So with this move to St. Paul, Minnesota, and the requisite unpacking, I’ve had the opportunity to review the various books about rock and roll I’ve acquired over the years.

Here are the ones I consider personal favorites (and I’ll leave out the Guralnicks, Marcuses, etc., etc.). Maybe not actually the best, but I’ll leave the title as is to capture more links

Best rock book overall: Pamela Des Barres, I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie. This is awesome because the account is from the present, but it’s punctuated (or maybe I should say perforated) by unvarnished journal entries from the period, and teaches well how absurd adolescent hero worship can be. Des Barres does a great job of critiquing yet acknowledging her younger, stupider, and more hormonal self.

Best history by way of interviews: McNeil and McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. Everything in this book has to be read with a grain of salt, because the subjects tend to play around with their memories. Still, quite a read.

Best book on routine rock depravity: [Tie] Rawlings and Diggle, Steve Diggle’s Harmony in My Head; Bonomo, Sweat: The Story of the Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band. Great bands, questionable choices.

Best roman-a-clef: Thomas, The Big Wheel [about Elvis Costello and the Attractions, by the bassist]. Could have been subtitled: The Ego and the Id. This one was out of print for quite awhile: No doubt they were laying low fearing lawsuits from Declan MacManus.

Best book about a style: Davidson, We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001.

Best reference: Robbins, The Trouser Guide to New Wave Records (first edition). Until this came out, it was impossible to figure out anything. Here and there are odd little mistakes that don’t exist nowadays in the era of Wikipedia, making the book all the more charming if you read it today or tomorrow.

Best book about collector scum: Milano, Vinyl Junkies: Adventures in Record Collecting.

Best scene book: Gordon, It Came from Memphis.

Best book about obscurities: Unterberger, Unknown Legends of Rock and Roll. Someone reading this today would probably deny that a lot of these are “unknowns,” but that is partly due to the impact of this book.

Best coffee-table book: Matheu and Bowe, Creem: America’s Only Rock & Roll Magazine.

Best serious memoir: Wareham, Black Postcards. From the Galaxy 500 / Luna front man.

Best serious biography: Ravenscroft, John Peel: Margrave of the Marshes. This began as Peel’s memoir, but was so ably completed by his wife, I’ll count it as a biography.

I just don’t get it. Amazon has introduced the new Kindle DX. I have a Kindle DX and use it. It’s pretty great. I’ve kept my oath for some months now not to buy another printed book, so my DX and the library have been wonderful helps.

But the new DX . . . Greater contrast is a good thing. But where is the left-side button for turning the page? Every DX user I’ve talked to who has also used a regular Kindle has complained about this. It is really great to be able to turn the page with either the left hand or right hand. Meanwhile, the DX still has the crappy squeezed keyboard, which is a step back from the keyboard on the newer 6″ Kindle. Maybe in user testing the squeezed keyboard was more effective. But it sure isn’t for me.

And, still, the web browser is “experimental.”

I am a believer in separate reader devices (that is, separate from reading on your computer, phone, or tablet) but this device is not making headway.

I’ve been trying to educate myself on the recent economic slide, and was given for my birthday two books that have received a lot of notice: John Lanchester’s I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay [amazon], and Joseph E. Stiglitz’s Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy [amazon]. Both came out at the beginning of 2010.

I’m no economist, but I am (I hope) a non-stupid reader of the news and someone who tries to pay attention. So as an everyday educated reader, I think I can plausibly assess these books for other similar readers. Basically, I can recommend Lanchester’s I.O.U., and I have a couple of things to say about Stiglitz, but can’t really recommend it.

Lanchester’s also a novelist, and boy can he tell a story. Each chapter has villians (mostly) and heroes (some), and a bit of a plot, especially in the first half and the last chapter (the middle sections flag a bit). The best parts of the book come in the first half where Lanchester provides humble parables that get to what such instruments as “credit default swaps” are all about. Here and there are little gaffes (I remember a mistake about statistics somewhere in there), but for the most part, it’s compelling. Having read around in Stiglitz (who is a Nobel winner), who has a similar account but more aimed at policy, it would seem that for the most part Lanchester is telling the truth. His overall conclusion about the state of the economy is extremely dire, and in the last chapter he goes a bit berserk, explaining our doom. Basically as a society we Americans have shot our credit cards. Now we have to pay. And it’s going to take decades. Sorry. Now really is the time to move to Canada.

Stiglitz’s book is more about policy, with a heavy dose of “I told you so.” It is highly repetitive. The basic message seems to be that the rewards structure in the American/European economies massively over-rewards finance, and especially short-term gain. Stiglitz firmly believe that the way out is to make massive investment in people via the educational system and other mechanisms. He likes to point out that for all of the praise of market-self-regulation and privatization, all of the best universities and colleges in the United States are not-for-profit. He uses this fact as a counter-argument about the merits of unfettered profit-driven capitalism.

Here’s the bit I want to pick out: One interesting aspect of the book is that for Stiglitz, a real culprit in the overall imbalance in capitalistic rewards is the underpricing of natural resources. Infuriatingly, this point does not seem to be broken out as a separate section, and the book has no index (!). But here’s a representative bit:

[We need a new economic model] — sustainability will require less emphasis on material goods for those who are overconsuming and a shift in the direction of innovative activity. At a global level, too much of the world’s innovation has been directed at saving labor and too little at saving natural resources and protecting the environment — hardly surprising given that prices do not reflect the scarcity of these natural resources. There has been so much success at saving labor that in much of the world there is a problem of persistent unemployment. But there has been so little success at saving natural resources that we are risking environmental collapse. (p. 192)

The other place where this comes up is in a remarkable section called “What You Measure is What You Value, and Vice Versa” (pp. 283-285) which takes square aim at the inability of GDP to measure what is really important about the health of economies (in Stiglitz’s view, it would be a measure of sustainability or even “happiness”). Here he talks more about the depletion of the natural resources, but the point about prices is to say that GDP is too high because the real costs of energy aren’t taken into consideration.

I would love to read a review of Stiglitz that breaks out his position on energy more schematically.

John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime. [Amazon]

I paid attention to the Presidential primary and general elections like everyone else, and even drove up to New Hampshire to see one candidate in person. I kept up enough to know that during one period, Hillary Clinton was said to be a “sure thing,” while later, it was rumored that her campaign was totally disorganized.

This book sorts all that stuff out, with significant “deep background” quotes from almost all of the players. It’s a good read. At Amazon, there are a lot of complaints that the book is slanted towards Obama, but I don’t think that’s really the case. If anything, there’s not enough about Sarah Palin.

By far, the most compelling chapter is the one on John and Elizabeth Edwards. It’s even more shocking and depressing that what you might have read in reviews. If even 25% of it is true, they are both do for some serious psychological counseling.

The book reminded me how much promise there was for these candidates.

Dave Thompson, London’s Burning: True Adventures on the Front Lines of Punk, 1976-1977 (2009). $18.95. [Amazon]

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.