Gene Lees

Lees was a Canadian music critic, biographer, lyricist, and above all a journalist. His writing, even when ostensibly about music, had the gravitas of anthology. He was writing about human history, and his insight connected everything in the background to everything in the foreground up to and including a protagonist.

In the book You Can't Steal A Gift, published in 2001 he connected broadly the post WWII American rural diaspora and the effect of brutal racism on the careers of Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Milt Jackson and Nat King Cole. Effectively it's one of the finest histories of bebop you will ever read. The book spans two decades of history but never becomes impersonal for his subjects or himself. His words have a certain economy. He dedicated the first chapter to his own roots in both music, and journalism. He visited Paris and realized the magnitude of WWII; he wrote:

"At last it became real to me that men really did from time to time dress alike , go out and, on the orders from someone unseen, obediently kill each other."

Lees died in 2010 obscure to most popular fiction readers but well-known among jazz heads.

Piece Of My Heart

The book is a fine read, even in the company of other rock n' roll history books. But the cover is strikingly gaudy. The photo is iconic but low resolution and the conflict between the low-contrast gray image and the pink and yellow spine and borders remains genuinely unpleasant. But the price was right as they say.

David Dalton was a founding editor of Rolling Stone and perhaps more in a position to rick rock history than many others. But even among Rolling Stone alumni he stands alone for his real journalistic accomplishments. He won the Columbia School of Journalism Award and the Ralph J. Gleason Best Rock Book of the Year. (Though neither was for this book) But he's written 24 books, you can't win an award every time.

But this book stands out because he write it twice and the result is more pancake than pastiche to paraphrase Adam Sternbergh. In 1972 Dalton published Janis, a mishmash of transcribed interview fragments, photographs, sheet music, lyrics, prose, and Dalton's own Rolling Stone Clippings... Piece Of My Heart takes that core and remixes it with additional content including some of his other writings on Joplin and some bits he nicked from Antonin Artaud. The resulting text is a bit bloated and even less coherent than the original. But oddly Dalton's occasional self-indulgent florid phrases function well in their context, and are not diminished the the scale and scope of the book. In particular...

"There are some for whom the night holds no terrors. Among them all these figures―criminals, insomniacs, whores, alcoholics, the inconsolable, the dreamers, and lovers―Janis was the queen."

It serves to remind us that greats like Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, and Nick Tosches once wrote for that once iconic and now hopelessly out of touch magazine.

The Third Policeman

The Third Policeman is a novel by Irish writer Brian O'Nolan under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien around 1940. It was published posthumously in 1967. Reams of criticism have been written about it's religious symbolism, its debatable status as the first "post-modern" novel. (I really don't care for that phrase. Everything currently novel is post-modern until it's passé.)  

Regardless, the circular timeline wooed critics then and it remains influential now. This status, overshadows O'Nolan's clever use of language, which is what remains more notable about his actual writing when you're done being impressed at how clever he is.

The protagonist dies early in the book. But withholding that information is key to the end of the book. In Chapter 2, to avoid being his own plot spoiler, he deftly describes death as below:

"It was some change that came upon me or upon the room, indescribably subtle, yet momentous. ineffable. It was as if the daylight had changed with unnatural suddenness, as if the temperature of the evening had altered greatly in an instant or as if the air had become twice as rare or twice as dense as it had been in the winking of an eye; perhaps all of these and other things happened together for all my senses were bewildered all at once and could give me no explanation."