I can has Vanishing Point?

Brilliant.

Slint - Spiderland by Scott Tennent

We are very pleased to announce this fantastic addition to the series...out in November

From the back cover...

"Of all the seminal albums to come out in 1991—the year of Nevermind, Loveless, Ten, and Out of Time, among others—none were quieter, both in volume and influence, than Spiderland, and no band more mysterious than Slint. Few single albums can lay claim to sparking an entire genre, but Spiderland—all six songs of it—laid the foundation for post rock in the 1990s. Yet for so much obvious influence, both the band and the album remain something of a puzzle.

This thoroughly researched book is the first substantive attempt to break through some of the mystery surrounding Spiderland and the band that made it. Scott Tennent has written a long overdue look at this remarkable album and its origins, delving into the small, insular musical universe that included bands like Squirrel Bait, Maurice, Bitch Magnet, and Bastro. The story, helped by in-depth interviews with band members David Pajo and Todd Brashear, explores the formation of Slint, the recording of Tweez, and the band’s dramatic move into the sound of Spiderland."

A little taste of what's inside from Scott Tennent...

The accepted story of Slint’s origin winds back to Squirrel Bait and usually ends there, as if the notion that Brian McMahan and Britt Walford shared the stage with fellow godfather of post-rock David Grubbs was too mythic to contest. But to trace a straight line from one band to the other is to overstate the significance of Squirrel Bait at the expense of the intertwining relationships and lesser-known bands shared by each of the young men who ultimately created Spiderland. Squirrel Bait is but one thread among many.

It’s certainly not the first thread. To pick that up you’d need to travel back to J. Graham Brown Elementary School, Grade 6, 1981. Founded ten years earlier, the Brown School was (and is) notable for its open, unstructured learning environment. The arts were heavily emphasized and each student’s curriculum was individually molded based on their unique aptitude, interests, and self-discipline. “I think [Brown] was pretty significant for all of us,” Brian McMahan told Alternative Press in 2005 — “all of us” being he and his classmates, Britt Walford and Will Oldham. “I don’t think I would’ve been so involved in music or writing if I hadn’t gone there,” he said. Just eleven and twelve, respectively, McMahan and Walford had already picked up instruments; Oldham was musically inept, but his older brother Ned, an eighth-grader, played bass. So Brian, Britt, and Ned, along with friends Stephanie Karta and Paul Catlett, started a band. They were called the Languid and Flaccid, and were an “art/noise band,” according to Clark Johnson, then a high school freshman who saw some of the band’s shows. “They were just little kids,” Johnson recalled in a 1986 interview in a small Xeroxed zine called the Pope. “They had songs like ‘White Castles’ and ‘Fire Engine,’ then they also had songs like ‘K Song,’ ‘L Song,’ ‘M Song,’ ‘N Song,’ etc. Their best song was called ‘Big Pussy,’ and it was so good. Brian sings on it way before his voice changes . . . Yeah, Languid and Flaccid were great.” Sean Garrison, a young Louisville punk, was also a fan. “Languid and Flaccid were a very garage-y band,” he told me. “Very clever . . . slightly smart-assed. It was just amazing hearing these guys. Man, they could play.”

Most tween bands tend not to justify their place in the annals of indie rock history, if only because they seldom make it off of the playground and onto a bona fide stage. But the Languid and Flaccid played out, holding their own against the other, older bands in the scene like Your Food, Malignant Growth, and the Endtables. All-ages venues at the time were scarce, so the Languid and Flaccid would get on Sunday matinee bills at a dingy downtown dive called the Beat Club. Garrison, known around town as Rat, first caught them at a Beat matinee. He was fairly new to the scene; he’d gotten involved because his friend, Brett Ralph, had recently become the new singer for Malignant Growth, arguably the biggest punk band in town. Just fourteen himself, Garrison became immediately compelled to check out this band of twelve-year-olds who had a set’s worth of all original music. So he made his way to the Beat Club to see the Languid and Flaccid open for Your Food on Halloween 1982.

“There was this little seedy pocket in Louisville then,” he told me. “The Beat Club was next to a really scary strip club — you couldn’t get seedier than this — called the Penguin. It was serious.” The Languid and Flaccid boys would get dropped off by their parents, who would help them load their equipment into the dank and dirty club populated by the intimidating punks who were part of the Louisville scene. “The guys that were in bands back then, some of them were really scary. Really scary. And some of them got scarier. But those kids could hang. It was very, very impressive, at least to me. It blew my mind.”

*

It was on the exact same day — Halloween 1982 — that Clark Johnson and his childhood friend David Grubbs kicked around the idea of starting their own band. The two sophomores were loafing around listening to records when Grubbs piped up out of nowhere, “Why don’t you play bass?” So Johnson picked it up. The two didn’t actually start practicing until December; they had to wait for their drummer, a friend named Rich Schuler, to come home from his first semester at University of Cincinnati, and Johnson didn’t own his own equipment until the following year. It wasn’t serious anyway: they named the group Squirrelbait Youth, in simultaneous emulation and parody of the DC hardcore scene, not to mention the local bands who were aping the anti-authoritarian rage with all the suburban naïveté they could muster. “Our first song was ‘Tylenol Scare,’ right after the Tylenol thing. And ‘That Badge Means You Suck,’ things like that,” Johnson told the Pope. Most of the energy put into Squirrelbait Youth was in concept — it was more of an inside joke between Johnson and Grubbs, mocking the local punk scene. Besides, Grubbs was in a more serious band at the time, a new wave group called the Happy Cadavers. They had just self-released their debut 7”, With Illustrations. “Grubbs was not taking [Squirrelbait Youth] seriously at all and not putting any time into it,” said Johnson. But the Happy Cadavers soon dissolved, and Johnson pressed Grubbs into putting more stock into their venture. “We dropped the ‘Youth,’ and I bought a bass.” It was impossible to be more serious, though, when their drummer could only practice on spring break and winter and summer vacation. They needed to find a replacement.

*

By late 1982 the Languid and Flaccid had already been around for more than a year, and Walford, McMahan, and Oldham were growing up and growing restless. They wanted to make music that was louder, faster, more aggressive. So they started a second band which they dubbed Maurice. Rat, who had become utterly enamored with the Languid and Flaccid, saw an opportunity to ingratiate himself into the new act. “I just kind of pushed my way in. They didn’t need [a frontman], I just insisted they did. I was like, ‘Man, I’m doing it.’”

If their intent was to create a more aggressive band, then the addition of Rat was a coup. “My level of rage was so much higher than theirs, it must have seemed comical. Just like their lack of rage sometimes seemed comical to me,” Garrison recalled. “Back then I didn’t realize that the angst or the fury I had, it definitely wasn’t teen angst. I was way beyond that.”

Indeed, Rat’s background could not have been more different from that of his bandmates. Walford, McMahan, and Oldham all grew up on Louisville’s East End, a middle-class and upper-middle-class part of town filled with tree-lined streets and well-kept lawns. As evidenced by the boys’ enrollment in the Brown School, their parents viewed their children’s potential as unlimited. They encouraged their kids to learn music, literature, and art. None of this described Rat’s childhood. Louisville’s South End was a more working-class, blue-collar part of town — and Rat lived south of there, in Pleasure Ridge Park, twenty miles beyond what was then the city limits. His father was an ex-marine who worked at the local ironworks. “I come from a family where if you didn’t have a dangerous job and you didn’t bust your ass, then you were a pussy.” The danger of daily life was no exaggeration — Garrison’s father, like his grandfather, died on the job. Garrison launched himself out of his home and out of his neighborhood like a juggernaut, plowing his way into the Louisville punk scene. He landed in Maurice, where his shrieking caterwaul both compelled and alienated audiences — and his bandmates.

Wowee Zowee book reviewed

Over on Pomo Jukebox, James Brubaker has written a review of Bryan Charles' book about Pavement for the series.

The whole review is worth reading (and you can do so here) but I particularly like this part:

"Bryan Charles' Wowee Zowee is a perfect example of why the 33 1/3 series is so successful and has had such long legs--with every volume there is the chance at greatness. Not every volume is great, and a few are downright boring, but Charles' sharp writing, self-referential framework, and measured earnestness make his book one of the series' biggest successes, and a great piece of rock journalism."

That "chance at greatness" is something I've always wanted the series to have - of course, it doesn't always work out like that, but giving the authors as much freedom as possible, trying dozens of different approaches to writing about music...these still feel like valid things to be doing, 7 years after the series started.

This would also seem an opportune moment to mention Bryan's about-to-publish memoir, There's a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came From. About which, people are already saying very nice things:

“A sneakily disturbing, disarmingly profound, casually devastating memoir, taut and adept, that cracked me up even at its saddest moments, and broke my heart almost without my quite noticing.”
—Michael Chabon

"This is the book I can't forget...Full of insightful, transcendent regular-guy moments and bad decisions, it didn't make me like the author, but it knocked me on my ass."
—Library Journal (starred review)

“With ease and humor, Bryan Charles does what all writers aspire to do: he shows us the familiar in a whole new way. His beautiful, often painful, honesty makes the inside of his head a fascinating place to be.”
—Rachel Sherman, author of The First Hurt and Living Room

Radiohead - Kid A, By Marvin Lin - An excerpt

The publication date is fast-approaching. Here's a taste of what's to come...

Pre-order the book from our website here, and set your iphone countdown app to November 25th.

EXCERPT:

On December 12, 1920, artist Tristan Tzara wrote a manifesto on behalf of the international cultural movement called Dada. Divided into 16 parts, Tzara’s manifesto contained mostly illogical but occasionally incisive prose, vacillating between the odd (“I prefer the poet who is a fart in a steam-engine”) and the odder (“the page was taken to the barbaric country where humming-birds act as the sandwich-men of cordial nature”). But there was one section that stuck out: wedged between a rant on “selfkleptomania” and another on autobiographies “hatching under the belly of the flowering cerebellum,” Tzara, in his most lucid state, provided instructions on how to make a Dadaist poem:

● take a newspaper

● take a pair of scissors

● choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem

● cut out the article

● then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag

● shake it gently

● then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag

● copy conscientiously

● the poem will be like you

● and here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

With the last line, Tzara hoists the poet atop a pedestal as a unique but misunderstood personality. The joke, of course, is that the preceding instructions almost entirely remove personality from the process: can a poet truly be considered “original” in the context of randomness, chance, and appropriation? Here, the artist is held accountable for technique, not for any autobiographical connotations, with the Dadaist poem sharing more aesthetic traits with auto-generated spam emails than with labored-over sonnets flaunting perfect semicolon placement. With a playful sense of irony and wit, Tzara was really critiquing the notions of celebrity, uniqueness, and craft, providing a subversive getaway authors could use to create distance between themselves and their work.

Ninety years since these instructions were first published, the Dadaist poem is still relevant to the silly mythologies we have of the modern musician: original, full of personality, and of course misunderstood.

* * *

So what about Thom Yorke?

While he’s decidedly full of personality, he’s certainly not winning any awards for affability. In a Kid A-era interview with the Observer, he admitted to still receiving hate mail from fans he upset during the OK Computer tour (one letter said it was a pity Jeff Buckley died instead of him), and during the Kid A recording sessions he posted on Radiohead’s official website, “I got beaten up in the middle of Oxford last week by someone who recognized me and saw me as an easy target.” Just try to find an interview with Thom that isn’t prefaced with a jab at his personality. Everyone seemed to have an opinion, and they were often high profile too: Kelly Jones of the Stereophonics called him a “miserable twat”; Noel Gallagher said he was a “cunt”; and Ronan Keating of Boyzone not only called him a “muppet” but also said he’d love to throw him off a mountain (metaphorically). At 2009’s 51st Annual Grammy Awards, Kanye West “sat the fuck down” during Radiohead’s performance after supposedly being snubbed by Thom, while Miley Cyrus claimed she was going to “ruin [Radiohead]” and “tell everyone” after the band refused to have a “sit down” with her. (Perhaps Cyrus should’ve had a “sit down” with West since he “sat the fuck down” anyway.)

And these are only the criticisms that made headlines.

Thom is clearly no stranger to having his personality stretched out and laid bare, but nowhere was this character examination more overblown than during OK Computer’s “Running From Demons” world tour. The press wasn’t concerned with the album’s commentary on the speed of human interaction in a hyper-capitalist technological landscape. It wanted to get to know him, as if the lyrics were purely autobiographical, as if they came from a tortured artist, a visionary, a depressed outcast on the brink of self-destruction who — hey, what do you know — just so happened to be artistically “brilliant.” How many times have both Radiohead’s music and Thom been described as “moody”? How many times have both been described as “paranoid”? To many, including me, OK Computer’s lyrical content and Thom’s psychology were one and the same.

But, ironically, not only were OK Computer’s lyrics overtly skittish but also they were purposefully designed to stray from The Bends’ introspection and to function more like Polaroids. As Thom told Q magazine in 1997, “It was like there’s a secret camera in a room and it’s watching the character who walks in — a different character for each song. The camera’s not quite me. It’s neutral, emotionless.”

However, Thom’s intent with OK Computer was immaterial to an industry that masqueraded as “neutral” and “emotionless.” As depicted in Meeting People Is Easy, the indelible 1998 documentary directed by Grant Gee, the media’s insistence on marketing a downtrodden yet noble artist in fact engendered the very conditions of alienation, disconnection, and simulacrum that OK Computer was lambasting, kick-starting a vicious downward spiral: Why is Thom wallowing in despair? Why is he always so angry? Perhaps it stems from the lingering trauma due to his drooping eyelid? Thom’s aversion to celebrity culture was mistaken for misanthropy, and the journalistic cheap shots aided in part to a nervous breakdown after OK Computer. He had trouble even speaking. As Thom admitted in a Rolling Stone interview,

"I came off at the end of that show, sat in the dressing room and couldn’t speak. I actually couldn’t speak. People were saying, 'You all right?' I knew people were speaking to me. But I couldn’t hear them. And I couldn’t talk. I’d just had enough. And I was bored with saying I’d had enough. I was beyond that."

The industry, as it tends to do, reduced Thom to a manufactured personality, to the point where fictitious storylines seemed to coalesce out of thin air, where consumers could hardly separate the value/function of the band from any other packaged goods on the shelf.

But as the lens focused more vigorously on his personality, Thom was already devising ways to increase the distance.

* * *

It wasn’t surprising, then, when I discovered that Radiohead had actually posted Tzara’s instructions for a Dadaist poem on their official website in the fall of 1999, roughly a year before Kid A’s release. It also wasn’t surprising to find out that Thom in fact employed a similar poem-making technique during the Kid A sessions to combat a two-year case of writer’s block. As he stated on a Dutch television show,

"What I’d went off and tried to do with the writer’s block thing was just basically have all the things that didn’t work and stopped throwing them away, which was what I’d been doing before, and keeping them and cutting them up and putting them in this top hat and pulling them out."

If one of the benefits of the Dadaist poem is the removal of personality and the distancing it provides, then randomly drawing cut-up lyrics from a hat seems like a reasonable reaction. With this new lyrical technique — influenced in part by David Byrne’s like-minded approach to Talking Heads’ Remain in Light — Thom was able to mount a critique that couldn’t be mistaken as autobiographical, couching his lyrics in obfuscation and ambiguity in order to distance himself from rock’s self-important mythologies. It was a lateral technique that provided links, however tenuous, to Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, to John Cage and the I Ching, to Guy Debord’s Mémoires. “The vocal parts are really interesting,” said guitarist Ed O’Brien, “because it’s the first album that we — as a band — haven’t been aware of what Thom’s singing about. He didn’t talk about his lyrics.”

-Marvin Lin

Terry & James & Carl & Celine

James Franco was interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air yesterday, and talked a little bit about Carl Wilson's 33 1/3 on Celine Dion and his work on General Hospital.

On his time on General Hospital

"I'd been discussing the idea [of doing a soap] with this artist named Carter. He's a friend of mine, and I collaborate on different projects with him. We were going to do a movie called Maladies that he was going to direct and I was going to star in, and I was going to play a character who was formerly on a soap opera. And that got us talking about, what if I actually was on a soap opera? Wouldn't that be interesting? People would be surprised. Nobody would expect it. And also, it's a different kind of entertainment and acting and yeah, people often look down on soap operas as kind of inferior entertainment. But I was thinking in a different way at that point.

I had just read this book by Carl Wilson ... about Celine Dion. And he wasn't a fan of Celine but he decided he was going to investigate why. Why does he feel superior to Celine's music? And he didn't come to any definite conclusions, but he figured out that Celine's music means something to some people and gives a lot of people strength, hope — whatever you get from music. So he decided to suspend his judgment and stop looking down on Celine just because she doesn't speak to him. So that's kind of the mindset I was in at that time."

You can read a little more of the backstory between Carl's book and Mr. Franco here.

It's also worth mentioning that Carl is contributing to a new blog these days: Back to the World. Check it out.

More Dylan in France, plus forthcoming items

A little advance warning, here. In the next couple of weeks, we'll be posting extracts from the upcoming 33 1/3 volumes on Slint, Radiohead, Johnny Cash, Nine Inch Nails, and Ween. Consider yourselves primed!

Also, Michael Gray will be hosting, in November, further Dylan-themed weekends at his home in the beautiful French countryside. Details:

Dylan expert and critic Michael Gray, who writes the long-running blog The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, is opening his home in France for Dylan Discussion Weekend Breaks this November.

A maximum of six guests per weekend join the author of "Song & Dance Man III", "The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia" and “Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell”, for evenings discussing Dylan’s work, augmented with good local wine and Dylan tracks from Michael’s own collection, after enjoying excellent meals created by his wife, the food writer Sarah Beattie.

Guests can choose topics such as Dylan & the Blues; Dylan & Rock’n’roll; Dylan's Use of the Bible; Dylan, Plagiarism & Bootlegs; Dylan & Literary Culture; Dylan In Concert; Dylan On Film; Dylan & the Beats.

The house is in rural Southwest of France, 45 miles from the Pyrenees and the Spanish border. These weekends follow successful previous breaks for fans sharing their enthusiasm for Dylan’s work in February-March, June and September.

Further details can be had here.

Home Recording Contest Update

I have assembled the panel of judges, and we're receiving a steady stream of great entries for the contest (guidelines can be found here). Current unrepresented genres include hip hop, noise/avant garde/sound collage, R&B, bluegrass, new age, salsa, hymns, reggae, dub, metal, and pretty much anything that does not prominently feature a guitar...
Keep 'em coming!

A Contest for Home Recorders

Contest info is below, but first, a little background...

We recently published a great book called Understanding Records: A Field Guide to Recording Practice.

Understanding Records explains the musical language of Recording Practice in a way that any interested reader can understand. Drawing on readily available hit records produced since 1945, each section of this book explains a handful of core production and engineering techniques in chronological record-making sequence, elucidating how those techniques work, what they sound like, how they function musically, where listeners can hear those techniques at work in the broader Top 40 soundscape, and where they fit in the broader record-making process at large.

Author Jay Hodgson currently teaches popular music practice and history, and the ‘project’ paradigm of production and engineering, at the University of Western Ontario, as part of North America’s first (and only) Bachelor of Arts in Popular Music Studies and Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture programs.

Understanding Records is required reading for anyone who wants to make sense of what they’re putting on tape, and for anyone who wants their recorded output match the songs they hear in their heads. It’s great for people experimenting at home, but it’s essential for anyone thinking about paying for studio time. When you’re on the clock, you want to know what you’re asking from the engineers…and they will be grateful that you’ve done your homework. It is really a great resource and an education.

Once upon a time, when I had more space and time, I dabbled in home recording, and over the last few years I’ve been going back and revisiting some of my old tapes and digitizing them so I can rock out on my ipod. Though I don’t have a chance to play and record as much as I would like, I still keep my TapeOp subscription current (you should, too, it’s free), and I also tend to gravitate toward the 33 1/3s that get technical about the studio work (Murmur, Big Star). I imagine there are lots of you out there who play instruments and do the same, especially now that amateur recording is so much more accessible with garageband and other software loaded on computers right out of the box. So with that in mind, I would like to propose a little contest…

Contest Guidelines:

1. Send me one song at jmboling (at) continuum-books.com, that you yourself have recorded at home (using a 4 track, ProTools, reel to reel, wax cylinder, whatever).
2. Include your name and mailing address with the submission.
3. The track should be recorded as a mp3, and of a reasonably emailable file size.
4. No limits on musical genre, all are welcome.
5. We will choose ten tracks and put those up on the website for people to download and listen to. We will be judging the songs, not the recording quality, so don’t be shy about that.
6. The lucky ten will receive a copy of Understanding Records and one 33 1/3 of their choosing in the mail.
7. Deadline is October 15th. Spread the word!
   

PS: Here are a couple of my own tracks of dubious fidelity from back in the day to get things started.

Better book titles

Allow me to bring this website to your attention. Comedy gold therein.

Van Dyke Parks to Play at Pop Montreal...WOW

Van Dyke Parks himself will be performing at this year's Pop Montreal festival on Thursday, September 30th. Not only will he be performing, but he'll be hosting a song-writing workshop earlier in the day so that the masses might get a chance to imbibe some of his knack for crafting catchy melodies. Our very own Van Dyke Parks 33 1/3 by Richard Henderson was published earlier this summer, which you can read all about here. Rumor has it there will be some of the books for sale at the merch table at the show on Thursday night.

Bryan Charles on Pavement on Newtown Radio

Bryan Charles will be talking about Pavement on Newtown Radio on Monday, September 20th from 8pm to 10pm. Also on hand will be Matthew Perpetua from Fluxblog, Wowee Zowee cover artist Steve Keene, and Joseph D'Agostino of the band Cymbals Eat Guitars.

They will be talking about the band, playing their favorite Pavement songs, and generally extending the Pavement high from this weekend's NYC shows.

Click here to listen in.

33.3 Event in Chicago Friday Night

Let this Onion AV Club feature serve as a reminder about tomorrow's 33 1/3 event at Quimby's in Chicago tomorrow night. Friday, September 17th, 7pm! More info here!

Some particularly nice words about the series from the intro to the AV Club piece:

"In 2003, Continuum launched a book series that any music critic and aspiring music critic would dream to be a part of: the 33-1/3 book series."

Dan Kois on Pavement Tickets

The New Yorker's Talk of the Town section has a nice piece by Dan Kois, on the harrowing logistical nightmares faced by Pavement fans who've been hanging on (or not) to their reunion show tickets for pretty much a whole year now. Here's a taste:

*

“It’s so rare that you hold on to a physical artifact now,” Yancey Strickler, a Pavement fan and a co-founder of the Web site Kickstarter.com, said. Strickler has to be philosophical: he hid his Pavement tickets in a book and lost them right away. “I remember thinking, This book will remind me of Pavement,” he said. Since then, he has searched every book he owns. “I found a lot of old airplane-ticket stubs, but no concert tickets.”

*

And you can read the whole thing here.

This post should, obviously, serve as a reminder of two recent 33 1/3 volumes:

Dan Kois' own book, on Israel Kamakawiwo'ole

and

Bryan Charles' Pavement book.

Chicago! 33 1/3 Night at Quimby's

Three albums, three books, three authors... One event!

Friday, September 17th, 7pm - Quimby’s Bookstore, 1854 W. North Ave, Chicago

Joe Bonomo – AC/DC’s Highway to Hell
Joe Bonomo strikes a three-chord essay on the power of adolescence, the durability of rock & roll fandom, and the transformative properties of memory. Why does Highway To Hell matter to anyone beyond non-ironic teenagers? Blending interviews, analysis, and memoir with a fan’s perspective, Highway To Hell dramatizes and celebrates a timeless album that one critic said makes “disaster sound like the best fun in the world.” Joe Bonomo teaches in the English Department of Northern Illinois University. He is the author of Sweat: The Story of the Fleshtones, America's Garage Band and various other works.

Mark Richardson – Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka
The Flaming Lips' 1997 album Zaireeka is one of the most peculiar albums ever recorded, consisting of four CDs meant to be played simultaneously on four CD players. Approaching this powerful and complex art-rock masterpiece from multiple angles, Mark Richardson's prismatic study of Zaireeka mirrors the structure the work itself. Thoughts on communal listening and the "death of the album" are interspersed with the story of the Zaireeka's creation (with assistance from Wayne Coyne) and an in-depth analysis of the music, leading to a complete picture of a record that proved to be a watershed for both the band and adventurous music fans alike. Mark Richardson is the managing editor of Pitchfork. He was a contributing editor to The Pitchfork 500 and his writing on music has appeared in many publications.

Scott Plagenhoef – Belle and Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister
If You’re Feeling Sinister shows how Belle & Sebastian transformed themselves over the space of a decade, from a slightly shambolic cult secret into a polished, highly entertaining, mainstream pop group. Along the way, the book shows how the internet has revolutionized how we discover new music—often at the cost of romance and mystery. Scott Plagenhoef is Editor-in-Chief for Pitchfork Media.

* * * * *

And just because, here's a picture of Bon Scott and friends in a hotel room in Atlanta, from page 76 of Joe's Highway to Hell book.
Update: some love from Chicagoist!