The Boy Who Cried Freebird
Rock & Roll Fables and Sonic Storytelling
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Wedding the American oral storytelling tradition with progressive music journalism, Mitch Myers' The Boy Who Cried Freebird is a treatise on the popular music culture of the twentieth century. Trenchant, insightful, and wonderfully strange, this literary mix-tape is authentic music history . . . except when it isn't. Myers outrageously blends short fiction, straight journalism, comic interludes, memoirs, serious artist profiles, satire, and related fan-boy hokum—including the classic stories he first narrated on NPR's All Things Considered.
Focusing on iconic recordings, events, communities, and individuals, Myers riffs on Deadheads, sixties nostalgia, rock concert decorum, glockenspiels, and all manner of pop phenomena. From tales of rock-and-roll time travel to science fiction revealing Black Sabbath's power to melt space aliens, The Boy Who Cried Freebird is about music, culture, legend, and lore—all to be lovingly passed on to future generations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Music writer Myers is knowledgeable not only about rock but also about blues, jazz, country, folk, metal and electronic sounds, and he is also extremely funny a potent combination that makes this collection of essays an insightful and entertaining look at popular music culture. Three of his best narratives include the decidedly mixed results of Black Sabbath's song "Paranoid" becoming the world's only defense against alien invaders; the adventures of a teenage Grateful Dead fan from 2069 who time-travels back to 1969 to see his heroes play in San Francisco; and a man driven to shout "Freebird" at every concert he attends. But Myers also displays excellent straight journalistic skills in looks at artists ranging from Doug Sahm, whose legendary psychedelic-country-rock-Mexican fusion, Myers shows, helped shape modern Texas music, to saxophonist Albert Ayler in an elegiac study of how his "hovering, stream-of-consciousness meditations" made him one of the most brilliant musicians in the 1960s free jazz movement. Also entertaining are his wild fictional scenarios about real artists like Phil Spector and Steve Albini that actually say more about those artists than can be found in much rock criticism.
