ALWAYS MAGIC IN THE AIR by Ken Emerson (Viking, 2005). One of the tales Emerson retells in this tome on the songwriters of the Brill Building era is the one about David Crosby storming out of sessions for The Notorious Byrd Brothers when his bandmates preferred cutting Goffin & King’s “Goin’ Back” to “Triad,” his homage to a ménage a trois. “Crosby was not alone in considering Goffin & King unhip,” Emerson writes. “Why record hack work when you could do your own thing? As the ’60s wore on, King and Goffin [and, by extension, all professional songwriters] fought a losing battle against this mind-set.” King, would, of course, come up to Cros’ lofty standards by the early ’70s, once she had crossed the room to sit, with him and the winning team, mellow and meditative on the Persian rug, passing the acoustic and pulling personal statements out of herself. Which is exactly why Always Magic in the Air needed to be written: to set the record straight about the early- and mid-’60s music biz and, frankly, to give teams like G&K, Barry-Greenwich, Mann-Weil and the rest official and overdue credit. History, I suppose, will judge whether the post-Beatles, I-write-my-own-material artists necessarily bested the pros (consider “Triad,” say, or Eric Burdon’s “Sky Pilot”). At any rate, the book is an informative, if not wild-styled, read. The triumph and sadness of composer Doc Pomus is touching, the stories behind the songs often intriguing (nice to learn that the bridge in Bacharach-David’s “Close to You” rips the melody from Goffin-King’s Bobby Vee hit “Run to Him”) and the flavor of the era effectively conveyed. When Emerson asks Jerry Leiber why he thinks Don Kirshner and George Goldner were the best song-pickers of their day, Leiber replies, “They both had the soul, temperament and minds of 12-year-old girls.” One of the book’s choicer images is of the middle-aged Goldner, the cigar-chomping gambler who discovered Frankie Lymon and put up the money for Leiber & Stoller’s Red Bird label, getting so excited in the recording studio when he heard what sounded like a hit that he’d bellow “That’s a smash!,” then hurl a chair at the control-booth wall. They don’t make record men like that any more. – G.S. JAMES WOLCOTT. It was 22 years ago today that we struck up the band for James Wolcott. The first Catalog of Cool called his "Medium Cool" (which ran in theVillage Voice) the most vital, entertaining TV column going. Wolcott's still around, though his beat's widened to cover all the popular arts and media culture. The sword remains sharp, owing to frequent use in (mostly)Vanity Fair. In a recent London Review of Books, he whacked one new novel as "the latest voyage to the bottom of the sink, a journey of self-discovery jinxed by dense fog and treacherous syntax." In the New Republic he heaped praise on a novelist who "doesn't ape the Norman Mailer of Advertisements for Myself and flaunt his ambition like a Popeye tattoo, muscling aside the competition to clear more legroom for himself in the first-class section." But there are lots of silver-penned devils out there plying their trade with wit and sandpaper. What makes Wolcott's writing so valuable is that he recognizes and celebrates true style and originality in others. Which explains his frequent "Medium Cool" encomiums to Sammy Maudlin, William B and the rest of SCTV and a recent V.F. column on Cary Grant. When Grant won a lifetime-achievement Academy Award (1970), writes Wolcott, "he brushed away tears at the lectern but didn't wallow in the adulation, as stars now do... clutching their trophies, spasming with sobs and psychodramatic tremors, and blurting out thanks to everyone from God to their dermatologist. He made a brief, eloquent, gracious thank-you and strolled offstage, his silhouette as cleanly scissored as it had been 40 years earlier. True elegance leaves no trace." -G.S. Due soon: Attack Poodles and Other Mutants: The Looting of the News in a Time of Terror . BEYOND GABBA-GABBA HEY: WHEN MUSIC WORDS UP It struck me as immensely funny and really cool when the Ramones printed the lyrics to all the songs on the inner sleeve of their debut LP. Seeing every chorus and couplet of "I Don't Wanna Walk Around With You" and "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue" spelled out seemed to both send up mid-'70s convention (I'm An Artist, And My Words Are Important) and reinforce, for this band, the primacy of what wild-eyed anti-rock evangelist Jack Van Impe used to decry as "the beat! the beat! the beat!" Who cares what a good rock 'n' roll band is singing about? Sound trumps content most days on this playing field, doesn't it? Affirmative. But what about those occasions when well-placed words actually compliment or enhance the melody and rhythm? We're not talking the epistles of Sting here, or the angry, post-Alannis gal pack who really want to tell us a thing or two about abusive relationships. We're talking about, near the apex of wedded word-music bliss, the poetry of the blues and the work of B. Dylan. Both are the subject of recent books. Randy Poe's Squeeze My Lemon (Hal Leonard, 2003) collects hundreds of classic and obscure blues lyrics and lays 'em out on the page by topic (birth, death, day- parts, "Guns, Knives, Razors & A Two-By-Four"). The book functions as a reference guide and a wake-up call that can send you straight to your CD collection for intensive followup. Dig R&B laureate Big Joe Turner on the charms of his girl: Here Comes my baby Flashin' her new gold tooth, She's so small She can mambo in a pay-phone booth © Unichappell Music or the wit and witnessing of Lonnie Johnson on the nature of relationships: My first night in Chicago My friends really treated me fine, Then overnight they changed Like daylight saving time. © Universal-Duchess Music, o/b/o Wabash Music                 In Dylan's Visions of Sin (Viking/Penguin, 2003), Boston University humanities prof Christopher Ricks analyzes Dylan lyrics by various categories of sin and virtue. Hence, "Positively Fourth Street" examines envy, "Like a Rolling Stone" pride, "Oxford Town" justice, etc. It's not just that, as a sleeve blurb says, the distinguished literary critic "is almost the only writer to have applied serious literary intelligence to Dylan." It's that Ricks does so with such a communicable sense of joy and discovery--and an accessible style that's as playful as it is informed. If you thought you dug Dyl before, reading Ricks could help explain why. -G.S.

RALPH GINZBURG (1930-2006). He's gone, and they're going. Ralph Ginzburg and magazines. In his time, the New York editor, photographer and rabble-rouser produced some of the best - alternately stark and lavish, always provocative and funny. There should be few raised eyebrows when it's noted that Ginzburg's peak was the '60s, when original moves spread through so many of the arts and media, oil-fed torches to a grassy plain. In the beginning, there was Eros , a pricey hardbound periodical launched in 1962 (see our essay The Last Good Year ) that, thanks to bluenoses and self-promoting politicos, landed Ginzburg a stretch in jail. From its premiere issue: "A Plea for Polygamy," "The Agonies and Ecstasies of a Stripper" and the (altogether tasteful) photo essay "Love in the Subway." Like all Ginzburg publications, Eros was art-directed by Herb Lubalin, a true artist of typography and design. Fact , which commenced publication in 1964, was famous for its bold, black-and-white covers bearing huge typewriter-script slugs like "Let's Give Vietnam to the Communists" (inside, a prescient article by Alaska Senator Ernest Gruening) and "1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater Is Psychologically Unfit to Be President!" (The latter cost RG $75,000 when Barry Goldwater won a libel suit against the magazine.) There were other mags too. The best of the later lot was Avant Garde , launched in 1968. A more intellectual version of the then-hip print crop that included Esquire and the countercultural Eye and Cheetah , AV won praise from Picasso, John Lennon and others for its graphic bounce and editorial bravura ("The Gang-bang on the Underground Press"; "Dial-a-Hawk," which printed the phone numbers of various Nixon-era war-pushers, including Henry Kissinger and Pat Buchanan). These were all beautiful books, artifacts of a rare age and author. You might try the online book-and-periodical search services to score copies. Good hunting. -G.S. INVENTING LATENIGHT: STEVE ALLEN AND THE ORIGINAL TONIGHT SHOW - Ben Alba (Prometheus Books, 2005). In a way, some of the best expressions of past cool are a little like cultural Black Dahlias: memorable events made mysteriously alluring because the evidence of their existence is so scant. In the case of the Steve Allen Show of the '50s and '60s (see our TUBE chapter on it and on Louie Nye), there are a bare handful of artifacts commercially available for viewing. The most prominent are Golden TV Classics: The Steve Allen Show Live, a 1986 VHS, and Allen's 75th Birthday Celebration, a 1997 DVD. Show clips are featured in the latter, though it's largely a testimonial affair, but the former includes some true highlights -- like Allen as network producer Hubbell Signoff, who introduces the new fall TV season's shows, among them The Wonderful World of Violence, in which Allen-show regular Pat Harrington and another actor introduce the program, then proceed to beat the crap out of each other, the furniture and, ultimately, the entire set. Nye, Don Knotts and others are also featured. Alba's book is largely a document for the defense of Allen as the Wright Bros. of nighttime TV craziness, and he handily makes the case that Allen and his writers originated just about every latenight convention that everyone from Johnny Carson to Letterman and O'Brien now routinely honors. Which is fine, but the book also offers intriguing background on how Allen Kittyhawked the bits, doing it net-less on live broadcasts, night after night. Until someone (his estate, perhaps?) decides to make what archives there are available (and tapes of the old shows do exist, though not in abundance), Inventing Latenight is a tantalizing tidbit, both for those who remember the Allen show and those who'd appreciate seeing what it was all about. Yes, there were square-biz variety-show guests and occasional dull spots (though precious few), but the sensibility of the show, whether expressed in skits, Allen's adlibbing or his prescient advocacy of Lenny Bruce, Lord Buckley, the Collins Kids and Elvis (who got his first TV break on Allen's show), was remarkably hip -- a combination of high wit and unfettered silliness, kind humor and generous spirit that's long vanished from American popular culture. We could use it now.-G.S. THE BEACH BOYS: THE DEFINITIVE DIARY and DUMB ANGEL GAZETTE #4: I long ago accepted Brian Wilson as my musical savior. But lately, it seems, he’s being given all the credit for the Beach Boys’ considerable contribution to popular music. I mean, great architects rate acclaim, but without carpenters and craftsmen their multi-story wonders don’t get built – and the input of all those hod-carriers and hammerers is essential to the construction. Two new books go a way toward righting the Beach Boys’ reputation, without unplugging the halogen glow around Bri Fi. Keith Badman’s The Beach Boys: The Definitive Diary of America’s Greatest Band On Stage and in the Studio accounts for the whereabouts and work habits of both master builder and crew from 1961 onward. It’s a solid piece of scholarship that not only reveals how critically involved all members of the group were in the landmark recordings, but also offers nuggets of new info, much of it from new interviews and vintage foreign-press coverage (who knew Brian and band manager Fred Vail cut tracks for a junked country album?). Its thorough documentation of sessions gives the clearest picture yet of just how hard pop acts worked in the ’60s, when issuing three or four albums a year was the norm. While nominally a periodical (this is Issue #4, but #3 was published in 1989), Dumb Angel Gazette has the heft and sense of purpose of a book. Editors Domenic Priore and Brian Chidester have delivered their foamiest, frothingest great-shake in this edition of DAG, subtitled All Summer Long after one of the Beach Boys’ most sophisticated/underrated tracks. It’s not specifically about the Beach Boys, but it is an oversized valentine to their mid-’60s music, Southern California and the youth culture the Hawthorne heroes both reflected and stoked. Articles address surf films and surf-mag graphics, the Beach Boys’ relation to the post-war physical environment, Dick Dale, Jan Berry’s productions, Spector sidemen, etc. The book’s design conjures L.A. itself – as it must’ve been then, as it may ever be in myth – which makes DAG a true Chet Baker read: you want to get lost in its pages. Both of these tomes’ll likely send you to your Beach Boys discs/files/vinyl, which is just as it should be. -G.S. STOMP & SWERVE: AMERICAN MUSIC GETS HOT, 1843-1924 by Donald Wondrich (U. Of Chi Review Press 2003). Examines lost-in-the-mists early musicians and their surviving wax cylinders (aural Lescaux cave daubings) of minstrel shows, military brass bands, ragtime and early jazz to show us that (1) the word "authentic" should be banned from musical criticism and (2) black ‘n’ white alike were tearin’ it down a helluva lot earlier than anyone believed. Those stiff b & w photos of non-classical pioneers shouldn’t, Woodford argues, obscure the fact they were young and had similar instincts and energy of any later rock & roller. Following in the admittedly deep footprints of Nick Tosches, the author fires off a lotta zingers, making his findings as entertaining as they are essential. Many thanks to fellow Catalog of Cooler Chris Davidson for pulling my coat to this one. - Dick Blackburn Listen here: The Stomp & Swerve audio CD (Archeophone Records) : 27 drivin' cuts" Kissin’ cousin: See below for We Called It Music: A Generation of Jazz. WE CALLED IT MUSIC: A GENERATION OF JAZZ – Eddie Condon with Thomas Sugrue (1947; DaCapo reprint 1992). Examples of living coolness from antiquity are, natch, hard to come by. The reasons are familiar: no living witnesses, poor record-keeping, lost kinescopes. But sometimes you get lucky. Like when you pick up guitarist Condon’s account of the sound-crazy musician’s life of the Roaring Twenties. The period itself was, in many ways, the original ’60s; despite rigid anti-pleasure statutes and the dominance of a dying square culture suffused with Bible-banging and sentimentality, young folks rocked out with vigor (liberated "flapper" women, open defiance of Prohibition, unrestrained, raucous dance music). We Called it Music recounts the heady early days of the white Dixieland cats, who resemble nothing so much as Mick & Keiths four decades before the Glimmer Twins were a glint. After long nights blowing hot stuff in some gin-sweat dive, driving dancers to delirium, players like Condon and Bix Beiderbecke would sprint for after-hour joints to bask in the glow of black-music originators – King Oliver, Armstrong, Bessie Smith. No one got to bed before dawn. The book’s a fast read and a scenic trip through the jazz age, made that much cooler by the (not overused) wiseguy and hepster patois of the time. Of Beiderbecke’s trumpet, Condon writes, "The sound came out like a girl saying yes." Footnotes translate lines like "Uncle Dave got well" (became prosperous) and "There was a lot of trump [at the society gig]. I have seldom seen so many clean people" ("trump" = money; "clean" = wealthy). In time– specifically the post-swing ’40s and ’50s when bop beamed in– the wild New Orleans style of jazz that Condon & co. promoted would be regarded as hopelessly square. But, like early rock ’n’ roll, another famously fun and flagrantly content-less genre, N.O. and Dixieland will always retain undiminished joy and juice. While reading We Called It Music, throw on Condon’s Classic Sessions 1928-1949 or Dixieland All Stars and hear for yourself. – Gene Sculatti “At this point, the singer’s parakeet glides silently from his perch and settles near Joe.”   JAMES ELLROY: The Demon Dog of Crime Fic unloads syllables in rapid-fire staccato that race by like notes for another novel: "Escape reports 9/57--adios, Richie, no details no leads. Breaking now--CRAAAZY violation." Dick Contino, Howard Hughes and Johnny "Stomp" Stompanato rub sharksin with fictional felons in a '50s and '60s so hermetically accurate you can smell the wallpaper. And through it all, alter-ego scandal-rag sleazeologist Danny Getchell, the Archduke of Alliteration, types up hyped up Hush Hush columns that pull paperback-peepers through a perilous expedition peppered with prowlers, pederasts, panty-sniffers, punks and pimps. The Chairman even shows up, ready to punch Getchell in the nose: "My prize prose prompted the payola probe and pissed off priapic Sinatra." In the L.A. Quartet (Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz), Ellroy plots the P.D. through a decade of sin-tillating shakedowns. The Underworld USA Trilogy (American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and ?) goes mob-national, in a frenzy of Hush Hush scandal-rag clippings, J.E. Hoover reel-to-reels, blotters, wiretaps and Vegas lounge laments. In My Dark Places, the Dog swings auto-bio, tracing his own journey from porno-store employee putz to world-class wordsmith. He got a hardback copy of Jack Webb's The Badge for his 10th b-day and never looked back. Several Dog-tales have made it to the screen, including James Woods's Cop, Brown's Requium and L.A. Confidential, as well as documentaries on his life, including White Jazz and Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction. They're all worth a look. But in fairness, no flick can capture the speed-o-matic of language assault of Ellroy's best tomes. "Weapon check: 45. Sap. Knucks. Let's go." -Danny Weizmann PSYCHOTRONIC VIDEO MAGAZINE How often is reading about something as good as (or better than) experiencing the thing itself? I've seen less than a thimbleful of the camp biker / horror / exploito / softcore films covered in any issue of Michael Weldon's mag, but I love hearing, in detail, about their preposterous plots and lumber-yard performances. PV's been at it for ages, celebrating the best of the worst, with reviews (in Phobia, Dr. Ross [Paul Michael Glaser] is "a corporate-backed, ice-hockey-playing psychotherapist who helps patients on parole confront their phobias") and in-depth Q&A's with B- and C-level actors (Clu Gulager, Edd Byrnes, Jeremy Slate). All this plus the best obits column anywhere (only the coolest are reported and their achievements duly noted) and a real editorial POV; a self-acknowledged TV lover, Weldon has no qualms declaring that , lately, the medium is "fast becoming a soulless window to the end of the world." There's no more reliable consumer-guide on the full range of trash culture (records and zines get covered too) than Psychotronic at its best. Where else to hip yourself to the Atomic War Bride, Erotic Vampire in Paris or The Devil With Hitler? -G.S. ROCTOBER MAGAZINE Chicagoland's Jake Austen heads a DIY media empire, with his weekly public access extravaganza Chic-A-Go-Go and occasional issues of now-it's-glossy, now-it's-not Roctober. A fanzine in the truest sense of the word, Roctober offers deeply researched, impassioned takes on the contributors' abiding obsessions, from Sammy Davis Jr. to midget rock and roll, one-man bands (an entire issue and a live festival) to Rudy Ray Moore, black punk rockers to outlaw country, plus comic interludes from Punk'nhead and his suspendered sidekick Ratso. After 30-some issues, the layout still looks like it was done by glue sniffing eight-year-olds, but the sheer breadth of rock and roll and pop culture knowledge gives them away. The Roctober gang is smart enough to know better, which makes it all the sweeter that they don't. -KC “Empty Williams and his girl have drugged Sam and locked him inside a slot machine!”   STONED- Andrew Loog Oldham (St. Martin's) 2STONED- Andrew Loog Oldham (Secker & Warburg, U.K.) Do Brits have the gift? Here's Creation Records' head Alan McGhee, on Oldham, in the Stones svengali's brilliant bipartite autobio: "Andrew Oldham brought to the table the idea, which still resonates, that personal obsessions can fuel everything, and his obsessions, from Jet Harris to Phil Spector, from the cutthroat world of American PR to the mercurial world of fashion design, from East End gangsterism to West End theatre design, still seem cool some 30 years later." All that and more is laid out in this oral history of the '60s, comprised of ALO's glib and insightful accounts and contributions from Marianne Faithfull, Pete Townshend, Lou Adler, Allan Klein, Brian Wilson, Bob Crewe, Kim Fowley and a host of others. Both volumes intrigue, but the second--commencing when his blues-boy charges first storm the States--is the better. Arguably (but not by me) the definitive behind-the-curtain look at pop's richest period, from one of its most keenly observant, wickedly funniest participants. Ride on, baby. -G.S. OOP Oldham sounds: two symphonic albums, 16 Hip Hits and East Meets West: Famous Hits of the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons, by the Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra (both 1965). The Immediate Singles Collection gathers tracks from Oldham's late '60s label and features such acts as P.P. Arnold, Chris Farlowe, Billy Nichols and the Small Faces. ALO Official Site here.     BEATSVILLE * Edited by Martin McIntosh with an essay by Domenic Priore (Outre Gallery Press). Just the book that connoisseurs of coolstuff have been waiting for, this compendium on beatniks is delicious hipster scholarship. It's somewhat less about the real thing (and, man, is Al G's howling more relevant than ever; see Collected Poems) and more about the mass-market Mad magazine version, which is an endlessly fun coaster to roll with. The book is gorgeous, seeming to chronicle every depiction and graphic appropriation of the original rebel set: album covers and men's-mag layouts, posters and paperbacks, ceramic figures and bongo manuals. There are even photos of Jack Davis' wild illustrations for the rare Yak Yak comic and Eliot Horne's swingin' Hiptionary book. A chapter on "Contemporary Way Out" features recent beard-and-sandal visuals by Coop, Shag, J.D. King and Charles Schneider, among others. And Priore's essay lights the whole subject like a candle stuck in an empty claret bottle, answering the big questions on Kookie, Krebs and Jack the K, Babs Gonzales and Frisco's Big Daddy Nord. Like, man, what is a Fabian? -- G.S. Beat a path to it: www.beatsvillepad.com See our TUBE chapter for "TV Meets the Beats, Punks & Hippies."

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