When musicians decides to write their memoirs they are often uneven (this is a kind statement). They often struggle to give words the life that do in their songs, this “new” format may not come naturally to them. That said, many of these men and women have great stories to tell and often provide compulsive reading. They do stumble in their wording and structure from time to time, but the stories are compelling and they succeed in capturing the spirit of their cultural moment with astonishing insight.
These twelve ten books are great examples of how it can be done if the authors manage to adjust to the new form. They are good period, not because they are written by famous artists, but because they reflect all the creativity, movement and human drama you’d expect from people driven by art. We kept it to memoirs, so no fictional prose (sorry, Nick Cave), no poetry (sorry, Patti Smith and Leonard Cohen), there are some of the books that touches different genres but all these books are mainly memoirs.
They are not necessarily the best biographies about artists written (although sometimes they are) but they are the best books written/narrated by the musicians themselves!
Egil makes the lists from the 60s and 70s, and I will hereby start doing the 90s. The remaining decades? we’ll see when we get there 🙂
The 1990s, pronounced “nineteen-nineties” or abbreviated as “nineties”, was a decade that began on January 1, 1990, and ended on December 31, 1999.
Culturally, the 1990s was characterized by the rise of multiculturalism and alternative media, which continued into the 2000s. Movements such asgrunge, the rave scene and hip hop spread around the world to young people during the decade, aided by then-new technology such as cable television and the Internet.
The 90s will not be done sequentially, I will start with 1995 and then, well, who knows…
This was the year that the Internet entered public consciousness.
Lyricist/guitarist Richey Edwards of the Welsh alternative rock band Manic Street Preachers goes missing from a hotel in Bayswater, London on the eve of a planned tour of the United States. His car is found two weeks later at Severn View services in Aust.
Astronaut Norman Thagard becomes the first American to ride into space aboard a Russian launch vehicle.
Mississippi ratifies the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the last state to approve the abolition of slavery. The amendment was nationally ratified in 1865.
The DVD, an optical disc computer storage media format, is announced.
The final original Calvin and Hobbes comic strip is published.
The 10 best Movies in 1995:
Strange Days
The Usual Suspects
Seven
Wild Bill
La cité des enfants perdus
Smoke
Bound
Devil in a blue dress
La Haine
Il Postino
A good year at the movies!
Egil has commanded:
Only one song per artist/group
The song must be released that specific year
Songs from live albums not allowed
Restricted to only 20 songs
A lot of wonderful music was released in 1995, very hard to pick only 20. Lets start this demanding task…
Here is a Spotifyplaylist (missing Palace Music and Van Morrison)
Lake Marie by John Prine from the album Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings, released 4th April 1995:
In a 2009 interview with The Huffington Post, Prine fan Bob Dylan commented, “If I had to pick one song of his, it might be ‘Lake Marie.'”
The song was inspired in part by Prine’s crumbling marriage and a series of grisly murders the singer remembered the Chicago news media having a field day with when he was a kid. The John Prine Shrine website quotes the singer discussing his inspiration for the song: “It’s an actual place along the Illinois-Wisconsin border. There’s an entire chain of lakes along there, small lakes, and I remember as a teenager growing up in Chicago, a lot of the teenagers would go to these lakes and in the summer time kind of get away from the city. Lake Marie was kind of just one that stuck out in my mind. About ’59, ’60, ’61, I grew up in Maywood – it’s a western suburb of Chicago, and we started hearing about murders that weren’t related to the mob. You know, John Wayne Gacy was like, about two towns away from me and you just hear about it. The suburbs were kind of thought to be a pretty safe place at the time, and then some of these unexplained murders would show up every once in a while, where they’d find people in the woods somewhere. I just kind of took any one of them, not one in particular, and put it as if it was in a TV newscast. It was a sharp left turn to take in a song, but when I got done with it, I kind of felt like it’s what the song needed right then.”
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
–
“John and I wrote She Loves You together. There was a Bobby Rydell song (Forget Him) out at the time and, as often happens, you think of one song when you write another.
We were in a van up in Newcastle. I’d planned an ‘answering song’ where a couple of us would sing ‘She loves you…’ and the other one answers, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ We decided that that was a crummy idea as it was, but at least we then had the idea for a song called She Loves You. So we sat in the hotel bedroom for a few hours and wrote it.” – Paul McCartney (Anthology)
“She Loves You” is a song written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and recorded by English rock group the Beatles for release as a single in 1963. The single set and surpassed several records in the United Kingdom charts, and set a record in the United States as one of the five Beatles songs that held the top five positions in the American charts simultaneously on 4 April 1964. It is their best-selling single in the United Kingdom, and was the best selling single there in 1963.In November 2004, Rolling Stone ranked “She Loves You” number 64 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. In August 2009, at the end of its “Beatles Weekend”, BBC Radio 2 announced that “She Loves You” was the Beatles’ all-time best-selling single in the UK based on information compiled by The Official Charts Company.
I’m goin’ to Memphis where the beat is tough
Memphis, I can’t get enough
It makes you tremble and it makes you weak
Gets in your blood, that Memphis Beat
~Jerry Lee Lewis – Memphis Beat
There many great songs with “Memphis” in their lyrics. Just check out this list on Memphis Rock n Soul Museum website: Over 1000 songs
I’ve picked 20 I really like:
1. Bob Dylan – Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again
This is the first post with Bob Dylan quotes from the 60’s. There will also, off course, follow posts with quotes from the 70’s, 80’s etc…
These quotes are collected from song lyrics & interviews. It’s not only “great” quotes we’ve collected, but also important quotes & funny quotes. (Read more)
