An intriguing and informative compendium of lore about a great pop-music canon.
A debut encyclopedia celebrates famous and obscure pop songwriters of the 1960s.
Dunbavan, a British musician and songwriter, wants to applaud the writer’s craft rather than the singer’s. He therefore includes only songwriters who mainly did not perform their own work but did pen tunes that made it into the Top 40 charts in America or Britain. Applying these criteria to the ’60s, when the singer/songwriter came to dominate music, leads to a somewhat haphazard selection that leaves out Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and many other luminaries of the era to focus on a dwindling number of professional pop composers. (The Beatles do get in thanks to a handful of forgotten tunes they wrote for other bands.) But there’s a good roster of legendary songwriting teams, including Burt Bacharach and Hal David, scribes of jaunty classics like “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”; Carole King and Gerry Goffin, authors of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” and other anthems of teen-girl yearning; Motown mainstays Eddie and Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier; and Phil Spector, who had his thumb as co-writer or producer in countless ’60s hits. The tireless Dunbavan also unearths unsung figures like Phillip Goodhand-Tait, who managed to get three songs onto the British charts, topping out at No. 6 with 1968’s “A Day Without Love.” Each entry includes lists of the songwriter’s charting hits, covers, and rereleases and biographies of several pages, with detailed accounts of how successes were composed and recorded. These thoroughly researched, gracefully written essays contain a wealth of information for scholars and aficionados, including anecdotes from the hit factory in Manhattan’s Brill Building, where songwriters plonking away in their cubicles could barely hear their own tunes above the din of others’, and well-judged critical appreciations. (The author toasts Bacharach’s “unconventional and shifting time signatures, polyrhythms, asymmetrical phrasing, and complex harmonies which stretched even the most accomplished vocalist.”) Fans of hits from the sublime (“You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ ”) to the ridiculous (“Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini”) should have their memories jogged and their interests piqued.
An intriguing and informative compendium of lore about a great pop-music canon.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-3346-2
Page Count: 692
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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