I think this is just allmusic.com being confused about two songs with the same name.

The history of UK punk has been told so many times, and so well, that it’s hard to believe that the story can be told again. But it can. Dave Thompson’s London’s Burning is a recollection of his mid to late teenage years, when he saw all of the groups in their earliest gigs: The Sex Pistols, of course, but also those a bit more afield, such as the Adverts, and the ones you haven’t heard of who were in the orbit of punk but didn’t get much attention — such as Masterswitch.

There are a few things that really stand out in this memoir. The first is the radical importance of reggae. English music was in a dead period, and white kids needed their revolution. The music at hand in 1974 and 1975 with the revolutionary message was reggae. Each chapter starts with a list of tunes in “heavy rotation” in the author’s mind, and until we get well into the 1976, it’s dominated by reggae. The lists are very interesting as well, because it is a distinctly “street” collection of reggae tunes. I think you’d have a hard time finding all of these as downloads.

Thompson is always well aware of the circumambient economic situation. Of course, all of the other books talk about how there were no jobs and workers were miserable under Maggie. But Thompson remembers that in the late 70s, no one had a theory; they just had misery:

[F]or anybody looking to draw conclusions from the events which ultimately cause 1976 to shape the landscape of the decades to come, it is only the sweet fortunes of hindsight that sllow even a vague hypothesis to take shape. For the people on the ground, in the frontline, at the sticky end of the pointed stick, 1976 was the same as 1975 was the same as 1974 was the same as 1973 and so on ad infinitum.

There were still no more than three channels on the telly; the programming still ended around midnight with the rousing chords of the national anthem. Some shows were still being broadcast in black and white. The pubs closed at eleven . . . [However, hindsight] might view the mid-1970s through a monochrome lens, but life was not gray, it was not flat, and it was not grim. A lot of people had a lotof fun in the 1970s . . . The big difference between “then” and “now” was that people were making their own fun then, as opposed to waiting for some multimedia conglomerate to package it up and deliver it to their door. (pp. 102-103)

Thompson is also good at pinpointing how 1976 was different from 1982: In 1976, Thompson says, the situation of the miserable economy “was not merely without precedent, it seemed to be without remedy as well” (p. 98). By 1982, punks had a pattern. So . . . 1976 becomes all the more interesting because it was all improvisation and invention.

The last thing I would say about this nifty book is that it’s great on the bands that got lost: Roogalator, the Rumour (who had a great album without Graham Parker), Tom Robinson Band — they’re all here, and will compel you to dust off the old singles and LP’s, if you have them.

Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked is about a cult musician, his fans, and his legacy. Tucker Crowe recorded what fanboys seem to think is the greatest break-up album of all time, “Juliet.” Then Crowe dropped out of the music business. One of his biggest fans is a musical trainspotter in a sleepy seaside town in England. When the demos of Crowe’s great album are released as “Juliet, Naked,” the fan writes a celebratory review, motivated largely by the fact that he is one of the first to hear the CD. Then his girlfriend reviews it — and pans it — and, miraculously, the elusive Crowe begins to re-emerge from his obscurity.

All of the musical “notes” in this book are pretty much perfect, from the fake Wikipedia entries to the self-regard of the fanboy. Meanwhile, the musical Crowe is immediately recognizable as something like an early Alex Chilton; after his “retirement” from music, Hornby takes the character a little further into obscurity than most cult figures go.

Where the book is pretty weak is around the relationships. Hornby can lay down a nice streak of almost weepy sentimentality. The book practically ends in a group hug. I liked the book, but, really, the music bits are the best bits. Even a brief appearance by a couple of the last Northern Soul fanatics has more life than some of the romance material.

But it was the earlier “Talking Heads: 77″ that really sold me. One reason was that the players were recognizably about my age (though preppier). And the sound was way stripped down, something I could imagine myself almost playing (if I could almost play the guitar . . .). They weren’t smiling. They had just a hint of wry grins. And Tina Weymouth looked like a boy.

And what were those lyrics about? Art school. Living in New York. Worrying about air travel over the boondocks. Consoling (ironically) the listener about the government:

I see the states, across this big nation
I see the laws made in Washington, D.C.
I think of the ones I consider my favorites
I think of the people that are working for me

Some civil servants are just like my loved ones
They work so hard and they try to be strong
I’m a lucky guy to live in my building
They own the buildings to help them along

Back in that era, I listened some to the albums after these, but it had become big rock and now I don’t feel much of a beckoning to revisit them.

The matches are stored in /Users/jgn/Library/Preferences/CD Info.cidb, but I couldn’t figure out an easy way to edit it. Fortunately, there is a program that lets you edit your CDDB data: iCDc, available here. Whew!

Doubtless there is something you can press when inserting the CD into iTunes that will force a new choice from Gracenote — or perhaps you can do it through “Get Info.” But as usually the documentation is minimalist, and it’s nice to have an editor anyway.

This is Dean Wareham’s story of his experience as the lead singer and principal songwriter of two of indie rock’s greatest bands, Galaxie 500 and Luna. It’s a memoir told in historical sequence, and seems to pretty honest (for a lead singer/songwriter . . .) about the joys and miseries of collaboration in music. If you have even passing interest in either of those two bands, you must read this book. If you’re interested in indie rock from the 80s and 90s, you’ll enjoy it as well; he relates provocative stories about Damon and Naomi (the rhythm section, and much more, for Galaxie 500 and beyond), the producers Kramer and Tony Visconti, the scenester Terry Tolkin, and many others. It’s also a good read if you’ve wanted proof of intelligence out there in rock world. It’s well written, and frequently droll. Wareham has a nice stylistic tic of deflating a phony with the final sentence in a paragraph:

Neil Hagerty of Pussy Galore was hanging around during our sound check. I’m not sure what he was doing at CBGB at five in the afternoon, but he seemed to be out of it on smack. His eyes were pinned and he stood by the side of the stage, scratching his legs and telling about the suede pants that he had picked up on the street for $5. Admittedly, that is a very good price for suede pants. (p. 58)

For each band there is a narrative arc from inception though self-discovery and self-knowledge, down to acrimony, depression, and boredom. A parallel story is how it has become increasingly hard since the 80s to stick out from the crowd even if your band is great, and to make any decent money — Wareham tells this story with frequent acknowledgement that with the advent of digital music downloads, you just can’t get the big advances anymore. And by “big advance,” we mean: Big enough to live without constant touring. There are incidental comments along the way about the awful economics of rock nowadays: For instance, clubs will ask for a cut of t-shirt sales (see pp. 290-291) . . . Now that’s sick and greedy. There are loads of stories here about hotels and clubs all over the world, drugs, people lost all along the way: I’ve read a lot of rock books and Wareham’s story of the routinization of road pleasures is perhaps the best. Wareham is good, too, about recovering details that were doubtless hugely significant in their moments: E.g., the relative merits of a Dodge Dart vs. a Datsun B-210.

A fair amount of the book is devoted to mentions of the decline of his marriage and his affair with Britta Phillips, a latter-day bass player for Luna; now, after Luna, Wareham is half of Dean and Britta. I won’t spend much time on that here, but the emotional story is a bit thin for a memoir. Balancing this thinness, though, are copious quotes from the songs. So when you’re wondering whether Wareham felt much about anything or anyone, it is worth pondering the lyrics he quotes near these scenes (which Wareham discusses on p. 259). Or, perhaps obviously, the true emotional story is about the “family romance” of being in a band: Wareham represents the two other band members in Galaxie 500 as acting like his parents (and thus making him yearn for a certain kind of freedom from them), and later acknowleges that break-up, and that of Luna, as a kind of divorce.

There’s also some rock wisdom in these pages:

Good drummers tend to come from the suburbs. They have a distinct advantage–garages, basements, extra rooms–all things that are in short supply in New York City. (p. 119)

Towards the end:

You can generally add a star to the review if you announce that the band is breaking up. (p. 283)

I read this fine book on a plane to Arizona without access to my tunes; but the narrative is so compelling that I could hear them in my mind as I read.

So anyway . . . A huge frustration with MusicMatch was that its CDDB sucked big time. Anything new or even slightly obscure would not be found, and I’d have to type in the songs myself. Plus, the MusicMatch ripper would not keep the per-track artist, which was deadly for anthologies.

In looking around for an alternative, I noticed that WinAmp pro throws in a subscription to Gracenote (probably the best CDDB out there – they were the orginators), and the Pro version of WinAmp is only about $20.

Wow, what a change. It has matched much more stuff, and WinAmp respects the per-track artists: So, particularly for quasi-historical anthologies (such as Mojo’s) I’m not always going back to the CD case to see what they heck I’m listening to.

Meanwhile, Mighty Baby’s track “Egyptian Tomb” (1969): Good grief, why didn’t this get wider circulation!?

So anyway, I grew up to listen to a lot of rock and jazz, especially with vocals, because I suppose children just have to depart from parental guidance (the paganism stuck, though). And I have to say, there is nothing quite like cheesy jazz at holiday time, hence my listening to “Christmas with the Rat Pack” (Capitol) and Diana Krall’s “Christmas Songs” (Verve). Both of these albums have really quite spectacular full band arrangements, but both will stoop to . . . pop flute (yeech) . . . to accent a song. I have little doubt that Krall is deliberately evoking the rat pack era of pop jazz. There’s some swinging on “White Christmas,” but, really, the arrangement doesn’t let her out. It would be interesting to see her do these live. Oh, and Krall scats (so to speak) on Jingle Bells. An oddity of the Krall is that her piano is rather second rate compared to what her best stuff. But that’s ok, right? On the rat pack album, Sinatra picks are just great. Dean Martin gets “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” and Sammy gets the fun stuff like “Jingle Bells” and the thoroughly secular “The Christmas Song,” in an arrangement that he manages to make sound good and also not like Nat King Cole. So . . . having said all that . . . recommended for a cold winter’s eve with egg nog (spiked with Maker’s Mark, Kentucky-style). [Rat Pack - Amazon-CD, Amazon-MP3; Krall - Amazon]

Brett Milano, frequent contributor to the Boston Phoenix, the Boston Herald, and other publications, has written a great little history of Boston rock and roll. If you have friends who saw a lot of local music in the 60s, 70s, 80s, or 90s, this would be a wonderful holiday gift: Tell them to start with the chapters on their decades. The opening chapters are more straight history, and the latter are a bit more of a “scene” history with insider anecdotes and reports of famously-gossipped-about events. You’ll learn something here about the key perfomers from the 50s to the present: Freddy Cannon, the Remains, the Lost, the “Bosstown Sound,” Aerosmith, J. Geils, Boston, the Modern Lovers, the Mezz, the Real Kids, DMZ, the Lyres, Mission of Burma,the Throwing Muses, the Pixies, Dinosaur, Jr., Morphine, Buffalo Tom . . . they’re all here. Much to Milano’s credit, he doesn’t fall prey to the mistake of Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me or Clinton Heylin’s From the Velvets to the Voivoids which provide the scensters way too much leeway to alter history with varnished versions of what really happened. Milano also knows many of the people he reports on as friends, and he does a good job of telling a true story that is also not inflammatory or embarassing to its subjects.

One thing Milano tunes into that was plausible to me but not something I’d cough up if you asked me to characterize the Boston sound is that Boston bands have written a lot of sad songs. Occasionally Milano mentions New England weather and overcast skies. He’s right. There is a real tradition of get-out-the-razorblades songs (many disguised with upbeat melodies).

There are some oddities: Salem 66 and November Group get their major mentions in the chapter on 1977-1980 (I guess because as gurls they get bundled in with Robin Lane and the Bristols, who are discussed in that era); the Neats are sadly neglected (a few brief mentions; they were terribly misunderstood and under-appreciated: I wish Milano had set the record straight here); ditto for Scruffy the Cat; Nat Freedberg doesn’t really get as much attention as he deserves; and Milano uses the Turbines “Wah Hey” as a way to introduce a chapter, but you don’t really get the details on why they were so compelling. But these are quibbles; having griped a bit here, there are bits that Milano gets so right. For example:

Most Lyres fans can recall the night they’ve dragged some music-snob friend, or maybe just a timid girlfriend to one of their less coherent shows and gotten only a puzzled look: you really think this could be one of Boston’s greatest bands? Damn right they are. You just have to see them on a good night, when those elemental chords are pounded out like the future of civizilization depends on it. (p. 110)

This is true. I was a lucky one who dragged someone to the Rat to see Lyres and they were spectucularly on and crazy, igniting a quasi-mosh pit frenzy. But talk about hit or miss . . . So everywhere in the book past 1980 or so Milano brings a valuable “you are there” perspective to what he narrates.

In fact, the book could (should?) have been twice as long, and I sincerely hope there will be a second edition (there has to be, right? Boston rock doesn’t stop!). There are a lot of opportunities to “drill down” on individual bands. Take Dumptruck, for example: Milano calls it Seth Tiven’s band (p. 190), but the shared leadership of Kirk Swan was crucial in their early years — and I can recall stories of their origins in two New Haven kids trading licks in their bedrooms: How else could you get that kind of guitar interplay? I am sure there was a page limit Milano was fighting against. Just for example, Milano touches on Big Dipper, but never mentions the connection to the Embarrassment; that’s a flaw, because there are going to be readers who are catching up on the Boston scene who know well the Embarrassment’s importance in mid-America. Yet another thing that would have helped would be to have given the street addresses of the clubs that have disappeared: Milano mentions the Unicorn, which was near the Pru. Really? Wow. Where!?

Also missing from this volume is a discographical essay. Brett! This is your chance to sort through it all and pick and choose and help out all of us hopeless record collector slime! An annotated discography would be a great thing (maybe one could be written for the book’s web site?); an accompanying CD would be even better.

The last thing I wish could appear in an expanded edition would be a “where are they now” section. Just for example, it has always pained me that people are still toiling away on the local scene with only occasional but sometimes astounding appearances (e.g., the Bags) — a word or two about how they’re still getting out there, what their day jobs are: That’s real life, and it has a place in a book that is so generous about the scene.