Night Beat
A Shadow History of Rock & Roll
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Few journalists have staked a territory as definitively and passionately as Mikal Gilmore in his twenty-year career writing about rock and roll. Now, for the first time, this collection gathers his cultural criticism, interviews, reviews, and assorted musings. Beginning with Elvis and the birth of rock and roll, Gilmore traces the seismic changes in America as its youth responded to the postwar economic and political climate. He hears in the lyrics of Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison the voices of unrest and fervor, and charts the rise and fall of punk in brilliant essays on Lou Reed, The Sex Pistols, and The Clash. Mikal Gilmore describes Bruce Springsteen's America and the problem of Michael Jackson. And like no one else, Gilmore listens to the lone voices: Al Green, Marianne Faithfull, Sinead O'Connor, Frank Sinatra.
Four decades of American life are observed through the inimitable lens of rock and roll, and through the provocative and intelligent voice of one of the most committed chroniclers of American music, and its powerful expressions of love, soul, politics, and redemption.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Arranged in rough chronological order by subject, this collection of a career's worth of rock, pop and jazz writing for venues like Rolling Stone and the L.A. Times shows Gilmore (Shot in the Heart, 1994) at his best when championing underappreciated icons--such as the Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson and singer-songwriter Tim Hardin--and seizing opportunities to point out what even ardent fans may have missed. But Gilmore has little to add to the general consensus regarding Elvis, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and his chapters about Jerry Garcia and Timothy Leary amount to not much more than brief biography and tender reminiscence. Gilmore's seemingly left-wing politics prove tedious when used to interpret such kindred spirits as Bruce Springsteen and Allen Ginsberg, but emerge as refreshing when he suggests that disco and David Lee Roth-era Van Halen may owe something to the ideals of the '60s. Less than revelatory discussions with Bob Dylan and Lou Reed are made fascinating by Gilmore's talent for invoking a mood and describing a scene--one can almost smell the white wine in Dylan's styrofoam cup and see Reed's weathered face in the dim light of a bar at sundown. All in all, the superlative-wielding sprawl of Gilmore's book may come as close as one can to a one-volume overview of the musical mainstream.
