Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture

by David Hajdu

Overview

The Beach Boys have been rolling, like the tide their great songs evoke, for more than thirty years, reaching professional peaks and tragic personal depths. In this electrifying account Steven Gaines reveals the gothic tale of violence, addiction, greed, genius, madness, and rock 'n' roll behind the wholesome, surf-and-sun image. Through candid interviews with close friends, family, and the Beach Boys themselves, Heroes and Villains portrays and evaluates all those who propelled the California myth, and the group who sang about it, into worldwide prominence: Murry Wilson, the corrosive father who abused them as children and exploited them as adults; Dennis Wilson, who explored every avenue of excess (including welcoming the entire Manson family into his home) to his inevitable self-destruction; the Wilsons' cousin, frontman Mike Love, whose devotion to Eastern religion could not quell his violent temper; the wives (more than ten), mistresses, managers, and producers who consumed huge pieces of the "musical pie"; and of course, the band's artistic center, Brian Wilson, the mentally fragile musical genius who achieved so much and then so little. With dozens of photos, Heroes and Villains recounts the bitter saga of the American dream realized and distorted and the music that survived.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786751044
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	10/06/2009
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	799,849
File size:	549 KB

About the Author

Steven Gaines has written many books, including Obsession: The Life and Times of Calvin Klein and, as coauthor, The Love You Make: An Insider's Story of the Beatles.

Table of Contents

Foreword David Yaffe ix

I B'S World 1

The Man Who Was Too Hot Billy Eckstine 3

II Whose Standards? 19

Mos Def and the American Songbook 21

Rodgers and Hart 27

Two Lives Sammy Davis, Jr. 34

Anita O'Day 40

Roman Candle Bobby Darin 45

Susannah McCorkle 50

III Blues and The Abstract Truth 55

A Hundred Years of Blues 57

Alan Lomax 66

Dinah Washington: Queen 74

Ray Charles 81

IV Growing Up 87

Elvis Costello at Fifty 89

Brian Wilson and the Lost Masterpiece 96

Sting the Lutenist 103

Joe Sacco and Daniel Clowes 108

The White Stripes 116

Abbey Lincoln and Mark Murphy 122

Three Women in Pop Taylor Swift Beyonce Lucinda Williams 128

V Cultural Machinery 135

The Blogging of American Pop 137

MySpace 144

The Music of Starbucks 150

Rick Rubin and Kanye West 156

Open-Source Remixing 162

VI Life with the Lions 169

Woody Guthrie Ramblin' Man 171

Will Eisner 178

Elvis and the Colonel 187

Ken Burns and the Great Men of Jazz 194

The Life John Lennon 201

Paul McCartney's Chaos and Creation 206

Joni Mitchell's Shine 212

Wynton Marsalis 218

VII Otherwise Engaged 237

Harry Partch 239

Elmer Fudd 250

Walt Whitman and Fred Hersch: The Jazz Leaves of Grass 255

Michel Petrucciani 261

Book of Longing Philip Glass Leonard Cohen 270

Jules Feiffer at the Village Voice 276

John Zorn 283

Josh Groban 289

Marjane Satrapi 295

Acknowledgments 305

Credits 307

Index 309

Editorial Reviews

In this rollicking collection of mostly previously published essays, Hadju (The Ten-Cent Plague; Positively 4th Street) combines the cutting candor of Lester Bangs and the measured and judicious cultural learning of Lionel Trilling as he takes aim at subjects ranging widely from jazz, rock and country music and cartoon characters like Elmer Fudd to broader cultural topics such as blogging, MySpace, and remixing. Hadju writes affectionately about the old Warner Brothers cartoons, recalling the respite they provided from the tumult of the 1960s, every night before dinner. In another essay, he uses the release of Joni Mitchell's album, Shine, as an entrée into a moving retrospective of her music and a bit of mourning over her recent absence from the music scene. In a superb comparison of the music of Lucinda Williams, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé, he captures Williams as a woman rare among pop stars, possessing unfeathered intelligence, untheatrical carnality, and uncompromising humanity. Hadju's opening essay on jazz great Billy Eckstine is alone worth the price of admission, a poignant portrait of a brilliant musician whose star might have risen even higher had he been born in a different era. Hadju's essays never fail to amuse, please and provoke.
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Publishers Weekly

Hajdu (Journalism/Columbia Univ.; The Ten Cent-Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, 2008) returns with a graceful collection of essays, most previously published, on a variety of topics-jazz mostly, but also Elmer Fudd, Elvis and others. The author writes with enormous confidence and competence in these pieces, most of which appeared in the New Republic, where he is a music critic. His encyclopedic knowledge of jazz history and musicians never reduces the prose to pedantry, and he is generally compassionate-though occasionally his criticisms are sharp. In Ken Burns's documentary on jazz, for example, Hajdu detects "subtle hints of racism and anti-Semitism," and he feels the music of Philip Glass can be "frigid." Hajdu is harsh when he needs to be-he declares that there are "four thousand holes" in a recent biography of John Lennon-and is often wry and amusing (see his quotation of Monica Lewinsky's note to President Clinton thanking him for Leaves of Grass). On the whole, the author is an able instructor whose vast knowledge inspires rather than intimidates. He moves easily from essays on celebrities everyone knows (Paul McCartney, Wynton Marsalis) to those known principally to the cognoscenti (Harry Partch, John Zorn). Hajdu includes a lovely essay on the brief life of pianist Michel Petrucciani, whose enormous talent was complemented by his capacious sexual appetite and shortened by bone disease. Among those earning the author's high praise are Susannah McCorkle, Billy Eckstein, Ray Charles and Mos Def. Those stung include Sting, Bobby Darin and Starbucks (whose CDs Hajdu equates with "state-sponsored music"). Occasionally he even chides himself, noting,for example, that as a young man he did not adequately appreciate the cartoons of Jules Feiffer. Hajdu's lengthy piece on Marsalis is a revelation. A gift for readers who enjoy erudition seasoned with elan. Agent: Chris Calhoun/Sterling Lord Literistic

Kirkus Reviews

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
ASCAP Deems Taylor Pop Book Award Winner
 
Kirkus, 9/1/09
“A graceful collection of essays…The author writes with enormous confidence and competence…The author is an able instructor whose vast knowledge inspires rather than intimidates…A gift for readers who enjoy erudition seasoned with élan.”

Publisher’s Weekly, on David Hadju
“[He’s] an exacting critic, and a great place to go for a thinking man's take on today's music.”

PW.com
“[A]rollicking collection… Hadju’s essays never fail to amuse, please and provoke.”

Entertainment Weekly website, 10/9
“[Hajdu is] the rare first-rate critic who’s also a first-rate interviewer.”

The New York Post, “Required Reading” column, 10/11
“An eye-opener…Enjoyable”

Forbes.com, 10/13
“[Hajdu is] like a grown-up Chuck Klosterman…,Heroes and Villains is hot.”

LibraryJournal.com, 10/9
“[Hajdu] uses his discerning eye to highlight controversial junctures in popular taste

From the Publisher