Gearing Up for the Summer Reading Program

With Memorial Day in the rear-view mirror, it's time to think about the books I'll take out to the hammock on the warm days ahead. I just finished Todd Rundgren's autobiography, 'The Individualist - Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations,' and what an interesting book it was, both in structure and content. I don't imagine there are too many Rundgren fans in our little community, but he's a Renaissance man I have admired for 35 years. That's the year I discovered Utopia and saw them in my first live show (on the very day I finished middle school).

Rundgren's book is made up of 179 one-page chapters of three paragraphs each. The first two paragraphs reveal an experience in his life and how he felt about it. The third paragraph is spent explaining the life lesson learned from that experience. If I can be crass for a moment, this layout makes it a perfect book for the "reading room," as Archie Bunker calls it. Anybody want to borrow my copy now? The chapters are in chronological order, and his early years in Philly and New York are real page turners. I appreciate the warts-and-all look at his life, (the Bebe Buell chapters will make you cringe), but while reading the sections on his most successful years as an artist, producer and computer pioneer, I was left wanting more. For example, recollections on producing XTC's 'Skylarking' are wildly entertaining, but c'mon, two pages?!?

Some of the typos and other grammatical errors are difficult to ignore as well, and I tried to convince myself the book is like a journal full of hurried scribbles. That's probably being pretty generous. Then there is the physical book itself. The slick pages, unappealing cover, type/font and binding itself leaves much to be desired. It reminds me of an English textbook I had in school. The content gets a B+ (a proofreader would have earned it an A), and the physical book is a well-deserved D. For the first time in my life I wanted an e-reader.

Here are a couple of of covers from solo albums to whet your appetite...

Two Little Hitlers (from 'Nearly Human,' 1989)
Rain (from 'Faithful,' 1976)

I have moved on to Bob Stanley's 'Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé.' I'm only 50 pages into the nearly 600-page book, and dense is the one-word description so far. I imagine this will take me all of June to finish. I'm up to Spector now, and it has already been fun to connect the dots and read about what was happening on both sides of the Atlantic in the '50s and very early '60s.

Will Burch's 'Cruel to Be Kind: The Life and Music of Nick Lowe' will be out in mid-August, and I'll be first in line for that one. Birch has known Lowe for four decades and should have the scoop. I especially want to hear about the Carter/Cash years and the Stiff era. That leaves a six-week gap for another book or two. Here is my plea to you: What music book should I read in July and early August? Swiss Adam didn't know it, but he gave me a nudge at his place yesterday, but I would like a few other candidates. What say you?