Read Beat (...and repeat)
If you're like me, you like to know things but how much time to invest? That's the question. Here's the answer: Read Beat--Interviews with authors of new releases. These aren't book reviews but short (about 25-30 minutes on the average) chats with folks that usually have taken a lot of time to research a topic, enough to write a book about it. Hopefully, there's a topic or two that interests you. I try to come up with subjects that fascinate me or I need to know more about. Hopefully, listeners will agree. I'm Steve Tarter, former reporter for the Peoria Journal Star and a contributor to WCBU-FM, the Peoria public radio outlet, from 20202 to 2024. I post regularly on stevetarter.substack.com.
Read Beat (...and repeat)
"They're Playing Our Song" by Bruce Pollock
Bruce Pollock has been around. He’s covered a lot of ground. Best known as a rock critic, he's the author of 17 books on popular music, the founding editor of Guitar (for the Practicing Musician), a former record producer, and he’s been published in Playboy, Saturday Review, TV Guide, New York Times, Crawdaddy, and many others. You can find him online at brucepollockthewriter.com.
His latest book, They’re Playing My Song, is a collection of articles based on interviews he’s done over the years with most of the great songwriters of our time: John Lee Hooker, Neil Sedaka, Gerry Goffin, Phil Ochs, Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Frank Zappa, Jimmy Webb, Paul Simon, Jerry Garcia, Randy Newman, John Prine, Bruce Springsteen, to name a few. You get the idea.
You learn things in this book. The songwriting team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant wrote 24 songs for the Everly Brothers, among other things. Pollock ‘s interview with them sheds light on how a successful songwriting team broke into the business. They wrote letters to everybody they could think of.
“My heart would crack with every rejection,” said Felice. “I thought, well maybe we’re not that good, because I was counting on the fact that the powers that be really knew, cause if they didn’t know they wouldn’t be there. I didn’t realize it’s all guesswork in their department, too.”
Boudleaux added: “Some of the (songs) that we ourselves have liked personally the least have been songs that other people have flipped out on, and some of them have been pretty good hits. And some songs that we absolutely just were crazy about and loved and thought were just the best we’d ever written didn’t do a thing, and we still have them sitting around.”
Pollock’s interviews span an era from the 1970s into the 21st century. So were there surprises? On Neal Peart of Rush: “Would you expect the drummer of a world-renowned arena-resounding rock band to be conversant with the subtleties of black humor?”
“He was an intellectual,” said Pollock, who, in a 1986 interview, recalled what Peart had to say about his favorite writer: “To me, Tom Robbins is the quintessential modern writer because he’s funny, he’s profound, he’s sexy, he’s irreverent, he’s dirty, he’s hip. He’s everything I would like modern writing to be.”
Frank Zappa, often the contrarian, proved quite polite, said Pollock. John Sebastian talked about “magic moments” in the studio that were responsible for the string of hits he composed for the Lovin' Spoonful in the 1960s.
Sometimes it’s Pollock’s endnotes following the article that stay with you: “The erratic, sporadic, and quintessentially chaotic career of Andy Partridge, in and out of XTC, with various spinoff groups and album reconfigurations, continued into the twenty-first century and as yet shows no signs of relenting.”
Pollock’s concise collection takes you across the board when it comes to insight regarding the music business.
Oh yes, Pollock is also the author of the Rock Song Index, 7,500 of the most important songs from 1944 to 2000. No, it’s not a countdown, although I’d love a radio station to take a shot at it sometime. What would it take? Maybe a month or more. Waiting for number-one would take a true fan.
