First up is a book I think I got on the street when someone was moving or just cleaning out their bookshelves. It’s Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector by Mick Brown.

Really enjoying the book so far. I’m just at the embarrassing flop of “River Deep, Mountain High.” Here’s something that jumped out at me: at one point in the book, Jerry Wexler is quoted thusly on Phil’s famed “Wall of Sound”: “That gargantuan leakage, everything leaking out of everyone else’s mike, was something we guarded against fanatically at Atlantic. To me it was like a muted roar. I didn’t like it, and I still don’t like it.”

I was taken aback, because while I’ve always heard that Phil Spector was mentally ill and thought that he fucked up both Let it Be and End of the Century, and of course, he’s a murderer, the genius of the Wall of Sound is just something that’s always been a given in any discussion of 20th century pop music.

I wanted to listen to the songs I was reading about and I have always liked those songs, so I queued up a bunch and found…Jerry Wexler was right. They sound shitty. Now don’t get me wrong, they’re still genius pop songs (though, lyrically, it’s a lot of moon/june dance/romance bullshit), but the sound is very dated. You can listen to Motown songs from the same era, and they don’t sound like they were recorded inside a garbage can. More like Wall of Mud, amirite?

It’s fun to read about how the recording sessions were fun chaos because they’d have like 5 guitar players and 3 piano players and two drummers and a crowd of randos shaking tambourines and stuff, but, like, why? Why do you have five guitarists playing a guitar line you can’t even really distinguish in the final mix?

The history of the first two decades of rock and roll was written by boomer critics who were teenagers in the late fifties and early sixties. And so here, at last, we arrive at my point: absolutely nobody is to be trusted about the quality of music that came out when they were teenagers.

The music is just too deeply entwined with the operatic rollercoaster of adolescence, when your feelings are so big you feel like they might break out of you at any minute, and hearing a song that taps into that is a tremendous relief. Everybody wants to feel seen.

But, ultimately, this doesn’t mean that the work of art that affects you so profoundly in those years is going to have the same effect on someone else years later. Tastes change, the culture changes, and what seems like a timeless work of genius might just be the thing that made you feel less alone when you were fifteen.

I certainly include myself in the “absolutely nobody” above. I will happily tell you that Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” is a timeless pop masterpiece, and maybe it is. Or maybe it’s just that it was playing on the car radio when I was in the back seat and my friend and his girlfriend were in the front and I was luxuriating in the delicious melancholy of my latest unrequited crush and the harmony on the chorus seemed to capture my feeling perfectly.

But you’re not me, and you didn’t have this experience with this song. It’s tempting, when you feel like everyone else likes something, to go along. I pretended to like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for a long time until I realized that whatever people liked about that record wasn’t speaking to me. (also it’s an artistic dead end that leads to the self-indulgence of prog rock, whereas the albums that preceded it set the stage for decades of delicious power pop.)

But you’re allowed your own taste, and you can and should be very skeptical of praise that anyone lavishes on a song that came out when they were teenagers.

(I cut a few paragraphs from this, but I just need to say Pet Sounds also sucks a lot, Rod Stewart’s voice is annoying, and that scene in Almost Famous where they sing “Tiny Dancer” was so mawkish and embarrassing it made me want to crawl under my seat.)

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But of course I have some quibbles. Read on only if you’ve read the book—there are major spoilers ahead.

So I loved the maps and the hidden towns and the copyright traps and the fact that Shepherd never attempts to explain why or how the magic works. It just does, and the characters are pretty much in the dark as much as we are. But here’s the thing for me about anything set in the real world that involves magic or other supernatural goings on: I have to believe it’s happening to real people. People who think and behave like real people help sell the supernatural elements.

And in this book, such people are almost completely absent. First, the plot hole—everyone’s trying to preserve this one single copy of the gas station map as though they’ve never heard of a photocopier. (We know that copies work because Nell finds her way to the map store using a map her father drew on the back of a business card.)

But, then, also? Nell’s mom decides to live apart from her child more or less forever so she can map an empty town? And Nell, upon discovering the ruse about her mother’s death, is not angry or resentful that she grew up bearing the grief of an imaginary loss. (I’m gonna go ahead and guess that the author has not experienced the death of a parent because its impact on Nell is trivialized by this novel.)

There’s more—so much more! Bear has this terrible secret which is that he’s broke, which everyone already knows, and he won’t ask his wealthy friends for help. Nell’s dad would rather have her hate him than just tell the truth about the stupid map which could easily be copied anyway, for chrissakes.

Anyway, I enjoyed the novel despite the fact that the characters don’t act like real people, but I couldn’t help but be disappointed, because if this plot had been populated by authentic characters, this would have been an amazing book rather than just a fun diversion.

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I’m not a Dylan cultist, but I do know he’s got an encyclopedic knowledge of (American, at least) popular music, and he has written some great songs, so I thought it would be entertaining to hear a well-informed master of the craft give some insights into various songs.

WOW, was I ever wrong.

Here’s the format of the book: Dylan recites what amounts to some kind of prose poem about the song. So instead of the economical beauty of song lyrics (because I guess nobody wanted to pay to clear them) you get this messy, overlong word salad.

And then, if you’re lucky, he’ll tell you something about the artist, or the song, or he’ll elaborate on the theme of the song a little bit. These bits are far less painful than the aforementioned prose poems, but they’re incredibly uneven and unfocused. The whole project is basically Dylan free associating on a song, and because of the aformentioned encyclopedic knowledge and songwriting talent, sometimes there’s a gem in there. But mostly not.

The physical book is a beautiful object, and with the holidays approaching, I know some folks will be tempted to give this to the music lover in their life.

Don’t do it. This is a terrible book, and there is better music writing just about anywhere you want to look. (Season one of the Cocaine & Rhinestones podcast, for example, or the annotations done by randos on genius.com, which at least sometimes shed some light on an obscure reference). Do some digging and find someone who is actually going to deliver what this book promises. Or just, I don’t know, buy a Dylan bootleg or whatever.

This is a sloppy, halfassed project that doesn’t deserve your money or your attention. I made it through less than a quarter of the audiobook. Which means the combined talents of Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Alfre Woodard, Sissy Spacek and Oscar Isaac couldn’t keep me engaged.

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The first half works really well, as we meet some winning characters, unearth some complex family dynamics, and observe the the terrible effects when people are dumb enough to do that thing you’re yelling at them not to do.

So far so good, but, for my taste, this one lost its way in the second half. I think this is a problem a lot of horror novels have—horror just works so much better in the short form that a lot of horror novels turn into action/adventure novels in the second half. So as our heroes try to fix what they messed up, we get some suspense, although not a lot—this is another problem with horror at novel length. It’s annoying in the extreme if you kill every character after we spend 400 pages rooting for them (lookin’ at you, The Ruins!) But knowing the author is too kind to do that to readers (Leeds reveals a strong sentimental streak early in the book that convinced me he wasn’t going to do that) kills the suspense.

So, ultimately, we get a lot of meh, and the presence of some recently dead folks helps kill the suspense (being dead doesn’t seem all that bad) and adds some comic notes that don’t quite fit the vibe of the rest of the book.

This is Leeds’ first novel, and I was engaged enough to finish even though the second half didn’t do much for me. So I think he’s got big things ahead of him, but, for me, anyway, this one wasn’t it.

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(This is partly due to my political problems with police forces in general, but also the police detective has just been done to death, and I can’t stand the cliches of cop fiction anymore. Oh, he’s haunted by that one case? Oh, he drinks too much because he’s seen to much? Oh, he has a daughter and struggles to be a good dad despite the aformentioned drinking and caring too much about the job? Feh. Seen it. And then seen it again. And again.)

But back to 1979. It’s about a plucky young woman who gets stuck writing dumb “women’s page” stories and kind of lucks into becoming an investigative reporter. But here’s what’s weird about the book: the structure. The first two thirds of the book center on the nuts and bolts of putting two big investigative stories together. This is pretty compelling, but it’s neither mysterious nor particularly suspenseful. The last third concerns a murder that is ultimately solved offscreen by the police for which there are only really two suspects.

In short, this is a crime novel that features a lot of crime and almost no mystery or suspense. That’s why I think it’s weird. The protagonist is winning, but I’m not sure I’ll be on board for the next one. Then again, I’m not sure I won’t be. Like I said, It’s weird. I’m still making sense of it.

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I recently watched The Haunted Palace with Vincent Price. It’s about how Vincent Price inherits a gigantic castle in Massachusetts(!) and gets possessed by the evil spirit of his ancestor who originally owned the joint!

It’s a fun time, if not as colorful as Masque of the Red Death. Kind of like a Hammer movie with less cleavage. For a fun bonus, it features a couple of guys who were on every TV show in the 1970s! (If you watch the movie, you’ll know them immediately, and look them up on IMDB trying to figure out where you know them from, then realize it could be literally any network TV program from 1970-80!). There’s a pretty big plot hole, but the end is great and it delivers the spooky atmosphere. Disappointing that Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth are mentioned but never make an appearance in the film. Whaddya got against elder gods, Roger Corman?

The Last One Left is a gothic novel by Riley Sager about a home health aide who comes to care for an old woman who may or may not have killed her parents and sister years earlier. It’s a pretty engaging read, but…well, there are many pleasures to be had from reading, and, in the mystery genre, I realize that what I really like is spending time with a cool protagonist while they try to unravel the mystery. I’m less interested in the solution.

Well, this book is all about the solution. The protagonist isn’t much of a character—just kind of an information-gathering machine. The solution is unexpected and brilliantly constructed, but…there are like five big plot twists in the last quarter of the book. After the first one, I was like, “Oh, cool!” by the fifth one I was like, “Really? Another one?” Ultimately the whole rest of the book is setting up the cleverness of the last quarter. If you like a clever solution and multiple plot twists, this is a good pick for you. If you’re like me…well, it’s still a very entertaining book. But be forewarned you may be rolling your eyes at the end.

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REFLECTIONS THAT MAY SPOIL STUFF:

For a book that takes place in the 60’s underground and, for the most part, paints cops as ineffectual at best and malicious at worst, this takes what seems to me a pretty sharp right turn (politically speaking) at the end. Trotting out the right-wing myths of people on acid thinking they can fly (I mean, I guess it might have happened at some point?) and protestors greeting returning Vietnam vets with abuse (particularly weird in this book because how do the protestors know when the bus is coming with the returning soldiers on it?) both make an appearance, and, in the end, the problem can only be solved by men with guns.

Also, it has to be said that there is not a single well-developed female character in the book. We come closest with the mom, but even she is pretty one-note in the end.

So, overall, it was entertaining. Would have been better if it were a hundred pages shorter.

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