Storyteller—The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl
By Donald Sturrock (Simon & Schuster, 2011; 672 pages)

It’s a big book, and a detailed one. There’s a neat description of a wad of foil chocolate wrappers which Dahl had pressed into an orb “between the size of a golf ball and a tennis ball” and used to show off to his friends.
But given Roald Dahl’s varied output, unapologetically nasty reputation and old-school sexist-and-classist personal life, one wished for a book that isn’t so… steady.

Sure, this is the “authorized” biography, but so was David Michaeilis’ Schulz & Peanuts, which allowed lots of leeway for scandal and analysis. Dahl is dead, as are most of the people who could claim to be offended by some of the revelations here. What happens actually is that when the bio loosens up and starts behaving like a Road Dahl novel, characters come to life. Congresswoman/playwright Clare Booth Luce as a sex-crazed adultress? Ian Fleming admitting his own deficiencies as an author, and justifying his fondness for that “ugly stuff,” money? Walt Disney as cold businessman discussing the allure of gremlins?

Taking a tip from the economical Dahl learned in his slam-bang short stories and chaotic yet well-charted children’s chapter books, this weighty and sluggish bio should have been half the length and twice the pace, with all the qualifying statements cut out. Dahl was clearly a let-the-chips-fall kind of guy. Donald Sturrock spends too much time walking carefully behind him and picking up the chips.

Of Faith & Light got their band name from a stick of butter in a convenience store. The keyboard/oboe duo builds tunes out of the classical repertory, jamming gracefully on classical riffs which swiftly devolve into chaos.
“We think of it as comedy,” reveals the tooting Faith Spread. “We thought that was pretty clear. But we did a show on campus last year and a college kid did a serious paper on us. It’s not like we don’t get it, you know? We’re classically trained. We know all those big words for what we do. But this is not some deconstructionist theory we’re working here.”
“If we could throw pies during the set, we’d do that,” pipes up Larry Light, whom some might remember as Harold Zeller Jr. of the late great—and more consciously pompous—Hazeus. “But it could be bad for the instruments.
“I turned into a swan for this band,” L/Harry allows. “But it’s the squawky, silly, flapping kind of swan.”

The Amazing Dr. Darwin and Billion Dollar Boy at the Bullfinch. Two solo men, one night before the all-women bill of Ganymede Club and My Brother’s Keeper tomorrow… Putting Up Roots, Dark as Day and Between the Strokes of the Night keeping under cover at Hamilton’s. Where do they get them all from? And who comes out to see them all while the college is on break?… The Nimrod Hunt and Cyborg from Earth, technindustrialectronica at the penitent D’ollaire’s…

Made a paper theater out of a cut-out book I found at Better Read Than Dead.

Young Buffalo, Only We Can Keep You From Harm
Part Gregorian chant, part Hotleg’s “Neanderthal Man,” part white funk jam, this was the perfect song with which to start a fractious week. The lyric, by adding a single syllable, comes off as more menacing than the title:
“IF only…”

Stinglet, the stripey-shirted singer of The Bobbie Truncheons, shut down a major stream of malicious gossip last week when he admitted that, accent and attitude aside, he’s not actually British.
How did this major, potentially professionally damaging personal revelation come about? Somebody asked him.
We’d never thought of that ourself. The whole Stinglet persona is so farfetched we assumed it came with a self-protective streak. Not so, as we learned in a follow-up conversation.
“It’s just a lark, innit? I mean, I’m just having one off, taking the piss.” said—oh, you know who said. Who else in our little scene would say like that?
For the record, Stinglet was born just outside Winter Garden, 37 years ago. He has no European heritage that he’s aware of, though he’d like to believe that his father, whom he’s never met, and knows nothing about, is from England.
Stinglet seems alarmed to learn that members of our creative community have taken his stage identity to be anything except a joke. “They must think I’m barmy,” he blithers. “Off me bleeding rocker.” Actually, we think we speak for the whole community when we say we’re just relieved.
The Bobbie Truncheons play Thursday at Hamilton’s—UK ales discounted during their set. The Red Whites, doing American R&B stolen from British R&B stolen from American blues, open… A more independent American streak that night at the Bullfinch, with idiosyncratic solo sets from Patricia Henry and Ben Arnold… The Booming Skies at D’ollaire’s, a patriotic drinker’s night out…

Tried to sort albums by common subjects, but they’re all about love.

Radical Dads, Mega Rama

Such a good name for a band, especially since there’s a woman in it, that you want them to succeed. Radical Dads have a leg up already because of the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah pedigree of guitarist Robbie Guertin. With the recent release of Mega Rama, the band (which formed in 2008) has more than doubled their recorded output. They play a special strain of Brooklyn rock that will resonate with elderly Velvet Underground acolytes and disenchanted contemporary youth alike. Crazy chord blurts and spectral consciousness-expansion combine in three-minute wonderments like “No New Faces” and “Little Tomb,” while the five-and-a-half-minute opus “Hurricane” is a wandering blissful thing unto itself. The most commercial-sounding, straightahead pop track, “New Age Dinosaur” is indeed the album’s first single and video. Lindsay Baker chirps the vocals on this one, which mentions power lunches and giant moths.

33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs from Billie Holiday to Green Day
By Dorian Lynkskey. Harper Collins/Ecco, 2011.

This is a tremendous, if unwieldy book about music making a difference.

It’s full of lively scholarship, done up in the style of Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train, where a central topic is allowed to grow into a garden of related strands of useful tangential subtopics. A chapter on, say, The Clash’s “White Riot” covers the birth of British punk in the mid-70s and the social irrelevance of the prevailing pop genre of the era, disco. The following chapter gives disco its due concerning the gay rights struggle, centering on Carl Bean’s “I Was Born This Way.” Which leads, in turn, to chapters anchored by Linton Kwesi Johnson, The Dead Kennedys (with useful material on the creation of MAXIMUMROCKNROLL magazine), Grandmaster Flah, Crass, Frankie Goes to Hollywood (yes! and justified beautifully!), U2 (the “Pride” period), The Special AKA’s “Nelson Mandela”, Billy Bragg (introduced thus: “If you ask someone to name a British protest singer, there is invariably only one response”) and REM (“Exhuming McCarthy,” though who knows what other trenchant politically conscious insights lie in Michael Stipe’s mumbled lyrics of that time?).

The secondary arguments and also-ran artists explored in this deeply annotated study (660 pages, of which 60 are source notes, 23 are the index and 30 are appendices listing songs listed in the text, important songs lying outside the book’s already broad boundaries and some recommendations for further listening.

The whole book also suffers from that maddening frame of mind which maintains that art which is more “important” when it pertains to real-life events. Plenty of perfectly progressive and protest-fomenting songs are dismissed or ignored because they’re too generally or don’t fit a newsy framework. Many which do make the cut are called out for not being specific enough.

Ultimately, his treatise is undone by the lack of workable definitions for what a protest song is or could be. Lynkskey rightfully wants to make room for genre-breakers such as “What’s Going On,” so he throws occasional wrenches into his own organizational methods. But as a cultural history and as music criticism, 33 Revolutions Per Minute is exceptional.

Still, what Lynkskey, an arts journalist for the UK Guardian, has collected here is remarkable on its own terms. Lynkskey could limited himself any way he damn pleased and still have a heck of a book. He went for a research-intensive approach that also allows for a lot of criticial analysis. One of my favorite bits is this hyper-qualified, hilariously disdainful appreciation of “Eve of Destruction”:

It was a somewhat gauche shopping list of reasons to be fearful: segregation, nuclear war, Vietnam, Red China, the JFK assassination, all conspiring to sweep humanity into an early grave. It had none of the judgemnet-day terror of Dylan’s apocalyptic songs, and none of their agility (the third verse has no fewer than seven rhymes for “frustratin’”), but a gripping momentum nonetheless. The hoarse-throated Barry McGuire, who had just left folk revisionists the New Christy Minstrels and was looking for solo material, deigned to record it.

We need more pop-music books like this.

Nobody in our little scene can surf. Ffew are even coordinated enough to pinch a cigarette into their fretboards while onstage. But music hath charms, so you gotta try.
Seven of us headed down to the public water park on a bus. There, we found bunches of cardboard which we fashioned into boogie boards and skim boards. (Nothing was long enough for an actual faux surfboard.) We balanced them on boulders and trashcans and had a great time until someone got hurt.
Best part was the soundtrack. Rule was that the music could never die. Nobody, however, had brought a player, so we had to sing it all. We kept up a constant chorus of rumbles and yips for what seemed like hours (especially to the pissed off picnickers around us).
Saturated with sweat and surfiness, we all melted onto the bus and dripped back to the Bullfinch for cocktails to soothe our burning flesh. The rocks were on us!

Inflatable Float at the Bullfinch with WhaleSharkDolphin. First 20 people at the bar get bitten… The Striped Towels and Season of the Beach at Hamilton’s, which its experimenting with a new outside “deck area” for this show only… Dollaire’s is back down for the count. Those friggin’ drunk minors!…