape. And here’s what’s more important—this is pretty good material that largely showcases Lulu’s underrated skills as a talented, earthy (and young—she was a teenager during most of this time) singer with plenty of US soul and R&B in her sound and repertoire.

Crucially, it also has quite a few covers that didn’t make her official releases of the period, most of them pretty good. These include Ike & Tina Turner’s “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine,” Solomon Burke’s “Cry to Me,” Ben E. King’s “Don’t Play That Song,” Stevie Wonder’s “Uptight,” the Marvelows’ “I Do,” Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher,” and even the Monkees’ “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You.” “Mr. Moonlight,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Cat Stevens’s “I Love My Dog,” and the Newbeats’ “Bread and Butter” aren’t as impressive, but at least make for something different. And she does a surprisingly rocking version of “Tennessee Waltz.”

Plenty of her ‘60s singles and LP tracks are here, too – not just the obvious “To Sir With Love” (two versions), but UK hits like “Shout,” “The Boat That I Row,” and “Leave a Little Love,” along with good songs whose studio counterparts are only familiar to serious Lulu fans, like “Can’t Hear You No More,” “I’ll Come Running,” “Heat Wave,” and the Rolling Stones’ “Surprise, Surprise.” The sound is thinner than her studio arrangements (and despite the title, her mid-‘60s backup band the Luvvers aren’t on everything). But that also eliminates some of the gaudier orchestration and pop touches, putting the focus a little more on her energetic vocals. And while this isn’t the sort of declaration that will win you acclaim from the rock critic community, overall the anthology reinforces her credentials as a significant talent who remains underrated.

2. The Bee Gees, Live on Air 1967-1968 (London Calling, 2019). True, there aren’t big surprises on this hour-long, 21-song compilation of early Bee Gees BBC sessions. There’s nothing they didn’t release back then, except the worthy if oddly titled “Mrs. Gillespie’s Refrigerator,” which can be heard in its studio version on an officially issued outtake. The arrangements don’t veer much off course the studio counterparts. But the sound quality and performances are good, and it’s a good mixture of all of their first half dozen big hits (“New York Mining Disaster 1941,” “Words,” “Massachusetts,” “To Love Somebody,” “Holiday,” “World”) and lesser known early tracks. Some of those less familiar songs are about as good as the hits (“In My Own Time,” “One Minute Woman”), and if “Birdie Told Me” and “Jumbo” aren’t of that caliber, well, they’re certainly satisfyingly obscure. In a way, this is about as good a representation of the late-‘60s Bee Gees’ strengths as a compilation of their better early studio tracks. Whether you’d go that far or not, it’s certainly a good listen.

3. The Move, Something More from the Move (Vogon, 2019). We’re talking a specialist release that by most measures wouldn’t rate near any best-of lists, owing to its sometimes iffy sound quality and position at the margins of a major group’s work. Still, I’m a British ‘60s rock specialist, and though I can hear the flaws, this does fill in significant margins of the Move discography. None of these thirteen tracks from radio broadcasts and live performances, spanning October 1966 to December 1967, have been released elsewhere before. It can be debated whether this is an official release, especially given the complete lack of liner notes, though at least the dates and locations are given.

But although most of the songs are available elsewhere in better (and certainly better recorded) versions, it’s still cool to have documents of the Move as they reached their prime. Most valuable of all are three songs from an October 24, 1966 radio session predating the release of their first single, since none of three are available in any other studio or live performances. “Cherry Cherry” is a somewhat eccentric cover of the Neil Diamond hit; “Tired of Being Lonely” covers a very obscure soul single by the Sharpies, and sounds more than a little like the Stevie Winwood lineup of the Spencer Davis Group. I don’t know the source of “Our Love” (that’s where the lack of composing credits is a real drawback), but it sounds like another soul cover to me.

Otherwise you have live performances, if sometimes roughly recorded, of their 1967 British hits; the less traveled but very good first-LP original “Walk Upon the Water”; and a few covers, one of which (“Eight Miles High”) doesn’t show up in any other Move version. And this one isn’t too good; it’s uncharacteristically sloppy in places. It’s interesting that the Move tried it, anyway, along with a few other Byrds songs from the time (two of which, “So You Want to Be a Rock’n’Roll Star” and “Why,” are also here). 

4. The Troggs, Live on Air ’66-’68 (London Calling, 2019). Another reliably decent-sounding and underpublicized BBC compilation from the London Calling label, this two-CD compilation has nearly three dozen tracks from their radio appearances, as well as a few brief interviews. There aren’t many surprises here – for the most part these are pretty faithful renderings of songs widely available on their studio releases. Yes, there’s a cover they never put on their official discs, but their version of John Lee Hooker’s “Dimples” wasn’t going to give either Hooker or the Animals (who did a much better one) sleepless nights. The guitar solo in “I Just Sing” sounds pretty exotic by their standards; on the flipside, “Gonna Make You All Mine” has some bass swoops that are so irritating you almost suspect they were deliberately annoying.

All their best hits are here (“Wild Thing,” “With a Girl Like You,” “I Can’t Control Myself,” “Love Is All Around,” “Night of the Long Grass”). But so are almost all of their better obscure early originals (“From Home,” “I Just Sing,” “66-5-4-3-2-1,” “Girl in Black,” “Maybe the Madman,” “Say Darlin’,”) as well as two performances of “I Can Only Give You Everything” – the only song here present in multiple versions. The presence of a lot of mediocre originals (especially those not sung by chief songwriter Reg Presley) reminds us that there was a pretty big gap between their genuinely excellent top-shelf originals and turkeys like “The Yella in Me,” “Little Red Donkey,” and “The Kitty Kat Song.” Sure, they could have played a few other of their better tunes not heard here – “Purple Shades,” “Jingle Jangle,” and “Cousin Jane,” in particular – but there’s still a better balance of hits and non-hits than there are in BBC compilations of most British acts from the time. It’s also interesting that Presley was aware of “I Can’t Control Myself”’s problems gaining airplay in the US, as in an interview he says its chart ascent was halted when it got (his term) “banned.”

5. Bob Dylan, 50th Anniversary Collection 1969 (Columbia, 2019). Like other volumes in what’s usually called Dylan’s copyright extension series, this was released as an extremely limited edition just before the year in which a “fiftieth anniversary” was about to expire – in this case, in December 2019. The double CD has 44 tracks, all of them recorded in 1969, and none of them previously available to my knowledge. In fact, none of them are even on 2019’s three-CD Travelin’ Thru: The Bootleg Series Vol. 15, which has quite a few 1969 outtakes. Before you get too excited, note that most of the items on this limited double disc are alternate versions, not songs haven’t circulated in other guises from the era. In that sense, they’re sort of outtakes of outtakes, mostly from the Nashville Skyline era. So there are previously unavailable, and pretty similar, outtakes of five Nashville Skyline songs, and previously unavailable alternates of about ten Dylan/Johnny Cash duets. Then there are five post-Nashville Skyline outtakes from spring 1969, most of them covers.

Virtually anyone with an awareness of this series knows going in that this isn’t the kind of stuff you count on hearing over and over. There’s not just similarity between previously circulating versions, but also a lot of repetition. There are, for instance, five versions of “To Be Alone With You”; six of “Lay, Lady, Lay” (granted that’s easily the best song here); and eight of “I Still Miss Someone.” The handful of post-Nashville Skyline tracks are no great shakes, including two versions of “Blue Moon,” another of “Ring of Fire” (without Cash, remember), and a cover of the Everly Brothers’ “Take a Message to Mary.” All that noted, it’s pleasant enough hearing Dylan (and, often, Dylan with Cash) run through this material with an informal, loose vibe, as if he knows there’s no great reason to strain himself with this lightweight (“Lay, Lady, Lay” excepted) material. It’s a nice addition to the bulging library of Dylan completists (or at least completists for certain Dylan eras), of which there are quite a few.

As it was for films and records, there was fear the extraordinary conditions of 2020 would slow down the torrent of book releases. It’s really going to take the next year or two to gauge the total impact, but there was little if any decline in either the quantity or quality of rock history books. Nor the variety: there were biographies, memoirs, genre overviews, gaudily illustrated coffee table volumes, and more.

Some readers might think it will be easier to keep the flow of books up, if your image of the writer is someone who just sits and types until he or she is finished. Maybe the limit to public gatherings and facilities will affect publishing less than film production or record manufacturing, but that’s not the whole story. If writers can’t visit libraries or other historical archives, their research will be handicapped or incomplete for quite some time.

As for speculation that interview subjects will be more available than usual if they’re not performing concerts or staying home far more often, that’s not always the case either. Restrictions on travel mean less in-person interviews and access to personal collections. And not everyone might be in as willing a mood to talk as they usually are, owing to the trying circumstances with which we’re all dealing.

For the last paragraph of bad news, the publishing industry has been badly affected over the last year, like most businesses have. Books have likely been delayed or canceled. It’s harder to get them printed and distributed, and there’s certainly less traffic at physical retail stores that remain open. Even the mail is a less reliable service for ordering books, especially between countries.

All that out of the way, my list for 2020 is nonetheless as long as usual. Also as usual, it doesn’t include several candidates I haven’t checked out, whether it’s because they’re still on my library hold list, or items that can’t currently ship from the UK, or books of which I’m not yet even aware. Notable ones I catch up with over the coming year can at least be reviewed as a supplement to my 2021 list, as I’ve done with a few 2019 titles I’ve listed at the end of this one.

1. Heart Full of Soul: Keith Relf of the Yardbirds, by David French (McFarland). While this high ranking might reflect my extreme interest in the subject matter more than the genuinely decent quality of the book, it’s good (and overdue) to have a biography of the Yardbirds’ lead singer. This book’s on the slim side at under 200 pages, but it doesn’t need to be longer, covering Relf’s story crisply without dragging or embellishing to make for a bigger volume, as often happens in rock bios. It benefits from first-hand interviews with Yardbirds Jim McCarty (also in Renaissance) and Paul Samwell-Smith (who also produced Renaissance’s first album), as well as Relf’s wife and members of his post-Yardbirds bands Renaissance, Medicine Head, and Armageddon.

Relf’s time with the Yardbirds takes up more than half the book, and his story is in many respects the Yardbirds story, as he was the most important member who was with them for all five years of their career. While moody intensity often came through in his vocals and songwriting, this reveals the real-life problems—including depressive episodes, major health threats, and a failing marriage—that also impacted his music and performances. Several of his professional and personal associates stress that he was something of an eccentric loner who was enigmatic and hard to fully know, and ill-suited to longevity in a music business where shunning the rock’n’roll lifestyle doesn’t usually work to your advantage.

The focus remains on the music, Relf getting his due as an underrated singer and harmonica player in particular. There’s plenty of description of his tours and recordings, though just a few surprising factual mistakes slip through (Elektra Records repeatedly being misspelled as Electra, for one). Along with Jim McCarty’s memoir Nobody Told Me!, this finally gets a good Yardbirds-centered book on the shelves, more than half a century after they broke up.

2. Muse, Odalisque, Handmaiden: A Girl’s Life in the Incredible String Band, by Rose Simpson (Strange Attractor). Rose Simpson was part of the Incredible String Band from around mid-1968 to the end of 1970, when the group expanded from the duo of Robin Williamson and Mike Heron to a four-piece with Simpson and Licorice McKechnie. Simpson was Heron’s partner and McKechnie was Williamson’s, though the relationships were open to varying degrees. This memoir goes into her time with the band in considerable detail, from around the time she met Heron through UK and US tours (including a disappointing appearance at Woodstock) and several albums. Along with the detail are well written, straightforward perspectives on the group’s unusual dynamic, which was fluid and rather whimsical, certainly by the standards of fairly successful bands with lengthy recording careers. Simpson, for instance, had barely any musical experience before joining, and wasn’t even that knowledgeable about pop music.

There’s a lot here that will interest any ISB fan, and some general fans of late-‘60s/early-‘70s folk and rock. Highlights include her comparisons of Williamson and Heron’s writing styles (Williamson being more given to cosmic flight, Heron to earthly concerns); observations on recording and working with manager/producer Joe Boyd, who ran the Witchseason roster of which they were a part; their erratic attempts at communal/rural living; the indulgent and in some ways disastrous attempts to branch out into film (with Be Glad for the Song Has No Ending) and multimedia theater (with the performance group Stone Monkey); and the sometimes exhilarating, often exhausting American tours, where they found ecstatic audiences at the Fillmores in New York and San Francisco, but not so much elsewhere. Especially refreshing are detailed memories of the recording sessions in which she took part, as those are often skimmed over or neglected in musician memoirs.

There’s also a lot about the group’s involvement in Scientology, though Simpson never fully committed to it, and it’s her (and some others’, like Boyd’s) view that it wielded a negative influence on the group’s music and lives. There are also encounters, sometimes volatile, with a wide variety of fellow rock celebrities (and cult artists like Vashti, Nick Drake, and Van Dyke Parks), including the Doors, Joan Baez, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and Keith Moon, who played drums on Heron’s solo album Smiling Men with Bad Reputations. As to the mystery that many fans are most curious about – what happened to McKechnie, who seemed to vanish thirty years ago – Simpson’s clear that she doesn’t know. She does devote several pages to discussing Licorice, leaving the impression her bandmate was an enigma that she and most others couldn’t get to know too well. You can read much more about Simpson and her book in this lengthy story I recently published, based on my recent in-depth interview with her.

3. Ready Steady Go! The Weekend Starts Here, by Andy Neill (BMG). The subtitle of this coffee table production is accurate: “The Definitive Story of the Show That Changed Pop TV.” Ready Steady Go! was the top British rock/pop/soul television program of the mid-‘60s, and in some people’s view the best rock TV show of all time. Over the course of more than fifteen years, Neill interviewed many of the people involved in its production, with the notable exception of the program’s most frequent host, Cathy McGowan. The text alternates between Neill’s history and extensive quotes from many of the producers, hosts, directors, technicians, and musicians involved in the show when it aired from 1963 to 1966. In a coup for a book of this sort, there are extensive multi-page comments from some of the top stars to appear on Ready Steady Go!, including Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend, Ray Davies, Donovan, Eric Burdon, and Lulu. 

The volume’s also sumptuously illustrated with many photos (some in color) taken on the set, as well as some vintage press clips, memos, and memorabilia. There’s also a meticulously detailed episode-by-episode guide listing all the performers and (when known, which is usually the case) songs, an appearance index, and even an analysis of the show’s ratings. Why isn’t it #1 on this list, after all that? Some of the comments from the oral histories on the behind-the-scenes production machinations are a little dry and technical, and through no flaws on the author’s part, it’s not quite as consistently compelling a story as the biography and memoir that outranked it. Certainly a good argument could be made for naming it book of the year, however. Just as certainly, it makes you lament the short-term thinking that found just a small percentage of the episodes and footage preserved; most of it’s almost certainly vanished for good.

4. The Velvet Underground: I Met Myself in a Dream…That’s the Story of the Third Album, by M.C. Kostek, Alfredo Garcia, and Ignacio Julia (Velvet Underground Appreciation Society). Bearing an October 2019 publication date but certainly unavailable in the US until 2020, this 336-page hefty hardback is limited to an edition of 500 copies. Largely devoted to nearly 200 photos taken of the Velvet Underground in November 1968, it is of course something geared toward very serious fans, especially since it’s $100. But if you are one (and I am one), it’s real interesting, and not just for the pictures. Of course the pictures are the main deal, with about 100 taken as they were recording their third album in TTG Studios in Los Angeles on November 6, 1968, and nearly 80 others at various Southern Californian outdoor locations (probably but not definitely Los Angeles) outside the studio a couple days later. Almost all are in black and white, though eight of the outdoor photos are in color. Besides offering many glimpses of the Velvets at work in the studio section, the outdoor pictures capture their transition to hippie decor, complete with frilly paisley shirts, bell bottoms, and (for Sterling Morrison) orange pants.

There’s not much text, just a couple brief essays that focus on explaining the background of the photos and the third album. But although those have some unfortunate typos, they’re of additional interest for offering a little in the way of obscure information. In particular, the first of the essays describes material on a demo tape performed by Lou Reed (who did most of the singing) and John Cale of Reed compositions in 1965, mailed to himself on May 11 to establish copyright. This is in Reed’s archive in the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts, but not many have heard it so far, and this is the first time I’ve seen it written about, albeit not in extreme depth.

The latter section of the book features lots of reprints of ads, reviews, acetates, tape boxes, and other miscellany related to the Velvet Underground’s self-titled third album and what the band were doing around that time. This again has some rarely seen material, some of which reveals information that hasn’t circulated much if at all elsewhere, like early titles to some songs on the third LP. The paper and reproduction quality are very good, and despite the high price tag I’m guessing it will sell out, if you want to put in your order (through inevitablevucatalogue.wordpress.com) while you can.

5. 13^th Floor Elevators: A Visual History, by Paul Drummond (Anthology Editions). Paul Drummond wrote the comprehensive 13^th Floor Elevators biography Eye Mind (published in 2007), and while the text in this new book is interesting, there’s a lot of overlap between what the two volumes cover. Much of it’s devoted to quotes from interviews, done by himself and others, that provided much of the research for Eye Mind. The main reason to check out this new work, even if you have Eye Mind, are the numerous and impressive illustrations in this large-format paperback. There are many photos, posters, newspaper clippings, ads, letters, documents, and other memorabilia related to the Elevators’ career, much of it never published before to my knowledge, and a good deal of it in color. The extensive captions go into a great deal of detail about the graphics, sometimes with quotes from people who were there. It fully lives up to the “visual history” promised in its title, though you should go on to read Eye Mind if you want a fuller history of the Elevators.

That recommendation dispensed, here are a couple criticisms that are small in the large picture. The sole Elevators interview printed during their lifetime (dominated by Tommy Hall), from the December 1967 issue of the Houston magazine Mother, is reproduced here in its entirety. Great, except the pages are so small they’re hard to read; I managed, but I think an appreciable number of readers won’t. And sure the 13^th Floor Elevators have a large cult following, but the text’s assertion that their second album “Easter Everywhere’s importance as the [italics included in the book] psychedelic album of the period has now been fully recognized” is unwarranted. By whom? A few critics and devoted fans? More fully by the general music community than Sgt. Pepper, The Doors, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Are You Experienced, or Surrealistic Pillow? The 13^th Floor Elevators were a good and certainly very interesting group; there’s no need to puff up their historical status with that kind of overkill.

6. Savage Impressions: An Aesthetic Expedition Through the Archives of Independent Project Records & Press, compiled by Bruce Licher and Karen Nielsen Licher (P22 Publications). Bruce Licher is known for constructing odd, spooky, primarily instrumental soundscapes in his alternative rock bands, of which Savage Republic and Scenic are the most well known. He’s also known, and not solely within the indie rock world, for his distinctive letterpress design work. It’s adorned records by groups in which he’s played, acts on the Independent Project label, and other record releases, posters, stamps, and other ephemera, extending to record company stationery. His visuals and layouts often bridge lettering both ancient and futuristic, often incorporating haunting images, photos, and unpredictable splashes of color. His perfectionist eye for detail extends to this 236-page coffee table book, which lays out an astonishing wealth and variety of his artwork, from the first Independent Project releases in 1980 to the present.

Interspersed throughout the book are essays on his various stages of development, from the Savage Republic era and his time in an ancient downtown Los Angeles building to his moves to Arizona and the Sierra Nevada. Detailed captions give the background to all of the reproductions, and while the text is straightforward, some amusing stories surface, like how he arranged to put stamps of his own design alongside official US stamps on mail, or how his stint designing poetry book covers for Penguin ended as poets felt they looked too much like small-press efforts (“the poets actually wanted glossy full-color covers!”). The range of his clients expanded from IPR-related projects (including early releases by Camper Van Beethoven) to bands like R.E.M. and labels like A&M Records, Licher eventually using more computer technology in his work without compromising the individuality of his output.

At $79.95, this is an expensive purchase, though justified by the high quality of the visuals and production. A 350-copy deluxe edition, including a bonus LP and a few other extras of less note, is already sold out. The LP, with fourteen previously unreleased tracks from various Licher musical projects spanning 1980 to 2019, is highly worthwhile, and reviewed separately in my post covering the top reissues of 2020. Read my story on Savage Impressions and Bruce Licher, based on an extensive recent interview with him, here.

7. Time Between: My Life As a Byrd, Burrito Brother, and Beyond, by Chris Hillman (BMG). In keeping with his low-key team player persona in most of his bands, Hillman’s memoir is a straightforward, unflashy, likable recount of his career. The Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers have been covered extensively in several books, most notably Johnny Rogan’s huge Byrds volumes and Hot Burritos, which Hillman himself co-wrote with John Einarson. There isn’t an enormous amount you’ll learn about Hillman’s most famous work if you’re familiar with those books, and with the history of his groups in general. But while there’s more on the Byrds/Burritos than anything else, he does cover less familiar ground, including his teenage folk-bluegrass years (scarred by the suicide of his father), Manassas, the Souther-Hillman-Furay quasi-supergroup, McGuinn Clarke & Hillman, and the country act the Desert Rose Band, in which he served as leader. 

If you’re looking for some less-traveled Byrds stories, while there aren’t a whole lot, it’s interesting to read how he wrote “So You Wanna Be a Rock’n’Roll Star” with Roger McGuinn, which he clarifies was not specifically about the Monkees, and how playing on demos for South African jazz singer Letta Mbulu gave him some impetus to start writing and singing his own songs. As to the controversy over McGuinn replacing some of Gram Parsons’s lead vocals on Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Hillman simply feels “Roger’s vocals were better in the end,” the album including “just the right balance of singers.” It’s not a secret as he’s spoken and written about this in the past, but Hillman’s memories of Parsons are decidedly mixed, combining great admiration of his talent and charm with disappointment at his unreliability and egotism.

The post-early-‘70s years don’t make for as much interesting reading, but Hillman knows not to dwell on the less celebrated parts of his career and maintain a reasonably interesting flow. There are some passages on his Christian faith, but not many, and these aren’t unduly obtrusive. Dry humor and realistic observations on the music business emerge from time to time, as in this summary of manager Larry Spector’s supplying the inspiration for the Burritos’ “Sin City,” in which he’s targeted: “At least he gave me something after robbing me blind.”

8. West Side Story, by Richard Barrios (Turner Classic Movies). Film musicals aren’t mainstays of my record collection, and books about them haven’t made appearances on my lists. West Side Story is the only film musical I really like, however, and this is a good book about how it was made, with plenty of photos. This follows its genesis as a Broadway play to the 1961 film, which was a stormy collaboration between directors Jerome Robbins (who was fired partway through the production as he was taking too much time and spending too much money) and Robert Wise. There’s a lot of back-story to how the cast was chosen, how the New York scenes were filmed, and how cast and crew coped with setbacks include cost/time overruns, quite a few physical injuries, and some tension between key actors. There are also sections on how it was promoted and received by critics and audiences, as well as differences between the play and the movie. I would have liked some more specific description of how the rumble scene was filmed, and didn’t need a final chapter about the recent remake (now not scheduled for release until late 2021). But overall, this is a more consistently interesting and crisply written volume than almost anything on this list.

9. All I Ever Wanted: A Rock’n’Roll Memoir, by Kathy Valentine (University of Texas Press). The autobiography of the Go-Go’s bassist and sometime guitarist concentrates almost exclusively on her life through 1990, when the group reformed after breaking up only four years after she joined. It’s a well written and, more unusually for rock memoirs, very well balanced account, covering recording, performing, songwriting, guitar playing, band and record business dynamics, and personal life and passions without leaning too hard or too long on any aspect. The chapters on her unconventionally permissive upbringing in Austin are about as worthwhile as those on the star period, and disturbingly frank in a couple reports of sexual assault. Her time with Carla Olson in the Textones (who recorded the original version of “Vacation”) is given its due, Valentine observing the band couldn’t break through in part because they were so different depending on whether they were doing Olson’s or Valentine’s songs.

Valentine’s rise to superstardom was rapid after she replaced Margot Olavarria in the Go-Go’s, and she recounts their tours, hijinx, and hits enthusiastically without overdoing it. It’s interesting to read how the band were initially highly disappointed in the sound of their debut album, finding it too clean. As she admits, “My opinion changed proportionally with the increasing sales.” And she has the perspective to add, “Sometimes I’ve wondered what it would be like to re-record Beauty and the Beat the way I would like it to sound, with thick, full tones and textures. But then I remember the ephemeral spirit infusing the recording process, the anticipation and joy of a fleeting time, and I know something else was captured that could never be reproduced.”

And then, the downside: not enough time to concentrate on writing strong material for follow-up albums; disputes over songwriting credits, publishing money, and management; getting coerced into publicity that exploited their perky image; and the breakup, to her shock, of the band in the mid-1980s, as she anticipated getting ready to record an album with producer Mike Chapman. She had more trouble than the other Go-Go’s in launching a separate career, and those difficulties are elaborated, as are her affairs with Chapman and Clem Burke. Drugs and alcohol were also a problem with some Go-Go’s, and there is, as there are in so many rock memoirs, a section devoted to her time in AA and recovery. The post-1990 years are briefly summed up in an epilogue, which might have been a tough call if she wanted to tell stories about the reformed Go-Go’s, their lawsuits, and their reunions. To be harsh, if so it was the correct one, as what’s here is solid without much of the post-peak hangover that makes the latter half of many memoirs tough sledding.

10. Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir, by Mark Lanegan (Hachette). If you’re interested enough to be reading a list like this, you’ve probably read numerous musical memoirs that at least in part document harrowing descents into substance abuse. Even by the standards of the most graphic of those, Lanegan’s is exceptionally grim and detailed. It’s often gripping, but there will be times when you might wish it wasn’t as graphic, or at least that the story moves along quicker to the usual rehab and redemption. In this case, it doesn’t come until the very end (and more than twenty years ago), after he’s spent much of the 1980s and 1990s looking to score, even and especially on lengthy tours throughout North America and Europe. Along the way, he helped drag a number of friends and acquaintances along the same path, whether doing drugs with them, selling drugs to them (and to many strangers), or letting lowlifes crash in his pad because they shared or helped him obtain what he wanted and needed.

Is there much about music amidst the chaos? Yes, though especially as the tale grinds on, maybe there should have been more. Lanegan has lots to say, much unflattering, about Screaming Trees, and also about his early solo career, which was considerably more vital in establishing his reputation as a dark alternative rock singer-songwriter. He also has much to say, again often though not always unflattering, about lots of pretty well known figures in the rock world with whom he was associated. That includes the heads of Sub Pop Records (who used a cover shot on his solo debut without his consent, and unceremoniously dumped him by handing his tapes back for his incomplete second album – before asking him back on the label), Nirvana (whose bassist Krist Novoselic asked to join Screaming Trees, though Lanegan turned him down), and Courtney Love (who paid for much of his expenses as he went through rehab). There are also weird and sometimes grisly anecdotes about a host of others, ranging from Greg Sage of the Wipers and 4AD Records chief Ivo Watts-Russell to A&R guy Bob Pfeifer, Liam Gallagher of Oasis, film director David O. Russell, and Jeffrey Lee Pierce. The music business is depicted as a harsh and capricious place, though maybe it often has to be to handle talents as volatile as Lanegan’s.

Lanegan doesn’t make excuses for his behavior, recounted in a straightforward and unflinching fashion, though his troubled family upbringing is discussed. Also there is not much moralizing about drugs or the redemptive power of rehab, and the expected frustrating near-misses when he seemed on the verge of escaping drug hell on his own. There’s not a great deal of self-introspection about the damage he wreaked on himself and others, though in some ways the story speaks for itself.

11. Remain in Love: Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Tina, by Chris Frantz (St. Martin’s Press). Talking Heads/Tom Tom Club drummer Frantz’s memoir concentrates on just what the subtitle says, his wife Tina Weymouth being of course bassist in both of his bands. Although there’s quite a bit (some would say too much) about his childhood/teenage years and family, the core is devoted to the formation and rise of Talking Heads, especially in the mid-to-late 1970s. It’s pretty well known by now that three-fourths of the group have had different views than singer David Byrne about the nature of the individual and collective contributions to Talking Heads’ sound. Frantz states in his intro that he wants his book to present his view on the “the true inside story,” which is different than some others that have circulated over the years.

If you want examples of Byrne’s at times asocial and inconsiderate behavior, there are quite a few, dating back to when the band formed in Rhode Island. However, Frantz also credits Byrne with a lot of talent as a singer, performer, and songwriter, though they (and Brian Eno) had substantially differing views of how composer credits should be apportioned. There are also numerous inside stories of encounters, close and passing, with plenty of figures from the CBGB’s and beyond. Some are very complimentary portraits (Lenny Kaye); some are mixed but overall quite positive (Sire Records chief Seymour Stein, CBGB’s owner Hilly Kristal). Some are mildly unflattering (Patti Smith), and some very unflattering (John Martyn, who though far removed from Talking Heads stylistically, crossed paths with them when Martyn was recording). And there are up-and-down interactions with people that could be pretty strange, like Lou Reed, Phil Spector, and Johnny Ramone.

But much more of the book covers Talking Heads/Tom Tom Club’s music and creative processes, both onstage and in the studio. The book hits its best stride when discussing how they aimed to make their recordings different from their live shows; how they wanted to make each album different; and how Frantz and Weymouth wanted to make their Tom Tom Club group different from Talking Heads, only getting a deal with Seymour Stein after they’d started to take off in Europe. The stories of how rough it was living in the Lower East Side when Talking Heads started out are pretty gripping, and the accounts of life at CBGB’s (musical and otherwise) when a punk/new wave scene started to blossom there pretty insightful. For all these reasons, Talking Heads fans, and fans of the ‘70s New York new wave scene in general, will find much to interest them. You can read more about it in my interview with Chris Frantz about the book.

12. The Ox: The Authorized Biography of the Who’s John Entwistle, by Paul Rees (Hachette). Entwistle was the least colorful member of the Who, though of course he had more competition than a guy in any other band would have when matched with Keith Moon, Pete Townshend, and Roger Daltrey. His stock-still, deadpan persona was an important part of what rounded the group’s image off, but in all his life makes more for a reasonably interesting story than a sensational one. That’s what you get with this bio, which covers both his musical contributions (his virtuosic bass playing and offbeat, often macabre songwriting) and his surprisingly tumultuous personal life, given his stolid persona. While in some respects he was a normal family man, he also indulged in typical rock star excesses – drinking a lot and drugging his share, spending money on countless indulgences, and womanizing, leading to his early death in middle age.

The book benefits from excerpts from a memoir Entwistle started but didn’t come close to completing, as well as cooperation from some close associates, including his son and two wives (but not Townshend or Daltrey). Much of this covers ground that will be familiar to Who fans, but it’s told well and does have fresh interviews with friends and colleagues who haven’t ever or often been quoted. There could have been more about his music, specifically his songwriting – interesting Who B-sides he wrote like “Heaven and Hell” and “Doctor Doctor” are mentioned only in passing. And how can you not write about his compositions “Silas Stingy” (about a guy who hoards so much he ends up with nothing at all) and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (possibly about his pal Moon) considering the obvious real-life personality traits they document?

While plenty of rock bios/memoirs document a descent into musical mediocrity and personal chaos, Entwistle’s was sharper and more depressing than most. His tours outside the Who were poorly received, and his solo albums largely uninteresting. The girlfriend with whom he spent his final years is almost universally vilified as a corrupting influence. The post-Moon years only take up the last third or so of the book, which will be a fairly worthwhile read for Who fans, but not on the level of Tony Fletcher’s Moon biography or the memoirs of Townshend and Daltrey.

13. Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era, by Elizabeth Pepin Silva and Lewis Watts (Heyday). For about twenty years after World War II, San Francisco’s Fillmore district was the center of the city’s African-American cultural life. This book deftly combines more than 200 photos with oral history quotes from people who were there, and some explanatory background text by the authors. Many local jazz, blues, and R&B musicians—whether residents or touring—played in Fillmore clubs, and many of the pictures the authors uncovered document performances. Some famous figures are seen (not always performing), from Chet Baker and John Coltrane to Dizzy Gillespie and Billie Holiday; some were more local/regional in their principal success, like Sugar Pie DeSanto and Saunders King; and some are not just obscure, but unidentified. There are also pictures of local life, whether club audiences, bars, district businesses, informal get-togethers, and the top neighborhood record store.

For all its liveliness, the Fillmore black music scene didn’t develop too much of a distinct or influential regional sound. Maybe it was too small, and some of the top homegrown musicians, like Etta James, moved elsewhere to journey to stardom. Also, even as it was thriving, urban redevelopment schemes were underway that razed much of the area, relocating many residents and destroying quite a few local businesses. And while San Francisco wasn’t as rampantly prejudiced as many US cities, even in its heyday, musicians and residents suffered blatant discrimination in obtaining work and housing. This is also covered in the text and some photos, serving as a sober record of how an ethnic enclave can be weakened and in some ways decimated by insensitive government policies. Read more about the book in my story after it was published, based on an interview with the authors.

14. Let’s Stomp!: American Music That Made British Beat 1954-1967, by Peter Checksfield (peterchecksfield.com). Peter Checksfield’s been cranking out valuable reference books covering pre-1980 (and especially 1960s) British rock over the past couple of years, with volumes documenting the TV/movie/promo films of British ‘60s rockers, the Beatles, and the glam era. This goes into different territory, listing more than 2000 American songs that were covered by British artists between, as the subtitle says, 1954 and 1967. The original versions, and all the UK cover versions Checksfield could find, are documented with original release information. The UK covers of specific songs include not just the first or best-known ones, but all of them, even if there were nearly a dozen (as there were, for instance, for some Chuck Berry compositions).

It’s not just a catalog-like volume of lists. Each of the covers is briefly but vividly described and evaluated, with stars awarded to the one Checksfield judges the best. When a cover is clearly based on a version that’s not the original, the likely actual recording that served as an inspiration is noted. When a song that’s been retitled from the original, or adapted from the original even if it bears different songwriting credits (not too rare an occurrence, alas), that’s noted too. Room is made for some artists from other countries who were based in the UK, like the Walker Brothers, P.J. Proby, and the Bee Gees (born in the UK but based in Australia for the first few years of their recording career). The lists of covers get into some really obscure recordings, including non-UK-only releases and even some versions that only circulate unofficially, or as video performances.

Checksfield is pretty generous in his assessment of the quality of many of the covers—more generous than I would be, in many instances. That’s not such a big deal, however, since his descriptions of the sounds are pretty accurate, and his designations of favorites usually on the money. The volume also makes it plain that, as much as British Invasion groups from the Beatles on down were rightfully hailed for digging deep into obscure US recordings for much of their repertoire, that had been happening with UK artists going back to the mid-‘50s.

His documentation made me aware of some obscure British ‘60s releases (including anthologies of BBC and live recordings) I’d never been aware of. It also made me aware of many original versions I’d not only never been aware of, but never suspected. To take just two examples, I’d always figured Herman’s Hermits “The Man with a Cigar” to be an attempt by someone to drag them into more sophisticated lyrics, not realizing it was a 1963 soul single by Lew Courtney. Simon Dupree’s “Kites,” a 1967 psychedelic hit, turns out to have first been done by the Rooftop Singers, of all people.

If you want to pick on such a mammoth work for occasional omissions, there are a few. The Small Faces’ cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Baby Don’t You Do It” is listed, but not the ones by Scotland’s finest ‘60s group, the Poets, or the Who (who didn’t release theirs at the time, but whose 1964 demo version came out on the expanded Odds and Sods CD). Nor is the Kinks’ 1967 BBC cover of Spider John Koerner’s “Good Luck Child” (which they retitled “Good Luck Charm”). Some artists who began overseas but relocated to the UK aren’t covered, most notably the Easybeats. And though early 1963 Rolling Stones demos (all cover versions) are noted as unreleased, actually they did officially come out on the 80-track version of the 2012 GRRR! compilation. These are tiny flaws, however, in a valuable reference work, and maybe can be corrected in an updated edition. 

15. Looking to Get Lost: Adventures in Music & Writing, by Peter Guralnick (Little, Brown). Guralnick is one of the pre-eminent writers on American roots music, most notably via his collections Feel Like Going Home and Lost Highway; his southern soul history Sweet Soul Music; and biographies of Elvis Presley and Sam Phillips. Like Feel Like Going Home and Lost Highway, this is a collection of essays and articles, most on prominent musicians like Joe Tex, Lonnie Mack, Delbert McClinton, Tammy Wynette, Chuck Berry, Solomon Burke, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Howlin’ Wolf. There are also a few pieces that go outside his usual format, including an interview with Eric Clapton; stories on (non-music) writers Lee Smith and Henry Green; and a couple essays going into his personal and family history. There are also portraits of key non-recording stars like songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller; Presley manager Colonel Tom Parker; and blues songwriter Willie Dixon. Most of these draw upon first-person interviews with the subjects, with whom he often hung out at recording sessions, offices, concerts, and such while gathering material.

Guralnick radiates such decency and sincere passion that I’m not eager to supplement that summary with some criticisms. But his portraits are often overzealous in their championship of heroic qualities in these men and women’s lives and art. This enthusiasm also spills over into the how the stories are written, with extraneous asides and breathlessly long sentences. From his report on sitting in on sessions for Maine country singer Dick Curless’s final album in the mid-1990s: “But it was his own quiet certitude most of all that established the mood that quickly took hold and convinced us unquestionably (though I must admit, the question still lingers in my mind, did Dick himself need any convincing?) that we had all set off on a spiritual journey, a journey that was likely to lead to exaltation and grace if we were simply willing to commit ourselves to it in our own way, with or without explicit belief.” I don’t think I could have gotten that worked up even if I’d sat in on the sessions for the Doors’ first album.

This has plenty of info and insights on some major (and minor, as most would classify Curless) figures in blues, rock’n’roll, soul, and country music. Feel Like Going Home and Lost Highway are more focused and more stylistically restrained, though hardly unenthusiastic. That makes them better reads for me, even though I don’t share his passion for all of the musicians he celebrates.

16. A New Day Yesterday: UK Progressive Rock & the 1970s, by Mike Barnes (Omnibus). At nearly 600 pages, this is a hefty history of a major rock genre that has never before been honored with such a comprehensive book. It’s not so much a straight chronological history, however, as it is centered around chapters on specific UK prog acts, most of them well known. Yes, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Genesis, Jethro Tull, Mike Oldfield, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer are obvious suspects, and a lot of the more cultish but prominent ones are covered too (Soft Machine, Van Der Graaf Generator, Gong, Henry Cow, Caravan). There are also sections on prog festivals, its coverage in the rock press, drug use and fashion among prog musicians and fans, and prog’s relationship with British folk-rock, among other sub-topics. 

The book’s chief asset is the fresh research, as Barnes did first-hand interviews with many of the musicians, including a lot of the stars as well as the lesser known figures. However, the separate chapters on numerous artists does mean that none of them are documented in extreme depth, and some represented elsewhere by comprehensive books devoted solely to a specific act. Personally I would have liked more description and analysis of the interrelationships between different prog groups and movements, and how the huge genre as a whole grew and morphed over the course of about a decade. Also maybe more in-depth Q&A interviews, of which there are only a few: the one with Sonja Kristina of Curved Air is not only extremely interesting, it’s my favorite part of the book. On the whole, of course this will have info (and knowledgeable perspective from the author) that will be valued by any prog rock enthusiast. Many would have wanted more (or sometimes less) coverage of specific favorites, but it’s hard to get a book published that runs more than 600 pages, and such broader coverage would have made that necessary.

17. Have a Cigar! The Memoir of the Man Behind Pink Floyd, T. Rex, the Jam, and George Michael, by Bryan Morrison (Quiller). The title is overly grandiose: Bryan Morrison was indeed involved in the business side of all of those acts, but sometimes for a short while, and more on the publishing/booking side than the personal managerial one. Written in the early 1990s, this was shelved when Morrison didn’t like how it had been rewritten by a publisher. Ten years after his 2008 death, it was edited by Barry Johnston and, with a few explanatory notes, issued in 2020. Boring technical note: it has a 2019 publication date, but certainly wasn’t available for purchase until 2020, hence its inclusion on this list.

This is a quick, breezy, and fairly entertaining read. It’s almost like an entertainment world equivalent to the O Lucky Man! film in how Morrison bounced from project to project (not always in the music business), often finding great success, and sometimes going bankrupt or nearly dying. There are amusing, if sometimes depressing, stories of the inside machinations of the rock world, whether it’s an unhinged Syd Barrett biting Morrison’s hand to the bone; Roger Waters dispassionately firing Morrison as Pink Floyd approached ‘70s stardom; and Paul Weller blowing the Jam’s chance for US success by dismissing a chance for an interview with a row of high-powered American media to talk with fans. Although the Pretty Things are not cited in the book’s subtitle, they were a vital stepping stone to Morrison’s career as the first band whose affairs he handled (as their co-manager in their early years).

This isn’t all that long (about 220 pages with a good share of blank chapter-dividing pages), and there’s a sense that Morrison could have said a lot more about his clients, who also included (at various stages) Robin Gibb, Keith West, and Wham! There’s also a feeling of impersonal distance from the music, though his enthusiasm does sometimes surface, and not always like you’d expect: he unreservedly hails Barrett’s pair of cult solo albums as classics, and accurately notes that “the songs he had written were wonderful and spoke of simplicity.” And in common with the autobiographies of numerous music business moguls, he gives equal treatment to a wide circle of artists that no reader will like equally: there really isn’t too much overlap between Syd Barrett and George Michael fans, for instance. Then there’s the issue of how he devotes quite a bit of space to non-musical endeavors – his investments in the fashion and design world, and his passion for polo – that rock fans might not want to bother with. It’s a volume for British rock specialists, particularly those with a bent for the kind of emerging underground rocks Morrison somehow tended to work with, though he didn’t seem like too much of a cultural radical himself.

18. Peter and the Wolves, by Adele Bertei (Smog Veil). Originally published in 2013 in a limited edition of 200, this slim memoir is now more widely available in a revised version. It’s slim because, although Bertei has had a long career in music (most famously with the Contortions), film, and writing, this focuses almost wholly on her experiences with Peter Laughner in the mid-1970s as she began to seriously pursue music. The subject of a recent box set that was also issued by Smog Veil, Laughner is one of rock history’s foremost examples of a talented musician, singer, and songwriter who didn’t reach his potential, with barely any released recordings before his death in his mid-twenties in 1977. Bertei mixes memories of her own artistic awakenings as she emerged from a troubled adolescence with her experiences with Laughner, who was kind of a mentor to her when they were roommates in Cleveland. 

In some ways this was an exciting time to be around Laughner and the Cleveland underground rock scene, as he was a key member of Rocket from the Tombs and early Pere Ubu with David Thomas. Laughner did much to encourage her entry into the world of professional musicianship and increase her knowledge of rock music in general. At the same time, he was prey to the demons of substance abuse and rock and roll excess as much as any dissolute superstar, though without the accompanying commercial success and widespread recognition. It’s disheartening to read not only tales of his reckless behavior (some involving guns), but also how he sabotaged his prospects in numerous musical projects, almost as if he had a fear of success even on an underground level.

Bertei celebrates his qualities, but doesn’t shirk from detailing the sordid and tragic aspects of his life, although she transcended these to make her mark on the New York underground. It’s a worthwhile account, illustrated with some vintage photos, but a frustrating one, as it reads like the first part of what should be a full memoir. Bertei notes in the acknowledgements that this was originally meant as part one of a lengthier memoir in progress, and one hopes she completes that in the future. You can read my interview with Bertei about the book here.

19. It Ain’t Heavy, It’s My Story: My Life in the Hollies, by Bobby Elliott (Omnibus). The memoir by the Hollies’ drummer doesn’t make this list on its literary merit. So be warned: unless you’re a big fan of the Hollies, you won’t be interested. And even if you are a pretty big fan of the Hollies, like I am, you’ll likely find it a pretty matter-of-fact and dry read. Even considering the large print, there’s surprisingly little of high interest in this 320-page book, often told in a “then this happened, then that happened” manner. Surprises are few, among them his story of how Paul McCartney tried to get him to join Wings, or running across Pretty Things drummer Viv Prince in a London gutter. But there’s a shortage of commentary on songs, recording sessions, or just what set Elliott’s fine, distinctive drumming apart from his contemporaries; he does express his admiration for jazz, but there aren’t many specific examples of how it was applied to the Hollies’ pop-rock. Nor is there much reflection on the personal and musical dynamics of the group, though there’s some insight into what drove Graham Nash to leave in the late 1960s, and lead singer Allan Clarke’s mercurial comings and goings in the ‘70s.

There’s enough in the way of musical and touring tidbits to keep you going if you’re looking for more info on the Hollies, who still don’t have a good book dedicated to their career. And, thankfully, the post-‘70s years, when they’ve pretty much been a nostalgia act, are dealt with in just a few pages. But I think the average British Invasion fan, and even some serious Hollies fans, are going to be disappointed. You want a good memoir by a top British drummer who emerged in the mid-‘60s? There were two, actually, in 2018: Jim McCarty’s Nobody Told Me: My Life with the Yardbirds, Renaissance & Other Stories, and Kenney Jones’s Let the Good Times Roll: The Autobiography.

20. Do You Feel Like I Do? A Memoir, by Peter Frampton with Alan Light (Hachette). Kind of like I wrote about the Elton John book in the 2019 section of this list, I’m interested enough in Frampton’s career to pick up a copy of his memoir from the library, though even a little less of a general fan of Frampton’s music. Certainly I don’t have to hear Frampton Comes Alive! again. But remember he did have a professional history that predated that monster by about a decade, including stints in the Herd (who had some late-‘60s UK pop success without breaking the US) and Humble Pie. And his mid-‘70s megastardom is sort of interesting from a sociological point of view, if not extremely so from a musical one.

To bring up the Elton John parallel again, Frampton’s autobiography is similarly likable and for the most part highly readable, though it runs out of more and more steam the farther it gets from the 1970s. In accordance with my personal tastes, the most interesting parts are the early ones, especially his memories of being sort of shepherded into pop-rock stardom with the Herd’s early songwriters/managers, and working with Steve Marriott in Humble Pie. He leaves the impression he never cared too much about stardom and wasn’t enthused by attempts to exploit his looks to gain that, prioritizing his guitar playing and songwriting. That makes it seem that Frampton Comes Alive! was almost an accident that he regrets, though the details of how the big hits were written and how that got expanded into a double LP from its intended single disc here. So are the details about various financial business troubles that have hindered him (especially with ex-manager Dee Anthony), as well as some illnesses and struggles with substance abuse.

The final chapters, like many celebrity memoirs (including, again, Elton John’s), get into steadily less compelling collaborations, tribute/concept projects, comeback tours, resolution of family conflicts, and such. Still, he retains a humble authorial voice, even as a recent rare illness is making it harder and harder for him to continue performing. Interesting trivial note: he turned down a chance to join Grand Funk in the early 1970s, and an invitation to join the Who in the 1980s.

21. Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar, by Oliver Craske (Hachette). Craske collaborated with Shankar on the sitar player’s 1997 autobiography, but this is an entirely separate volume that’s a straight biography. It’s an extremely thorough one, running more than 600 pages, and draws on interviews with more than a hundred people, including Shankar and many of his closest family members and professional associates. The detail of his compositions, recordings, film scores, and performances can be technical, using a lot of terms in Indian music that may be unfamiliar to readers not versed in the form, though the terminology is explained in a brief preface. The intensity of the documentation might be hard to wade through for some more casual Shankar fans and listeners.

But if you’re willing to spend more time than is the norm for a biography, a lot of material focuses on the more human side of his life and art. Musically, this includes coverage of his wide influences on and interactions with the international music world, George Harrison and the Byrds foremost among them. Less known, but also discussed at even-handed length, are his numerous fans in the jazz world (notably John Coltrane) and other genres, including occasional collaborator Philip Glass. As for his personal life, his numerous romantic liaisons are examined, as are careers of his offspring, especially daughters Norah Jones and Anoushka Shankar. Whatever your knowledge of his music, the sheer scope of Ravi Shankar’s life will impress you, from international tours as a boy to an astonishing number of recordings, famous concerts, and meetings with celebrities and heads of state throughout the world. In addition to interviews, the author was also able to access a great deal of archival material that helped clear up the essentials on Shankar’s background and rise to global prominence.

22. Leonard Cohen: Untold Stories: The Early Years, by Michael Posner (Simon & Schuster). Posner interviewed more than 500 people for a mammoth, three-volume Leonard Cohen oral history. This first volume covers his life until the end of 1970, from his formative years in Montreal through his rise as a poet and novelist and, starting around 1966, his transition to acclaimed singer-songwriter. There are many stories in this 482-page book, some from close associates like producer John Simon, others from friends and peers who’ve seldom or never had their memories published.

There’s a ton of content here. But it reminds you how, unless you’re devoted to collecting as much info as you can, biographies that distill such interviews into part of a focus on the essentials usually make for better reading. Some of the tales are mundane, and there’s a lot of repetition of similar sentiments, particularly those testifying to Cohen’s gracious character, formidable intellect, and prolific womanizing. For those such as myself interested in his music above all else, the sections about his early songwriting, records, and concerts are by far the most interesting.

Even some of the stories that are known to serious Cohen fans will be pretty obscure to many readers. Those include attempts by little known folkies the Stormy Clovers and Penny Lang to do the earliest versions of “Suzanne,” or the several songs he’s known or rumored to have written about Nico. But for a better and more readable overview of Cohen’s career and most important achievements – even considering that only a part of it covers the period documented in this book — I’d recommend the best biography of the singer, Sylvie Simmons’s I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen.

23. Ted Templeman: A Platinum Producer’s Life in Music, by Ted Templeman as told to Greg Renoff (ECW Press). Templeman had a very successful career as a producer in the 1970s and 1980s, gaining his biggest hits with the Doobie Brothers and Van Halen. That means I’m not nearly as interested in the subject as I am for almost any other book on this list, but it has its value, even for someone like me who’s not a fan of those acts. First, Templeman had close ties to some artists who do interest me. He co-produced Van Morrison’s Tupelo Honey and Saint Dominic’s Preview as he was starting his production career. Before that, he was in sunshine pop group Harpers Bizarre, and even before that, Santa Cruz group the Tikis, who recorded for San Francisco’s Autumn label in the mid-1960s. His stories of those times hold my attention more than the other sections, and his memories of Morrison will be sought by any Van fan, especially as he’s more positive about the singer than many of his associates are, though he acknowledges and entertainingly details Morrison’s eccentricities.

But the post-Van parts, which take up more than half the book, are for the most part worthwhile too. Even if you’re not particularly big on the Doobies and Van Halen, you get a lot of behind-the scenes stories about how their familiar hits were made. More notably, Templeman has a lot of insights into the shifting role of a producer, combining psychology, respect, authority, technical know-how, commercial considerations, and more in a complicated juggling act. There are also illuminating stories about the inner dynamics of Warner Brothers Records, for whom Templeman worked (and also served as a vice president). He was a close friend and associate of Lenny Waronker from the time Waronker worked with Harpers Bizarre, and there’s plenty of commentary about power brokers at Warners like Waronker and Mo Ostin. Like many artists, Templeman fell victim to substance abuse; unlike many memoirs, this doesn’t spend a whole lot of pages on it, or belabor the descent and recovery. At 460 pages, this is pretty long, but pretty well written, with little extraneous material. There’s also some coverage of other artists he worked with (especially Nicolette Larson, Sammy Hagar, Carly Simon, and Montrose), though the ones mentioned earlier in this review take up the bulk of the text.

24. All My Yesterdays, by Steve Howe (Omnibus Press). The Yes guitarist’s memoir is thorough, detailing his career from his start in mid-‘60s British R&B bands through the psychedelic group Tomorrow, his peak ‘70s stardom with Yes, and post-Yes work with Asia, GTR, and others, along with his numerous solo projects. Thoroughness doesn’t always mean goodness, and this is the most erratic book on this list. When Howe focuses on how bands evolve and what their music meant to him, and throws in some reasonable human interest stories, there’s some good stuff about not only Yes, but also Tomorrow, the little known Tomorrow-Yes bridge Bodast, and some other acts. There’s a lot of nuts-and-bolts stuff about songwriting, song construction, and recording that might interest readers who are more fanatical about Yes more than they interest me, but that’s fair enough. There are also loads of details about his numerous guitars and associated equipment, and at that point even Yes-heads might get a little lost or uninterested.

It’s to be expected that the story, like so many rock autobiographies and biographies, gets less interesting after the commercial/artistic peak – in this case, after the 1970s Yes years (and, “yes,” their numerous reunions are covered too). But the last half or so of the book gets progressively rote, with whole paragraphs and pages that read like little more than lists of when and where tours took place, interspersed with a few memories of recording sessions and family occasions. Howe does unveil a reasonable sense of humor from time to time, especially when recounting the pitfalls and injustices of the music business. But a strong editorial hand would have really been useful in both condensing the information overload on his less interesting periods, and emphasizing stories and human perspective instead of raw data.

If you like Yes and at least some of Howe’s other work, you’ll find some facts and even insights you’ll appreciate, if much more so in the first half than the second. But even the biggest fans of the guitarist are likely to labor through at least a few of the parts. If you’re wondering whether there’s much dirt on Yes, he restrains himself from throwing much mud around, though it’s obvious he’s had major artistic and personal differences with Jon Anderson, Rick Wakeman, and Chris Squire.

25. Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over, by Nick Soulsby (Jawbone Press). Subtitled “a companion to the film by Beth B,” this is likely to be read by a lot of people before they can see the movie, which at this writing seems to have seldom been screened. It’s primarily an oral history of the no wave/punk/goth/all-around subversive singer, with comments from nearly a hundred people who’ve worked with, been intimate with, and/or been influenced by Lunch, as well as some from Lunch herself. Thurston Moore, Exene Cervenka, Beth B, and members of her bands going back to the late ‘70s are among the contributors. If you’re not extremely familiar with her career, you might get a little lost by the procession through her dizzying assortment of projects; while her music gets the most attention, there’s also coverage of her spoken word performances, film appearances, and books. The author helps by providing an introduction and brief links summarizing the activities documented by each chapter, as well as a timeline/filmography/bibliography/discography.

While this is often fairly interesting, the sections on her early work, when she was among the most notorious no wave performers in bands like Teenage Jesus the Jerks, 8-Eyed Spy, and 13.13, are the most valuable. Like many career overviews, it gets less gripping as her activities scatter into numerous other short-lived bands and side projects – though virtually all her bands were short-lived, and she always had many projects going at once. There are plenty of details on her confrontational performances; their reflection of early abuse she suffered, and her use of sexuality as a means of empowerment; and the diligent work ethic she brings to tackling many avenues of expression.

There’s enough repetition of similar praise for her achievements and character that some editing would have been advisable. Some behavior that would be considered gross or nasty by many or most outside of the deep underground is hailed as groundbreaking use of art to combat systemic abuse and oppression. While plenty of people would question that, they’re not the most likely ones to read a book like this. Looking for odd trivia? Here are a couple bits: she played Herman’s Hermits a lot in her early years as a recording artist (and cited “No Milk Today” as a favorite song), and manager Tom Garretson says “we tried to get her signed to Madonna’s label but I think Madonna felt someone like Lydia was threatening to her. I do know the demo wound up on the coffee table at Madonna’s home because a mutual friend saw it there.”

26. London, Reign Over Me: How England’s Capital Built Classic Rock, by Stephen Tow (Rowman & Littlefield). This book’s objective is to detail how London rock of the ‘60s innovated and changed over the course of the decade, from blues and R&B to mod, psychedelia, folk-rock, and progressive rock. It’s okay as a breezy overview of that hugely important scene, though it doesn’t cover every notable act or subgenre, and isn’t long enough to go into any particular artist or aspect in huge depth. I’m a little puzzled as to the aim and value of a not-so-big volume that might serve as a part of an introduction to someone who doesn’t know much about British ‘60s rock. Some acts who didn’t originate in London are covered; the more pop-oriented ones don’t get much coverage, and nor do many women artists; and the focus is often on sweeping summations of their music, rather than the specific London connections. Its main strength are the wealth of quotes—a good many first-hand, and some of the others from obscure period sources—from many of the musicians on the front lines. If you’re pretty familiar with ‘60s British rock, you won’t learn much else.

27. Untamed Youth: The Ultimate Visual Guide to 50s & 60s Rock & Pop at the Movies, by Peter Checksfield (peterchecksfield.com). The industrious Peter Checksfield has self-published five music reference books in the last couple years. There’s little text in this one, which is more like an illustrated list of all the pre-1970 musical appearances of rock (and some pop) acts in films that he could find. That means theatrical films (including some shorts), not including TV appearances and promo films, which he’s documented in other books. This isn’t something you’ll sit down and read (or if you do, it won’t take more than an hour or so), as it only notes the title, year, country, and songs performed (whether live or mimed) in each appearance, as well as whether it’s in color or black and white. Each entry has a screenshot of the performer in the film.

This is useful as a reference book, and although the hugely famous items like the Beatles’ films are covered, there are many entries for obscure performers and obscure performances. I’d guess not many fans, for instance, know Amen Corner were in 1969’s Scream and Scream Again, or that the Beau Brummels did “Wait and See” in 1966’s Wild Wild Winter, or that the Zephyrs were actually in a couple movies. Still, it would have been good to have even brief descriptions/critiques of the musical performances/sequences, as Checksfield has offered in other books.

The following books came out in 2019, but I didn’t read them until 2020:

1. How Sweet It Is: A Songwriter’s Reflections on Music, Motown, and the Mystery of the Muse, by Lamont Dozier with Scott B. Bomar (BMG). Dozier was, as is well known, one-third of the Holland-Dozier-Holland songwriting/production team (with brothers Eddie and Brian Holland) that generated many hits for Motown in the mid-1960s. As it happens, the Holland brothers also published a memoir in 2019 (see review farther down the list). Dozier’s book is better, as it’s more straightforward, and more clearly explains how the partnership worked and his role in it—at least, as he sees it. There are also detailed memories of how numerous Motown classics were written, like “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “Heat Wave,” “How Sweet It Is” (which Dozier actually wanted to record himself before being pressured to get a hit for Marvin Gaye), “Reach Out I’ll Be There,” and quite a few others. Some stories aren’t too familiar, like Dozier’s revelation that Supremes vocals were taken off “Baby Don’t You Do It” before Marvin Gaye put his vocal down on the track for a hit. He didn’t really have to do it, but Dozier also puts paragraphs in which he highlights points/suggestions about songwriting in bold.

That’s the heart of the book, but there’s also a fair amount about how he and the Hollands continued their partnership at the Hot Wax/Invictus labels in the late 1960s and early 1970s, though that didn’t end well as they went in different business and musical directions. The complicated circumstances leading to their acrimonious departure from Motown are still complicated as relayed here, but at least they’re less oblique and more concrete than they are when depicted in the Hollands’ book. The text steadily declines in interest as it shifts to Dozier’s solo recording career in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and his periodic successes with different partners to the present day. In common with many a musical memoir, there’s a little too much in the way of childhood memories too. But the most interesting passages of Dozier’s life and career take appropriate precedence, and it’s a worthwhile entry in the volumes of books about or by Motown figureheads.

2. Echoes, by Glenn Phillips (Snow Star Publishing). Subtitled “The Hampton Grease Band, My Life, My Music and How I Stopped Having Panic Attacks,” Phillips’s memoir covers one of the longest-lived cult rock careers. The Atlanta guitarist’s discography spans half a century, from his barely-out-of-his-teens stint with the Hampton Grease Band in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s through many solo albums. He’s been on Virgin Records, SST Records, and Columbia, as well as putting out his own discs. Through it all, he’s never been too close to the mainstream. The Hampton Grease Band’s sole album (a double LP) wasn’t just goofy avant-rock, but also allegedly one of the lowest-selling records in Columbia’s history. His solo projects have gotten their share of critical acclaim, but have never sold in great numbers or been too commercial.

In itself that makes for an interesting story. But for a rock memoir, Echoes has an uncommonly good balance between musical and personal experiences, with a concise focus missing from many rock autobiographies. His personal life could be harrowing, including alcoholic parents, stormy affairs with unstable women, and the suicide of his father, committed on the father’s fiftieth birthday. As a musician, he’s run the gamut from recording for a young Richard Branson to gluing together his own self-pressed LPs—and those experiences took place pretty close to each other. If you’re especially interested in the Hampton Grease Band’s career, that takes up a good third or so of the book, a section funny for its coverage of their stranger-than-fiction shows and recording decisions. It’s also sad for the portraits of eccentrically impossible-to-deal-with lead singer Bruce Hampton (who blocked release of archival live recordings through his obstreperousness) and guitarist Harold Kelling (who died after a long descent into alcoholism). Phillips maintains a level-headed mix of humor and serious self-examination, with an entertaining knack for retelling a stack of improbable anecdotes.

3. Good Lovin’: My Life As a Rascal, by Gene Cornish with Stephen Miller (genecornish.com). Of all the items on this list, this is the one that flew the most under the radar, attracting no reviews or even online comments that I saw. Cornish was guitarist in the Rascals, and the least well known of the four. Still, he’s the only one of the still-surviving quartet to have written a memoir. This 530-page book covers his whole career, and isn’t as lengthy a read as that figure might indicate, since the print is large and the margins are wide.

There’s a lot of detail in this autobiography, from his days in scuffling pre-Rascals bands in Rochester, New York through the half-dozen years or so he was in the Rascals, his obscure post-Rascals groups, and their reunions. The style is fairly informal and anecdotal, and has neat nuggets like how Atlantic Records recorded the group live to get a feel for how they should sound in the studio prior to their first LP (does that tape still exist?); why they turned down a chance to record with Phil Spector; Atlantic’s unwillingness to issue “Groovin’” and “People Got to Be Free” as singles, thinking they were too risky and too much of a departure from their sound; and the other Rascals’ initial fury at Cornish for approving the version of “Good Lovin’” that became their first huge hit.

There’s also a lot of love and criticism of his fellow Rascals – not so much drummer Dino Danelli, but certainly Felix Cavaliere, which didn’t stop Cavaliere from writing a kind introduction. Singer Eddie Brigati also comes in for his share of knocks for leaving the group and not committing to some reunions, though Cornish can also be tough on himself, acknowledging his decades-long descent into drug abuse after his time in the Rascals ended.

Cornish’s post-Rascals decades were rough indeed, finding him at times scrounging for food and a roof over his head. The last third or so of the book is largely devoted to those struggles and his continual Rascals reunions or semi-reunions, and can make for a drawn-out downer, though many rock memoirs follow that path. And like many other rock memoirs, this has some mistakes in rock history chronology that numerous knowledgeable readers (not just Rascals fanatics) will spot, along with a good number of typos that could have been more carefully checked. However, overall these are minor gremlins in a pretty comprehensive overview that any Rascals fan will be interested to read.

4. Come and Get These Memories: The Genius of Holland-Dozier-Holland Motown’s Incomparable Songwriters, by Eddie and Brian Holland with Dave Thompson (Omnibus). The Hollands were two-thirds of the songwriting/production team responsible for more Motown hits than any other, especially for the Supremes, Four Tops, and Martha & the Vandellas. This is more oral history than standard memoir, with extensive quotes from both brothers linked by some narrative text written in their dual voice. The bulk of this appropriately focuses on their early-to-mid-‘60s work for Motown, though their activities at the label where they subsequently worked, Invictus, are also covered. There’s a good share of interesting stories about the writing of many of their famous songs, the division of their production/composing duties, and the inner machinery of the Motown operation.

It’s not quite the knockout book for which some Motown/soul fans might be hoping. There’s too much time spent on their family upbringing, and Dozier’s role, while not neglected, certainly gets a lot less space than the Hollands’. He didn’t participate in this project, which might have something to do with some business and creative disputes they’ve had, though these took place after Motown. The trio’s split from Motown in the late ‘60s—a move that neither the trio nor the label never fully recovered from—gets a few pages, but is described in roundabout terms that make it difficult to determine exactly what was being disputed. It does seem like Eddie was the main man from the trio negotiating with Berry Gordy, and though he says “it could have been solved with one phone call,” it didn’t help that he didn’t read his lawyer’s 32-page response to one crucial round until years later. More revelatory are Brian’s recollections of a mid-‘60s relationship with Diana Ross, and how that affected what he was writing for the Supremes.

5. Some People Are Crazy: The John Martyn Story, by John Neil Munro (Polygon). Martyn is one of those guys whose records I never find as interesting to listen to as reviews of them lead me to expect. He’s also one of those guys whose story interests me more than his music, in part because he was part of a British folk-rock scene that’s a big interest of mine, though I don’t like him nearly as much as Nick Drake, Donovan, or Sandy Denny, to name just a few of his peers. This is a reasonably interesting bio of the folk-rock (with a lot of jazz, some blues, some reggae, and some electronic experimentation) singer-songwriter-guitarist, originally published in 2007, and revised/updated in 2019. It follows his career from his Scottish youth through his early albums (some with first wife Beverley Martyn), his peak of critical acclaim with early-to-mid-‘70s albums, his increasingly fitful post-‘70s work, and his death in 2009 after massive health problems (including an amputated leg and obesity). Plenty of people who knew and worked with him were interviewed, along with Martyn himself.

Tellingly, a few figures who worked with him extremely closely did not speak about Martyn, whose volatile personality put plenty of colleagues off. Most notable among the absentees are Joe Boyd, who produced early Martyn records and found him distasteful to work with; Chris Blackwell, who as head of Island Records gave Martyn the chance to record many albums, though the singer was never a big seller; and Beverley Martyn, who had a rocky marriage with John, and felt he curtailed her own musical career (though the author contests whether this was definitely the case). There’s plenty of info about his recordings and his prickly persona, and friendships with Nick Drake and Paul Kossoff (both of whom died tragically young), though occasionally the text rambles and doesn’t fully fill in some gaps in his arc. His alcoholism and rough treatment of some of his romantic partners are not overlooked, though criticism of his flaws is a little restrained, and his diverse musical talents enthusiastically celebrated. It leaves the impression that many of us would go out of our way to avoid this mercurial man who was capable of great nastiness, as documented in Beverley Martyn’s memoir.

6. Me, by Elton John (Henry Holt). I’m not a big Elton John fan, which explains why it took me more than a year to get around to checking out a memoir by a major rock star whose career started in the late ‘60s out of the library. Still, I acknowledge this is a pretty interesting, well-written autobiography. He has a good British self-deprecating sense of humor about himself and the frequent absurdities of the music business, going all the way back to his days as a backup pianist for Long John Baldry in Bluesology. He’s unapologetic about his love for some aspects of celebrity excess, like shopping sprees and camp clothing. That’s balanced, somewhat, by detailed recounts of his drug and relationship problems, and his contributions to numerous charitable causes. 

If you’re more interested in his pre-late-‘70s work—the part that’s gained him by far the most critical respect—than anything else, know that this covers all phases of his career fairly evenly, the post-mid-‘70s eras taking up more than half the book. As for whether this follows the common trail of rise to success followed by cocaine addition, rehab, fallow artistic periods, hobnobbing with non-musical celebrities, and redemption of sorts through family love, this book’s not an exception. If you’re a record nerd who wants details about his early tours and albums, there are a fair amount of those, though some well known songs are barely or not discussed. His long personal/professional association with lyricist Bernie Taupin is covered in depth, however, and most readers with a casual or greater interest in Elton John will find at least some sections worth reading, even if you skim some of the rest.

7. The Beatles: Tell Me What You See, by Peter Checksfield (peterchecksfield.com). Subtitled “the ultimate guide to John Paul George & Ringo on TV and video,” this lists all known footage of musical performances (live and mimed) by the Beatles, both as a group and solo performers. It follows the same format as his two previous useful reference books, Channeling the Beat! (for UK ‘60s pop on TV) and Look Wot They Dun! (for UK glam rock on TV). All dates, sources, and locations (when known) are listed, along with brief descriptions, as well as notes as to whether the footage survives. It’s a handy primer for what you can view, including promo and feature films as well as TV appearances. Note that the solo years take up a much larger part of the book—about 200 of its 280 pages—than the section devoted to the Beatles as a group. In fact, Paul McCartney’s section alone takes up a little more than a hundred pages. Through no fault of the author, that means some parts—namely the later solo years—are a lot less interesting than others, namely the Beatles and the early solo films.

8. The Last Four Years, by Annette Walter-Lax in conversation with Spencer Brown (self-published). Walter-Lax was Keith Moon’s girlfriend the last four years of his life, and with him when he died in his sleep in September 1978. This isn’t a conventional memoir, although it recounts their time together in detail. The first part, taking up almost the first half of the 200-page book, has quotes from recent interviews Spencer Brown did with her, linked by Brown’s narrative text. The rest of the book offers Q&As from the interviews covering various topics, like their trips abroad and particularly troublesome incidents in which Moon destroyed hotel rooms or caused general havoc. There was a lot of that when you were around Moon, maybe more so in his final years than during his first decade with the Who. In his case, it was yet more excessive than most downward booze-and-drug-fueled spirals. In common with many another celebrity memoir, it becomes evident he isn’t going to get his act together. It also becomes evident that his partner, for whatever reasons, won’t leave him in spite of his abusive behavior – not physical abuse, but having sex with another woman in front of you certainly qualifies among the worst forms of abuse.

This is a quicker read than its 200-page length might set your gears for, as there are pages with a lot of white space, and sections of black-and-white photos from their relationship (reproduced in mediocre quality). There’s also a fair amount of repetition of similar sentiments and overlap between what’s covered in the first part and the Q&As. The point is made, in fairly interesting but depression fashion, that if anything Moon’s descent was worse than has usually been reported, and he might well have died earlier from his recklessness. It also notes that his physical and mental problems were affecting his musicianship, and that the couple’s extended stay in Hollywood (in which Moon hoped to enter films, and recorded a poor solo album) was pretty disastrous both in terms of professional self-sabotage and the burning of bridges even with fellow hard-partying rock buddies.

9. Harlem 69: The Future of Soul, by Stuart Cosgrove (Polygon). Like Cosgrove’s earlier books Detroit 67 and Memphis 68, this mixes coverage of a city’s soul scene in a particular year with the social upheavals affecting the region’s music and overall lives. Like those books, it takes a kind of haphazard path, alternating music-focused passages with extended segments on the sociocultural backdrop. There’s not a great deal of overall continuity, making it feel like an episodic tour of Harlem’s musical and cultural communities that doesn’t stop too long in one place. The musical sections cover figures like King Curtis, Betty Davis, the Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron, and Donny Hathaway; styles like boogaloo; and events like the Harlem Summer Cultural Festival concert series and Jimi Hendrix’s September benefit show in the area. The social segments discuss the growth of the drug trade, the Black Panthers, and gay life. The frequent connections drawn between Harlem soul of the late-‘60s and later developments in black music like hip-hop and New Jack swing are sometimes strained, and there are several pages on Arthur Conley although he does not seem to ever have been based in Harlem. The book’s best treated as something to dip into on a chapter-by-chapter basis, the one on the Harlem Summer Cultural Festival being the best and most focused.

For most of 2020, media’s been in, if not a lockdown, a slowdown. We’re not going to movie theaters, and access to book stores, record stores, and libraries is limited, if there’s access at all. Film directors, record producers, and publishers can’t work as quickly and efficiently as normal. This naturally has led to expectations that less product would be released, perhaps much less than in a typical year.

Surprisingly, this hasn’t turned out to be the case at all, more so for music history films than music history books and reissue albums. Actually this list is longer than any other best-of I’ve compiled for the film category. There have been rock documentaries of all sorts, from superstars to cult figures, on regional scenes, magazines, and TV shows.

In part this testifies to the continued, and likely growing, interest in music history. For this year in particular, it reflects the growing use of “virtual” cinema sites that enable viewers to easily stream movies upon or shortly after release. In some ways, it’s become easier to see the movies than it would if we’d tried to catch them in theaters, especially for specialized ones that might seldom or never play in your town. Maybe there will be a slowdown next year, when the difficulties in researching and filming movies at a time when there aren’t public gatherings catch up with the release schedule. But for now, there’s lots to see.

As long as this list is, it doesn’t cover everything I would like to have seen in 2020. I don’t have HBO, so I didn’t see the new Bee Gees documentary. Could I have gone over someone’s house who has HBO to see it? Not safely, not now. Released near the end of the year, a DVD set of the complete episodes of the early-‘60s British folk TV series Hullabaloo would not have arrived through the mail from the UK before January 1 even if I’d ordered it on the day it came out.

There are also several documentaries that I’m willing to check out of the library, but whose subjects don’t interest me enough to pay to watch. These include films on Tiny Tim, the Go-Go’s, and Shane MacGowan, as well as Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President. I’ll add any 2020 documentaries that I don’t see until 2021, but find worthwhile, as a supplement to my 2021 best-of list. If it’s thought my failure to spend as much time and money as I can to see everything I can before year’s end makes me unqualified to publish a best-of list, I eagerly—even hungrily—accept your rebuke.

Since my picks are often not in line with what the majority of critics select, it’s refreshing to lead off this list with a documentary that was extremely well received in every review I saw, and by everyone I know who watched it. If there was a list that combined picks from all other best-of lists in this category, my guess is that it would be #1 there too.

1. Laurel Canyon. In two parts adding up to two-and-a-half-hours, this justly praised documentary takes a pretty comprehensive look at the Laurel Canyon rock scene from the mid-‘60s through the early ‘70s. All of the major acts associated with the Los Angeles neighborhood are covered, including the Byrds, Love, Buffalo Springfield, the Doors, the Mamas & the Papas, Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Linda Ronstadt, and the Eagles. So are a few that aren’t as major (Alice Cooper, Little Feat, the Monkees), and Frank Zappa might have been given more time, although he’s in there. Unlike many, maybe most, such films, this doesn’t use on-screen recent interviews, with the exception of those for photographers Henry Diltz and Nurit Wilde. Instead, interviews with almost all of the key musicians are voiced over vintage footage and photos, some of them obviously conducted many years ago (including remarks by late figures like Jim Morrison and Love’s Bryan MacLean). A few non-musicians from the music industry are also heard from, like David Geffen, Jac Holzman, and radio DJ Jim Ladd.

There are many, many photos and clips excerpted in the film, some of which seem to have been rarely or never seen since first screened or broadcast. While much of the story will be familiar to fans who know a lot about this era of folk-rock, psychedelia, and singer-songwriters, the comments are relayed in an interesting and colorful manner. Some of the stories are not so familiar, like Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine” outtake making its way to the Byrds in part because some felt Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s harmony vocals made it unusable. There’s also Love guitarist Johnny Echols’s view that his group got Elektra to sign the Doors so they could get out of their contract with the label, only for that to backfire when they couldn’t leave Elektra, who put a lot of its resources into promoting the Doors.

The rapid blend and flow of clips and commentary is excellent, and this refreshingly avoids two overdone clichés of music history documentaries. First, there aren’t several introductory minutes of soundbites of numerous figures gushing over how great the subject of the film is. Second, there aren’t modern critics or post-‘70s musicians supplying unnecessary validations of why this subject is important and how we need to revere it. The documentary trusts the strength of its own content to let that speak for itself.

2. Creem: America’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll Magazine (Greenwich Entertainment). This packs a lot into its 75 minutes, with a fast pace that verges on the hyper at times, though some would contend that’s appropriate for a magazine that prided itself on living fast and hard. There are interviews with many of the key surviving figures, including editors Jaan Uhelszki (who worked on the film as writer and co-producer) and Dave Marsh, and Connie Kramer, wife of late Creem publisher Barry Kramer. There are lots of testimonials from rock musicians like Alice Cooper, Peter Wolf, and the MC5’s Wayne Kramer, and rock critics like Greil Marcus, Cameron Crowe, and Lenny Kaye. There’s even some grainy vintage black-and-white footage of staff (and a performance by Mitch Ryder’s group Detroit) at the early-‘70s Detroit offices. There are plenty of stories of the volatile relationships between key staffers like Kramer, Marsh, and the late Lester Bangs, who were all determined to have a fun and lively rock magazine, but often disagreed on how to do it.

Creem wasn’t all high times, and some of the seedier aspects of its history are addressed. Their offices, whether in Detroit or in the countryside, had a lot of squalor. Their humor, meant as provocative and tongue-in-cheek, often skirted the line of getting offensive. The opportunities it gave pioneering women rock journalists are appropriately celebrated at some length. So are the psychological difficulties that led Barry Kramer into drug abuse and death in 1981, when he was only in his late thirties. This movie can now be streamed for free in many regions, if you have an active library card, through kanopy.com.

3. Mr Soul! In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the public television program Soul! (exclamation mark included) presented not just soul music, but all kinds of African-American arts and social affairs. This documentary offers a valuable retrospective of this semi-forgotten, groundbreaking show, focusing on producer/host Ellis Haizlip. There are plenty of interviews with associates who worked on the program and artists who appeared on the show. The prime attraction, though, is the wealth of excerpts from vintage Soul! clips. This includes a mighty impressive roster of stars, lesser known but influential artists, and near unknowns. Here’s a partial list: Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight, Al Green, Ashford and Simpson, the Last Poets, Amiri Baraka, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, B.B. King, James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael, Kathleen Cleaver, Ossie Davis, and Ruby Dee. And  there’s room for some figures who haven’t been canonized as much, like Black Ivory and New Birth. 

It makes you wish there was a series devoted simply to highlights from the show that offered complete performances, especially since these have seldom been seen since they were aired. The fast-paced documentary does waver a bit in its focus, sometimes jumping around chronologically and between segments concentrating on the show and covering Haizlip’s life and personality. But overall it’s a highly worthwhile and entertaining look at a television production that should have greater recognition.

4. Zappa. This two-hour documentary of a major figure in twentieth-century (usually) rock music has a lot going for it. There’s a ton of rare footage from throughout his career, and even before his career in some family home movies, with excerpts (if brief ones) of things you’d never expect to see, like his wife help setting up the cover shoot for We’re Only In It for the Money. Frank Zappa is represented by excerpts from many filmed interviews going back half a century, some of which have rarely or, I’d guess, never been seen, especially the early ones. Some of his key collaborators are interviewed, including his late wife Gail and members of various Mothers of Invention/Zappa lineups, including Bunk Gardner, Ian Underwood, and Ruth Underwood. Several aspects of his work and music are covered, including some (not all) of his early psychedelic-period albums; his work in symphonic/non-rock composition; the “Valley Girl” hit, with vocals by his daughter Moon Unit; and his fight against censorship in the 1980s, which found him testifying articulately in Congress.

A two-hour documentary can’t encompass everything interesting and important about Zappa, of course, and some of his fans might be dismayed by what’s missing. Many of his key supporting musicians are mentioned only in passing or not at all, like singer Ray Collins and drummer Jimmy Carl Black, to name just a couple. There were so many in his groups that it would be hard to fit in the majority of them, but it’s hard to believe, for example, that Flo and Eddie wouldn’t have had something to say for a production like this. His very interesting Bizarre/Straight labels, which put out eclectic productions by other artists (often with direct assistance from Zappa), are barely noted, and his involvement in Captain Beefheart’s career not really explained. His manager Herb Cohen, a big part of his early years (and with whom he had major disputes), is entirely absent. His sole Top Ten album, Apostrophe, isn’t directly addressed. The list could fill several paragraphs; probably several pages, if Zappa fans more interested in his post-‘60s career than I am were writing this.

Rather than rag on the film for what it can’t cover unless it was a multi-part anthology, it’s better to enjoy its rather episodic journey through much of his career highlights, though the sections on his final appearances in the early ‘90s are drawn out. Note, by the way, that when I saw this through virtual streaming, some bonus footage played at the end, with a few rather unpleasantly unfunny minutes of backstage hijinx at the Whisky in the early ‘70s, and a workout by his band during the Apostrophe era. I don’t know if this will be showing as part of the presentation everywhere it streams, or will be in theaters, if/when it screens in those.

5. In My Own Time: A Portrait of Karen Dalton. Folk singer Dalton’s cult is avid but small, and her recorded output (with just two albums issued during her lifetime) sparse. The odds seemed against the construction of a good full-length documentary, but this film manages to beat those odds, making for an interesting view even for listeners like me who aren’t huge Dalton fans. Although she wasn’t filmed much, it turns out she was on camera more than you’d guess, and this includes some seldom seen footage of her in performance taken by German and French television. There are also what seem like they might be home movies or supplementary non-musical footage shot by those programs, and a good amount of vintage photos and shots of handwritten lyrics and journals (some of which are voiced by a woman other than Dalton for this documentary). While some of her close associates are gone or not represented, there are interesting interviews with a good number of people who knew or worked with her, including Peter Stampfel, Peter Walker, Dick Weissman (who played with John Phillips and Scott McKenzie in the Journeymen folk group), Michael Lang (who ran the label that issued her second album), her daughter, and her third husband.

Dalton had a troubled and in some ways tragic life, reflected to some degree in her sorrowful Billie Holiday-meets-folk-revival vocals (which are often heard on recordings used on the soundtrack). She wasn’t the most responsible mother; had serious substance abuse problems before dying of AIDS in her mid-fifties in 1993; and never got too far in her performing or recording career, despite moving from Oklahoma to New York and attracting attention and respect from some notable peers. Stampfel makes interesting observations that she seemed to expect audiences to be in thrall to her performances, and was taken aback when such reverence wasn’t always forthcoming. While there were occasional interactions with bigger names (she was briefly tried for a slot in the Journeymen but didn’t work out; she was close to Tim Hardin for a while and covered numerous songs of his; she opened for Santana on tour, though the match was ill-conceived), these didn’t result in major breaks. And she wrote little of her own material and wasn’t adaptable to the rock era and recording in a folk-rock style.

As a final stroke of bad fortune, a fire a quarter-century after her death destroyed her journals, as well as some tapes. Fortunately a lot of the archival material had been photographed by the filmmakers, and some of it can be seen in this worthwhile documentary.

6. Music, Money, Madness…Jimi Hendrix in Maui. How did Hendrix end up giving his second-to-last American concert to a few hundred hippies, for free, in the hills of Maui on July 30, 1970? It’s not an easy question to answer in just a couple sentences. This hour-and-a-half documentary does a good job in explaining the circumstances, especially as some of the key figures are long gone a half century later. But some are interviewed here, including bassist Billy Cox and several figures involved in the performance’s preservation, the concert’s staging, and the production of the movie for which some of the show was filmed, Rainbow Bridge. This is supplemented by archival interviews with drummer Mitch Mitchell and Rainbow Bridge director Chuck Wein, as well as quite a few clips from the concert itself.

Basically, Hendrix and his manager Mike Jeffery needed money to finish Jimi’s studio, Electric Lady. A complex deal was arranged where half a million dollars were secured from Reprise Records to finance a film to which Hendrix would create a soundtrack. The film, Rainbow Bridge, was a disastrous mix of amateurishly scripted (or non-scripted) hippie life and philosophizing, and Hendrix died before he could construct a soundtrack. Its one asset was the seventeen minutes of footage of Hendrix, Cox, and Mitchell performing the somewhat impromptu concert, in conditions so windy that huge pieces of foam had to be placed over the microphones.

Although a few people involved in Rainbow Bridge (notably Wein himself) speak positively about the film, most agree, in humorous detail, that the movie was both chaotically produced and a mammoth artistic failure. The movie’s poor reception and its aftermath, in which a deceptive album of unreleased material titled Rainbow Bridge (which didn’t include any recordings from the Maui concert) was assembled to capitalize on the film, are also covered. It’s amazing that a large company like Reprise (part of Warner Brothers) could be sort of suckered into the deal, so half- (or less) baked was the film’s story and setting. It makes for a good tale of hippie-era excess half a century later; in fact, it’s a good deal more entertaining than Rainbow Bridge itself.

Also valuable are the bonus features of all the existing 16mm color film from Hendrix’s two performances on Maui that day. These include some not used in Rainbow Bridge, though unfortunately the cameras weren’t running all the time and missed a good deal of the show. Indeed, sometimes they weren’t running all the way through some songs, and still photographs fill in some of these gaps.

This Blu-ray is packaged with a two-CD set, Live in Maui, which has recordings of both of the sets Hendrix played this day. It’s reviewed separately in my list of 2020 album reissues (to be published December 31).

7. Every Night’s a Saturday Night (MVD Visual). To be precise this documentary on saxophonist Bobby Keys came out in 2018, but it didn’t get on DVD until 2020, so here ‘tis on this list. Keys is most known for playing on numerous Rolling Stones records and often touring with them, though he also recorded/toured with Joe Cocker, George Harrison, John Lennon, Delaney & Bonnie, and many others. This is a little more low-budget and less slick than most of the films on this list, but that doesn’t really hurt because the list of people interviewed for the production is quite impressive. Besides quite a bit of storytelling from Keys himself (obviously filmed before his 2014 death), there are comments from Keith Richards, Mick Taylor (surprisingly as he’s seldom interviewed about his peak years), Charlie Watts, frequent musical partner Jim Price, Bobby Whitlock, Richard Perry, and numerous others. There’s some vintage footage from his stints with the Stones, Delaney & Bonnie, and Joe Ely, but the accent’s on the interviews, tracing his career from his teenage years in Lubbock through his times, some wild and crazy, with the Stones and others in the ‘70s. 

True, there’s little post-mid-‘70s coverage, though his firing and re-entry to the Rolling Stones entourage is noted. But almost all viewers are here for the years leading up to that, right? And here for the Stones stories above all, and they get more space than anything else, including quite a bit on the Exile in Main Street sessions in France. Keys makes the interesting observation that Jimmy Miller was a good producer for the Stones at this time as he knew when to voice his opinion, and when not to. The story of Keys filling up a bath with liquor to immerse himself in with a female friend is also here, if you want some of the sleaze. There’s also the back story of how he and Richards threw a television out a hotel window in Robert Frank’s 1972 tour documentary (the impression is it was staged and kind of forced). The clip in which he takes a solo with Joe Ely is too long, but there’s not much else to gripe about in a documentary that’s both entertaining and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

8. Michael Des Barres: Who Do You Want Me to Be? Michael Des Barres has been around as both an actor (since childhood) and rock singer (since the early ‘70s) for more than half a century without breaking through to true stardom. Since he went through a bunch of mediocre glam/hard/mainstream rock bands, you might wonder whether he’s worth an 80-minute documentary. But he is, and not just because he interacted with quite a few more well known figures, from Led Zeppelin and Duran Duran to Don Johnson and second wife Pamela Des Barres. Interviews with Des Barres get the bulk of the screen time, and he’s an interesting, drolly funny storyteller who doesn’t make unwarranted grand claims for his talents and achievements. The bumpy road includes a weird childhood mixing aristocratic boarding school education with one schizophrenic parent and another in jail; a minor supporting role in the hit movie To Sir with Love; his early-’70s stint as lead singer with glammish rockers Silverhead, probably his most well known band; Detective, who were signed to Led Zeppelin’s label; a brief time as singer with Power Station; Chequered Past, with Steve Jones and members of Blondie; and numerous bit and supporting roles in movies and TV series, most famously a recurring role on MacGyver.

Quite a few others from Des Barres’s past and present were also interviewed, including his three wives (most notably Pamela Des Barres); John Taylor from Duran Duran/Power Station; members of Silverhead; Blondie’s Nigel Harrison, who was in both Silverhead and Chequered Past; Steve Jones; director Allison Anders; Don Johnson; and music business executive/manager Danny Goldberg. Clips from TV/movies/performances spanning decades are sampled. Des Barres does not shirk from recounting various troubles and flaws, including alcoholism (though he’s been sober since the early ‘80s), excessive/irresponsible womanizing, and a brief time when he was a sort of rent man to rich Hollywood women to pay bills, observing that it wasn’t all that much different than what you had to do to make a living as a rock musician.

The actual music and songs of his various projects aren’t discussed in depth, and frankly, they’re not of such value they deserve that kind of analysis. (Drug dealers, he notes, were the fan base of one of his groups.) As one of the other talking heads aptly comments, Des Barres could easily transition to acting since he was so often acting the part of a rock star, even if he never was one. He’s in his early seventies now, but his engaging, entertaining, candid presence in this documentary might be his greatest role. It might be a while if ever before you can see this in theaters, but it’s available to rent in the expanding world of online virtual cinema; youtube charges the reasonable price of $3.99.

9. Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band (Magnolia). This documentary – technically a 2019 production, although I’m not aware of it screening before 2020 – is indeed focused on Robertson’s take on the Band. He’s the main interview subject and storyteller, though there are also interviews, both recent and archival, with the other guys in the Band; producer John Simon; Robertson’s ex-wife; Ronnie Hawkins; and numerous other Band associates. While I’m not much of a Band fan, it’s interesting and well done, with plenty of footage (some rarely or never seen, I believe), piles of vintage pictures, and lots of attention paid to their roots as backing bands for both Hawkins and Bob Dylan. Robertson can be a bit deliberate as he spins his tales, but he speaks well and gives the other guys in the Band credit.

Not enough credit, however, for some Band fans and critics. After its release, this drew some criticism—some of it harsh—for being too Robbie-centric, though the film’s title doesn’t make any secret of that. More seriously, some feel he was whitewashing his role in the group’s troubled descent. In particular, drummer Levon Helm was vocal at points after the Band’s breakup over what he felt was unfair apportionment of the group’s songwriting credits, which were dominated by Robertson. This issue isn’t ignored in the film, though the claims aren’t given much weight. The Band’s diminishing critical and commercial success after their first two albums isn’t examined, the years rushing by between 1970 and The Last Waltz. So there are significant gaps, but—as with most documentaries—there are books to fill those in and give a fuller perspective. What this does cover is worth seeing if you have a serious interest in rock history.

10. The Shadows at Sixty (BBC Four). Hour-long TV documentaries that aren’t always easily accessible after their broadcast (especially if you don’t live in the region of their origin) usually aren’t candidates for high rankings on year-end best-of lists. 2020 was an unusual year, though, and I think critics can be forgiven for including some such TV productions in their selections. And viewers can be forgiven for searching them out on the Internet, through whatever channels they can be seen.

One such deal is this hour-long overview of the Shadows, who were by far the most popular and influential British rock group before the Beatles. In Britain, that is (and much of the rest of the world); in the US, they never had a hit, and are still relatively unknown. Their long run of instrumental hits in the early ‘60s, however, were vastly important to inspiring many aspiring British guitarists. And with their sort of Ventures-with-a-twang sound, the records did have their moody, mysterious appeal, though there were limitations of what you could do within that format.

While there’s nothing extraordinary about this documentary, it’s a solid enough look at their career. There are many excerpts of vintage Shadows performances, and while they’re exceedingly brief, it could be argued that it might be somewhat tough going to see many full-length versions at once. There are also recent, fairly informative interviews with lead guitarist Hank Marvin, rhythm guitarist Bruce Welch, and drummer Brian Bennett, as well as singer Cliff Richard, the early British rock superstar whom the Shadows often backed on record, onstage, and in movies.

If you’re real knowledgeable about their work, there are things to pick on. The contributions of bassist Jet Harris, whose enormously thick sound was innovative in his own right, aren’t detailed. Ian Samwell, who was in Richard’s earlier backup group and wrote some of his and the Shadows’ early material (including the classic initial Richard hit “Move It”), isn’t a presence. But it’s still a useful survey of the group, and it’s good that the survivors were interviewed while there was still time to capture their recollections.

11. The Story of Ready Steady Go! (BBC Four). Technically speaking, there was a 2019 date on the end credits of this hour-long documentary on the mid-‘60s British rock music TV program Ready Steady Go! But to my knowledge, it wasn’t seen until it aired on BBC Four in March 2020. So it makes the cut here, even considering it’s not so easy to watch if you’re not in the UK (though there have been ways with today’s technology). It’s a no-frills, punchy rundown of this legendary pop music program, which presented everyone from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones down, and was a crucial outlet for exposure at a time when BBC radio didn’t allocate much of its airtime to rock music.

Besides exciting (if very short) excerpts of appearances by the Beatles, Stones, Who, Them, Lulu, Dusty Springfield, Martha & the Vandellas, Stevie Wonder, and others, there are also recent interviews with several artists and Ready Steady Go! staff. These include Donovan, Manfred Mann singer Paul Jones, Georgie Fame, Gerry Marsden, and Chris Farlowe, as well as some of the show’s dancers, program producer Vicki Wickham, and Michael Lindsay-Hogg (who directed some of the show’s episodes). The show’s demise is covered near the end, and largely attributed to the ascendance of the rival program Top of the Pops, which mystifies me as Ready Steady Go! was clearly the better and more exciting series; interviewees feel Top of the Pops’ use of charts to determine the content was a crucial factor.

12. White Riot. (Film Movement). The UK organization Rock Against Racism was formed in 1976 to combat racism and the National Front with musical concerts and activism. It makes for an interesting documentary subject that echoes all too strongly in what’s happening in society in 2020. That doesn’t mean the film’s without its flaws, although it’s worthwhile viewing. It’s strongest in its interviewers with several key members of the original RAR, as it’s abbreviated, including founder Reg Saunders. There’s also a good deal of vintage footage of performers with ties to RAR, including X-Ray Spex, the Clash, Steel Pulse, and Tom Robinson. Non-musical film clips of National Front rallies and leaders remain horrifying more than forty years later, and there are some recent interviews with musicians from the time (including Robinson, the Clash’s Topper Headon, the Selecter’s Pauline Black, and Steel Pulse’s David Hinds), although these aren’t too numerous or extensive. Period photos and graphics (including some from RAR’s fanzine, Temporary Hoarding) add to the visuals, which are most impressive in the final few minutes, which focus on a 1978 RAR march/concert (with the Clash, Robinson, and Steel Pulse) that drew about 100,000. Clips of the largely Asian band punk band Alien Kulture, and comments from the band’s Pervez Bilgrami, give welcome voice to an ethnic group not often heard from in punk/new wave histories.

Still, this movie doesn’t entirely convey the extent of RAR’s reach and influence, especially on the musical side. There’s as much coverage of the National Front and general late-‘70s UK racism as there is of the music, and while those topics are important, it’s hard to gauge how many acts participated and to what degree. The interesting tension between Sham 69’s following (which included some listeners with right-wing leanings) and the usual anti-racist stance of punk acts is noted. But the section in which there’s unrest at a Sham 69 concert with black reggae act Misty in Roots doesn’t make the details of the ruckus too clear, though Sham 69 singer Jimmy Pursey did his part to throw in his lot with RAR by participating in the big 1978 concert. The film doesn’t cover what happened to RAR after the 1970s, though its effect was felt in election defeats of the National Front.

There are books that cover RAR with some depth, but the modest 84-minute running time of this documentary could have been extended for a fuller view. The pace is somewhat herky-jerky, too, alternating slower, deliberate sections with frantic late-‘70s clips. There’s a strange vogue for framing some vintage clips inside a TV set in recent music documentaries, and White Riot does this sometimes, although I’d much prefer seeing that footage fill the entire screen.

13. Meeting the Beatles in India. In early 1968, Canadian Paul Saltzman, then in his mid-twenties, went to Rishikesh, India to learn about transcendental meditation at the ashram of the Maharishi. He didn’t know that the Beatles were there when he was admitted, and for a week, he learned about TM alongside the group and their companions. He also took quite a few color photos of the Beatles, which were published many years later in his book The Beatles in Rishikesh. His film Meeting the Beatles in India is based on those photos and experiences, mixing his memories and pictures with a recent visit to Rishikesh and interviews with a few others who were there.

The movie isn’t entirely devoted to the Beatles, with some commentary about meditation and its benefits, and some of Saltzman’s personal history. While it can get sentimental at times, it’s well done and includes some first-hand interviews with insiders who haven’t often been seen on film speaking about the Beatles. These include George Harrison’s first wife, Pattie Boyd; Pattie’s sister Jenny, who was also in Rishikesh; the flute player on “The Inner Light” (who doesn’t remember too much); Lewis Lapham, the only journalist who was able to cover the story within the ashram; and, most surprisingly, Rikki Cooke, the real-life model for “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill.” Top Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn (who accompanied Saltzman on his recent return visit to Rishikesh) supplies some context, and there’s some seldom seen footage of the Beatles in Rishikesh and Harrison working with Indian musicians.

14. Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind (Lionsgate). In essential respects, this is a typical competent documentary, mixing lots of excerpts of vintage clips with contemporary interviews with Lightfoot and numerous associates/admirers. For those (like me) who are frustrated by overviews that jump back and forth in time, you might find the structure a little exasperating, though not so much that it interferes with basic enjoyment of the film. Instead of progressing chronologically, it’s more episodic, with segments devoted to his songwriting, guitar playing, Canadian identity, rural upbringing, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” and other topics. That still leaves enough for viewers to grasp his basic history, though the torrents of praise from peers past and present (including unlikely people with no strong connection to Lightfoot’s career, like Geddy Lee and Alec Baldwin) are a little excessive even by the standards of admiring documentaries.

There are so many bits (if usually very brief) of vintage clips going back to before his rise to mid-‘60s fame that you wish a compilation of them could have been made separately, since many of them seem rarely if ever seen since they were first made or broadcast. (You can also throw in a brief snippet of Ian & Sylvia performing “You Were on My Mind,” the first ‘60s clip I’ve seen of them doing their most famous song.) Some of the interviewees do have close ties to Lightfoot, including Ian Tyson, Sylvia Tyson, and Warner Brothers executive Lenny Waronker; others at least have high name recognition and were around when Lightfoot rose to fame, like Ronnie Hawkins, Randy Bachman, and Anne Murray. Some difficult aspects of his life are dealt with, including his alcoholism and relationship with Cathy Smith (later girlfriend of John Belushi). For more music historian types that might be interested in things like his time under Albert Grossman’s management (referred to fleetingly) and early recordings for United Artists Records, you’ll have to go to the printed record. Lightfoot himself comes off as unsurprisingly self-effacing, if willing to talk to some degree about his craft and experiences, and his lack of productivity since the ‘70s means there’s little about his post-‘70s work and recordings. This movie can now be streamed for free in many regions, if you have an active library card, through kanopy.com.

15. Suzi Q. (Cadiz Music). Suzi Quatro had a string of big glam-poppish hits in the UK in the mid-1970s after moving there from her native Detroit, but never broke through as a star in the US. Maybe that opening sentence is considered unnecessarily elementary by many rock fans, but actually she remains more known in her own country for her role as Leather Tuscadero in Happy Days than for her records. This documentary is a brisk overview of her career, built around extensive interviews with Quatro and plenty of vintage film clips. Also interviewed are a couple of her sisters (who were in bands with Quatro before she went solo) and key associates like ex-husband Len Tuckey (who played lead guitar in her band during her prime) and Mike Chapman (who co-produced and co-wrote her big hits with Nicky Chinn). A bunch, perhaps too many, musicians past and present briefly testify to her importance. I’m not big on the presentation of some film clips on TVs that take up a small part of the screen, though for the most part these are used in standard full-screen fashion.

The film, and Quatro herself, address a couple subjects that cloud what for the most part was a success story. Her decision to go solo after producer Mickie Most singled her out as the part of a band with her sisters worth pursuing caused resentment within her family, which to some degree still seems to linger. As to why she didn’t break through in the US while scoring lots of big hits in the UK, Australia, and numerous other countries, the blame is placed on under-promotion and being ahead of her time as a tough frontwoman. The sameness of much her material is not cited, but that isn’t to be expected from a documentary whose purpose is to celebrate and elevate her legacy, not to criticize it. Also covered are her Happy Days years and ventures into theatrical roles in later years, though this isn’t as interesting as the core of the movie, which deals with her rise and ‘70s peak. 

16. Chuck Berry. There aren’t any other rock documentaries of the past year or two that are such a mish-mash of the interesting and the mediocre. Its strongest points, though they’re not incredibly strong, are interviews with Berry’s immediate family, including the woman he was married to for almost seventy years. There are also interviews with a few insiders, notably Marshall Chess of Chess Records and (via archival footage) longtime pianist/accompanist Johnnie Johnson and Berry himself. There are also archive clips of Berry in performance from the 1950s through the end of his life, though these are less numerous and briefer than you’d hope.

The biggest pitfalls are the ridiculously hokey reenactments of major incidents in his life, which are more numerous and lengthier than you’d wish. Some of the real-life connections of the talking heads to Berry are tenuous at best, and Gene Simmons’s comments are featured way too much. You get an overview of his music (though not too much specifically about most of his major hits), and his problems with the law and womanizing are discussed, though in a chronologically nonsequential fashion that avoids getting too critical or going too deep. Those with substantial knowledge of Berry’s life—which was quite interesting, musically and otherwise—won’t learn too much, though it gives an outline of his times and achievements for viewers who aren’t as familiar with him.

17. Herb Alpert…Is(Herb Alpert Mod). Twice this film has a soundbite proclaiming Alpert outsold the Beatles in 1965 and 1966; a promo blurb for the movie plays it a little safer, saying he outsold them in 1966. I don’t think 1965 has a case, but that could be true for 1966, more because Alpert released more LPs that year than because he truly surpassed the Beatles in popularity. This documentary doesn’t go so far as to claim he’s the more significant artist, but is certainly a flattering portrait of the genial trumpeter/record executive. It’s in the standard format for such retrospectives of living legends: recent interviews with Alpert and close associates like Lou Adler and A&M Records co-founder Jerry Moss; vintage clips of Alpert and the Tijuana Brass (one of whom offers just a few comments); and a fair amount of attention to the A&M label he co-founded with Moss, with comments from some A&M artists like Sergio Mendes and Sting.

These are the film’s the most interesting sections, even for someone like me who doesn’t highly rate his music. But then there are the other standard parts of such documentaries that aren’t as worthwhile. Those include testimonies from people who didn’t have a direct role in Alpert’s career, like Billy Bob Thornton (who notes, oddly, in one soundbite, that Alpert’s “like butter”); too much repetition of general praise on what a great guy and important figure Herb is; gushing, sentimental comments from his wife, who sang with Mendes; and quite a bit of time on his painting and sculptures, which have been much of his focus in the past few decades since he retreated from the front lines of the music business. As for the A&M sequences, it might be too much to expect coverage of some of the more intriguing acts who were on the label in their early careers (like Captain Beefheart and the Strawbs). But it should have at least been noted that they shrewdly picked up US distribution for numerous major UK acts in the late 1960s, like Procol Harum, Joe Cocker, Free, Fairport Convention, and T. Rex. 

18. Vinyl Nation. There have been a few documentaries about vinyl records, usually focusing on what vinyl discs mean to collectors and the resurgence of interest in manufacturing and buying them. Some of Vinyl Nation covers similar territory to previous such films. There are testaments to how great LPs are from fans, label owners, and record store employees; how vinyl is more tactile, has more graphics, and more personal associations; and how record-buying builds community. There are also some more behind-the-scenes aspects of the vinyl revival with visits to facilities where the records are manufactured. This hour and a half movie differs most from others I’ve seen on the subject with its willingness to explore some areas that are less oft-traveled, and even a bit controversial. These include the substantial environmental impact of manufacturing vinyl records; the much higher cost of LPs, both compared to new CDs and to how they used to cost in the twentieth century; and how much, or even whether, the oft-touted better sound quality of analog vs. digital product really exists. Also, a much higher percentage of people of color and women are interviewed than they usually are for this kind of project. 

19. The Ventures: Stars on Guitars (Vision Films). The Ventures were one of the most popular instrumental rock groups of all time—the most popular by some measures. They weren’t the most colorful guys, and while that doesn’t mean they can’t be the basis of a good documentary, this one fails in a key respect. It has very little actual music by the Ventures. There are brief archival clips, but even those have only very brief bites of sound from actual Ventures records or performances on the soundtrack. The 90-minute film is based around extensive interviews with the sole surviving Venture of the core quartet from their vintage years, guitarist Don Wilson. Some other Ventures are heard, briefly, talking in older clips, and plenty of other musicians weigh in with praise and observations, from the famous (John Fogerty and the MC5’s Wayne Kramer) to the not-so-famous and unknown. 

Much time’s given to explaining how the group’s most distinctive sounds and techniques were perfected. Their actual recordings don’t get nearly as much examination, though most of their big hits are discussed. So is the sheer, mind-boggling quantity of their recorded output; their numerous theme albums, and the artwork used to illustrate them; and their phenomenal fame in Japan, where (according to Wilson) they outsold the Beatles two to one. At least it isn’t claimed that they were therefore twice as good and significant. This has its interest for Ventures fans, but it’s kind of a slight overall production, seriously handicapped by the absence of Ventures music, even if almost anyone interested enough to watch this knows what it sounds like. You can stream it for free, by the way, on hoopladigital.com, if you have an active library card with one of the many libraries that grants you access to the site. 

20. Rolling Stone: Life and Death of Brian Jones (MVD). While this documentary lays out the basics of Jones’s life (and death), really this can’t be considered a top-flight overview of his very interesting career, let alone one that contains revelations. Its good points? It does have interviews with a fair number of people who knew or worked with him, including Pretty Things Dick Taylor and Phil May, photographer Gered Mankowitz, Stash Klossowski, and Volker Schlöndorff (director of the movie Jones scored, A Degree of Murder, starring Brian’s girlfriend Anita Pallenberg). It also has some rare photos and silent footage (some dating back to his teenage years), some of which I’d never seen, and I’ve seen a lot of early Jones/Rolling Stones.

You would think, however, that if there’s one thing a Brian Jones documentary should have, it’s footage—with sound—of him playing with the Rolling Stones. There’s none here—my guess it was deemed too expensive to license, or permission was denied. Recently recorded incidental Stonesy music on the soundtrack doesn’t compensate for this. There are also no interviews with the surviving Stones or crucial associates Andrew Oldham and Marianne Faithfull, or girlfriends who bore Jones’s sons, like Linda Lawrence. Sure those must be hard to secure, but it does mean this doesn’t include the closest perspectives of Brian’s life and death. There are numerous rock documentaries in recent years that stretch to cover an important subject without the resources to produce a satisfactory result. This is one of them, though Jones fans like myself might want to check it out for what it does manage to present.

The following documentaries came out in 2019, but I did not see them until 2020:

1. The Gift: The Journey of Johnny Cash. With the same director (Thom Zinny) who worked on Elvis Presley: The Searcher a few years ago, this documentary uses a similar approach. It doesn’t go over Cash’s career point by point, though it offers a basic tour. It doesn’t have talking heads, instead using voiceovers from vintage Cash interviews and many people who knew and/or admired him, including some superstars like Bruce Springsteen who didn’t have a notable role in his story. There are many photos and vintage film clips, stretching from the 1950s to shortly before his death. Attention’s paid to both his music and up-and-down personal life, including some family and pill problems.

If you’re looking for thorough details on all of his notable songs and recordings, you might be at least a little disappointed. “I Walk the Line” isn’t heard; “A Boy Named Sue” isn’t even mentioned; and his time in the Highwaymen is absent. It’s kind of an episodic path through his times, from growing up in poverty in Arkansas through his rise to stardom at Sun Records, his 1960s concept albums, his hit prison LPs, his TV show, his religious beliefs, and his comeback in late life with Rick Rubin. It’s worthwhile and fairly illuminating, but I’d say it’s worth more than 95 minutes. Give it two hours, and maybe some more interesting details could have fit in—like, say, a clip of and discussion of “I Walk the Line,” his first big hit, and one of his best. You can see this documentary for free on youtube, as part of that site’s YouTube Originals series.

2. Olompali: A Hippie Odyssey. While only tangentially related to rock history, the Chosen Family commune in Rancho Olompali in Marin County in the late 1960s makes for an interesting story. Its connection to the rock scene was principally through the Grateful Dead. And it wasn’t even too strong – the Dead rehearsed there a few times, lived on the grounds for a while in 1966 (before the commune moved in), and, maybe most famously, took the picture on the back cover of Aoxomoxoa there. The communal lifestyle, however, was growing in tandem with the explosion of psychedelic music and culture, and should be of interest to most people interested in that period of musical history.

The Chosen Family was started in 1968 by disillusioned ex-businessman Don McCoy, who could afford to support an extended family through an inheritance. The good part of the year or so more than half a dozen families and others lived there was mostly in the beginning, where group decisions were made, children played together and were home-schooled, and lots of cooperative fun was had. There were warning signs soon enough: kids were given drugs at a very young age, and McCoy went to India, where he found a guru while leadership in his absence grew haphazard. Then it got worse – much worse. Hell’s Angels gang-raped one of the commune’s women. There were two big drug busts. Worst of all, two young children drowned when they fell in the swimming pool without supervision. Not even the main mansion burning to the ground shortly afterward (and fortunately not killing anyone) was as bad as that.

The documentary has first-hand interviews with many of the residents, including the now-middle-aged children. McCoy died in 2004, but is well represented from numerous extracts from an oral history he taped. Plenty of photos from the period also illuminate a tale whose value shouldn’t be dismissed as a morality tale of how the hippie dream was doomed and inherently hopeless. There were a lot of noble goals and some happy times associated with its inception, even if its fall from grace was pretty horrible, and due in part to inexcusable irresponsibility.

3. Creating Woodstock (Cinema Libre Studio). Just like Woodstock’s 50^th anniversary generated several books and a 38-CD box set, so did it generate more than one documentary. Focusing more on the genesis and staging of the event than the music, this covers some of the same ground as the superior PBS/American Experience production Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation (reviewed in my 2019 best-of documentary list). But even with the fair amount of overlap, this is worth seeing if you want some more information and stories, even if some of it’s retold with different words.

There’s little music heard, and the footage of both the performers and audience is variable, the emphasis being on interviews with the organizers. Some of them were among the principal figures, like John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Michael Lang, and Artie Kornfeld; others, like talent coordinator Bill Belmont, aren’t heard from as often. Just a few musicians are here too (Arlo Guthrie, Leslie West, and Richie Havens), along with a couple guys from a band who played off the main stage, Quarry. Some of the interviews were obviously done years, sometime many years, before the 2019 release date of this film; indeed, more than half a dozen of them are no longer alive. Some of the details of stage construction, crowd management logistics, and the like get dry, though they’re evened out by a few behind-the-scenes anecdotes about the performers. A half dozen brief extras from a few of the interviews are included on the DVD.

4. San Francisco’s First and Only Rock ‘N’ Roll Movie: Crime 1978 (Superior Viaduct). In 1978, Larry Larson filmed early San Francisco punk band Crime in the city’s top punk venue, Mabuhay Gardens. About forty years later, the footage was used as the basis of this 35-minute film, edited and directed by Jon Bastian. It’s a brief piece, really more a concert movie than a documentary, and like much early punk footage, has imperfect sound that makes it hard to hear the lyrics. Still, it’s valuable for the historic record, capturing the group in color at the Mabuhay’s apex. It has better image quality than most early punk films do; there’s a little footage of the group filmed separately in an outdoors location; and there are very brief interview snippets with the band that are more statements of attitude than informational observations. It’s been issued on DVD with a vinyl double seven-inch record of the soundtrack.