The Music Book Podcast

On this episode, Marc talks with David Stubbs. He’s the author of “Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don't Get Stockhausen,” originally published in 2009 and recently reissued. It's an examination of how avant-garde visual art gets mainstream acceptance but avant-garde music is comparatively obscure and unpopular. It's also a pocket history of modern art and music that brings up all kinds of interesting issues and associations among many different artistsAs David writes, “Part of this book is a history, albeit a potted and highly subjective one, of twentieth-century music set in its social and aesthetic contexts and in parallel with developments in the arts…This text isn’t intended as a sealed and finished piece of academic work - it’s as much a matter of questions, suspicions, and impressions as answers, historical facts, and conclusions.” We hope you enjoy Marc's conversation with David Stubbs!

On this episode, Marc talks with Frans de Waard, author of “America’s Greatest Noise,” published in July of 2024 by Frans’s own imprint, Korm Plastics. It’s the story of Ron Lessard, founder of RRRecords in Massachusetts, which he ran from the mid-80s until 2009. It's a story told in Lessard’s own words, compiled by de Waard from a series of Skype conversations the pair had over the past year. There are so many fascinating and often hilarious stories about how Lessard put together his releases, including some uniquely odd projects that helped define the noise scene of the past 40 years. As Frans writes, “I learned a lot and we laughed a lot about noise musicians, releases, quirks, anti-records, concerts, and so much more. Here’s a man who enjoys a joke and whose releases sometimes have a humorous streak, yet at the same time he is serious concerning the release of records and creating noise music.”We hope you enjoy Marc's conversation with Frans de Waard!

On this episode, Marc talks with Robyn Hitchock, author of “1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left,” published in July of 2024. You probably know Robyn as an incredibly creative and accomplished musician. His first book could be called a memoir, but it’s confined to the year 1967, when he left home at age 13 to enter boarding school in England, and fell in love with music. It's a super compelling book filled with Hitchcock’s vivid depictions and idiosyncratic notions, written to read like a real-life novel.As Robyn has explained, “For me, 1967 was the portal between childhood and the adult world...the world was changing as fast as I was, and music embodied that change.”We hope you enjoy Marc's conversation with Robyn Hitchcock!

On this episode, Marc talks with Toby Manning, author of “Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music,” published in May of 2024. It’s an extensive examination of pop music from the early 1950’s to the present in America and England, and how it interacted with the political culture of its respective times. Covering a vast selection of songs and albums, Manning finds connections and provides insights that you might never have considered. Anyone interested in pop music of the last 70 years will find something entertaining and thought-provoking inside this book.As Toby  writes, “Popular music’s dialectic of repression and refusal charts and channels the political struggles of the last three-quarters of a century, and it’s this relationship to which this book is dedicated.”We hope you enjoy Marc's conversation with Toby Manning!

On this episode, Marc talks with Mike Smith, author of “In With The In Crowd: Popular Jazz in 1960s Black America,” published in May of 2024. Smith argues that most studies of 60s jazz focus on the avant-garde centered around John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and more, and he sets out to balance that with a history of the more popular jazz artists from that decade, such as Eddie Harris, Nancy Wilson, and Ramsey Lewis, showing how their music also influenced the form and culture of jazz.As Mike writes, “There was an infrastructure that allowed jazz to thrive in the sixties because jazz, for many, was a moneymaker. It wasn’t just the music of protest; it wasn’t just the music that spoke to feelings of rage, anger, and resentment. Jazz could be all of those things, but it was also so much more.”We hope you enjoy Marc's conversation with Mike Smith!

On this episode, Marc talks with Tom Maxwell, author of “A Really Strange and Wonderful Time: The Chapel Hill Music Scene, 1989-1999,” published in April of 2024. It's the story of a community where musicians played in each other’s bands, toured with each other, produced each other’s records, and supported each other’s work regardless of style or pedigree. Tom also shows what it was like to be in a place where major labels descended, boosting some bands and discarding others. He experienced it first hand as a member of many NC bands, including Squirrel Nut Zippers, whose 1995 album “Hot” sold over a million copies.As Tom writes, “I want to give you a sense of what was broadly going on musically and show you the fertile soil from which all this wondrous music sprang. Because this kind of community is very much like a garden: there are the beautiful flowers, of course, which command most people’s attention, but for those flowers to grow there must also be a rich diet, pollinators, earthworms, and the right amount of rain, shade, light, and decay.”We hope you enjoy Marc's conversation with Tom Maxwell!

On this episode, Marc talks with Tara Lopez, author of “Chuco Punk: Sonic Insurgency in El Paso,” published today, June 4th, 2024. It’s a fascinating history of how punk rock developed and grew in the Texas city of El Paso, and the way this opened punk up to marginalized groups. It’s a story about community and self-reliance that adds a new chapter to the history of punk rock.As Tara writes, “While punk is known for its daring subversion, so too is El Paso. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, El Paso’s reputation as a criminal outpost of sin was so widespread that its nickname soon became “Chuco,” a derivative of the Spanish word for “crooked” or “illegal.” El Paso was the natural staging site for a punk revolution."We hope you enjoy Marc's conversation with Tara Lopez!

On this episode, Marc talks to Bill Sassenberger, author of “Toxic Shock Records - Assassin of Mediocrity: A Story of Love, Loss, and Loud Music,” published in the spring of 2024 by Fluke Publishing. Bill and his wife Julianna ran Toxic Shock Records from 1980 up until about 2014 - it was a store, a label, a distributor, and tour booker, and much more.Bill’s book is both a personal memoir and a history of his business, as well as a diary of his time with Julianna after she had a stroke in the early 2010's. Julianna passed away before Bill wrote the book, but he includes her voice via an interview she did, which he puts right after his introduction. All together, this is a compelling portrait of two people who worked hard to get deserving music heard.As Bill writes, “We preferred to work behind the scenes. Much to our chagrin, it was this fact that probably kept us from being more successful in a business where who you knew led to your success or failure. It was just us against the world and we preferred it that way.”We hope you enjoy Marc's conversation with Bill Sassenberger!

On this episode, Marc talks to Laina Dawes, author of “What Are You Doing Here?: A Black Woman's Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal,” first published in 2013 by Bazillion Points books, then republished in a new edition in 2020. It’s a combination of memoir, oral history, and highly-researched documentation of the roles black women have played in heavy metal, both as artists and as fans, and by extension in all kinds of music scenes.As she writes, “What are you Doing Here? reveals the common thread of strength and determination among black women musicians in male-dominated music industries. We have a track record of resilience against all the obstacles put in our path.”So I hope you enjoy my conversation with Laina Dawes, here it is!

On this episode, Marc talks to Michael Veal, author of “Living Space: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Free Jazz, from Analog to Digital,” released in April 2024. It’s a fascinating, complex study of John Coltrane’s work from 1965 to his death in 1967, and Davis’s “Lost Quintet,” who played from 1968 to 1970 without ever recording in the studio. Comparing the former to digital architecture, and the latter to experimental photography, Veal explores themes of outer space, free meter, race, musical analysis, the avant-garde in jazz, and much more. As he writes, "Similar to the way that my interest in architecture influenced my articulation of rhythmic ideas (with John Coltrane), my immersion in the language and history of photography helped transform what initially seemed like an intractable stumbling block (the lack of official Davis recordings) into a constellation of new opportunities for jazz history, analysis, and interpretation."We hope you enjoy Marc's conversation with Michael Veal!