A lost Jazz painting by Harry Smith.
Our year end book favorites are staff generated. Book links connect to our affliate pages on Bookshop.org or in some cases to our Backroom Gallery bookshop which features many local and signed books. Happy Holidays! Thank you for reading and shopping local.
Art & Photography, 2023
Music
Lou Reed: The King of New York
Will Hermes
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
“The great virtue of “Lou Reed: The King of New York,” the new and very fine biography by Will Hermes, is that it’s really two biographies: of a bored and in some respects ordinary suburban teenage boy, typical of postwar America, and of his alter ego — the louche, urbane, ambi-poly decadent forever trembling at the absolute limit of Experience — brought into existence by his lonely daydreaming.
The first verges on stereotype: Dad a tax accountant, Mom a homemaker; a single-story, stand-alone brick house in the suburbs on Long Island; playing stickball until dark, back in time for a home-cooked meal. He went to college and wept when President Kennedy died. But the mid-century demanded a normalcy of Lewis Reed that he was unable to supply. Here was a fragile kid, maybe dyslexic, definitely depressed, sexually attracted to both men and women. Hence, Lou Reed, and his very urgent need to make rock and roll.
How dead do you have to be inside not to feel some nostalgia for this part of a rock biography? Pre-internet, pre-Spotify, music sneaking up on you in a darkened bedroom via samizdat radio waves. For Reed, curiously, it was not rhythm and blues or Elvis that most turned him on, but doo-wop. The Solitaires, the Chantels, the El Dorados — this dreamy catalogue of the now-half-forgotten taught Reed a critical life lesson: You only need four chords.” –Washington Post
“No matter how well you know the man and his music, there’s so much more to him that’s never been revealed until now. This book has the menace and allure of Reed’s finest work–a fascinating, addictive, head-expanding rush into the unknown.” –Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone
“An irresistible plunge into one of the seminal rock figures of the ’60s and ’70s . . . [Readers are] going to inhale it. This is a total no-brainer.” –Esquire
Bob Dylan Mixing Up the Medicine
Mark Davison and Parker Fishel
Hachette
The documents, as essential as they are intriguing—draft lyrics, notebooks, and diverse ephemera— comprise one of the most important cultural archives in the modern world. Along with countless still and moving images and thousands of hours of riveting studio and live recordings, this priceless collection now resides at The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, just steps away from the archival home of Dylan’s early hero, Woody Guthrie.
Nearly all the materials preserved at The Bob Dylan Center are unique, previously unavailable, and, in many cases, even previously unknown. As the official publication of The Bob Dylan Center, BOB DYLAN: MIXING UP THE MEDICINE is the first wide-angle look at the Dylan archive, a book that promises to be of vast interest to both the Nobel Laureate’s many musical fans and to a broader national and international audience as well.
“In 2016, the world learned that a new Bob Dylan Center was coming to Tulsa, Okla. Dylan said, “I’m glad that my archives, which have been collected all these years, have finally found a home and are to be included with the works of Woody Guthrie and especially alongside all the valuable artifacts from the Native American Nations.” “Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine” is the center’s official publication, a lavishly illustrated collection of archival treasures, edited by Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel. It also has new essays by a host of Dylan scholars, from artists like Ed Ruscha, Richard Hell and Lee Ranaldo to writers like Greil Marcus, Joy Harjo, Michael Ondaatje and Amanda Petrusich.+ -Rob Sheffield, The New York Times
Sonic Life
Thurston Moore
Doubleday
Signed copies available in store or at Book Beat gallery online.
“Both a herculean work of research and a love letter–to Moore’s youth, to underground rock, and to a band that formed in downtown Manhattan in 1981 and went on to change music forever… an exuberantly detailed account… Sonic Life is a big book and it feels like a whole life is poured into it.”
–Vogue
“Electrifying… At its most evocative when describing the downtown music scene of the late 1970s and ’80s New York.”
–Mark Yarm, The New York Times
“An edgy valentine to ’80s punk… Few musicians have more indie rock credibility than Thurston Moore… Moore writes self-assuredly and aware but without conceit.”
–The San Francisco Chronicle
“Sonic Youth was the lodestar of alternative rock, pushing boundaries and providing inspiration to a generation of renegade, free-thinking bands. In this candid memoir, Thurston Moore traverses his journey from ardent fan to revolutionary instigator, sharing his love of transgressive soundscapes and finding ever new guitar tunings for his celebration of song.”
–Lenny Kaye
Nick Drake: A Life
Richard Morton Jack
Hachette
Experience the definitive biography of one of the greatest singer-songwriters of the twentieth century with this eye-opening book featuring a foreword by Gabrielle Drake and over 75 photos, many rare or previously unseen.
Nick Drake: The Life is the only biography of Nick to be written with the blessing and involvement of his sister and estate. Drawing on copious original research and new interviews with his family, friends, and musical collaborators, as well as deeply personal archive material unavailable to previous writers–including his father’s diaries, his essays, and private correspondence–this is the most comprehensive and authoritative account possible of Nick’s short and enigmatic life.
“This is the book we’ve been waiting for . . . It is a biography to be treasured.”–Joe Boyd
Comics and Graphic Novels
Best Graphic Novels of 2023: Monica, Why Don’t You Love Me?, The Talk, I Must Be Dreaming