Author: brendanmstewart

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Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music, by David N. Meyer

Trying to track down the Big Bang of any type of music is a fool’s game. Every genre has multiple antecedents. This is particularly true of rock music, which has many rivers feeding into its ocean. Several years ago, a new genre was coined: “Americana.” Truth is, there was absolutely nothing new in this genre. It goes back to Sun Studios and the initial blending of country music and rhythm and blues. Elvis Presley singing “Blue Moon of Kentucky” is as Americana as it gets. It was dubbed rock and roll.

Over the ensuing years, other threads were added to the tapestry. The Byrds brought folk music into the mix, and it was dubbed “folk rock.” They also incorporated country music into their repertoire. In 1967 Bob Dylan traded in his wild mercury sound for sparse instrumentation and acoustic music with John Wesley Harding. He was followed in 1968 by his old backing group The Band and their Music From Big Pink, an album of almost incalculable influence. The Beau Brummels, famed for their British Invasion-style hits “Just A Little” and “Laugh, Laugh” made a hard turn left with their country- and folk-inspired Bradley’s Barn LP. And it was called roots music.

The biggest musical shock of 1968 was likely the Byrds and their terrific album Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Here was an album that was made by a well-established rock group, but the sound was stone-cold country music. Although the Byrds had always dabbled in country, Sweetheart was a complete stylistic change. This was due to the influence of a country singer who loved rock and roll, Gram Parsons.

Parsons had been kicking around for a few years and had released an album with the International Submarine Band (so many bonus points for naming themselves after a Little Rascals joke). He befriended the Byrds’ Chris Hillman and was brought into that group. Such was his presence that even the founder of the band, Roger McGuinn, bought fully into the country sound.

It is here, from his time in the Submarine Band through his short stint with the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers to his time as Keith Richards’s drug buddy and through his all-too-brief solo career, that David N. Meyer’s 2007 biography Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music stands as a definitive work.

Gram Parsons

Meyer’s greatest achievement is his incisive exploration of Parsons’ musical legacy. He dissects what Parsons called “Cosmic American Music,” a blending of country, rock, soul, and folk with precise attention to detail. He frames the style as a radical synthesis of country’s emotional authenticity, rock’s rebellious energy, and soul’s spiritual depth. The book meticulously traces Parsons’ evolution from the International Submarine Band’s tentative experiments to Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which Meyer argues was a cultural pivot point for country-rock. His analysis of Parsons’ tenure with the Flying Burrito Brothers, particularly albums like 1969’s The Gilded Palace of Sin, highlights their blend of Nudie-suited theatricality and raw vulnerability. Meyer’s close readings of songs like “Hickory Wind” and “Sin City” reveal their lyrical and sonic complexity, positioning them as archetypes of Americana’s introspective ethos. His discussion of Parsons’ collaboration with his protégé Emmylou Harris on 1973’s GP and 1974’s posthumous Grievous Angel is especially good, portraying the duets as high art. Meyer convincingly argues that Parsons’ influence—evident in the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, Wilco’s experimentalism, and the alt-country movement—stems from his ability to transcend genre. This was a man who felt comfortable adding distortion to pedal steel (an unforgivable sin in country music at the time) and who did a fine rendition of “Cry One More Time” by Boston’s answer to the Rolling Stones, the J. Geils Band. With the Burrito Brothers he was also the first to record and release “Wild Horses,” predating the Stones’ classic recording on Sticky Fingers by a year.

The biography’s portrayal of Parsons’ life is equally rigorous. It’s clear that Meyer is a fan, but he’s able to look at the singer objectively. Parsons’s youth is portrayed as something out of a William Faulkner novel, born and raised fabulously wealthy in a highly dysfunctional family torn and frayed by alcoholism and tragedy. This context informs Parsons’ paradoxical character: a charismatic innovator whose idealism and prodigious talent was undercut by self-destructive tendencies. Meyer’s research—drawing on interviews with obscure associates and bandmates—illuminates Parsons’ relationships, notably his influence on Keith Richards and his creative partnership with Chris Hillman. The book avoids hagiography, candidly addressing Parsons’ heroin addiction, erratic behavior, and professional unreliability, which Meyer frames as both a personal failing and a byproduct of the 1960s counterculture’s excesses. This approach yields a complex portrait of the artist as a young man: Parsons as a catalyst for musical change, yet someone whose potential was curtailed by his inability to harness his own genius. Meyer’s vivid prose captures the era’s cultural ferment—Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon scene, country music’s resistance to rock, and the transatlantic exchange with the Rolling Stones—making the biography a valuable cultural history as well as a personal one.

It must be said that the book gets off to a rough start. A reader would be forgiven for abandoning the story fairly deep into it. Approximately 30% of the book, almost the entire first third, is a forensic detailing of Parson’s family history going back to his grandparents. Page after page is filled with the minutiae of their business dealings, their successes, their failures, their trouble with alcohol, distant relatives, childhood friends. The subject of the book is barely a character and deep into the book there’s still plenty of discussion about his eighth-grade band and his high school years. This excruciating level of detail proves that Meyer did his research, interviewing virtually everybody whose life intersected with Parsons, but a good editor could have told him to summarize it all in one chapter. It’s an interesting detail that the Parsons family at one point owned a full third of the orange and citrus business in Florida, but you don’t have to read about every business dealing on the way to their fortune. The writing here is self-indulgent and unnecessary.

Once the reader gets past this, the story takes off, culminating in a motel room in Joshua Tree National Park. The story of Gram Parsons’ death from an overdose of morphine and tequila is tragic; the immediate aftermath is a sick farce. Meyer does not romanticize this story, as many have in the past. It is not the ultimate farewell to a shining star as Parsons’ road manager Phil Kaufman tries desperately to portray it. Kaufman’s theft of Parsons’ body, and the gasoline-fueled cremation of his naked, recently autopsied corpse in Joshua Tree is now the stuff of gruesome legend. It matters not that Parsons and Kaufman had pledged to do this in case one of them died. It was a reckless, drug-fueled promise that should have been broken, and Parsons should have been buried with dignity.

Twenty Thousand Roads is a much-needed biography of a figure that, as much as any single person, can rightfully be called the father of Americana. He was building on influences from Buck Owens to the Rolling Stones, but the sound coalesced on his wonderful solo albums and his work with the Flying Burrito Brothers. One listen to the heartbreak of “$1000 Wedding” or “Love Hurts” and the spinning road tale of “Return of the Grievous Angel” and you can hear the entire history of country music as well as the key to the future of the genre. Gram Parsons was the real deal, the performer that the Eagles desperately wanted to be, though they could not hope to measure up. You can hear Parsons’ influence through the subsequent years. It’s in the cow punk of Jason and the Scorchers, the Southern Gothic sound of early R.E.M., the alt-country stylings of Lone Justice, the Long Ryders, Uncle Tupelo, the Jayhawks, and so many more. None of those bands were labeled as Americana because the term didn’t exist until marketing departments became desperate to hang a label on the sound, but they all tie back to Parsons. Much of the modern sound of country (I’m talking real country, not that godawful “sittin’ in my pickup with my dog, drinking a beer, wearing my blue jeans and Stetson, looking to raise trouble” bro-country) owes allegiance to a singer who was scorned by Nashville for decades until the music scene caught up to him. He was, in the prescient song by fellow Burrito Brother and future Eagle Bernie Leadon, “God’s own singer.”

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The Death of Summer: Brian Wilson and Sly Stone, RIP

It’s been a rough week for popular music with the death of two of the most important figures in the culture of the last 70 years. On the surface, Brian Wilson and Sly Stone could not be further apart. Wilson was the sun-kissed, clean cut all-American kid singing pop songs with his family about surfing, girls, and cars. Stone was the perpetually high black hippie singing funk and soul songs with a racially and sexually integrated band about togetherness, self-empowerment, and enjoying life to the fullest. Wilson marked the first half of the 1960s, Stone was a product of the second half of that decade.

On further reflection, several striking similarities are also evident. Both were geniuses. Both bands were built around family members. Both made it into the 1970s with increasingly scattered results. Both were casualties of drugs and mental illness. Both were unbelievably influential on their peers and their descendants.

Sly Stone, born Sylvester Stewart in 1943, was a disc jockey, producer, and musician in San Francisco who led the Family Stone, a funk outfit that had a great love for all types of music and incorporated rock, soul, psychedelia, gospel, and pop into their sound and blew the doors off of the boundaries of the music scene. Beginning with his Top Ten hit, “Dance to the Music” he began a string of classic songs and albums that redefined the music of black America. This was not the hardcore funk of James Brown, nor was it the Memphis soul of Otis Redding, or the gorgeous pop symphonies of Motown. This was, well, all of that thrown in a blender. The result was unique to Sly and the Family Stone, but others were paying attention.

It’s simply impossible to imagine the sound of black music in the 1970s and beyond without hearing and understanding Sly and the Family Stone. Beginning with his first breakout albums, Music of My Mind and Talking Book, and culminating with the magisterial Songs in the Key of Life, Stevie Wonder had clearly been paying close attention to Sly. Without Sly, there is no Philly soul, no Jacksons, no Parliament-Funkadelic, no Earth, Wind, and Fire, no Spinners, no War, no latter-day Temptations. Follow the trail into the 80s and beyond and there’s no Terence Trent D’Arby, no Prince, no Red Hot Chili Peppers, no Fishbone, no OutKast, no Vintage Trouble. James Brown can rightfully claim the credit for inventing rap, but one wonders if the more music-oriented rappers would have picked up their instruments without Sly leading the way. All these bands and performers were paying homage to Sly Stone in their different ways. Even Talking Heads’ more funk-oriented songs from the early 80s were directly inspired by Sly.

Stone peaked with 1968’s album Stand! and the three singles that he released to close out the decade. “Hot Fun in the Summertime” remains one of the all-time great summer songs, as good as anything Brian Wilson’s brothers had released. The double A-side that he released at year’s end, “Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” and “Everybody Is A Star” pointed the way to the seventies on the first side and summarized Sly’s sixties on the second half.

Brian Wilson, the heart and soul of The Beach Boys, was a fragile genius who turned the California dream into a universal language. Born in 1942, Wilson’s early life was steeped in music but scarred by the abuse of his father, Murry, a domineering figure whose cruelty left lasting marks. It was a smack from the desperate wannabe songwriter Murry that rendered Brian deaf in one ear. Wilson’s genius took a while to become evident. The early Beach Boys, as enjoyable and as fun as they are, were mainly variations on a theme: surfing is cool, and life is best lived at the beach. But the genius was lurking all the time, poking his head up in introspective songs like “In My Room” that hinted at a more melancholy side to the songwriter. The musical and vocal arrangements were also getting more sophisticated. As a kid, sitting in front of the stereo with headphones on listening to the then-new Endless Summer compilation, I was drawn more to the intriguing arrangements of the music on “California Girls” and the vocals on “Help Me, Rhonda” than I was to “Surfin’ Safari”.

Brian Wilson Beach Boys

Still, nothing prepared the music-loving America of 1966 for the explosion of brilliance that was Pet Sounds. Surely the winner of any competition for “Worst Cover/Best Album” in history, Pet Sounds was Brian Wilson’s attempt to pick up the gauntlet the Beatles had thrown down with Rubber Soul. Brian has stated that his album was an effort to create something that had “more musical merit than the Beatles.” For their part, the Beatles flipped over the Beach Boys album. Paul McCartney still calls it his favorite album. It wasn’t the lyrics on Pet Sounds that were revolutionary, though they broke from surfing and cars. Singer Mike Love even complained about that to Brian, telling him to “stick to the formula.” No, it was the musical arrangements that completely upended rock music. This was music that demanded to be taken seriously. Even the brilliant musicians who provided the instrumentation, Los Angeles mainstays The Wrecking Crew, familiar and fluent in every type of music around at the time, were confused by what Wilson was asking for in the studio. Confused, but also in awe of the results. Harpsichords, tympanies, barking dogs, bicycle bells…nothing was off-limits in Wilson’s imagination. Anchored by “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “God Only Knows,” Pet Sounds remains one of the greatest albums ever recorded. And it was such a flop Capitol records rush-released a greatest hits album just two months later. The fact is that nobody (except other musicians) was ready to hear Brian Wilson’s genius yet.

Wilson’s brilliance reached its apogee with the following single, “Good Vibrations,” a song whose intricate arrangement stuns the listener to this day. But Wilson’s attempt at a follow up album, Smile, was mired in a sea of LSD, pot, and mental illness. He’d had a nervous breakdown in 1964 which led to him giving up touring to concentrate on the records, and now he had another, far more serious one. Smile was abandoned. Parts of it were released on the albums Smiley Smile and Wild Honey, providing a tantalizing glimpse into what might have been. While he “finished” Smile in 2004 as a solo artist, the fact remains that the full Beach Boys-treatment remains the great lost album of the sixties.

Wilson’s career was a rollercoaster of brilliance and breakdown. His mental health struggles, compounded by drug abuse and the manipulative control of psychologist Eugene Landy, derailed him for decades. Landy, initially a savior in the 1970s, became a Svengali-like figure, isolating Wilson until a 1992 lawsuit freed him. His wife and guardian Melinda Wilson died in 2024. Brian Wilson lived out his life suffering from dementia, a tragic ending to a tragic story.

Sly Stone’s life mirrored Wilson’s in its descent. Drug addiction, particularly cocaine, and erratic behavior unraveled his career by the mid-1970s. The Family Stone fractured, and Stone became a reclusive figure, his output dwindling as he battled personal demons. His later years were marked by legal troubles, financial ruin, and health issues, culminating in a prolonged battle with COPD that eventually killed him.

While their stories are tragic, the music they left behind stands testament to their genius. As the drugs got worse Sly Stone’s music turned dark, but his work from the sixties remains fresh, sunny, bold, and optimistic. It’s the perfect companion to the hot nights partying after spending the day on the beach, where Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys provide the soundtrack of the endless summer. The musical world is greatly diminished by their loss.

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Homeward Bound: The Life of Paul Simon, by Peter Ames Carlin

Homeward Bound The Life of Paul SimonThe poet half to Art Garfunkel’s one-man band has always been an interesting guy. Like Bob Dylan, he was a rock ‘n’ roll fan who went deep into the folk music scene only to reemerge with a sublime combination of the two genres. He achieved massive levels of fame and fortune, gathering critical hosannas the entire time, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice and now, in his 80s, is still releasing music. All of this, but Peter Ames Carlin’s 2016 biography was the first serious attempt at capturing this life on the page. The story covers Simon’s entire life from his days as a baseball fanatic kid growing up in Queens, New York through his years with Garfunkel and on through his solo career. Simon was not a particularly prolific artist, his solo albums being years apart, but the high quality of the work from “The Sound of Silence” to Graceland and beyond is unassailable.

The musical journey begins in 1957 when an unknown duo calling themselves Tom and Jerry released a standard ’50s vocal group tune called “Hey! Schoolgirl.” Credited to Jerry Landis and Tom Graph, these were pseudonyms designed to obscure the obviously Jewish roots of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. The song became something of a regional hit, allowing Simon to namedrop it when attempting to make his way into the music industry. Simon struggled for years attempting to cash in on the success of “Hey! Schoolgirl” to no avail. He and Garfunkel parted ways as musical partners, though they remained friends.

Much like Bob Dylan had, Simon threw the dice on a career in folk music when that scene exploded in the early sixties, reuniting with Garfunkel. Unlike Dylan, success came slowly, resulting in an album called Wednesday Morning, 3 AM that went nowhere. Disheartened, he made his way to England where he had had success on a solo jaunt the year before. In England he attracted a large following, and even recorded an album called The Paul Simon Songbook, which was not released in the United States at the time but is a fascinating glimpse at many Simon and Garfunkel classics in their early stages.

When Simon achieved success he was unaware. Unbeknownst to him, the producer of Wednesday Morning, Tom Wilson, had decided to add some electric guitars, bass, and drums to the all-acoustic song “The Sound of Silence.” It was released as a single and Simon’s original reaction was anger, which abated once the royalty checks started flowing. From there Simon and Garfunkel were off to the races, scoring hit after classic hit.

The duo split, acrimoniously, in 1970 when Garfunkel decided to try his hand at acting, leaving Simon alone with his thoughts and a guitar. The result of that abandonment was Paul Simon, an excellent collection of tunes that proved Simon didn’t need the crystal-clear tenor of Garfunkel to succeed. As the seventies rolled on, Simon released only two more albums, both of which were extraordinary. One of them, 1975’s Still Crazy After All These Years even featured a reunion with Garfunkel on the brilliant “My Little Town.”

After two more albums, Simon released Graceland in 1986. The album generated an enormous amount of controversy because it was recorded in South Africa using musicians from that country at a time when artists were actively boycotting the apartheid regime there. The kerfuffle was overblown. Simon had fallen in love with the music coming out of Africa and wanted to share it with the world. He used black South African musicians, paying them twice what they normally would make, and brought more attention to the racist government of the country. Graceland was wildly successful and assured Simon’s place in the pantheon of rock and roll greats. His subsequent solo albums, despite critical acclaim, never matched that success.

Peter Ames Carlin’s book does an excellent job of assessing the career and events of Paul Simon’s life. It is comprehensive in its inclusion of detailed discussion of the music and is not afraid to discuss both the positive aspects of Simon’s life and the negative side of his personality (he wasn’t above claiming credit for the work of others). It also spends a lot of time, perhaps too much, on Simon’s relationship with Garfunkel, a lifelong series of reconciliations, reunions, and breakups that seems to have settled on a respectful distance. As Simon said in his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, maybe he’d even record with Garfunkel again, before slyly adding, “No rush.”

There are a few obvious errors in the book, but those errors are minor in the whole. For example, in his discussion of the Simon and Garfunkel album, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, Carlin writes about the brilliance of some of the album tracks and then proceeds to list four songs from the Bookends album. At another point, he has Simon and Garfunkel performing on the same night as Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead at the Monterey International Pop Festival. The errors may be insignificant, but they’re also sloppy and should have been caught in the editing stages. They also call into question the veracity of the author’s other claims.

Paul Simon is something of an anomaly in popular music. A short, balding, Jewish, well-read man who would seem to be most at home in the English department of New York University in Greenwich Village, he nonetheless emerged as one of the biggest, most successful stars of the last half of the 20th century. His work with Garfunkel, his initial splash in the industry, probably reverberates the most because their amazing singles created his legend, but it’s Simon’s solo work that truly transcends. He may never have written songs as good as “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “Mrs. Robinson,” or “The Sound of Silence” in his solo career, but he and Garfunkel never came close to putting out albums as consistently remarkable as There Goes Rhymin’ Simon or Graceland. From a lyrical perspective, only Bob Dylan was as literate, and Simon’s words are far, far more accessible.

Carlin’s expansive tome is a well-researched and engaging summary of Paul Simon’s life up until 2015 or so. It misses a few albums, including the beautiful Seven Psalms which Simon wrote, recorded, and released at the tender age of 81, but provides deep looks into everything up until that point. The book aims to be the definitive look at Simon’s life, but can any biography be classified as such if the subject in question is still alive, active, and capable of great work? Regardless, though it may be incomplete, Homeward Bound: The Life of Paul Simon succeeds in giving the reader an in-depth understanding into the life and work of a legendary songwriter.

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The Ruen Brothers: Ten Paces

Ten Paces by The Ruen Brothers

Imagine, if you will, an old black and white Western film set in John Ford’s treasured Monument Valley, directed by Sergio Leone, starring the cast of The Maltese Falcon. Now imagine the film has a pop/rock soundtrack instead of the usual Ennio Morricone music. This Twilight Zone spin on the old Westerns, combining them with Bogart’s cynical but honest gumshoe, Mary Astor’s femme fatale, and Sydney Greenstreet’s villainous “Fat Man”, gets its soundtrack courtesy of the Rues Brothers, an Americana duo from England.

The lightly picked guitar and the sound of ricocheting gunshots that open “Slow Draw” may grab the listener’s attention, but it’s the rich Roy Orbison-meets-David Byrne vocals of Henry Stansall that provides the deep hook of the music’s appeal. For Ten Paces, their third album, the brothers dive deep into the atmosphere of the odd combination of Western and film noir. The result is a song cycle that has a musical theme, and lyrical allusions, to another time and place. But just because it’s odd doesn’t mean it isn’t good, and Ten Paces is a very good collection of songs.

There is no plot or real concept to the record. This isn’t Tommy or Quadrophenia. It’s a hushed, mostly acoustic, somewhat downbeat affair with a cohesive sound that is not like anything else on the radio today. The Western feel to the music grounds the album in American country and folk but the songs themselves fit comfortably in neither genre. The album is classified as “Singer/Songwriter” in Apple Music, but there’s a little too much rock involved for that to be completely true. It’s impossible to imagine James Taylor singing “Hi-Yo”, a song about the search for gold that evokes the blood, sweat, and tears of the prospectors living in the hope that prosperity is right around the corner.

The imagery of gold appears again in “Silver to Gold” a love song that uses the titular phrase as a metaphor for a blooming relationship. These lyrical nods to the Western, often in conventional songs about love and loss, abound. A noose and hanging appears in the mid-tempo shuffle “The Fear”. Gunfight metaphors provide the lyrical hooks to the superb opener “Slow Draw”, “Bullet Blues” and “The Good Surely Die”.

“Is this a desert dream/Or a story in the West” Stansall sings on “Don’t Know What’s Come Over You”, a song of broken love with a pounding beat and a brief, out-of-place but still effective, synthesizer solo. Native American drums and the image of imprisonment highlight “Free As The Birds”. Only the closing track, “Long Road” is completely devoid of these nods and winks and is grounded in the present with its lyrics about turning on the radio and starting up the engine. But even here, the music keeps the connection with the rest of the songs alive with its subtle touches of pedal steel and acoustic guitars from Rupert Stansall.

Ten Paces is a return to form for the Ruen Brothers, an odd step in the opposite direction from Ultramodern, their previous album that tried to sound like its title with drum machines, processed vocals, and generally less-than-inspired songwriting. It’s a strong successor to their debut album All My Shades Of Blue, even if it’s lacking that album’s rockier tracks. This album deserves wider recognition than it has received, but when your music sits in another time and place obscurity is to be expected, if still lamented.

Grade: A

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Hollywood: The Oral History, by Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson

Hollywood An Oral History by Jeanine Bsinger and Sam WassonI’ve been looking for a good history of the movie industry for a long time now, which makes Jeanine Basinger’s and Sam Wasson’s 2023 release Hollywood: The Oral History all that much more frustrating.

The book is excellent for what it is. Oral histories are as difficult to compile as they are easy to read, and the effort that Basinger and Wasson put in is Herculean. They scoured primarily the American Film Institute’s series of interviews with the movers and shakers of Hollywood. Everyone is accounted for here from studio heads to writers to producers to directors to stars to crew. As they tell their stories, a rough history of the movies takes shape. Unfortunately almost 800 pages later that’s what you’re left with…a rough history of the movies told from specific, and sometimes contradictory, points of view. Over 400 people are represented in the book so the story can get a little scattershot at times.

What this book is extraordinarily good at is providing a detailed look at how movies are made. From concept to script to screen, the journey of a film is explained in detail. Mysteries are solved, such as “What does a producer actually do?” The moguls, people like Irving Thalberg, Jack Warner and Sam Goldwyn, are also discussed at some length by people who knew and worked with them. This oral history approach brings the famous names of Hollywood to life in a way that a more conventional history might not have.

The evolution and dissolution of the studio system takes up the first half of the book, before giving way to the “New Hollywood” when the Hays Code was abandoned and filmmakers approached their jobs with newfound freedom. That freedom ushered in a lot of gratuitous nudity and violence but also enabled the moviemakers with the ability to make personal artistic statements in a way not seen since Orson Welles made Citizen Kane. The ending of Bonnie and Clyde, one of the first films from the New Hollywood, could never have been made during the studio system (one of the reasons it was so shocking in 1967) but it still has the power to shake the viewer almost 60 years later. From the studio system only the shower scene in Psycho compares, and that contained no shots of the knife piercing Janet Leigh’s skin.

The New Hollywood is deservedly discussed at some length, including the rise of the blockbuster films, led by Jaws. The tentpoles of the era are The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, and Star Wars and all receive their due respect. Most other films are glossed over or mentioned in passing despite their influence on the cinema. While directors like Peter Bogdanovich are quoted extensively, there’s virtually nothing in the book about The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, or What’s Up, Doc? and less to connect him to those movies. Stanley Kubrick gets a bit more respect, but not much. Even Martin Scorsese string of influential 70’s movies get a superficial treatment.

The book is basically the point of view of the studios. There is a great deal of talk about how Jaws opened in a record number of theaters, how it became the first summer blockbuster film, and how much money it made. There is very little, if any, discussion about the content of the film. If you were to read the book without being familiar with the movie, there would be no context whatsoever with the words on the page.

And this is the most frustrating part of the book. In the beginning there is a list of all of the designated narrators of the story, along with their role. So you get names like “Steven Spielberg, director” but there is nothing at all to tell the reader what films Spielberg actually directed. There is no filmography in the book so there is no way to connect the narrators with the final work that they did. More than once I had to go to IMDB to find out just who the narrators actually were. The director Allan Dwan is quoted at some length in the book but it wasn’t until I went to IMDB before I realized that he’d directed Brewster’s Millions and The Sands of Iwo Jima. Similarly, there is no sense of when the interviews were given. Some of them are decades old.  Directors will wax poetic about the good old days and the problems with movies in the current age, but there is no clue whatsoever about when the good old days were or when the current age is. When discussing movies in the present tense, it’s helpful to know when the present is.

A similar frustration is the lack of an index. It is historical malpractice to write an extensive, 800 page survey history of a time and place without including an index. So if you want to know the opinion of the Hollywood movers and shakers about Monroe, Marilyn (not a good opinion at all), you just need to remember in which chapter and pages those observations reside. It makes going back to fact check some of my opinions here impossible.

On the negative side, there is also the lack of pictures. How does one compile an oral history of moving pictures without including any pictures? It’s another missed opportunity for Basinger and Wasson. Perhaps they were worried that the inclusion of pictures, filmographies, and an index would pad an already overstuffed book, but it would be better to have a 900 page book with context than an 800 page without.

Finally, this is something of a whitewashed history. Hollywood’s notorious reputation of being a place where decadence and debauchery are not just accepted but expected, is nowhere to be found. There is no cocaine blizzard in the studios during the 1970s. There’s no casting couch or #MeToo movement. There are not even any closeted homosexuals married to beautiful starlets. No affairs, no divorce, no alcoholism, no mental breakdowns. Hollywood earned this reputation and not just recently. Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust was written in 1940 and the hedonistic reputation of the city as both the maker and breaker of dreams was already set in stone.

Hollywood: The Oral History is a compelling and at times fascinating book. Unfortunately it is not the whole story and what is there is presented without much context. As such it is Hollywood 101. Deep dives into the history of the movies exist, but they are more likely to be focused on specific eras or filmmakers (e.g., Peter Biskind’s authoritative history of the New Hollywood in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls). An oral history may be the right approach for a history of such an unwieldy subject, but Basinger and Wasson fall several feet short of the mark.