Contemporary Authors

1. Present tense : rock & roll and culture https://lccn.loc.gov/92001651 Present tense : rock & roll and culture / edited by Anthony DeCurtis. Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press, 1992. xii, 317 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ML3534 .P76 1992 ISBN: 0822312654 (pbk. : alk. paper) :0822312611 (hardback : alk. paper) : 2. The Rolling stone album guide : completely new reviews : every essential album, every essential artist https://lccn.loc.gov/92050156 The Rolling stone album guide : completely new reviews : every essential album, every essential artist / edited by Anthony DeCurtis and James Henke with Holly George-Warren ; reviewers, Mark Coleman ... [et al.]. 3rd ed. New York : Random House, c1992. vi, 838 p. ; 24 cm. ML156.4.P6 R62 1992 ISBN: 0679737294 : 3. The Rolling stone illustrated history of rock & roll : the definitive history of the most important artists and their music https://lccn.loc.gov/92006339 The Rolling stone illustrated history of rock & roll : the definitive history of the most important artists and their music / edited by Anthony DeCurtis and James Henke with Holly George-Warren ; original editor, Jim Miller. 3rd ed. New York : Random House, c1992. viii, 710 p. : ill., ports. ; 32 cm. ML3534 .R64 1992 ISBN: 0679737286 4. Rolling Stone images of rock & roll https://lccn.loc.gov/95076662 Rolling Stone images of rock & roll / edited and designed by Fred Woodward ; text by Anthony DeCurtis. 1st ed. Boston : Little, Brown, c1995. 1 v. (unpaged) : ill., ports. ; 32 cm. ML3534 .R65 1995 ISBN: 0316754684 5. The soundtrack of my life https://lccn.loc.gov/2013560241 Davis, Clive. The soundtrack of my life / Clive Davis with Anthony DeCurtis. 1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed. New York : Simon & Schuster, 2012. ISBN: 9781476714783147671478914767147979781476714790 6. In other words : artists talk about life and work https://lccn.loc.gov/2005002298 DeCurtis, Anthony. In other words : artists talk about life and work / Anthony DeCurtis. 1st ed. Milwaukee, WI : H. Leonard, c2005. xviii, 485 p. ; 24 cm. ML394 .D43 2005 ISBN: 0634066552 7. Lou Reed : a life https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008817 DeCurtis, Anthony. Lou Reed : a life / Anthony DeCurtis. First edition. New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2017.©2017 viii, 519 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm ML420.R299 D43 2017 ISBN: 9780316376556 hardcover 8. Rocking my life away : writing about music and other matters https://lccn.loc.gov/97009717 DeCurtis, Anthony. Rocking my life away : writing about music and other matters / Anthony DeCurtis. Durham : Duke University Press, 1998. xviii, 348 p. ; 24 cm. ML3470 .D43 1998 ISBN: 082232184X (cloth : alk. paper)

• The Rumpus - http://therumpus.net/2017/11/sound-vision-anthony-decurtis/

  Sound & Vision: Anthony DeCurtis

  By Allyson McCabe

  November 30th, 2017

  Anthony DeCurtis’s music journalism has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including the New York Times, Vibe, and Rolling Stone, where he is a contributing editor. The essay he wrote to accompany Eric Clapton’s Crossroads box set earned him a GRAMMY for “best album notes” and he’s a three-time winner of ASCAP’s Deems Taylor awards for excellence in writing about music.

  DeCurtis has also written several books, including a collection of interviews with musicians, actors, directors and writers entitled In Other Words: Artists Talk About Their Life and Work, and the retrospective anthology of his work Rocking My Life Away. He is the co-author of Clive Davis’s autobiography The Soundtrack of My Life, and the author of the newly published biography Lou Reed: A Life. DeCurtis holds a PhD in American Literature and he teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania.

  ***

  The Rumpus: How did you get your start as a music journalist?

  Anthony DeCurtis: I’d always read a lot about rock ‘n’ roll growing up, but the first real thing I set out to do was become an English professor. Even so, I always hoped in some way or another that I would get to write about music in a popular (non-academic) format. I was in graduate school at Indiana University from 1974-79. When Patti Smith’s album Horses came out in 1975, she came to visit Bloomington to do a performance and I got to write about her.

  Rumpus: Tell me more about that experience.

  DeCurtis: I wrote an advance piece for the student newspaper and somehow I convinced the editor to also let me talk to her and Lenny Kaye. I had never really done anything like that before, I didn’t get much time, and I didn’t really know what I was doing! [Laughs]

  Rumpus: Did they both sense that?

  DeCurtis: Patti was very nice, actually they were both very friendly, but she was as high as anyone I’ve ever been around in my life, which is saying something. And, you know, I had no practical sense of how to do an interview so I latched onto the things I read about her that made sense to me and my own experience. I was a graduate student, so I spent about half of the time asking her about Rimbaud. I didn’t think to ask her what it was like to be a band on the road, or what she would like to speak about. I was trying to impress her I guess, so it was wrong in every conceivable way.

  Rumpus: And yet you kept at it.

  DeCurtis: Around the same time I also wrote another piece for the student paper about Sid Vicious when he murdered Nancy Spungen—but that was more of an op-ed, essentially a kind of defense of punk rock. My real start came at the end of ’78 when a friend of mine who’d been writing a weekly record review column for the town newspaper, which was called the Herald-Telephone (now the Herald-Times, thankfully), moved on, and suggested me as a replacement.

  Rumpus: Do you remember your first review for the paper?

  DeCurtis: Yes, it was a review of the first Cars album and then I was off to the races. Bloomington was a happening place back then, and I got to do some live reviews too. Early on I reviewed Sun Ra, Elvis Costello, and Dexter Gordon. I liked the immediacy of doing the column. Unlike academic writing, which is a long, drawn out process, when you wrote something for the paper, it came out right away and people started talking about it.

  Rumpus: As you were just talking about the difference between academic writing and newspaper writing, another thing that struck me is the difference between doing reviews and interviews. When you’re reviewing it’s just you and the record. You’re listening and formulating opinions, but not necessarily anticipating that the artist will ever read them and react. But in interviewing you’re asking the artist about his or her work, and the dialogue is person-to-person. When and how did you get back into interviewing?

  DeCurtis: I got a teaching job at Emory so I moved to Atlanta in ‘79. There was a lot happening there at the time—R.E.M. was just getting going, the B-52’s had just taken off, and I was freelancing about town. I started to get assignments from Record Magazine, which was published by Rolling Stone, and I was getting real interviews. To prepare, I started focusing more on what was going on in the rock press and getting people to stay stuff like that. More importantly, I learned how to step outside of myself. At first I think I’d had the “A” student problem—trying to impress my subject with how smart I was, how much I knew, how hard I had prepared, and what a big fan I was. But when I let them explain the music, it went much better.

  Rumpus: How did you develop those skills?

  DeCurtis: The questions became more and more simple and much more direct. And also just paying attention, really listening to your subject, looking for what might be interesting to them, and following up. You’re going to have certain things you want to get at, but you’re better off if you play to people’s strengths a bit. You’re also assessing how it’s going and adjusting as needed. Does your subject seem up for it, willing to do it, and is he or she enjoying the interview? Or do they need to be coaxed, or reassured, or whatever they might need from you? Like writing, interviewing is a process that you keep learning, and you’re always trying to get better and better.

  Rumpus: In some senses you’re a proxy for your reader, anticipating what they want to know about your subject, but you’re always going to see more than you can show them. How do you negotiate what to include, or exclude, and when to just walk away from the interview entirely because the subject isn’t participating or is in no condition to participate?

  DeCurtis: I’d say the vast majority of my interview experiences have been pleasant, better than pleasant. But sometimes there will be people who will size you up. There can be that “rock star” thing where they think it’s cool to pull back.

  Rumpus: Do you think it’s a generational issue? Are older, more established artists conditioned to be elusive whereas younger artists are pressured to appear accessible?

  DeCurtis: Well, not necessarily. I think younger artists are often “students” of the rock press. They have their favorite rock star interviews and know how they’re supposed to act. But I find that time helps a lot. If you have enough time you can sort of break that down just by being a normal person. And then they realize the interview isn’t just a performance, and they can actually speak to you. I often try to get people into a space where they’re not over-thinking what they’re talking about and instead they’re speaking emotionally, from within their experience.

  Rumpus: Can you recall a specific example where that came through?

  DeCurtis: I might ask about the first time they heard a song that they really responded to, like when I asked Mos Def when he first “got” hip-hop and he went into this memory about how hearing someone rap really affected him. He wasn’t simply remembering the event. It was almost like he was occupying that space again. When you can really transport an interview subject like that, your readers can feel it and it helps them to connect with the artist.

  Rumpus: This is a good segue to talking about Lou Reed because he’s someone who didn’t generally like interviews, and consequently he was known as a notoriously “difficult” interview subject.

  DeCurtis: That’s true. It can be nerve wracking if you walk into the interview and you’re not sure what to expect—

  Rumpus: For sure. And now I’m also thinking specifically about someone like Terry Gross, who was a big fan of Lou Reed’s. She tried to get him on Fresh Air forever, and when she finally got him to say yes, it flopped. He walked out in the middle of the interview because he clearly didn’t want to be there. That can happen any time, but I think it’s so much worse if you’re a big fan. Is the oft-repeated cliché that you should never meet your idols true?

  DeCurtis: With Lou it was characterological. It had nothing to do with Terry or the many other smart and devoted interviewers who tried to talk to him and he blew off. I’ve given this a lot of thought because it was such an aspect of him and something that didn’t really make any sense. You know, it’s fine for Michael Bolton not to like rock critics because he’s a pop artist with a lot of fans, so if rock critics don’t like him, fuck them. But for Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, critics saved them, kept them alive. So why did the switch flip where you might go from being grateful to being resentful?

  Rumpus: What are your thoughts on this?

  DeCurtis: Lou had some run-ins with journalists in the 70s and stuff, but I think for the most part the change was after he got clean. Some of the early interviews were wild. He would talk about things that even back then rock stars wouldn’t speak about, and ultimately he became embarrassed about it. He was very concerned about control, and having been out of control to that degree humiliated him. So if he heard somebody go, “Gee, back in 1979 you said…” what he heard was, “You were as high as could be and didn’t even know what you were talking about…” I think that’s why he ended up talking about equipment a lot. By their nature, technical things are devoid of emotional content.

  Rumpus: Ah yes, the gear, that’s a common strategy. But you knew Reed socially, and he was fond of your work. Did that make it easier for you to access him emotionally?

  DeCurtis: We got along. We were both New Yorkers—I grew up in Greenwich Village and was familiar with a lot of the worlds he moved in. And though he’d never admit this, I think it meant something to him that I had a PhD in literature. And, you know, the other thing is I think he trusted me. The photographer Mick Rock was a long-time friend of Lou’s—they’d been introduced by David Bowie back in ’72, and Mick took the photo for the cover of Transformer and a million other pictures of Lou over the years. Bowie once said about Mick, “He sees me the way I see myself,” and I think that’s how Lou felt about me.

  Rumpus: Did he know that you might write a book about him one day?

  DeCurtis: I wasn’t working on the book when he was alive. My friendship with him meant something to me, and it would have been too hard because he wouldn’t have wanted it done. But after he died publishers expressed interest in having me write about him, and I thought about it and it did seem like something he deserved. Like James Atlas’s biography of Delmore Schwartz, I wanted to write the kind of serious book that’s been written about literary figures, the kind of book Lou would have read.

  Rumpus: Were you concerned that people might want you to omit certain information?

  DeCurtis: No one tried to get in my way, or ask me to leave anything out. Laurie [Anderson] kept a benign distance. She didn’t tell people not to talk to me or try to stop the book, but she also made it clear she didn’t want to be involved, which meant she wouldn’t have control over what I did or didn’t write about. I tried to take the same approach to Lou that he took to the characters he wrote about- a combination of distance and empathy.

  Rumpus: How did you manage your own feelings, investments, and expectations about him?

  DeCurtis: Look, Lou did some pretty reprehensible things, but I didn’t want to stand in judgment of them. I wanted to present them clearly along with all of the good things about his life.

  Rumpus: So you took the same approach, presenting the highs and lows, when it came to talking about his music?

  DeCurtis: I did, and to some extent his life and music are intertwined. For example, Berlin portrays some pretty grisly stuff, and it got some really spiteful reviews. Lou did try to talk about it, like asking, “Do you really need an album to tell you not to beat up your girlfriend?” In Othello, Othello kills Desdemona, but no one reads that play as a model for their own behavior. In Lou’s case, you’re listening to a song, and in my case you’re reading about a life. Like Lou, I trust my audience to make their own moral determinations.

  Rumpus: Some other artists disavow any relationship between their lives and the songs they write. Did Reed allow that he drew creatively from his lived experience?

  DeCurtis: Well, he would go back and forth on that. He was aware of the Lou Reed persona, which was an invention to a large degree. But on the other hand he would clearly draw from his own experience and confess to that, though he certainly didn’t hesitate to change or add or subtract details if it made for a better song. The autobiographical impulse in Lou was very strong, especially in his work up until the 80s.

  Rumpus: What changed after that?

  DeCurtis: After he got clean, he started looking outward and writing about bigger subjects—the New York album, for example, which was about a larger set of issues about a city he loved and drew on for his work (1989), or collaborating with John Cale on Songs for Drella about Andy Warhol (1990), or working on Magic and Loss (1992), which was a kind of meditation on mortality. I think he was able to look at these big issues independent of his own circumstances because his head was clearer.

  Rumpus: Wow, as you were talking about his discography, I was thinking about how album-centered his work is, and how closely it tracks with things that were happening in his life and the broader world around him. Today young artists are under a lot of pressure to put out new singles all of the time. Arguably that’s done harm to the concept of an album, and maybe the arc of a career too. I’m wondering—has it also complicated the work of the music journalist/biographer?

  DeCurtis: There are a lot of ideas packed into what you just said! With respect to writing, when I broke into music journalism it wasn’t easy but there was more of an established path. I wanted and was able to have a grown-up person’s job with a real salary writing for a fairly sizable audience about stuff I cared about. When you’re starting out, you try to get as much experience as you can so people will see your work, and maybe start giving you the assignments you want, and paying you (hopefully both). And if you’re lucky you land someplace where you can stay for a while. But today that’s a trickier trajectory to envision.

  Rumpus: Has it changed the way you teach students?

  DeCurtis: When I started teaching, I would get miffed if a student asked me to write him or her a recommendation for law school—I’d feel like that’s not what we were doing in the course. But now I see that person as someone who might be gainfully employed. I bring in a lot of people to speak to my classes, and I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve expanded the type of guests I invite to include people both inside and outside of the traditional publishing world.

  Rumpus: But even within the established music press, I find it’s often the case that artists have publicists, media training, and talking points, all aimed at generating pre-release buzz for singles they expect to have a very short shelf life. At the same time, music journalists are clamoring to be first to go out with whoever and whatever is next, not necessarily going deep with an artist who could have a lasting influence. If this generation produced a talent like Lou Reed, would we be able to identify and support the value of that artist’s work?

  DeCurtis: Yes. If a musician cares about what he or she is doing, and you show up and care, you can go some place. That will never change. There are a number of ways to approach this, and my favorite is the way we’re doing it now—just talking.

  Rumpus: That’s a very valid point. Perhaps going back to what Bowie said about Mick Rock, your ideal situation is to meet each other on terms where you can have an authentic dialogue. You’re also the co-author of an autobiography of the music impresario Clive Davis. How is collaborating with a subject on an autobiography different than working solo on a biography?

  DeCurtis: They’re very different. Clive went to Harvard Law School. He knows how to write a sentence. We passed chapters back and forth, we were both in there fully, and that was our process. But in the end I thought of Clive’s book as Clive’s book, and I felt like my job was to help create the version of his life he wanted to portray.

  Rumpus: Whereas for Reed it’s another kind of dialogue?

  DeCurtis: For the Reed book, of course there were smart editors, and I collaborated with them as I wrote it, but it’s my book about Lou. The book reflects me one hundred percent.

  ***

  BONUS MATERIAL:

  ***

  All photographs courtesy of Anthony DeCurtis.

  ***

  This interview has been edited and condensed. If you’d like to recommend someone for “Sound & Vision,” drop Allyson a line here.

  Allyson McCabe writes and produces stories about music for NPR, and her own subscription-based channel, Vanishing Ink. More from this author →

• Indiana Public Media - https://indianapublicmedia.org/profiles/music-journalist-anthony-decurtis/

  Music Journalist Anthony DeCurtis
  By Glenn Gass
  Posted January 25, 2013

  Glenn Gass speaks with Anthony DeCurtis, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, who has written for The New York Times and other publications.

  Anthony DeCurtis

  I didn’t get into music so I could have cool opinions and condescend to people. I got into music because I thought it was just the greatest thing I’d ever encountered.

  Anthony DeCurtis’ books include In Other Words: Artists Talk about Life and Work and Rocking My Life Away: Writing about Music and Other Matters.

  DeCurtis co-edited The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll and The Rolling Stone Album Guide. His essay accompanying the Eric Clapton box set Crossroads won a Grammy in the “Best Album Notes” category.

  He has appeared as a commentator on MTV, VH1, Today, and many other news and entertainment outlets. DeCurtis holds a doctorate in American literature from Indiana University.

• Los Angeles Review of Books - https://lareviewofbooks.org/author-page/anthony-decurtis/

  Anthony DeCurtis

  Anthony DeCurtis is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, where his work has appeared for more than 35 years, and a distinguished lecturer in the creative writing program at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of In Other Words and Rocking My Life Away and the co-writer of Clive Davis’s autobiography, The Soundtrack of My Life, a New York Times best seller. DeCurtis is a Grammy Award winner and has served as a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominating committee for 25 years. He holds a PhD in American literature and lives in New York City.

• Linked In - https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-decurtis-5014235/

  Anthony DeCurtis
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  Field Of Study English, Philosophy

  Dates attended or expected graduation 1969 – 1974
  Indiana University Bloomington
  Indiana University Bloomington

  Degree Name MA, PhD

  Field Of Study American literature

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  Ted Drozdowski
  Ted Drozdowski

  Senior Editor at Premier Guitar

  December 26, 2013, Ted reported directly to Anthony

  Anthony is an American treasure. His journalism is astute, perceptive and warmly human, which allows him to get to the core of his subjects. His professionalism is exemplary and inspiring. His conversation full of insight. And as an editor he is able to improve writing with subtle guidance. He is also an eloquent and entertaining public speaker. He is truly exceptional.

  Syd Mandelbaum
  Syd Mandelbaum

  CEO at Rock and Wrap It Up!

  April 25, 2008, Syd worked with Anthony in different groups

  Anthony is a creative and insightful writer, always keeping you interested in his observations.

  Frank de Falco
  Frank de Falco

  Owner at Gitapiedinewyork Tours

  March 4, 2008, Frank worked with Anthony but at different companies

  Highly influential and prolific music/entertainment/culture writer whose landmark interviews for Rolling Stone and other outlets with Woody Allen, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Martin Scorsese, Don DeLillo, Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen, Keith Richards, Al Pacino and others have recently been collected in the book, "In Other Words: Artists Talk about Life and Work" (Hal Leonard publishers). Grammy-award winner for the extensive booklet that accompanied Eric Clapton's "Crossroads" boxed set. Exceedingly generous and an indefatigable supporter of young talent. A true gentleman.

  Rhonda Markowitz
  Rhonda Markowitz

  Assistant at New York State Family Court

  October 4, 2007, Rhonda worked with Anthony but at different companies

  I've known Anthony for over 20 years, and couldn't be prouder to have someone in "my network". Seriously, all you need to do is a quick Amazon.com search, and you'll see the books he's written or contributed to. What they won't tell you there is what a terrific person he is. I just hope that saying this publicly won't blow his cover.

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  Anthony has 4 publications 4
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  The Soundtrack of My Life Blues & Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer In Other Words: Artists Talk About Life and Work Rocking My Life Away: Writing About Music and Other Matters

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• Indiana Daily Student - http://www.idsnews.com/article/2018/02/entanthony022118

  Rock 'n' roll writer Anthony DeCurtis receives Distinguished Alumni Award
  By Emily Abshire
  Published Feb 22, 2018 12:02 pm
  _MG_2159

  Author and music critic Anthony DeCurtis applauds English majors before speaking about his book "Lou Reed: A Life". DeCurtis spoke at 5:30 p.m. Feb. 21, in the Solarium of the Indiana Memorial Union. Ty Vinson Buy Photos

  Even though music writer Anthony DeCurtis was born and raised in Manhattan, New York, he said Bloomington is where he really did his growing up.

  He spent five years at IU for graduate school, receiving a Ph.D. in American literature in 1980, and is back at IU this week to receive one of three Distinguished Alumni Awards for 2018 from the College of Arts and Sciences.

  DeCurtis has been a contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine for more than 35 years and has written multiple books on rock ’n’ roll.

  Most recently, he released the biography “Lou Reed: A Life,” which he read from Wednesday night to an audience in the Indiana Memorial Union’s Solarium.

  Music professors and record store owners could be spotted in the crowd, along with a mix of students, faculty and community members.

  The book, which was published Oct. 10, 2017, focuses on Reed's complex and nuanced personality, which is often oversimplified or misunderstood in other biographies, DeCurtis said in an October interview with the Indiana Daily Student.

  “I really didn’t anticipate the degree of interest in it,” DeCurtis said to the IDS before the event.

  Writers are used to not getting the attention they feel they deserve, he said, but the feedback for this book has been incredible. He said he’s been doing events and interviews since it published in October, and the book has garnered the attention of major news and music outlets.

  “I’m proud of it,” he said. “I like the way it came out. I’m happy with it.”

  DeCurtis said he wrote about Reed because he thinks Reed is just as influential of a songwriter and musical figure as any that exist in rock ’n’ roll.

  DeCurtis isn’t big on trying to sell Reed to people, though. If people have a curiosity about Reed, that’s all DeCurtis needs to take them the rest of the way there.

  IU makes a cameo in the book in a scene where Reed visits Professor Glenn Gass' history of rock 'n' roll class in 1987.

  DeCurtis read from the chapter “Coney Island Baby” to the audience. He said the chapter is one of the sections he likes the most because he feels like it isn’t his book.

  Writing a book means spending a lot of time reading and re-reading it, he said, but this section made him forget it was his book and get into it.

  After the reading, English Professor Edward Comentale interviewed DeCurtis about Reed.

  “Wherever I go, an English major is doing something cool,” Comentale said first, referring to both DeCurtis and Reed.

  Comentale asked about a variety of subjects, including Reed’s early life, his status as a gay icon, stereotypes about him, and his musical style and voice. Then the audience asked questions, and DeCurtis signed books for the crowd.
  Anthony DeCurtis, author and contributing editor for Rolling Stone, signs copies of his book "Lou Reed: A Life" for fans. DeCurtis spoke about his book and answered questions from the audience Feb. 21 in the Solarium of the Indiana Memorial Union. Ty Vinson Buy Photos

  Arts and Sciences Dean Larry Singell said in a letter to DeCurtis that his ability to tell stories and forge his own path with his English degree is a testament to the arts and sciences and among the reasons why he will receive the Distinguished Alumni Award.

  DeCurtis' peers on the Arts and Sciences Alumni Board nominated him for the award based on his professional achievements, which have shown how he’s used his liberal arts degree to its full potential, said Vanessa Cloe, director of alumni relations in the College of Arts and Sciences.

  Additionally, the board considered how active DeCurtis has been on campus. Cloe said he is always willing to come back to IU and engage with the student body.

  DeCurtis said anytime he gets invited back to IU, he always wants to come.

  Like what you're reading? Support independent, award-winning college journalism on this site. Donate here.

• Entertainment Weekly - http://ew.com/article/1992/12/04/rolling-stone-illustrated-history-rock-roll/

  The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll
  Ty Burr December 04, 1992 AT 05:00 AM EST
  The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll

  type
  Book
  Current Status
  In Season
  author
  Anthony DeCurtis, Holly George-Warren, James Henke
  publisher
  Random House
  genre
  Nonfiction, Music

  We gave it a
  B-

  Last revised in 1980, Anthony DeCurtis, James Henke, and Holly George-Warren’s The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll has sat on bookshelves for 12 years, watching pop music disappear into the future. With this updating the book approaches coffee-table status, only fitting since the magazine that spawned it has transformed itself in the past decade from smart-ass rag to corporate slick. The sections on R&B, blues, and rock in the ’50s and ’60s, written for the original 1976 edition, remain invaluable primers, and no one has dared tamper with the late Lester Bangs’ garage-rock essay or Nik Cohn’s frightening take on Phil Spector. But just because Janet Maslin declined to update her Dylan chapter — perhaps the single best short piece ever written about the man — is no excuse to replace it with Alan Light’s much weaker essay. And new entries on the hydra-headed rock of the ’80s can’t help but skim the surface. It may be that pop music has finally outgrown one-volume histories. Or it may be that it has outgrown Rolling Stone. Where the book’s early chapters pulse with a love of the sounds described, the essay on rap reads as dutiful, disinterested show-and-tell. Rock may not be dead, but that hasn’t stopped these folk from trying to embalm it. B-

• Rock's Back Pages - https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Writer/anthony-decurtis

  Anthony DeCurtis
  Anthony DeCurtis

  Anthony DeCurtis is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, and he also writes for The New York Times and other American publications. He has published two collections of his writing: In Other Words: Artists Talk About Life and Work (Hal Leonard) and Rocking My Life Away (Duke University Press). He teaches in the writing program at the University of Pennsylvania.

  Steven Ward's 2000 interview with DeCurtis

  By Artist | By Date
  List of articles in the library by artist

  Garth Brooks: Ropin' The Wind

  Interview by Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone, 1 April 1993

  GARTH BROOKS is a regular at the Pancake Pantry on Twenty-first Avenue in Nashville. When he arrives for breakfast, the proprietor greets him at the ...

  Jackson Browne: For Everyman

  Review by Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone, 5 August 1999

  THE TITLE TRACK of Jackson Browne's second album, For Everyman, was a response to the escapist vision of Crosby, Stills and Nash's 'Wooden Ships'. As ...

  Crosby Stills Nash & Young: Crosby Stills Nash and Young: American Dream

  Review by Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone, 12 January 1989

  American Dream fades out on the line "Why not keep on singing anyway?" – and that lackadaisical slogan seems to sum up the spirit in ...

  Don Henley: Inside Job

  Review by Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone, 8 June 2000

  On his first two solo albums (I Can't Stand Still and Building the Perfect Beast), Don Henley made yearning his great theme. Something had disappeared ...

  Whitney Houston: Down and Dirty

  Interview by Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone, 10 June 1993

  YOU'RE EXPECTING her to float delicately into the room, but Whitney Houston strides in with a purposeful air. She's dressed way down in purple stretch ...

  Michael Jackson: Michael Reinvents Pop

  Retrospective by Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone, August 2009

  Recorded before he turned 21, Off The Wall made him a superstar — and the most important young R&B artist in America. ...

  Janet Jackson: Free At Last

  Interview by Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone, 20 February 1990

  With her last album, Janet declared her independence from her famous family. Now, on Rhythm Nation, she's stepping out and dealing with the real world ...

  Jason & The Scorchers: Jason and the Scorchers: Can't Be Real If It Ain't Got That Feel

  Profile and Interview by Anthony DeCurtis, Record, January 1984

  SWEAT-SOAKED and sprawled on a couch in the dressing room of Atlanta hot-spot 688 club, Scorcher guitarist Warner Hodges pulls on a cold one and ...

  Rickie Lee Jones: Flying Cowboys

  Review by Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone, 2 November 1989

  Flying Cowboys simultaneously bears the distinctive mark of Rickie Lee Jones's wild, unruly talent and continues the steady process by which her art is achieving ...

  The Kinks: Ray Davies: Rocking My Life Away

  Interview by Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone, 29 March 2002

  Lost Davies interview illuminates the "underrated" Kinks ...

  Lil Wayne: Lights Out (Cash Money Records) ***½

  Review by Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone Online, 1 February 2001

  EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD LIL' WAYNE, one of B.G.'s fellow Hot Boys (along with Juvenile and Young Turk), has followed up his blinging '99 debut, Tha Block Is ...

  Fred Neil: Rocking My Life Away: Fred Neil

  Obituary by Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone, 20 July 2001

  "HE WAS A hero to me," David Crosby said of singer-songwriter Fred Neil. But when Neil died of cancer on July 7th at the age ...

  The Notorious B.I.G.: Murder Ballads: The Notorious B.I.G.: Life After Death (Bad Boy)

  Review by Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone, 1 May 1997

  IN A FRIGHTENING WAY, the current hip-hop scene recalls the end of Goodfellas: The major players are turning up dead, heading off to prison or ...

  Prince: The Artist Formerly Known As

  Interview by Anthony DeCurtis, Word, The, August 2004

  Prince has dumped the "glyph", reverted to his real name, expunged the profanities from his set-list and now apologises for his past megalomaniac excess — ...

  Lou Reed: New York

  Review by Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone, 23 February 1989

  NEW YORK is Lou Reed's rock & roll version of The Bonfire of the Vanities. But whereas Tom Wolfe maintains an ultimately cynical distance from ...

  R.E.M.: Rock Criticism and the Rocker: A Conversation With Peter Buck

  Book Excerpt by Anthony DeCurtis, Rocking My Life Away, 1998

  IN SEPTEMBER 1994 R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck kindly took time off from promoting R.E.M.'s Monster to do an interview with Anthony DeCurtis, who wanted an ...

  R.E.M.: An Open Party

  Interview by Anthony DeCurtis, Record, June 1984

  R.E.M.'s Hip American Dream ...

  Lionel Richie: Dancing on the Ceiling

  Review by Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone, 6 November 1986

  Lionel Richie will never surprise you. His triumph has been his ability to turn conservative dependability into a commercial, and at times even an aesthetic, ...

  The Rolling Stones: Rolling Stones: Undercover

  Review by Anthony DeCurtis, Record, 1984

  VIOLENCE OF both sexual and political nature is never more than a shout away on Undercover, the Rolling Stones' first studio LP since 1981's much ...

  Paul Simon: Sounds Of Simon

  Interview by Anthony DeCurtis, New York Magazine, 9 October 2000

  After getting clobbered by critics for Capeman, Paul Simon returns to folk-rock form with You're The One, an upcoming tour, and a few choice words ...

  Sting: Nothing Like The Sun

  Review by Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone, 3 December 1987

  Nothing Like The Sun – a powerful, often hypnotic album that blends jazz and rock styles into a thoughtful suite of twelve songs about love, ...

  Tracy Chapman: Central Park Summerstage, New York

  Live Review by Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone, 19 September 1996

  "LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE, but through it all, forgive"; "Let's not compare ourselves to others"; "You are your own garden"; "For God's sake, teach people to ...
  List of genre pieces

  Flirtations with Chaos: The Life and Work of Robert Palmer

  Essay by Anthony DeCurtis, 'Blues & Chaos', 2009

  NOTE: This is Anthony DeCurtis' introduction to Blues & Chaos, his 2009 anthology of Bob Palmer's work. * ...

  back to LIBRARY

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

• University of Pennsylvania - https://www.english.upenn.edu/people/anthony-decurtis

  Anthony DeCurtis
  ADeCurtis@aol.com
  Office Hours

  Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing3808 Walnut Street215 573-CPCWBy appointment only.

  Anthony DeCurtis is the author of recently published "In Other Words: Artists Talk About Life and Work," as well as "Rocking My Life Away: Writing About Music and Other Matters." He is also the editor of "Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture," and coeditor of "The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll" and "The Rolling Stone Album Guide" (3rd edition). He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where his work has appeared for twenty-five years, and he occasionally writes for The New York Times and many other publications. His essay accompanying the Eric Clapton box set "Crossroads" won a Grammy Award in the "Best Album Notes" category. He holds a PhD in American literature from Indiana University.
  News & Events
  2018/01/26
  Anthony DeCurtis interviewed on Fresh Air about his new biography of Lou Reed
  2017/11/09
  KWH: Rachel Tashjian: From Vanity to Vice
  2017/10/19
  KWH: “The Life and Music of Lou Reed.”
  Courses Taught
  fall 2018
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  spring 2018
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture: The Beatles
  ENGL 170.301 Advanced Writing Projects in the Arts and Popular Culture
  fall 2017
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  spring 2017
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture: Bob Dylan
  ENGL 170.301 Advanced Projects in Popular Culture
  fall 2016
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  spring 2016
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  ENGL 170.301 Advanced Writing Projects in the Arts and Popular Culture
  fall 2015
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  spring 2015
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  ENGL 170.301 Advanced Writing Projects
  fall 2014
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  spring 2014
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  ENGL 170.301 Advanced Writing Project
  fall 2013
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  spring 2013
  ENGL 117.301 The Art of Popular Culture
  ENGL 170.301 Advanced Writing Projects
  fall 2012
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  spring 2012
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  ENGL 170.301 Advaanced Projects in Popular Culture
  fall 2011
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  spring 2011
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  ENGL 170.301 Advanced Writing Projects
  fall 2010
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  spring 2010
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  ENGL 170.301 Advanced Projects in Popular Culture
  fall 2009
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  spring 2009
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  ENGL 170.301 Advanced Projects in Popular Culture
  fall 2008
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  fall 2007
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  fall 2006
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  fall 2005
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  fall 2004
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  fall 2003
  ENGL 117.301 The Arts and Popular Culture
  fall 2002
  ENGL 117.301 Writing about the Arts

• Rock Critics - https://rockcritics.com/2013/02/22/from-the-archives-anthony-decurtis-2000/

  From the Archives: Anthony DeCurtis (2000)

  Though obviously Anthony DeCurtis was a critic I was aware of when Steven Ward pitched an interview with him in 2000, he wasn’t a critic whose work I was intimately familiar with, beyond the infamous dismissal of Lester Bangs he penned for Rolling Stone in May that same year. No need to re-litigate all that right now (stay tuned is all I can say), rather, I’ll just note that, I never found his interview with Steven to be anything less than informative and entertaining (even just glancing at it now, I chuckled at his “purely coincidentally, of course” in regards to his run-in with former rock critic and current multi-platinum musical legend, Ira Kaplan).

  – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

  Anthony DeCurtis: Populist at Large
  By Steven Ward (November 2000)

  Anthony DeCurtis never liked the rock writing of Lester Bangs. He never read Creem. After 20 years, DeCurtis still writes for Rolling Stone and still loves and defends the world’s most famous rock mag. DeCurtis hates Captain Beefheart.

  Wait a minute!

  Anthony DeCurtis is a rock critic and writer who does not like Lord Lester Bangs or Captain Beefheart? YES!

  No one can accuse DeCurtis of not being his own man. But many in the rock-write world have accused him of something or other. None of which bothers the New York City-bred DeCurtis. What does bother him is younger writers who say older ones have no business writing about rock because they won’t dive into a mosh-pit. And writers who don’t really care about the craft of writing. Rock criticism is writing first, DeCurtis said recently during a phone interview. That is sometimes forgotten by bad Bangs and Meltzer imitators trying to impress editors with their style.

  It’s no surprise that DeCurtis cares about such things as “writing” while discussing the world of rock criticism. He holds a Ph.D. in American literature from Indiana University and has taught English at Emory University and Indiana University. DeCurtis decided to switch from teaching to writing about rock because those were two of the most important things in his life: music and writing. Writing in particular made a tremendous impact on DeCurtis when he realized that he had the gift to “get ideas down.”

  DeCurtis has edited a book of rock essays, Present Tense: Rock and Roll Culture, complied his own music journalism in one volume, Rocking My Life Away: Writing About Music and Other Matters, and won a Grammy for his essay that accompanied the Eric Clapton boxset, Crossroads.

  DeCurtis is more widely known as a former editor and current contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he has penned some of the magazine’s best cover stories, profiles, and record reviews over the last 20 years.

  DeCurtis is unapologetic about working for the world’s most criticized rock magazine. In fact, DeCurtis said working at Rolling Stone changed his life and gave him exactly what he wanted as a rock writer: an audience. Possibly, the largest audience rock critics have ever known in its short history.
  – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

  Anthony DeCurtis

  Steven: The first thing that pops into my head is, what is a guy with a Ph.D. in American Literature doing writing about rock and roll?

  Anthony: I did set out to be an English professor, but I was always a big music fan. I guess in the back of my head I believed, or hoped, that I would write about music as part of whatever I did. In my dissertation I wrote about contemporary American fiction, things that were written after 1960. Since I was doing this in the 70s, that was pretty recent. I liked the idea of tangling with contemporary culture. I went to Catholic schools for grade and high school, and by the time I got to college I was envious of some my friends and their ability to think freely. I felt like I was disciplined and learned well but I always seemed to be waiting for someone to tell me what to think. When I got to college and grad school I opened up a lot and that all changed. There was an exhilaration about writing about contemporary culture, because very little had been said about it and no one could tell you what to think. That freedom translated pretty easily to popular music. But it’s actually a long, gory story about how I made the transition from academia to writing about pop music.

  Steven: You were a grad student at Indiana University when you first started writing for the little town paper, The Bloomington Herald Telephone. How did that come about?

  Anthony: Through one of my friends in grad school, who is now a professor at Carnegie Mellon. His name is David Shumway. He was working at the paper as the pop music critic. He had to leave town because his wife got a job and they asked him if he knew anyone who might be interested. He said, ‘I think my friend Anthony would want to do it.’ So that’s how I got that gig. They asked to meet me. I talked to them. They asked me to write a review, and I wrote about the first Cars album, actually. I brought the piece in. They said, it’s good and they took me on. They let me write about whatever I wanted. The only time they ever complained was when I reviewed Gimmie Some Neck, the Ron Wood solo album. There was a track on there called, “F.U.C. Her.” I rendered that title in the paper and the editor, an older woman, just kind of pointed at it to indicate to me that I was not supposed to do that.

  I wrote about The Clash, Lou Reed. I did mostly record reviews but I did some overnight reviews. Bloomington was a cool town. It was on the way to Chicago, so someone like Luther Allison would play there regularly. The music school there is good, so jazzbos would come by a lot. I wrote about Dexter Gordon and Sun Ra, who both performed there. If someone was passing through town–like Weather Report, I got to meet Jaco Pastorious–I would review them. I reviewed Elvis Costello and B.B. King. I mean, the job was nice but it was ridiculous. I got paid $12.50 a story, which at the time was a nice addition to my meager income as a graduate student. The job market for English Ph.D.s was shrinking, so the notion that I might have something else in my pocket was inviting. I was then hired to teach for a year in the English Department at Emory University in Atlanta–freshman writing courses, surveys in poetry and fiction. I taught a seminar in Thomas Pynchon. While I was down there, the whole Athens thing was going on. When my year at Emory ended, I stayed down South and I was looking around for work. I sent a letter to Jim Henke, who was an editor at Rolling Stone, and asked him if I could write about the B52s who were coming back to Georgia to do their first shows after becoming successful. I wanted to write a concert review. I didn’t send him any clips–just a brief, three-paragraph note. He called me up one day and said, “Look, I don’t know who you are or what your writing is like, but it’s a good idea, so go and review the show. If your piece is good, we’ll run it.”

  Steven: Too bad those days are over.

  Anthony: Yeah. I was too naive to know that you were not supposed to do that. But I got the assignment and I began to cover that scene a bit, both locally and nationally.

  Steven: That was before you started working at Record, right?

  Anthony: Yeah. Writing for Record was the breakthrough for me; I think that was 1982. I got the Rolling Stone assignment in 1980, and did one other piece for them. While all this was going on, I got a job as a business and technical writer at Georgia Tech to make money. But I also started to do more journalism and a lot of that was music writing. There was a little monthly called Muzik! that I wrote for–for free of course. I was trying to pick up experience, to get my work out there. I felt that I was good and if people saw what I could do I would get other opportunities. I wrote for Musicianthrough the recommendation of the now legendary Andy Slater, who these days manages and produces The Wallflowers, Fiona Apple and Macy Gray. Andy was a writer back then in Georgia, and we were good friends. He got an assignment from Musician to review a Clash show, but he couldn’t do it, and he recommended me. I got a few assignments from Musician subsequently. But at Record, this guy David McGee really took a liking to my stuff, and that’s where I did my first big stories. I did a David Byrne cover, a Go-Gos cover. Getting that regular work and that platform gave me the courage to move back to New York City, where I grew up. That was in 1984. I got hired at Record in 1985.

  Steven: Who were some of the other staffers at Record?

  Anthony: There were not a lot of us, believe me. McGee was the editor. Wayne King had been there but he left just when I came on. John McAlley, who is now the music editor at Entertainment Weekly, was the photo editor. Joe Dizney, who is now the art director at the Wall Street Journal, was our art director. It was an extremely small staff. I think there were four full time edit people.

  Steven: Record was some kind of music offshoot of Rolling Stone, wasn’t it?

  Anthony: Around 1980, Rolling Stone began to cover other aspects of popular culture more energetically than music. Music was not really happening at the time on that mainstream level. There was a sense that Record would become the full-on music magazine and Rolling Stone would be this pop culture publication. The demise of Record came about because Rolling Stone started moving back to covering music aggressively and because Jann bought US magazine. We were always like Rolling Stone‘s bastard kid brother anyway. Rolling Stone would be jetting people all over the place for stories, and we would have to beg for $500 to touch up a photo for our cover. I mean, Rolling Stone would kill photo shoots that would have cost our entire photo budget for the year. Record was definitely run on a shoestring. But it was great for me. I got a lot of experience there and not incidentally, the guys at Rolling Stone saw my work. Jim Henke was the music editor at Rolling Stone then. So when Record folded in 1985, I gave him a call. I said, “Hey, I’m looking for work. If you have anything for me to do, I would love to do it.” I had been reviewing pretty regularly for Rolling Stone while I was at Record. Jim said they were a little short-handed and he started giving me stuff to do. A month later he hired me. And that was the total breakthrough.

  You know I tell this story in a fairly offhand way but all of this was very emotionally charged for me. I was in my early 30s by this time. In all modesty, it had always seemed like I was going to do something big, but nothing ever seemed to work out. Because of the job market, my academic career was a crushing disappointment. I left that world with the greatest reluctance, and I was unprepared for anything else. The transition to journalism was not easy. So when I was first hired at Record, it was a huge thrill. I thought, finally I got a gig. But then Jann folded Record within a year of my getting there. So whenRolling Stone hired me after that, I mean, that was unbelievable. I got the job at Rolling Stone because I had been offered another job–a time-worn path to getting anything beneficial at Rolling Stone, as I was later to learn. After Record folded, I was freelancing and then the Westchester-Gannett newspapers, a string of 10 newspapers in the suburbs north of New York City, wanted to hire me as a news feature writer. I thought, “Great, I can do the newspaper thing.” But Jim had asked me, in this very mysterious Rolling Stone type way, “What’s going on with you?” I said I was looking for a job. He said, “Don’t do anything until you talk to me.” So when I got the newspaper job offer, I told Jim about it. Jim said, “Let me talk to Jann.” So he did and they made me an offer matching–though not exceeding–the Westchester Gannett salary, another aspect of Rolling Stone that I would come to know. To their credit, Westchester stepped up and offered me a couple of grand more–$29,000. Rolling Stone held firm at $27,000, and I took it. I walked in there to accept the job offer and Jann came into Jim’s office. Jim said, “Jann you know Anthony right? He’s come to work for us.” And Jann said, “Yeah. Hi Anthony. Welcome aboard…again.”

  Steven: Tell me about your favorite non-music writers?

  Anthony: Don DeLillo and Martin Amis are probably my two favorites. Both have a vision as well as a style. The writing, in both cases, is particularly strong. Amis is a little easier match to what I try to do, though I’m not as much of a smartass. But he can do the high style, while also doing the slang and the hip stuff. DeLillo is a little more enclosed although his characters play around with some of the goofier aspects of language. But both those guys are models for me.

  The often overlooked and un-discussed aspect of music criticism is that–it’s writing. It is not the music, and it is not your version of the music. It’s writing. So, you want to have a style that makes sense for what you’re writing about. This idea that writing reproduces its subject is ridiculous. If someone wants to feel the effect of the music, they need to go listen to the music. That’s what the music is for. But rock critics are supposed to be writing, and what they do has to succeed as writing. I really believe that, but I’m not sure that many other critics do.

  Steven: What rock mags did you read when growing up?

  Anthony: The first rock criticism I read was in the Village Voice. It was by Annie Fisher. Her stuff was really good. I read Richard Goldstein. I remember the semi-famous piece he wrote on the Rolling Stones when they were in NYC in 1966. It was great. I remember sitting in Downing Street Park on Carmine Street in Greenwich Village, which was where I grew up, and just devouring that piece. The Voice was also important to my political coming of age. I grew up in the Village, but it was an Italian neighborhood then and it might as well have been some tiny town outside Naples. It was very enclosed. People spoke Italian and the Catholic thing was in very full effect. It was almost medieval. But I grew up in an apartment at the corner of Bleecker Street and 10th Street, and so all I had to do was walk outside and there were alternatives. The Voice offices were right around the corner, literally two blocks away, and reading the Voice was where I learned about politics when I was a kid. It was transformative. It made a huge difference to me in terms of pop culture and it gave me a larger way of thinking about issues like the Vietnam War.

  Creem meant nothing to me. It just seemed like a magazine for kids and geeks. Rolling Stone made a huge impact. That was gripping. It was something I really wanted. What Jann meant it to be, is what it was–sort of a news magazine for the counterculture. It covered those things very seriously. They would take Pete Townshend…

  Steven: Pete Townshend is my hero.

  Anthony: Yeah. Jann would do a 10,000 word interview with Pete Townshend. I can still quote from that piece. That’s what I wanted to read. That made a big, big impact on me. Fusion was a good magazine. I actually sent them some stuff when I was 17. I sent them a review of Beck-ola, the second album by the Jeff Beck Group. I got a letter back from an editor saying, “I already assigned this to someone, but please send us more record reviews.” I just thought that was the kind of thing he must say to everyone, so I never sent anything else to him.

  Steven: You touched on this already, but what other rock writers did you like and which ones might have influenced your writing? I know Lester Bangs surely did not.

  Anthony: Yeah. Lester was the counter influence–what not to be. But John Mendelssohn, who I later had a bit of a falling out with when I was atRolling Stone, was a guy whose writing I liked a great deal.

  Steven: Really? He was sort of lumped in the Bangs/Meltzer camp

  Anthony: Yeah, but he was better than either of those two I think. I also used to read Crawdaddy! Paul Williams was someone I liked. It’s funny because I can remember buying a copy of Crawdaddy! in this little record shop on Bleecker Street. It was stapled together and had a picture of Donovan on the cover–from his Sunshine Superman period. One issue had, like, a 10-million word interview with Brian Wilson. Nothing could have seemed less hip at the time. Things like The Stones and Dylan seemed dangerous and scary, but–Jesus Christ!–Brian Wilson? How could he be taken seriously? But how prescient that was. That was the first piece I ever read that took the Beach Boys seriously. Paul really understood what was happening with that. As for other writers who influenced me, I should also mention John Rockwell and Robert Palmer, who was a friend and my absolute favorite music writer.

  Steven: What about Robert Christgau? He’s a fan of your writing, from what I understand. Did he have any kind of influence on you?

  Anthony: Christgau made an impact on me a little later. When punk happened, he came alive in a really compelling way in the Voice. Especially then, when there was no Internet and it was hard to get information. In 1977, was cable TV even around? Mainstream media would never touch the punks. So these pieces Christgau was writing and assigning week after week made a tremendous impact on me when I was in Bloomington and later in Atlanta. When I began to hang around the music scene in Athens and Atlanta, I began to understand how a mention in the Voice could mean everything to people. Bands would live on it, and it could really help energize a scene. I interviewed Bob once for a fanzine in the early 80s, and he was very gracious and generous with his time. He took me seriously. He asked me to vote in the Pazz and Jop poll which, to me, was a big deal. He never asked me to write for him in theVoice–I pitched him once or twice–but he was even gracious about that.

  It’s funny that you say he likes my writing. I had the impression that he liked my writing reasonably well, but thought that it was just not right for the Voice. He recommended me to others and made suggestions. He was a total pro and seemed like a nice guy. One person he recommended me to was the sainted Billy Altman, whom I actually know a bit now. Billy sternly lectured me about calling him at home. He was working for Creem. Christgau gave me his phone number. So I sent Billy some stuff and then I called him. I got this very severe, “Why are you calling me at home?” He had enough writers, he said, and didn’t need any more. Years later, one night at the Bottom Line, he apologized for it. I was struck that he even remembered it, because it was a five-minute conversation. I remembered it, but you tend to remember anyone who is cruel to you while you are coming up. A particularly notable asshole I remember was the equally sainted Ira Kaplan, who is now in Yo La Tengo. He was an editor at New York Rocker. He edited a story of mine and ended up killing it so that he could reassign it to one of his friends. He sent these scathing, incredibly condescending comments back to me about the piece. Purely coincidentally, of course, Yo La Tengo never got much coverage in the review section at Rolling Stone while I was editing it.

  Steven: In regards to your anti-Bangs essay for Rolling Stone.com, did you ever feel like, maybe this is something I should not do? Or did you do it because no one else was saying anything negative about him?

  Anthony: I’m curious, why would you think that I might think twice about writing it? I’m curious about your perspective on that.

  Steven: Well, the guy is so liked. I mean, I’ve read everything there is to read about Lester and your essay was the first time I ever read anything negative about him.

  Anthony: Well, that’s why I wrote it. That was the reason to do it. Not to sound crass, but I felt like at this stage in my career I could write it. If I really thought it was going to have a terrible impact on my career, I probably would have kept it to myself. It wouldn’t have been worth it. I must say, though, that his popularity, so to speak, is something that has always mystified me. But I’m not the only one who feels that way. I swear to God this is true–a stranger stopped me on the street at 1 a.m. to thank me for writing that piece, and I’ve gotten many similar responses–“Thank God someone finally said it.”

  Steven: Why do you think Lester’s writing touched a nerve with so many though?

  Anthony: First, the autobiographical aspect–the fantasy about his life has overwhelmed the writing itself. I remember once reading a piece by Barney Hoskyns, a very underrated writer by the way. Barney was writing about Gram Parsons in Mojo. Gram was supposed to produce a Merle Haggard album at one point and it never worked out. So critics speculated that maybe Merle Haggard didn’t want Gram to produce it because he thought Gram was “too wild.” This, to Merle Haggard, who had been in prison and was a pretty tough guy and for whom Gram Parsons was probably just some two-bit drug addict punk.

  There’s a parallel here. Lester Bangs seems a “wild guy” to a lot of the sheltered, geek-type people who tend to grow up to be rock critics. He does not seem that wild to me, and his various antics never impressed me. I grew up in a pretty tough neighbourhood and somebody like that seems to me to be a dope. All the silly excesses, to me, seemed not only not cool, but something that would get you smacked down. I just don’t think it’s a great act of rebellion to walk into a party and knock over the fucking punch bowl. That just seems stupid. Rock critics tolerate that in Lester Bangs–they’re even titillated by it. But if some rock star did it, they would think, “Aw, fuckin’ millionaire thinks he can do anything he wants.” But if Lester did it, it’s cool. As for the writing, I don’t like the adolescent snottiness–which, unfortunately, has come to be what most rock writing is about. Writing with that kind of aspiration to stupidity does not make sense to me, maybe because I always wanted to be older when I was a kid. I was trying to figure out what someone like Don DeLillo was thinking about. I like some of Bangs’ sources but I don’t think Kerouac was trying to write like a kid. As for why it’s so influential, well, I think that’s because it looks easy. Most of Bangs’ imitators aren’t even as good as he is, but it’s still easier to attempt that gonzo style than to actually learn how to write well.

  Steven: What about Meltzer? Was he the same for you.

  Anthony: Pretty much the same. There’s the same goofiness, which I really can’t stand, though I did occasionally enjoy the lunatic aspect of his writing. He seems smarter than Bangs to me. Bangs I found useless most of the time. I read him in the Voice, so maybe I missed his good stuff, which people say was in Creem, which I didn’t read.

  But one impression about my anti-Bangs piece that I would like to correct is that I actually do think Jim DeRogatis did a good job with his book on Bangs. I’m not a big fan of Jim’s but I think he was fair-minded in his presentation of Bangs. Whether he knows it or not, I think the book paints a damning portrait. Jim didn’t hold back unflattering information just because he happens to worship Lester Bangs.

  Steven: When I first asked you about this interview and you checked out rockcritics.com for the first time you said something very similar to what Stanley Booth said when he first looked at it, you said It’s intriguing but kind of scary. Do you think it’s crazy for people to be fans of rock critics and rock writing itself?

  Anthony: I have a certain amount of ambivalence about doing this. Not this interview, but about the world of rock criticism that I’m inevitably a part of. If there’s a situation where there’s going to be a bunch of rock critics, I generally try to avoid it. Like South by Southwest for example. I went once.

  Steven: Didn’t you answer a question given to you there while you were on a press panel about how people in their 40s or 50s could not write about rock effectively without being in a mosh-pit or something.

  Anthony: I actually wasn’t on the panel but someone told me about it. The people on the panel were completely defensive, saying, “Well, I stood near the mosh-pit once” or whatever. The correct answer would have been, “What the fuck does that have to do with writing?” It’s ridiculous. The people in the mosh-pit can write from the perspective of being in the mosh-pit and I’ll write about the perspective of having seen Jimi Hendrix play in a club the size of my living room. You bring the experience you bring. I’m not devaluing the experience of being in the mosh-pit–though it’s the last place I would ever care to be–but it does not have anything to do with your ability to write.

  All of this is an example of why I’m ambivalent. I’ve been doing this work almost all my adult life and in many ways I’m a champion of it. But at the same time the warped purism of so much of it really annoys me. It’s incredibly stupid. So when I looked at your site it reminded me of walking into a bar in Austin during SXSW, and finding at least half a dozen people I would actively try to avoid in New York.

  On the other hand, to read something like your interview with Paul Nelson, who had a big impact on me, or J.D. Considine, that was a real treat. It was even kind of moving. And it certainly was exciting to think that somebody would read an interview like that with me. Very often people do not take what rock critics do seriously. So the fact that someone is, is exciting.

  Steven: All these years of writing about music, has it ever taken the joy out of just listening to music for the fun of it?

  Anthony: No. I remember when I got my job at Emory in 1979. I was in my late 20s. It was the first time in my life I could go into a record store and pull out a bunch of stuff and not have to go through “Which ones do I have to put back now because I can’t afford to buy them all?” That was the first time I thought, “I’m making money now. I can buy all of these.” Being a rock critic holds that same kind of thrill. There still is the excitement of getting the music I want on a daily basis and getting to listen to whatever I want.

  But it is a job. When I was teaching literature, I couldn’t always read what I wanted to because I had to read the stuff I was teaching or working on. So I have to be responsible to listen to the things I have to listen to for work. There are always things I wish I could just put on because I feel like listening to it–like the new Radiohead album, which I was listening to tonight. But that said, I never, never, never make myself listen to music. I never do that thing where I force myself to listen to everything just to keep up or something.

  Steven: Were you surprised when you met guitarist Peter Buck and found out that he was an actual fan of rock criticism outside of what critics had to say about R.E.M and have you met other musicians who are fans of rock writing?

  Anthony: Not to the degree that Peter is–but I also met him before R.E.M. ever had a record out. He’s a rare case. One thing he said to me was, “If I go out to clubs to hear music, which I do all the time, who’s likely to be there? Music critics. Not people in bands.” Essentially that’s true, so I think he feels he has a lot in common with writers.

  Steven: What was it like to work as a staffer at Rolling Stone?

  Anthony: It was something that transformed my life. Rolling Stone as a magazine made a huge impact on me as a kid. To this day, Rolling Stone is my first priority in terms of my various commitments. It’s still the biggest thrill to write for them.

  Steven: The magazine takes a lot of shit from rock critics today. It’s not like it used to be, or whatever.

  Anthony: Oh yeah. When I would be on panels at conferences and the panel was supposed to be an hour and a half about the future of rock criticism or something, that subject would get discussed for 90 seconds and the rest of it would be about who was on the cover of Rolling Stone that month and why. It’s like the New York Times. Everyone criticises it to death, no one says anything decent about it. And when you’re working at a place that gets that big and has a powerful impact in a world where not many things do, you are set up for that sort of relentless attack. Rolling Stone is not perfect. There are dubious things that go on there that trigger a lot of the criticism. But it was over-criticised before I got there and it probably always will be. It’s funny because I would read screeds about the magazine and think to myself, “But I just got clips from this writer a month ago.” Jealousy is definitely a factor–I’d think, “That person just wants my job.” I’ve written for Rolling Stone for nearly 20 years now, and there was always a sense you were not going to get the gold watch there. You stay there for as long as it makes sense and then you move on. But I was on staff for nine years. I made a good living there, and I’m still on the masthead and I continue to do a lot of work there. They pay well, and it’s amazing to feel that you put a piece out and people actually read it. I mean, I’ve written in a million places, and the only time I get a bigger response is when I write for the Sunday New York Times. Other than that, it’s Rolling Stone.

  As for being on staff there, I worked really hard. Despite its being perceived as a glamour pit, everyone works really hard there. Do I get upset when Christina Aguilera is on the cover every other issue, yes. But in every one of those issues do I think there are things in the magazine that are great and that no other music magazine would do, yes. Absolutely. I just think of the celebrity pieces as the price you pay for actually having an audience. Unlike most rock critics, I never had the fantasy of being a bohemian, maybe because I grew up in a working-class family. The idea that I would be poor and starve for my art did not hold the slightest allure for me. I always wanted an audience and I wanted to write in big places and be successful. Rolling Stone was the place to do that. I should also mention that the magazine has a wall full of national magazine awards. It’s serious, quality stuff. It’s relentlessly attacked, but I still think it’s the best music magazine out there, all in all.

  Steven: J.D. Considine said something interesting to me. He said there were no new, younger critics out there that he was scared of. Are there any new young writers that you like or scare you?

  Anthony: I would not say scare. I’ve always felt that the more people that wrote well, the better off I would be. Neil Strauss is interesting. He always has a fresh take. He’s a good writer. He can report stories and do profiles.

  Steven: He was attacked in the Rock Critical List.

  Anthony: That is really a whole other story. That was fucking ridiculous. The person, who wrote it–Charles Aaron by most accounts, though he denies it–was so childishly vindictive. Nothing is good. Everyone is an asshole. Everyone is a sellout. It was absurd. The truly perfect thing about it is that half the people he attacks are his best friends.

  Steven: So Neil Strauss…

  Anthony: Yes. These people are not all youngsters, and I’m leaving out a lot of people–like Alan Light, for example–who are primarily editors now. But Ann Powers is interesting. Lorraine Ali at Newsweek is someone I like a lot. Elysa Gardner. David Fricke. Tom Moon. I like Anthony Bozza at Rolling Stone–he’s got a smart, lucid style. David Prince at Spin. Matt Diehl. I always read Jon Pareles at the New York Times with pleasure.

  Steven: What about J. D. Considine? He is a guy I like because he concentrates on writing about music instead of going on and on about the lyrics.

  Anthony: I’m certainly guilty of that–and I do like J.D.’s writing a lot. The most common suggestion I get from editors after I’ve turned in a piece is, “Can you say something about the music?” The music is really an afterthought to me–not as a listener, but as a writer. It’s harder for me to write about music, because my training is as a literary critic. I love language. So the music part of it is difficult. Why is a sound compelling? That’s tricky. It’s tough to get at.

  Steven: What advice would you give someone today who wanted to write about music for a living?

  Anthony: Find a place to do it. College newspaper, local weekly, the internet, wherever you can get experience. Get your stuff out there. Work on your writing is the other advice. Rock critics all have taste. They like what’s good, mostly. But you need to be able to put words together. One of the most thrilling realisations of my life was when I knew that I had the ability to express in writing any idea that came to my mind. Popular music was the least of it–that ability was liberating for every aspect of my life. Clearly a critic is responding to the music. Now find a language to make that response compelling to people.

  Steven: A new question I’m going to start asking critics. Captain Beefheart. Fan or non-fan?

  Anthony: Non fan.

  Steven: I don’t believe it

  Anthony: (Laughing) Why?

  Steven: To be a rock critic, you have to love the Velvet Underground and Captain Beefheart.

  Anthony: I love the Velvet Underground. Captain Beefheart is corny avant-garde. Bloops, squawks and bleeps. Sorry. I’m afraid not.

  Steven: What would be your choice for Greil Marcus’s Stranded 2000. By the way, he’s not putting one together, as far as I know.

  Anthony: Blonde on Blonde. It’s a cliched rock critic answer, but I love it. I’ve never heard that record without finding something new. That album would do me on a desert isle. I could happily listen to it once a day for the rest of my life.

Lou Reed
David Pitt
Booklist.
114.1 (Sept. 1, 2017): p28. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Lou Reed. By Anthony DeCurtis. Oct. 2017. 528p. Little, Brown, $32 (97803163765561; e-book, $15.99 (9780316376549). 782.42166092.
This is the third biography of singer-songwriter Lou Reed to be published since his death at 71 in 2013, but that's fine, since Reed was a complex figure whose life contained many areas obscured by shadow. Author DeCurtis, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone who knew Reed for more than 15 years, draws on interviews with the artist's fellow bandmates, friends, and former girlfriends to paint a picture of a brilliant musician whose deeply troubled past (which included a diagnosis, while still in high school, of schizophrenia and subsequent electroshock treatment) informed his music and his life. Even though he counted Reed among his friends in the music business, DeCurtis pulls no punches; for example, he talks about Reed's early sexual promiscuity in highly critical terms and is equally frank in discussing Reed's drug and alcohol abuse. This is a rough-edged, straight-talking biography of a man who became a legend as much for his offstage life as for his musical skills.--David Pitt
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Pitt, David. "Lou Reed." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 28. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509161478/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=14c1db23. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
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DeCurtis, Anthony: LOU REED
Kirkus Reviews.
(Aug. 1, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
DeCurtis, Anthony LOU REED Little, Brown (Adult Nonfiction) $34.00 10, 10 ISBN: 978-0-316-55242-4
A full-length portrait of legendary musician Lou Reed (1942-2013).Rolling Stone contributing editor DeCurtis (Creative Writing/Univ. of Pennsylvania; In Other Words: Artists Talk About Life and Work, 2005, etc.), who followed Reed's career closely over the years, claims to be one of the few rock writers Reed respected. Focusing on the music as much as the singer's often dissolute lifestyle and controversial opinions, the author makes a good case for Reed's lasting significance. Born in Brooklyn, he moved with his middle-class Jewish family to Long Island when he was a young boy. A rebellious teenager, he began playing in bands early on. At Syracuse University, he came under the influence of the poet Delmore Schwartz, who encouraged him to take writing seriously--and served as a model of the bohemian lifestyle. Moving to New York City, he soon joined up with the future members of the Velvet Underground, who gained cachet by being "adopted" by Andy Warhol. But the band set another pattern that would dominate Reed's career: an inability to share credit. Singer Nico, installed by Warhol to give the band glamour, and John Cale, who co-wrote many of the band's songs, were both bones of contention. Reed embarked on a long solo career, marked by alternating flashes of brilliance and gestures that seemed deliberate self-sabotage. DeCurtis faithfully chronicles all of them, with detailed information on recording sessions and Reed's musical collaborators. He also gives illuminating background information, often drawn from Reed's personal experiences, on what led to some of the compositions. Despite a flamboyant lifestyle in the gay culture of the day, Reed was an intensely private person, but the author has made every effort to interview those who knew him best. While his assessment of Reed's importance seems slightly overblown, the book is a well- written, valuable document of a major figure in the American rock scene, putting a human face on a man who often seemed impossibly remote. Essential reading for Reed fans and strongly recommended for anyone interested in rock as art.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"DeCurtis, Anthony: LOU REED." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2017. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499572510/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=a67e8249. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
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Lou Reed: A Life
Publishers Weekly.
264.28 (July 10, 2017): p76. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Lou Reed: A Life
Anthony DeCurtis. Little, Brown, $32 (528p) ISBN 978-0-316-37655-6
In this engaging yet uneven biography, Rolling Stone contributing editor DeCurtis (In Other Words) explores the life of a troubled kid from Long Island who transformed American music. A child of postwar suburbia, Lou Reed embraced rock and roll and the low life in his teens, and these two obsessions would fuel his career. In college, a close friendship with poet Delmore Schwartz marked his rejection of the mainstream. While songwriting at Pickwick Records not long after graduating, he met avant-garde Welsh musician John Cale and together they formed the Velvet Underground. Adopted by Warhol as the house band for his Factory, the Velvet Underground failed commercially even as they were creating a new musical paradigm. After leaving the band, Reed scored an unlikely hit with "Walk on the Wild Side," but his uneven solo output and louche proclivities kept him from stardom. Nevertheless, before his death in 2013 Reed was celebrated as godfather of rock's underground and had found domestic contentment with artist Laurie Anderson. While DeCurtis touches on Reed's violent behavior, substance abuse, and complex sexuality, the icon remains distinct but quite distant, and DeCurtis's takes on Reed's musical output are equally lacking. The 500-plus pages pass swiftly but leave the impression that when it comes to Reed, much remains to be said. Agent: Sarah Lazin, Sarah Lazin Books. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Lou Reed: A Life." Publishers Weekly, 10 July 2017, p. 76. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499720102/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=bf614003. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
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Rocking My Life Away
Max Brzezinski
The Antioch Review.
57.1 (Winter 1999): p114+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 1999 Antioch Review, Inc.
Full Text:
by Anthony DeCurtis Duke University Press, 360 pp, $24.95.
DeCurtis, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, compiled this collection of music reviews, interviews, album liner notes, and cultural musings in an attempt to give the "palpable feel of a person rendering perspective on a series of experiences in a complex culture." His success in achieving this intent is somewhat mixed. His technically precise but bland style often is inadequate to describe some of the most exciting individuals, events, and cultural movements of the past twenty years.
Most successful are the interviews, album reviews, and features that focus on many of the most creative figures of popular music: Bob Dylan, Peter Buck of R.E.M., Leonard Cohen, and Bluegrass legend Bill Monroe. When dealing with these and other talented musicians, DeCurtis allows the works and the artists to express themselves in unexpected and enriching ways. As an interviewer, he often leads his subjects into informative insights about the formation of their work. As a music reviewer, where DeCurtis is forced to be brief, he frequently identifies the major thematic underpinnings and musical high points of an album.
However, when not discussing and analyzing musical greatness, he is clearly outside his element, and flounders badly. The ill-conceived section "Culture Watch, Culture Wars" that concludes the book provides undistinguished and uninspired looks at such disparate topics as Don DeLillo, the Ph.D. in popular culture, and talk radio.
Although the book fails to be either unified or consistently engaging, it does contain many articles essential to the serious student of popular music: "Rock Criticism and the Rocker" provides a never-before-published interview with R.E.M.'s Peter Buck, and DeCurtis's music reviews (in the sections entitled "The Classics" and "Recordings") provide consistently reliable aesthetic judgments.
Max Brzezinski
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Brzezinski, Max. "Rocking My Life Away." The Antioch Review, Winter 1999, p. 114+. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A54010400/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=4f4555ea. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
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Davis, Clive: THE SOUNDTRACK OF MY LIFE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2013): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Davis, Clive THE SOUNDTRACK OF MY LIFE Simon & Schuster (Adult Nonfiction) $30.00 2, 19 ISBN: 978-1-4767-1478-3
Revealing, entertaining account of the fortunes--almost always waxing--of the music mogul. Writing with ace Rolling Stone journalist DeCurtis, Davis recounts his rise from an impoverished Brooklyn childhood to heading Columbia Records and other labels. That rise came by way of hard work and attendance at Harvard Law School, where he qualified for the Review but, ever entrepreneurial, joined the activities board because the post offered a small stipend. As counsel to Columbia, he found that he had an ear for music and an eye for talent, and from there, he rocketed upward. In his tenure at Columbia and Arista, Davis discovered many artists and elevated many others, and he is gracious toward almost all, if carefully so: Paul Simon, we gather, is prickly, and Whitney Houston was a constant handful (about The Bodyguard: "She held her own, but you couldn't say her performance was inspiring"). Davis is also remarkably catholic in his tastes, having worked with everyone from Miles Davis to Laura Nyro to Johnny Cash to the Grateful Dead to Sean Combs and his coterie of rappers ("When I went to artist showcases or parties Puffy threw for his label's stars in clubs around the city late at night, I never once brought a bodyguard"). The anecdotes are fun to read, if seldom newsworthy; what is of greater value is Davis' detailing of how hits are made. As he writes, "I think there's a bit of confusion between pop music and pop success," adding that although the Dead and Patti Smith, and even Aretha Franklin, weren't pop artists, he was able to work his magic on them to produce hits--and lots of money. A touch overlong, but a pleasure to read, elevated and mensch-y at the same time.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Davis, Clive: THE SOUNDTRACK OF MY LIFE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2013. Book Review
Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A324054890/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=c7307247. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
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Rocking My Life Away: Writing
About Music and Other Matters
David M. Turkalo
Library Journal.
123.7 (Apr. 15, 1998): p82. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 1998 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
DeCurtis, Anthony. Duke Univ. May 1998. c.312p. index. ISBN 0-8223-2184-X. $24.95. MUSIC
In these diverse essays, Grammy Award-winning writer DeCurtis, who has been writing for Rolling Stone and other publications for more than 20 years, tackles music and popular culture with a distinct, insightful, and clearly left-wing slant. His writing is solid and so good, however, that regardless of one's political or cultural moniker there is a lot to be learned, savored, and just enjoyed. A good three-quarters of the essays are taken up with pop music criticism, ranging from "Their Way: Frank Sinatra and Johnny Cash" to "Life and Death: The Notorious B.I.G." The quarter or so of the book under the section "Culture Watch, Culture Wars" is a fascinating hodge- podge of essays like "I'll Take My Stand: A Defense of Popular Culture," "Erotic Terrorism: The Enemy Is Us," and portraits, e.g., writer T. Coraghessan Boyle and Neil Sheehan and performance artist Eric Bogosian. Most of these essays have appeared elsewhere, and while not every one is a winner, the bulk of this book is a grand exposition of one man's trip through the realms of pop culture. This highly entertaining yet thought-provoking collection should find a readership in both public and academic libraries.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Turkalo, David M. "Rocking My Life Away: Writing About Music and Other Matters." Library
Journal, 15 Apr. 1998, p. 82. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A20557521/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=83334491. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
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Rocking My Life Away: Writing
about Music and Other Matters
Mike Tribby
Booklist.
94.17 (May 1, 1998): p1488. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 1998 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
DeCurtis, Anthony. Rocking My Life Away: Writing about Music and Other Matters. May 1998. 312p. index. Duke, $24.95 (0-8223-2184-X). DDC: 781.64.
Erstwhile Rolling Stone editor DeCurtis says his writing is "traditional--perhaps even belletristic." Like warhorse rock critic Greil Marcus, DeCurtis writes very seriously about popular culture, spewing aesthetic pronouncements and historical allusions at a dazzling pace, then pulling up short with a folksy metaphor. Rock mogul Phil Spector, DeCurtis writes, "approached the raw materials of the pop culture mass market ... with the visionary boldness of a hip Michelangelo standing before a virgin block of marble." Thus (sans the folksiness, this time) does DeCurtis successfully combine the verbal bombast the pop music public presumably wants with a significant-seeming perspective. That's writin', mister, especially when the subject is ultimately a form of rhythmic expression often considered most useful as accompaniment for illicit coupling. For a sheer hoot, it is hard to beat the Spector piece, though DeCurtis' interlude with the artist formerly known as Prince does employ the unpronounceable symbol the singer- songwriter uses instead every time he (the artist, not DeCurtis) is referred to. So rock on, self- consciously, with DeCurtis.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Tribby, Mike. "Rocking My Life Away: Writing about Music and Other Matters." Booklist, 1
May 1998, p. 1488. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A54174657/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=1b2b0a44. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A54174657
8 of 12 4/22/18, 12:49 AM

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The Music Shelf
The Bookwatch.
(Apr. 2013): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 Midwest Book Review http://www.midwestbookreview.com/bw/index.htm
Full Text:
The Soundtrack of My Life
Clive Davis with Anthony DeCurtis
Simon and Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas, 14th fl.
New York, NY 10020
9781416714783, $30.00, www.simonandschuster.com
The Soundtrack of My Life recounts the life of music legend Clive Davis who holds five decades in the business and who has worked with some of the great musicians of our times, from Paul Simon to Whitney Houston. He overcame an impoverished childhood to graduate from Harvard Law School, there to become a general counsel at Columbia Records, where he became president of the company. His ability to spot talent and foster hit records made Columbia and Arista highly successful companies - and lead Davis to discover and develop more unique artists than anyone in the industry's history. This memoir recounts his life, his work, and his many encounters with some of the greatest names in music history, and is key for any collection strong in popular music history and culture.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Music Shelf." The Bookwatch, Apr. 2013. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A327359384/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=b143a454. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A327359384
9 of 12 4/22/18, 12:49 AM

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In Other Words
The Bookwatch.
(Sept. 2005): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2005 Midwest Book Review http://www.midwestbookreview.com/bw/index.htm
Full Text:
In Other Words
Anthony DeCurtis
Hal Leonard
PO Box 13819, Milwaukee, WI 53212 www.halleonard.com
0634066552 $24.95 1-800-637-2852
Musicians from all genres of music speak of their lives and work in In Other Words: Artists Talk About Life And Work. Anthony DeCurtis has spent 25 years interviewing artists from musicians and movie directors to artists and songwriters: many have appeared in Rolling Stone and other notable publications, so it's refreshing to see all under one cover for the first time. From gripping studio session conflicts and moments to why director breakthroughs never seemed to happen, interviews are probing and revealing.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"In Other Words." The Bookwatch, Sept. 2005. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A135969076/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=76005b5b. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A135969076
10 of 12 4/22/18, 12:49 AM

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Rocking My Life Away: Writing About Music and Other Matters
Publishers Weekly.
245.17 (Apr. 27, 1998): p56+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 1998 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Anthony DeCurtis. Duke Univ., $24.95 (312p) ISBN 0-8223-2184-X
It's no coincidence that the most interesting contribution in this wide-ranging "greatest hits" package is an off-the-cuff interview with R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, in which he and the author discuss at length the cultural value of such an endeavor as writing critically about rock and popular entertainment. Too often an assumption is made by and about writers for magazines such as Rolling Stone, where DeCurtis spent nearly a decade as an editor: the writer may want to define consumer taste, but generally his assignment is simply to reflect upon it. DeCurtis is something of an anomaly from the decades before popular culture became a province of social theoreticians, years when rock 'n' roll could be discussed as art. He defends the academic study of pop culture, in such essays as "Pop Goes to College" and his examination of Don DeLillo's Great Jones Street, but his work is informed by a gutsy street sensibility absent from that of DeCurtis's more academic peers. This unique blend of intellect and bravado might well lead readers to argue a point here and there, but that is the purpose of criticism. DeCurtis reminds us of this basic point with the ease of recalling a classic Keith Richards riff. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Rocking My Life Away: Writing About Music and Other Matters." Publishers Weekly, 27 Apr.
1998, p. 56+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A20539723 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=17bf46d1. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A20539723
11 of 12 4/22/18, 12:49 AM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
The Music Shelf
Internet Bookwatch.
(Apr. 2013): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 Midwest Book Review http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
The Soundtrack of My Life
Clive Davis with Anthony DeCurtis
Simon and Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas, 14th fl.
New York, NY 10020
9781416714783, $30.00, www.simonandschuster.com
The Soundtrack of My Life recounts the life of music legend Clive Davis who holds five decades in the business and who has worked with some of the great musicians of our times, from Paul Simon to Whitney Houston. He overcame an impoverished childhood to graduate from Harvard Law School, there to become a general counsel at Columbia Records, where he became president of the company. His ability to spot talent and foster hit records made Columbia and Arista highly successful companies - and lead Davis to discover and develop more unique artists than anyone in the industry's history. This memoir recounts his life, his work, and his many encounters with some of the greatest names in music history, and is key for any collection strong in popular music history and culture.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Music Shelf." Internet Bookwatch, Apr. 2013. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A327359468/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=ead035d5. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A327359468
12 of 12 4/22/18, 12:49 AM

Pitt, David. "Lou Reed." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 28. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509161478/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=14c1db23. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018. "DeCurtis, Anthony: LOU REED." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499572510/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=a67e8249. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018. "Lou Reed: A Life." Publishers Weekly, 10 July 2017, p. 76. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499720102/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=bf614003. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018. Brzezinski, Max. "Rocking My Life Away." The Antioch Review, Winter 1999, p. 114+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A54010400/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=4f4555ea. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018. "Davis, Clive: THE SOUNDTRACK OF MY LIFE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2013. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A324054890/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=c7307247. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018. Turkalo, David M. "Rocking My Life Away: Writing About Music and Other Matters." Library Journal, 15 Apr. 1998, p. 82. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A20557521/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=83334491. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018. Tribby, Mike. "Rocking My Life Away: Writing about Music and Other Matters." Booklist, 1 May 1998, p. 1488. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A54174657/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=1b2b0a44. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018. "The Music Shelf." The Bookwatch, Apr. 2013. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A327359384/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=b143a454. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018. "In Other Words." The Bookwatch, Sept. 2005. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A135969076/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=76005b5b. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018. "Rocking My Life Away: Writing About Music and Other Matters." Publishers Weekly, 27 Apr. 1998, p. 56+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A20539723/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=17bf46d1. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018. "The Music Shelf." Internet Bookwatch, Apr. 2013. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A327359468/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=ead035d5. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.

• New York Times
  https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/07/bib/980607.rv101733.html
  Word count: 157

  June 7, 1998
  By MARK OPPENHEIMER
  ROCKING MY LIFE AWAY
  Writing About Music
  and Other Matters.
  By Anthony DeCurtis.
  Duke University, $24.95.

  Anthony DeCurtis's collection offers literate and deeply informed profiles of the artists responsible for our musical landscape. But the enthusiasm that makes DeCurtis such a strong music journalist makes him a weaker critic. Almost all the reviews included here are positive. Although many of the pieces have previously been published -- most of them in Rolling Stone, where DeCurtis is a contributing editor -- ''Rocking My Life Away'' also contains some strong unpublished work. And by including scholarly essays on nonmusical subjects, like the novelist Don DeLillo or the dichotomy between high and popular culture, DeCurtis shows himself to be a writer whose boundaries extend beyond music. Like the bootleg tapes that DeCurtis always seems to have heard first, these unpublished or obscure pieces are the real find.

• Rolling Stone
  https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/rocking-my-life-away-why-music-matters-20010928
  Word count: 1075

  Rocking My Life Away: Why Music Matters

  Why Music Matters More Than Ever
  By Anthony DeCurtis
  September 28, 2001

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  Over the past few weeks I've read a great deal and had many conversations with friends and colleagues about what popular music can mean in the wake of the horrific terrorist attacks on the United States. Everyone has different ideas about the shape of things to come: irony, cuteness and cleverness are dead; violent lyrics and aggressive sounds will seem silly and cartoonish; singer-songwriters and work with spiritual depth will enjoy a resurgence; the teen tarts and hunks will slink off the media stage, sent up to their rooms in shame by an audience with bigger things on their minds and heavier weights on their souls.

  Some or all of those predictions will prove true, at least for a while. The many benefits that the music industry has organized will set a tone of concern that will make it hard for the more anarchic aspects of popular music to find expression. And that's fine, even appropriate. Some times are right for pushing the limits of our lives, and some times are right for finding the center of our lives. Right now, understandably, everyone wants to be reassured about what is really important, what resonates at the very core of who we are as human beings. There are no atheists in foxholes, the old saying runs. That may or may not be true. But I'm absolutely certain that no one in a foxhole ever worried much about being edgy or hip. We are all in foxholes now.

  But I can tell you another thing, for sure: Plenty of people in foxholes hummed tunes to themselves or thought about song lyrics as they tried to come to terms with the prospect that they might not live to see another day. Sometimes the music in their minds was the greatest work ever composed in the history of our culture. Sometimes it was just a pop song that they just happened to hear a few days earlier, or shared with a loved one in safer times. Sometimes the music was ennobling and inspirational. Sometimes it was sweet and calming. Sometimes it was just something to think about to pass the time, to distract them from fear. But music always had a role to play even in those most threatening times.

  And it has a purpose now. Amid all the theories about popular music that I've heard recently, the only one I've felt the need to argue against -- and it came up surprisingly often -- is that being concerned with popular music at a time like this is "trivial." Writers and editors, music industry executives and even musicians have all expressed this view to me. It is simply wrong.

  It's not that music is some sort of universal good. The Nazis revered Wagner, as we all know, and, more recently, racist skinheads in Europe and the United States have used music to communicate their revolting views and attract young converts to their cause. Music is only as good as we are as people -- and we know that isn't always so good.

  The world of music does have its trivial aspects -- cheap glamour; celebrity worship; untrammeled egotism; exclusionary, hipper-than-thou posturing; an obsession with sales, status and money; tawdry, exploitive sex -- but those things were trivial before the terrorist attacks, and they would continue to be even if the world were miraculously rid of violence.

  But the music itself -- from the dumbest, one-off hit to the most resonant, enduring statement -- does have meaning. It all has a capacity to bring pleasure into our lives, and there is room for all of it. None of it is trivial.

  As it happens, I got married on September 8th, the Saturday before the bombings. It was a spectacularly sunny day, and one that was filled with music -- from the gospel sounds that greeted our guests as they entered the white, one-room, wooden church, to the Stevie Wonder songs ("I Believe When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever," "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours") with which we began and ended the ceremony, to the moving performance ("The Only Story I Tell") by our friend Walter Salas-Humara of the Silos. Enough profound things happened and were said over that weekend to last a lifetime.

  But in the two days after the wedding and before the bombings, the song that, ridiculously, kept running through my head was Digital Underground's "The Humpty Dance." In my mind I could see my friends and family racing for the dance floor as it began to thump out of the speakers, the tent bright and the sky darkening over the Catskill Mountains, all of us with crazy grins and sweat on our faces as we obeyed the song's glorious, nonsensical injunction to "Hey, do the humpty-hump/Uh, do the humpty-hump." It was a moment of sheer physical joy, uncomplicated, free and ecstatic. For all its silliness, the song managed at that moment to capture the possibilities of love and connection as fully as the eloquent vows we so carefully wrote and could barely speak for our tears and emotion.

  As people who care about music, the best service we can do for ourselves during these sad, confusing days is to allow music to help restore us to the full range of our feelings. For that, we need "Oops! . . . I Did It Again" and "Chimes of Freedom." We need "The Message" and "Nookie." We need "A Change Is Gonna Come" and "Baby Got Back." We need Steve Wonder and "The Humpty Dance." If any of that is trivial, it's no more trivial than any other spontaneous fun we had in our lives before a cowardly attack made us hesitant to laugh and love, the very things that make our lives worth living. No more trivial than that, indeed, and no less essential to our recovery.

• Curled Up
  http://www.curledup.com/inotherw.htm
  Word count: 419

  In Other Words: Artists Talk About Life and Work
  Anthony DeCurtis
  Hal Leonard
  Hardcover
  512 pages
  May 2005
  rated 3 of 5 possible stars

  previous review next review

  These are the collected interviews of Rolling Stone contributing editor Anthony DeCurtis, a highly respected veteran music journalist. This book is the end result of 25 years talking to, taking apart, and diving inside the heads and hearts of music's - though he does take a peripheral look at directors and actors - most elite and eccentric players.

  He demonstrates, time and time again, his mastery of the Q&A form - question and answer - as he tackles such diffident and typically closed-mouth individuals as Van Morrison ("Whenever I'm asked about the interview I enjoyed the least - or hated the most - I immediately bring up this 1985 encounter with Van Morrison") and King Crimson brainchild Robert Fripp ("Do I find a personal need to do interviews? Not at the moment," replies a typically churlish and always challenging guitarist in response to Anthony's opening gambit, "Do you enjoy doing interviews?"). In this latter give-and-exchange, he manages to turn Fripp's statement back on himself in extracting some intriguing nuggets, and in the Morrison conversation mentioned above, he, well, he turns what could have been a disastrous encounter into a mildly entertaining game of intellectual ping pong.

  In the opening chapter, "Introduction: The Art of Talk," the author explains the delicate balance that is the interviewing experience and that a handful of well-intentioned questions and a headful of specific knowledge is only the pre-requisite in producing a well-crafted and emotionally charged Q&A piece. And he's right.

  This may be inappropriate as a reviewer but, like DeCurtis, I am a music journalist, and I've had the opportunity to sit brain-to-brain with Robert Fripp and Frank Zappa and Ginger Baker, musicians notorious for their dis-interest in interviews and, more specifically, interviewers. So, when he says, "Being able to read the person in front of you is one of the intangible skills of the interview," he knows of what he writes. This is not brain surgery, it is not complex physics, but it is untangling the machinations of another human being who, at that particular point in time, may not want to be untangled.

  DeCurtis has compiled a wonderfully eclectic selection here and anyone interested in knowing more than a musician's inseam measurements needs to read In Other Words.

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/all-the-poets-musicians-on-writing-anthony-decurtis-on-lou-reed/
  Word count: 3799

  All the Poets (Musicians on Writing): Anthony DeCurtis on Lou Reed

  Scott Timberg interviews Anthony DeCurtis

  81
  0
  0

  NOVEMBER 24, 2017

  LOU REED’S INITIAL STATEMENT of what was possible in more-or-less popular music — the 1967 album The Velvet Underground & Nico — still resonates as loudly as anything released by the Beatles or Jimi Hendrix. Reed, the VU’s main singer and songwriter, put out a handful of influential albums with the group before leaving just three years later. Those LPs, along with his widely varied solo work, made him a key figure — maybe the key figure — for punk rock, post-punk, and the entire alternative and indie rock cosmos. Bands from Television to R.E.M., from Luna to Yo La Tengo are inconceivable without him.

  Anthony DeCurtis, a longtime writer for Rolling Stone, recently published the long-awaited Lou Reed: A Life. DeCurtis holds a doctorate in American literature, and the musician’s literary influences and reference points are central to his narrative; at one point, he describes Reed as “a speed-addled, leather-clad Virgil,” guiding friends through the underworld of Lower Manhattan sex bars.

  I spoke to DeCurtis by phone, for a posthumous installment of “All the Poets,” the title of which comes from one of VU’s best-known songs.

  ¤

  SCOTT TIMBERG: Let’s start, Anthony, by talking about the heft of Lou Reed’s achievement and influence. What kind of things did he make possible within the rock tradition?

  ANTHONY DECURTIS: In terms of influence alone, Lou Reed ranks up there with Bob Dylan and Lennon and McCartney and James Brown. I don’t know if there’s anybody else in that particular pantheon. I mean, I think the whole heritage of alternative rock, from punk rock to post-punk, grunge, and whatever forms it exists in today, is rooted in Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground.

  Yeah, I was having one of these sort of adolescent discussions with someone, I think it was Jonathan Lethem, about the key compass points: what are the key elements of rock and roll? And it came down to the Beatles, Dylan, Chuck Berry, and the Velvets: if you removed one of those four elements, you would have lost whole lineages.

  Yeah, that’s fair enough. The Velvets, obviously, are different from the other ones, because they never had any hits. But that was part of their contribution: that you didn’t need to have hits … A rock band could appeal to posterity in the way that poets and playwrights and novelists and filmmakers did. There dared to be a strand of popular music that did that.

  That’s a good point. I wrote a piece about ’90s indie rock the other day, and a number of Boomer friends were pointing out how insular that period was, with bands like Pavement making cryptic stuff — a generation talking to itself, or mumbling. It crossed my mind that VU might be responsible for that sensibility: that we don’t need to do anything except make music that we like.

  That was the point that John Cale made, specifically, when the Velvet Underground was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — that you don’t need to think commercially all the time, that the Velvet Underground was being honored simply because of the value of their work, you know?

  Lou died in 2013. When did you start working on the book?

  Well, shortly after that. I was being interviewed a fair amount about Lou. It was just people doing stories … And I was on a radio show in New York on WNYC — which is the local NPR station here — it’s hosted by a guy named John Schaefer and it’s called Soundcheck. And an editor heard it and got in touch with my agent, asking about the idea of my doing a Lou Reed book.

  It was very soon after Lou died. I wouldn’t have done the book while he was alive — it just would have been too much trouble. He wouldn’t have wanted it done and it would have been a fight, and I valued my relationship with him too much. But, after his death, it seemed to me like a worthy project. We signed the deal in January 2014.

  You had been a music journalist for Rolling Stone and others places, based in New York for decades. How much contact, over the years, had you had with Lou?

  Well, quite a bit. You know, I interviewed him half a dozen times, and I ran into him constantly. I mean, it was quite remarkable. And we got along well. I think Lou did some things with me that weren’t common. I mean, I did public interviews with him on three occasions, and that wasn’t something that he was ever especially in a hurry to do.

  He came down to the University of Pennsylvania where I teach, and we did a couple of things, but we did one thing at the 92nd Street Y here, and we did another thing when the film version of Berlin came out, and then I interviewed him for some print stories. We’d always have a conversation whenever we saw each other, and I think Lou liked the way I represented him, not to put too fine a point on it. Lou thought I viewed him the way he wanted to see himself, and that was, I think, primarily as a kind of literary figure.

  You know, Lou cared a lot about music, obviously, cared a lot about sound, but his deepest impulses, I think, were literary, and that’s probably true of me as well, in terms of my background, and I think he recognized that.

  One of the key influences on Reed was the poet Delmore Schwartz. Give us a little sense of who Schwartz was and why he was important to Lou.

  Well, Lou was a student at Syracuse University and Delmore kind of landed there — it was one of his last stops. Delmore launched his career in a very dramatic way. He was a poet and fiction writer and essayist praised by people like T. S. Eliot, but he had psychological problems and drank a lot, and went into a serious descent.

  His friends, including people like Saul Bellow and Robert Lowell, worked hard to get him a position like the one at Syracuse, to save his life. Nonetheless, he was still a storied figure, and in many ways he was Lou’s first glimpse of a larger world. Lou’s upbringing in Long Island was pretty constricted. You know, obviously, Syracuse University is a good school, but it’s in the middle of New York state, also a little isolated. But here’s Delmore, a figure playing on a very big stage. And Lou studied with Delmore and they hit it off and drank together. Delmore became a vision of a possible future for Lou.

  Delmore was also, like Lou, Jewish, and born in Brooklyn. There were a lot of similarities, and Delmore recognized that. Delmore recognized Lou’s talent, also. So I think this was Lou’s first sense that you can play on a big stage. Delmore was a famous raconteur. He would entertain students, including Lou, at this place called the Orange Bar in Syracuse, and I think Lou liked that performative aspect as well.

  It’s interesting to read about how early Lou was writing songs, including some that later became famous VU songs. He does a fair bit of stuff before the Beatles had even released Help!, I think. Give us a sense of the influences and ambitions that are coming together in the mid-’60s, around the time the VU were taking shape — doo-wop, experimental music?

  Lou was listening to and reading a lot of different things, and I think both of those came together in what was going to become the Velvet Underground. He had a radio show at Syracuse that was mostly avant-garde jazz, which was not necessarily music that was associated with him, but you can certainly hear that stuff in the first couple of Velvet records.

  Of course, Lou loved classic R&B and doo-wop, that was the kind of music that really reached him, and maybe, in a sense, was his truest love his whole life. He also, around that time — this is not widely known or widely discussed — had a fair amount of interest in blues and folk music. According to his girlfriend around that time, Lou would sit around and strum a guitar, and do, sort of like, Dylan songs, really.

  And some of those numbers on their first album are tricked-out folk rock songs, that have the Dylan-ish quality.

  Absolutely, and even a later song like “Kill Your Sons” started out as a kind of Vietnam protest song. There’s an early song, I think it was called “Prominent Men,” which is also a kind of protest song. I think there’s also a harmonica on it. Lou would never talk about that, and would speak dismissively about blues and folk, but he was listening to it, and liked it, when he was a college student, as were many college students back then.

  And Tin Pan Alley, too.

  Well, there was an inevitability to that. It was the popular music of the day. Regardless of what you thought of it, it was hard to avoid.

  I think the crucial thing early on for Lou was a formulation that he would repeat often — so often that people have stopped paying attention to it. Delmore Schwartz, who was encouraging Lou as a writer, really hated rock and roll lyrics, and this put a thought in Lou’s mind: “Well, suppose you had rock and roll, which I love musically, and you had lyrics that someone like Delmore Schwartz could respect.” And that was the key that turned the ignition — that became Lou’s project, really, for his whole life, but certainly for the Velvet Underground.

  There’s one other element. The Beatles and Bob Dylan made it possible for smart people to like rock and roll. I mean, smart people liked rock and roll before that — but, now, if you were an English major, you suddenly didn’t have to hide your rock and roll preference.

  Smart people and grown-ups, too.

  Grown-ups, absolutely. That put another texture into that cultural moment, which Lou could perceive.

  Part of what you’re saying, maybe, is that the Beatles and Dylan may have cleared some room for VU even though VU was not in any way Beatle-esque, and it doesn’t sound like Blonde on Blonde.

  The simple fact of the matter is that Lou Reed would be inconceivable without Dylan. Lou had a complicated relationship with Dylan throughout his life, but there’s no question that — just as a singer, even — before Dylan, it would have been inconceivable for someone like Lou Reed to make pop records.

  That’s a good point: that flat singing voice would have sounded off without the example of Dylan. VU also had a fraught and perhaps antagonistic relationship with California in general and Los Angeles in particular — the audiences, the bands, some of the music writers, and the larger West Coast sensibility, associated with Hippiedom and psychedelia. How did that play itself out in the VU period?

  Well, there was a whole lot of animosity. On a famous trip that the Velvet Underground made to California, in 1966, they were supposed to do an extended residency at The Trip in Los Angeles that got shut down after two or three shows. They outraged the local media, and many local performers. The famous quote belonged to Cher: “They will replace nothing, except maybe suicide.” And Andy Warhol took that quote straight to the bank; it’s used in promotion of the Velvet Underground.

  But then they went to San Francisco, and that was an even more fraught experience. They played at the Fillmore, and they aggravated Bill Graham, and they condescended to everybody, and Graham said they’d never have them back. And Ralph Gleason, who was the music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and soon to be co-founder of Rolling Stone, described them as “Greenwich Village Sick,” which is a kind of funny thing for a critic in San Francisco to say.

  Right, you’re saying that it’s homophobic …

  Right, even in San Francisco, which was then the gay capital.

  But despite this animosity, they ended up recording their third self-titled record, which sounds nothing like Pet Sounds, out here in North Hollywood.

  And The Matrix in San Francisco became one of their regular stops, and some of the live stuff that came out of there is just prime VU.

  Look, these things are complicated. Their run-ins with the official culture didn’t mean there weren’t cool people around who really responded to what they were doing. And, you know, I think around the time they recorded their third album, the Velvets, and particularly Lou, were interested in being more than a “New York band.” I think they had felt a little typecast by the Andy Warhol thing. Recording in California was a way to broaden their own perspective, and broaden the perception of the band. Those last two albums, The Velvet Underground and Loaded, are efforts to reach a larger audience, to one degree or another. I mean, they failed — spectacular failures — but nonetheless, there was a definite desire to be more than a cult band.

  Right, to get out of the Factory.

  Yeah, I think that was Lou’s motivation, in part, for getting rid of Andy Warhol, and getting rid of John Cale, and really trying to make the Velvets, in the best sense of the term, a kind of conventional rock and roll band, one you might actually hear on the radio.

  Well, we’ve talked a lot about the Velvets, partly because I, like many members of my generation, consider them the godfathers of the alternative and indie rock movements. But there are still many decades left to Lou, and several hundred pages of your book. How does his solo output compare to that of the band, and what seem to be the high points for you, either tours or LPs?

  For those of us who were living contemporaneously with Lou, there were obviously frustrations with the ups and downs and twists and turns of his solo career. I think, for younger artists, that has come to seem like … I won’t say exactly a model, but a kind of example of how you can be free as an artist and do what you want to do. If you want to just talk about high points, I would pull out Transformer, and of course Berlin.

  Right, which was not considered a smashing success at the time.

  A commercial disaster, but a record that’s held up extremely well. Coney Island Baby, Street Hassle, The Blue Mask with Robert Quine …

  New Sensations.

  New York, Magic and Loss, and Songs for Drella, which was a collaboration with John Cale. And Ecstasy, I would say.

  Those records have a lot of high points, in different styles; it’s not like he’s just doing one thing over and over.

  And I’m ignoring something like Metal Machine Music, which sparked outrage at the time, but has come to be taken seriously by the avant-classical world. And you have a Velvet Underground Reunion in there. That live record is not a masterpiece, but it’s certainly worth owning for anyone who cares about that band. Lou’s willingness to do what he wanted to do …

  To paraphrase a song of his …

  Yeah, doin’ the things that we want to, that’s exactly right, I think that’s how he saw it. And I think that’s how younger musicians have experienced him. When they think about him, they don’t think about whether or not he had hits, or one particular album, they think of someone who represented a certain attitude and approach to his own music that existed independent of commerce, you know? It didn’t disown commerce, but it wasn’t governed by commerce. In our world now, it’s very difficult to find anything that isn’t governed by commerce.

  It’s interesting to read how he responded to reviews and sales, and how the various labels and managers took it. He makes records that really do try to be commercial, and then he does something that’s a total fuck-you to the people who would have jumped on the bandwagon after the last record.

  Not to be governed by expectations, you know? That’s what it is, I think. Whether the expectations are that you have to avoid hit-making completely, or that you have to have only hits. I think he just traveled his own path, and there’s a real texture to the solo career. We could argue about these records, obviously — they’re not all masterpieces, and I think when you’re living contemporaneously with an artist, it’s easy to get frustrated. You’re waiting two or three years for a record and he makes one that’s not a great one, and you’re pissed off. But I think when you look at the overall arc of his career, it’s impressive.

  Reed was sort of a famously difficult, ornery guy, who also seemed to have had real relationships, both friendships and marriages that, at least some of the time, worked and were loving. You have a great anecdote at the beginning of the book where he comes to speak at your university. But maybe the best scene in the book — which feels like it describes the complexity of the guy — is when he goes to Czechoslovakia, to interview Václav Havel, who was a huge VU fan. That VU-loving subculture was in some ways responsbile for the liberation of Czechoslovakia.

  The Velvet Revolution.

  Exactly, so tell us how weird and ambiguous that encounter was.

  Well, I think it was very difficult, even after Lou got clean — maybe even more difficult — for him to give up control of situations. And so, he was going to interview Václav Havel for Rolling Stone, and I think it was hard for him to understand the momentousness of the occasion. Here is this prominent literary figure, who essentially led a revolution that freed his country, and that was in many ways inspired by the Velvet Underground. And Lou was treating it like a gig, you know. Havel is asking, “Gee, would you be able to perform in a club here?” And he’s like, “Oh, I don’t usually play clubs. I can play some songs for you.” And Havel has to say, “Gee, you know, there are a lot of people here who would like to see you, and if you just played songs for me, they wouldn’t be able to.” And finally Lou does it, and it’s a very important moment for him, and a very moving moment for Havel.

  But Lou just fought it every step of the way. There’s an insecurity in him that was manifest there, a kind of rigidity, a desire for control … You know, “I can’t go on stage without a week of rehearsals,” or whatever, rather than just thinking this isn’t about the perfect musical moment, it’s about an important statement of support for this leader and for this country that was recently liberated.

  The whole story you tell is quite complicated and fascinating, in part because, in the end, Lou ends up being moved by the experience, and has a human response that we don’t always get from him, an empathetic connection that didn’t come naturally to him, it seems.

  I think there was always an expectation on his part that somehow he was going to be exploited in some way, or that the quality of his work was not going to be respected. And in a situation like that, it was just mind-boggling, it really was completely incredible. That was a very frustrating section to write … You’re trying to empathize, but you’re also going, “Jesus Christ, just do it.”

  You close the book with his death, and the huge amount of warmth and appreciation, and, in some cases, forgiveness that greeted it. As somebody who’s listened to his music for a long time, knew him socially and professionally, and spent several years thinking about him and talking about him, do you feel he was misunderstood? Do you find yourself a little repulsed by his hostility? How do you close the page on him?

  I think I try to see him in three-dimensional terms. I did know him, and we were always friendly. But I never, even in those moments, lost my regard for him as an artist. I hold him in the highest esteem. There are also some very grisly stories, and he did some mean and even despicable things, but, you know, he lived a long life. There was a kind of urge for redemption in him, for all of the terrible things that were part of his life.

  “Despite all the amputations,” right?

  Yeah, I think there was a desire to rise above them. And, you know, I think he did. It doesn’t excuse a lot of the bad stuff, but I think he tried to answer to the best elements in himself and create the best work that he could.

  And look, this guy altered the course of popular music, there’s no question about it. His impact and his influence still seems very potent, and it’s likely to remain that way.

  ¤

  Scott Timberg is the editor of The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles and author of Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class.

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/books/review/the-soundtrack-of-my-life-by-clive-davis.html
  Word count: 1706

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  Arista Cat
  ‘The Soundtrack of My Life,’ by Clive Davis

  By TOM CARSONMARCH 15, 2013
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  No mere vulgar showbiz reminiscence — and that’s kind of a pity — Clive Davis’s autobiography has the ceremonious heft we associate with presidential memoirs. At 586 dense pages, “The Soundtrack of My Life” is dwarfed by Bill Clinton’s herculean “My Life.” But it leaves the shrimpy 497 pages of George W. Bush’s “Decision Points” looking like an amuse-bouche.

  The real resemblance, however, is in the book’s obstinate priorities. Indiscretion, zesty anecdotes and chattiness are in short supply. So is much sense of life’s tumult outside the hero’s professional tunnel vision. The main project at hand is to itemize and thereby monumentalize Davis’s legacy as the music industry’s ultimate hands-on hit-maker. While some interest is guaranteed, there’s a reason Clinton’s “My Life” is the dullest book about Bill Clinton.

  Not that Davis is overestimating his own stature. As the head of Columbia Records in the 1960s, he discovered, among others, Janis Joplin. As the founder of Arista and then J Records later on, he not only sprang Barry Manilow and Kenny G on a blameless world, but presciently signed Patti Smith and revitalized the careers of Aretha Franklin, the Kinks and the Grateful Dead. Then he turned Whitney Houston into a superstar and helped hip-hop go mainstream in the 1990s. Those are just the highlights of a career studded with too many lesser coups to count, though “The Soundtrack of My Life” invites us to try.

  As he’s eager to remind us, Davis hasn’t exactly slowed down in this millennium, playing Svengali to Alicia Keys as well as masterminding Kelly Clarkson’s post-“American Idol” recording career. (He and Clarkson have bickered lately over who masterminded what.) When he amusedly quotes a musician who was nervous about auditioning for him — “Clive was just sort of the name that you hear, like Moses” — he isn’t being unduly immodest. It’s probably an accurate reflection of the awe he’s held in by industry insiders.

  What about us outsiders, though — those for whom “Clive” is just sort of the name we hear, like Dagwood? We might not grasp his full achievement. So not one of Davis’s successes goes unchronicled, however minor or else fatiguingly replicated ad infinitum. No musicians he helped to reach the big time are mentioned without their sales figures and the Grammys they won under his tutelage larding the text. We’ve been turned into potential stockholders who need a full report as we contemplate investing in his legend.
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  Davis is clearly a born educator, and anyone considering a career in entertainment will learn a lot. “The Soundtrack of My Life” brims with shrewd observations about the difference between rock and pop markets, how to placate stars whose sense of their own gifts clashes with what they’re in demand for, and how veteran acts should navigate changing tastes: “What’s most effective is to make a fresh statement in a familiar way.” (That the adjectives can be reversed doesn’t matter; the key thing is the blend.) Yet those who don’t approach the book as pupils may pine for less master-class sagacity and livelier, punchier tale-telling.
  Photo
  Whitney Houston and Clive Davis. Credit Courtesy of Clive Davis

  Since Davis is renowned for his perceptions of a given audience’s needs, his muddled sense of his own readership is a surprise. It’s most glaringly displayed in the book’s introduction, “Welcome to the Party,” an infatuated description of the exclusive pre-Grammy Awards bash he’s hosted for almost 40 years. The more we hear about it — the star-studded guest lists, the intimate live performances we huddled masses will never see — the less welcome we feel.

  Far more pleasurable is his account of growing up Jewish in Brooklyn in the 1930s and the war years. Substituting “Crown Heights” for “Newark,” this is Philip Roth territory — the two are near-exact contemporaries — and Davis and his amanuensis, Anthony DeCurtis, do well enough by Catskills vacations and loving the Dodgers. Next came N.Y.U. and the first of the glittering prizes: Harvard Law School. Yet practicing law didn’t stimulate Davis, making him glad when an offer to become Columbia’s counsel led to running the company.

  Aside from its big early-1960s catch, Bob Dylan, Columbia was still effectively mired in the Pleistocene. Once the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival showed Davis the light, he transformed the label into a rock-era leader. Though he wasn’t always right (he thought Simon and Garfunkel could use a name change), his instinct for adapting old-fashioned career-molding to counter­cultural fashions may have been unequaled. No wonder he felt shocked when, in 1973 — not long after Columbia had acquired a promising newcomer named Bruce something — he was abruptly fired for expense-account fiddling.
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  Davis’s account of this episode is more outraged than illuminating. Anyhow, it ended up as a blip, since he reacted by founding Arista — “the House That Barry Built,” thanks to Manilow. Davis is irritated enough by the implication that it wasn’t the House That Clive Built to quote himself mocking Manilow’s yen to be valued for his songwriting, not his showmanship: “Well, if you were Irving Berlin, we would know it by now!” You wonder how many zingers about other artists — not to mention fellow execs — have been buried by Davis’s insistence on keeping “The Soundtrack of My Life” anodyne.

  It’s around this point, however — with 30-plus years to go — that dramatic interest starts to fade. His part in the 1960s music revolution done, his redemption assured by Arista’s success, Davis is simply a brainy man running a profitable record company. One sign he and De­Curtis know as much is that straightforward chronology gives way to potted chapters about different music genres in which Arista made its mark. Yet he can’t stop vaunting his own undimmed brilliance, going into wearying detail about his acumen in handling performers few of his readers are likely to care about. (Face it, Clive: civilians are in it for Joplin or maybe Manilow, not Maroon 5.) Except as more feathers in his already brimming cap, Davis doesn’t seem to care much about them either — other than, no surprise, Whitney Houston, who rates her own, atypically emotional chapter.

  He’s also so reticent about his personal life that you’d think he was worried Clive Davis might sue him. Though we do hear about his failed first marriage, his second and its aftermath go M.I.A. for several hundred pages before he awkwardly cops to being “bisexual” and in “a strong monogamous relationship for the last seven years” with another man. When we’re belatedly and sheepishly told that his first gay encounter was the result of a pickup at Studio 54 in that glitz emporium’s heyday, the mind reels at the book “The Soundtrack of My Life” might have been if he hadn’t spent most of it playing ­politician.

  Over all, he has such good material that he’d have benefited from having an impresario. You know, someone savvy about recognizing the nature of a given project’s appeal, unabashed about vetoing its weaknesses and irrelevant vanities, and charmingly ruthless in overcoming the talent’s qualms about who knows best. Isn’t it a shame he doesn’t know anybody like that? In more than one sense, “The Soundtrack of My Life” could have used lots more Clive.

  THE SOUNDTRACK OF MY LIFE

  By Clive Davis with Anthony DeCurtis

  Illustrated. 586 pp. Simon & Schuster. $30.

  Tom Carson is the movie critic for GQ and the author of “Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter,” a novel.

  A version of this review appears in print on March 17, 2013, on Page BR20 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Arista Cat. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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• Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-soundtrack-of-my-life-by-clive-davis/2013/03/18/8bc50970-8a8a-11e2-8d72-dc76641cb8d4_story.html?utm_term=.d92bb25ab9fb
  Word count: 981

  ‘The Soundtrack of My Life,’ by Clive Davis
  By Jen Chaney March 18, 2013

  The initial media attention surrounding Clive Davis’s “The Soundtrack of My Life” implied that the well-known record executive’s autobiography overflows with dishy, music-industry gossip. Davis’s decision to appear on Katie Couric’s talk show and drop one of his memoir’s key bombshells — that he’s bisexual — helped foster that impression. So did Kelly Clarkson’s headline-generating denial of the tome’s assertion that she “burst into hysterical sobbing” during a business meeting with Davis after he insisted she include the song “Since U Been Gone” — a track that ultimately became a massive hit for her — on her 2004 album “Breakaway.”

  “I refuse to be bullied and I just have to clear up his memory lapses and misinformation for myself and for my fans,” Clarkson wrote in an online post that affirmed her reputation as a strong-minded spitfire and brought even more attention to the recently released book by Davis, who, for the record, stands by his published account of that episode.

  Not that there was any doubt, but this man still knows how to craft and promote a piece of work for maximum buzz-generating effect. Yet those who plan to buy “The Soundtrack of My Life” should know that it isn’t exactly a juicy tell-all. It’s more of a humble-brag-all, one that trumpets Davis’s many accomplishments while often relying on the sort of diplomatic prose normally reserved for internal workplace memos.

  Of course, the 80-year-old hitmaker who has launched and reignited a staggering number of high-profile music careers — including those of Janis Joplin, Barry Manilow, Aretha Franklin, Carlos Santana, Alicia Keys and, most famously, Whitney Houston — probably doesn’t care about wowing anyone with his capacity to turn phrases. What he does care about is ensuring that his version of industry history gets documented, in permanent, published ink. On that front, he’s done his job; its writerly shortcomings aside, “Soundtrack” will undoubtedly be listed as required reading on many History of Pop Music college-seminar syllabuses.
  “The Soundtrack of My Life” by Clive Davis with Anthony DeCurtis (Simon & Schuster)

  Davis’s career is certainly worthy of study. Despite the fact that he had “little interest” in early rock-and-roll, the Brooklyn boy with the Harvard law degree eventually proved — first at Columbia Records and later at his own Arista and J Records — that he possessed a discerning eye for talent and an irrefutable knack for finding songs that could catapult under-the-radar acts to mega-popularity. His work with Houston — his greatest achievement, with the most tragic outcome — is covered in the book’s lengthiest chapter, which, naturally, recounts the shock Davis experienced after learning of Houston’s death in 2012, just hours before she was to attend his annual pre-Grammy Awards party. “There are moments when time stands still, and you feel as if you can’t even begin to comprehend the words that are being spoken to you,” he writes. “That’s how I felt right then.”

  Davis also recounts his uber-involved and occasionally blunt approach to guiding Houston and other artists, particularly those — like Manilow, Clarkson and Melissa Manchester — who wanted to compose their own music instead of singing the radio-ready melodies Davis selected. During a particularly contentious confrontation with Manilow — who, according to Davis, resented performing “I Write the Songs” when he knew that he hadn’t written many of his best-known ones — Davis exploded at the superstar: “Well, if you were Irving Berlin, we would know it by now!”

  After acknowledging such creative clashes, Davis follows up with gushy compliments about the immense genius of these artists. Even now, this old pro doesn’t want to burn any bridges.

  As observant as he seems to be, Davis occasionally claims to have been clueless about details that are hard to believe he missed. He says, for example, that he “was unaware of [Janis Joplin’s] drug use.” He also swears that he initially had no idea the members of Milli Vanilli — the most notorious lip synchers in fake-singing history — didn’t perform the tracks on their hugely successful debut American album, which was distributed by Davis’s Arista. “I was shocked to learn that because I was a well-known musical executive, and I’d submitted songs for this notorious album, people thought I was in on this elaborate scheme,” he writes. “Shocked”? Really? When Davis has a reputation for being as hands-on as his two upper appendages will allow?

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  As for that aforementioned bisexuality bombshell, it doesn’t appear until the book’s final chapter, when Davis acknowledges publicly for the first time that, following divorces from the two women who gave birth to his four children, he has primarily been in long-term romantic relationships with men. He speaks about his orientation with a personal openness that might have enlivened other portions of the text, where a somewhat stilted, businesslike tone pervades.

  But perhaps businesslike is appropriate for a man like Davis, a creative force but also an astute businessman, one who instinctively knows how to get deals done, spot a sure singing thing and harness a vocalist’s powers until the hitmaking heavens are left with no choice, really, but to make it rain.

  Chaney is a freelance pop culture writer and former Celebritology blogger for The Washington Post.

  THE SOUNDTRACK OF MY LIFE

  By Clive Davis with Anthony DeCurtis

  Simon & Schuster. 586 pp. $30.

  We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

• Letter Press Project
  http://www.letterpressproject.co.uk/inspiring-older-readers/2016-08-10/rolling-stone-images-of-rock-and-roll
  Word count: 519

  posted on 10 Aug 2016
  Rolling Stone: Images of Rock and Roll by Fred Woodward and Anthony DeCurtis

  Rolling Stone is something of an American institution and given its origins – San Francisco in 1967 – it isn’t really surprising that it has always presented itself as in some way counter-cultural. Although it may have started life at the epicentre of Hippiedom, it long ago lost its radical edge and became, quite quickly I think, part of a journalistic establishment that promoted rather than questioned the cultural hegemony and championed a very US-centric notion of rock music.

  Rolling Stone never really crossed over into the British rock music mainstream which was dominated more by the weeklies that were steeped in a sort of fanzine temperament – NME, Melody Maker, Sounds etc. Where the British went for opinionated, off-the-cuff young gunslinger journalists, Rolling Stone began to develop a reputation for ‘serious’ writing and backed this up by using high quality photography to illustrate their columns.

  The magazine developed a portfolio of photography that was a work of art in its own right and this big, glossy publication by Virgin Books brings many of the best, groundbreaking work together. There are, of course, some big names represented here – Art Kane, Annie Leibovitz, Terry O’Neill, Robert Mapplethorpe – but I was really surprised to see how many of the examples in this book are ascribed as ‘photographer unknown’ and this seems to reflect the way in which rock photography used to be an open and democratic art-form which was not policed and image-protected in the way it now is.

  The vast majority of images included here are in black and white but there are a small selection of colour images too. The decision on which medium is used seems to be more about artistic vision than economics – black and white provides mood and authenticity in a way that is very hard to achieve in colour. The photographs are also set out in careful ways – the use of double-page spreads is really intelligent and adds to the impact. Annie Leibovitz’s colour photographs of Marvin Gaye show just what can be achieved by the clever use of double page spread. The book’s editor and designer, Fred Woodward, should take a bow for producing a thing of beauty in this instance. The text here was written by Anthony DeCurtis and is really only a short prelude to the fabulous series of plates that follow. Nevertheless, it’s a more than useful introduction.

  The book was first published in 1995 and retailed through the Virgin record shops when they existed – which is where I picked up my copy. I think there were quite a number printed and this accounts for why copies can be picked up on the second hand market for well under £10 – although you might pay up to £15 for a copy is very good condition. Well worth the outlay for anyone interested in some of the rock gods of American music ( with a few Brits thrown in too!).

  Terry Potter

  August 2016

• Chicago Tribune
  http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1992-12-20/entertainment/9204250734_1_record-review-trouser-press-record-guide-popular-guides
  Word count: 1044

  Critiquing The Critics
  They`re Already Taking Shots At `The Rolling Stone Album Guide`
  December 20, 1992|By Bruce Britt, Los Angeles Daily News.

  31

  LOS ANGELES — Like many critics, Anthony DeCurtis often fields complaints from readers who object to his reviews. But DeCurtis says he makes a particularly tempting target because he is senior features editor and occasional critic for the nation`s biggest-selling pop music publication, Rolling Stone magazine.

  ``Sometimes I want to say to these people who criticize me, `I`m sure you would take my job if you could,` `` DeCurtis said. ``I think these criticisms come from an emotional place, rather than any genuine desire to see or create the greatest journalistic product.``

  Rock enthusiasts of every stripe will probably have a lot to say about a new book co-edited by DeCurtis. ``The Rolling Stone Album Guide`` (Random House; $20) has been updated to include reviews of records released over the past decade. (It also deletes many out-of-print recordings featured in previous editions.) The 2,500 or so reviews featured in the book were written by four critics within a year`s time.

  DeCurtis` rolling tome is just the latest entry in the record review book sweepstakes. Other popular guides include ``The Trouser Press Record Guide``

  (Collier Books; $18.95), which focuses on alternative rock recordings; and the ``The Christgau Record Guide: The `80s`` (Pantheon; $17.95), a compilation of updated reviews by renowned Village Voice pop music critic Robert Christgau.

  The emergence of these review-oriented publications raises some questions: What methods are employed when compiling such books, and what critical criteria do reviewers go by? And, why would a reader want to wade through so many reviews-it`s well known critics aren`t always in step with the public.

  For instance, in critiquing the Police`s 1983 classic ``Synchronicity,``

  writer Jim Green asserts in ``The Trouser Press Record Guide,`` ``Most of the records simply can`t be taken seriously by anyone but a chowderhead and/or indiscriminate music fan.``

  Reviewing Mariah Carey`s multimillion-selling debut album in the new Rolling Stone guide, Paul Evans opines: ``This ersatz soul music is breathtaking in its wrongheadedness-skill and passion slaving over piffle.``

  ``I`m fully anticipating attacks,`` DeCurtis said, referring to response to the Rolling Stone guide. ``No human being, including me, is going to agree with everything in it. But these are serious books, and the writers really came at the work with a lot of intensity.``

  DeCurtis` premonition already has come true. As if to boldly illustrate the differing philosophies and approaches of critics, some fellow reviewers are challenging the Rolling Stone guide, which is billed as ``the definitive guide to the best of rock, pop, rap, jazz, blues, country, soul, folk & gospel.``

  Christgau writes a monthly record review column for the Village Voice and is author of consumer guides devoted to the pop music of the 1970s and 1980s. Though he expresses ``tremendous admiration`` for the Trouser Press guide, Christgau is less effusive about the Rolling Stone book. Despite the fact that he has not read the updated guide, he speculated it could be ``useful.``

  ``Judging from previous Rolling Stone guides, I imagine the book would offer a solid, conventional overview of this music against which you could test more eccentric opinions,`` Christgau said.

  But Christgau has doubts about the way the Rolling Stone book was conceived. He believes the editors should have assigned an African-American writer to critique some of the records. He also questions whether four writers could accurately assess thousands of records.

  ``There`s no way four writers are going to review everything,`` Christgau said. ``They may have played them, but they didn`t engage them. To me, it seems like a completely fraudulent concept and a lousy way to do a record guide.``

  Not everyone is as skeptical. Robert Scott Lefsetz, publisher of the music-industry tip sheet the Lefsetz Letter, said books like the Rolling Stone guide are ultimately healthy for the music business.

  ``Ever since its inception, popular music has been denegrated,`` Lefsetz said. ``Putting out a book like this helps music in general, because it takes a serious approach to something.``

  Though some may criticize DeCurtis` modus operandi, the fact is that methods and criteria vary.

  For instance, while DeCurtis employed only four writers who started from square one, ``Trouser Press Record Guide`` editor Ira A. Robbins recruits more than 40 reviewers.

  ``Since I don`t profess to know it all, I always look for people to write about the genres I`m not interested in or curious about,`` Robbins said. ``I`d much rather take somebody who`s a friend of mine and say, `We see eye to eye on this. Why don`t you write something on it?` than try and fake it.``

  DeCurtis defends the decision to use four writers, saying it was a way to ensure a consistent tone.

  ``By using fewer writers, readers can, hopefully, develop a relationship with the reviewers. You can read an entry by, say, J.D. Considine, and respond to it by saying, `Well, judging from the rest of the stuff in here this guy`s crazy,` or, `I really trust this writer`s tastes, so I`ll trust his recommendation on this other thing I haven`t heard.` I imagined a dialogue with a thinking reader.``
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  https://www.forbes.com/sites/kinetica/2018/03/26/accelerate-extreme-iot-analytics-with-the-gpu-database/#418751566001
  Word count: 1527

  Inside Anthony DeCurtis' Definitive Biography Of Lou Reed

  Steve Baltin , Contributor
  I write about music and the business of music.
  Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

  FRANKFURT AM MAIN, GERMANY - NOVEMBER 03: Lou Reed looks on during his photo exhibition at Frank Landau Gallery on November 3, 2012 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. (Photo by Hannelore Foerster/Getty Images)

  Sometimes things just make sense, like Anthony DeCurtis writing the definitive biography of Lou Reed. DeCurtis, who has been an editor at Rolling Stone and New York Times contributor, has been part of the New York music journalism scene since the ‘80s. Lou Reed is certainly one of the most important and greatest artists to ever come from New York.

  DeCurtis knew Reed for decades, first as a fan, then as an interview subject and friend. And now, four years after Reed’s passing, DeCurtis is telling the complete story of Reed in a superb and critically acclaimed biography, Lou Reed: A Life.

  Telling the story of Lou Reed, from his early days through changing the face of modern music with the Velvet Underground through his famously sometimes curmudgeonly days as a solo artist, is not an easy task. As DeCurtis says in an understatement, “It’s a complicated story.”

  But DeCurtis does it in the best way possible, honestly. As he admits, “There is no question if I had written this book while Lou was alive he never would have spoken to me again.” The book is an honest look at Reed, sometimes to the point of being uncomfortable. At the end though there is no doubt of the admiration and affection DeCurtis felt for his friend.

  I spoke with DeCurtis about Lou Reed. It is a conversation as intriguing and compelling as both the book and its brilliant subject.

  Steve Baltin: One of the reasons people are responding so well to the book is it is a complete portrait of a three-dimensional person, not a fawning look.

  Anthony DeCurtis: That’s absolutely what I set out to do. I really feel like, all too often, Lou is represented in a kind of cartoonish way, for good and bad. There’s a perception of him as a monster and there’s also this perception of him as this kind of untouchable artist. And finding a way to put his feet on the ground and perceive him in three-dimensional terms was the goal. And I think it’s like what anybody’s life is like really. Obviously not all of us are geniuses and not all of us also went out as far on the ledge as Lou did. But those kinds of complexities I think exist in all people and that’s what I set out to portray.

  Baltin: Did you set out to tell Lou’s story this way or did the writing dictate that direction?

  DeCurtis: Both, when the possibility of doing it arose I thought, “That would be a good subject.” I knew him fairly well, obviously I followed his work since the Velvet Underground, it was very important to me, I held him as an artist in the highest regard. On the other hand, like so many people out there, I was intrigued by the darker side of him. I find myself, in even talking about him, not exactly contradicting myself, but talking about the different aspects of him. There was a really conventional aspect to Lou Reed. One of my favorite quotes in the book is his college girlfriend, after talking about the difficulty of being Lou Reed’s college girlfriend, at the same time said, “Lou was the first person I ever met that carried himself like an artist.” And also she said, “To this day, Lou is the only boyfriend I ever had who on Valentine’s Day gave me a big heart-shaped box of chocolates.” He married his second wife on Valentine’ Day.

  Baltin: Did this change the way you hear his music or were there songs in particular you got a new appreciation for?

  DeCurtis: Yeah, a song like “Coney Island Baby” certainly really deepened for me when I learned how profound his relationship with Rachel [the transsexual he had an affair with in the ‘70s] was. I was just talking about the conventionality of Lou’s life, but here he is in the ‘70s living for three or four years living with a transgender woman, that would be, for a major rock star, shocking today. Sometimes Rachel was referred to he and sometimes as she. At that time people were still sorting out, and in many ways are still sorting out what transgender means. So on Street Hassle, on “Coney Island Baby,” for a male singer on a major release on a major label to just un-ironically and deeply sincerely sing a line like that is really pretty stunning. I knew that, I bought that record when it came out and listened to it a lot. But somehow living with Lou Reed for three years while writing this book, when I hear it now, it has a really powerful impact. Or a song like “Kill Your Sons,” Lou’s invention of his father, in many ways, he never forgave his family, his parents for electro-shock therapy. He was acting out, all kinds of drugs and bad behavior and certainly homosexuality was part of it. But Lou presented his dad as a kind of monster. But, in fact, Sidney Reed was just a very conventional guy; a middle-class, Jewish accountant who was quite successful and who would have liked a son that took over his business. And I think was mystified by who his son turned out to be. And he got advice from doctors on how to treat that and felt he made the best decision he could. I think Lou’s mother was guilty about the electro-shock treatment for the rest of her life. And the complexity of that relationship, Lou’s need to create his father as a figure to rebel against, I think was identity building for him. Somebody told me a story, I couldn’t confirm it, that when Lou quit the Velvet Underground, that night at Max’s Kansas City, they did a show and then he just said, “Oh, by the way, I’m leaving the band,” that Sid was waiting in the car outside the club to drive him back to Long Island. I don’t know 100 percent that’s true, it certainly could have been true. Lou immediately moved back out there whether they chauffeured him there or not. It’s pretty amazing, the kind of richness and depth these contradictions [have].

  Baltin; It does seem to be heightened from other artists though. So do you think the art was so great because the extremes were so great?

  DeCurtis: In his case what separates him from other artists is perhaps the extremes. I think that’s fair enough to say, but also his willingness to put it all out there. I never paid that much attention to a song like “Rock Minuet,” but when Julian Schnabel read the lyrics at Lou’s memorial service at the Apollo I was like, “Wow, I have to really take a closer look at this.” There aren’t many rock songs that address themes like that. Or talking to Suzanne Vega, she described a boy taking her on a date when she was a college student to see Lou Reed, who she vaguely knew about, in the late ‘70s. When he sings “Caroline Says,” Suzanne says, “I never knew you could say something like that on the stage.” I think that’s what separates Lou. We all have elements of these kinds of things in us, Lou wrote about them and put them out there.

  Baltin: Were there moments in doing this where you were torn between wanting to include something but I don’t want to include this for fear of shattering the myth of Lou?

  DeCurtis: There is no question if I had written this book while Lou was alive he never would have spoken to me again. There’s no doubt about that. There are things in this book that would have made his skin crawl, even if they were true. Maybe especially because they were true. I felt like Lou deserved a biography like this, one that was three-dimensional. Lou finally saw himself as a writer. There was a line that Mick Rock told me David Bowie said about him. He said, “Mick sees me the way I see myself.” And I think one of the reasons Lou liked me was because when he read things I wrote about him I saw him the way he saw himself, as a writer and as a great artist. Lou’s story is a complicated story. But, as an artist, I think he deserved it and I think on some level would understand that.

• Financial Times
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  Lou Reed: A Life by Anthony DeCurtis — not-so-perfect days
  The biography connects the two sides of a complicated rock star
  The Velvet Underground (with Lou Reed, centre) performing in New York, 1965 © Adam Ritchie/Redferns

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  Ludovic Hunter-Tilney October 13, 2017
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  1

  Biographies tend to uncover hidden vices in their subjects. Lou Reed: A Life does the opposite. We encounter rock’s most cantankerous figure weeping after a moving encounter with fans at a book signing. Telephone conversations are signed off with the words “I love you”. A friend recalls the “fatherly” kiss that Reed would plant on his forehead. Can this be the same Lou Reed who mimed shooting up heroin on stage, wrote songs about every kind of depravity, fell out with nearly all the people he worked with and was prone to emotional bullying and hitting women?

  According to Anthony DeCurtis’s judicious biography, yes. Reed’s reputation as a dauntless adventurer at the limits of experience — he “enjoyed taking situations to extremes you couldn’t imagine until you’d been there with him”, recalls bandmate John Cale — is not compromised by the thread of sentimentality running through the book. Other voices describe him as an “egomaniac”, a “control freak”, “one of the most miserable people I’ve ever known”. “God forbid I should ever be nice to people: it would ruin everything,” Reed tells the author, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone.

  During his life Reed erected a carapace of contempt and belligerence to ward off the journalists he detested so heartily. (“Why do I have to go through this?” he groaned when I interviewed him in 2008.) Despite DeCurtis’s friendly relations with him in the years before his death in 2013, the book is written with a sense of posthumous disapproval. “It’s not something he would ever have wanted,” admits DeCurtis.

  One difficulty in apprehending such a complicated individual is the question of whether his persona was an act. Masks and truthfulness are recurring themes in his life. Brought up as Lewis in a middle-class Jewish home in Long Island, he was sent by his parents to undergo electroshock therapy as a teenager in response to what they perceived as his budding homosexuality. Behind the placid surface of suburban life was a violence as sadistic as any he went on to chronicle in Manhattan’s demi-monde.

  Like the divided city of cold war Berlin, setting for one of Reed’s most striking 1970s albums, his life can be mapped in two halves. Until about 1980, he was the drink and drug-addicted, bisexual decadent who brought high literary standards to New York low-life as leader of The Velvet Underground and then as a cult solo star. Peerless heights such as 1972’s David Bowie-produced Transformer were accompanied by antagonistically challenging lows: his record label apologised to retailers after releasing the hour of atonal noise that was 1975’s Metal Machine Music.

  After 1980, when he defeated his addictions, he moved into the second phase, making work of increasing seriousness, suffocatingly so at times, and finding companionship with his third wife, the experimental musician Laurie Anderson. That is when, in Lou Reed: A Life, he starts dispensing paternal kisses and telling friends he loves them.

  “I created Lou Reed,” he is quoted as saying in 1976. “I have nothing even faintly in common with that guy, but I can play him well.” Three years later, in an unguarded moment, he contradicts himself. “I guess the Lou Reed character is pretty close to the real Lou Reed, to the point, maybe, where there’s really no heavy difference between the two, except maybe a piece of vinyl.”

  DeCurtis endorses the second interpretation. He suggests that Reed’s private and performing selves were intimately connected. “Reed would always regard himself as among the damned — the addicted, the deviant, the impulsively cruel, the mad. Rising above that condition is a central theme of his work,” he writes. As Reed put it himself in “Perfect Day”, which builds like many of his songs into a healing mantra: “I thought I was someone else/Someone good.”

  Unlike previous biographers, DeCurtis prefers to emphasise the rising above over the more debased aspects of Reed’s life. The black eyes he gave his first wife, Bettye Kronstad, and the racist and anti-Semitic epithets he uttered during amphetamine and whisky binges in the 1970s are treated parenthetically.

  But the tension between Reed’s desire for acceptance — he was determined to be seen as a weighty literary figure — and bold defiance is well handled. The links between the provocateur who shaved a swastika in his hair in the 1970s and the cussed middle-aged rocker who grew increasingly interested in his Jewishness are plausibly elucidated. The result is an even-handed, well-researched portrait rendered in the spirit of “the empathy and distance” that DeCurtis identifies as crucial to Reed’s songwriting.

  Lou Reed: A Life, by Anthony DeCurtis, John Murray, RRP£25/Little, Brown, RRP$32, 519 pages

  Ludovic Hunter-Tilney is the FT’s pop critic

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  Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2018. All rights reserved.

• Pitchfork
  https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/5-things-we-learned-from-the-new-lou-reed-biography/
  Word count: 1367

  5 Things We Learned From the New Lou Reed Biography
  Lou Reed In New York City
  Photo by Waring Abbott/Getty Images
  pitch

  by David Chiu
  Contributor

  Rock
  Experimental

  October 15 2017

  Rolling Stone contributing editor Anthony DeCurtis first met Lou Reed in an inauspicious place: the Cleveland Airport in June 1995, a day after Reed performed at the opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Both DeCurtis and Reed’s flights were delayed, so the two hung out in the airport lounge. “I had reviewed the New York album [for Rolling Stone in 1989],” DeCurtis tells Pitchfork, “and Lou chided me for not giving it five stars; he was sort of kidding around. It was a very relaxed conversation. I think we were all glad to have something interesting to talk about while waiting three hours for our flight.”

  That encounter at the airport began a friendship that lasted until Reed’s death on October 27, 2013. Now DeCurtis, who also interviewed Reed several times, has written a biography on the iconic rocker. At over 500 pages, Lou Reed: A Life offers a thorough, unflinching, and balanced look at Reed’s complex life. It includes plenty of tabloid-ready tales of Reed’s excesses in the 1970s and his rivalries with such collaborators as John Cale and David Bowie, as well as insight on major moments in his career, from the Velvet Underground’s brilliant 1967 debut record to the controversial 2011 Metallica collaboration Lulu. It also touches on Reed’s relationship with his wife Laurie Anderson, and his eccentric side forays, including an interview he conducted with the onetime Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel—a chat that went so disastrously, Rolling Stone deemed it unpublishable.

  “I liked the fact that [Reed] was as complicated as he was,” says DeCurtis. “I felt that most of the writing about Lou fell into one camp or another: He’s God or he’s a monster. I understood both aspects of those perceptions; I didn’t see him in either of those regards. I felt that I could maneuver through the extremes of his personality and present a three-dimensional portrait.”
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  Lou Reed: A Life is an absorbing read, full of new insights delivered masterfully by DeCurtis. Here are five things we learned, annotated by the author in a recent interview with Pitchfork.
  Reed Was Hurt By the Harsh Criticism of Berlin

  Following the success of his David Bowie-produced album Transformer, Reed turned in Berlin, a disturbing record with lyrics that document turbulent relationships, violence, and suicide. The 1973 album is now regarded as one of Reed’s best records (Rolling Stone selected it as one of their 500 Greatest Albums of All Time) but, upon its release, it received a decidedly mixed reception. Rolling Stone ran a very harsh review of Berlin that called it “a disaster,” and said it was the singer’s “last shot at a once-promising career. Goodbye, Lou.”

  “He was angry and hurt by that,” DeCurtis says. “Berlin is a great record; I liked it when it came out, but it certainly didn’t shock me that people wouldn’t play Berlin on the radio. It’s a scary record. Lou would always say, ‘If I was writing a book and it was like Berlin, or a movie and it was like Berlin, people wouldn't get upset about it.’ But he tried to do that in a rock ‘n’ roll song and people got worked up about it.”
  Reed’s Electroshock Therapy Tore His Family Apart

  Around the time that Reed was a freshman at New York University, he experienced intense psychological issues, including mood swings and depression. Reed’s parents became worried he might kill himself and put him through electroshock therapy, an experience that made him resent his father for the rest of his life. (Rumors have persisted that Reed’s parents were also concerned with Reed’s bisexuality, but his sister, Merrill Reed Weiner, has refuted that.)

  “I think it enabled him to create his father as a monstrous figure in his imagination. I think he never forgave his father for that,” DeCurtis says. “I feel like his father did the best he could—Lou was acting out with drugs and sexually in ways that certainly at that time would've been beyond the pale. Lou used it creatively, regardless of whether or not his father really was this bad a guy, as he said.”
  Reed Had a Dramatic Affair With a Transgender Partner, Rachel

  The ’70s were a wild time for Reed: His drug and alcohol use were heavy, and he frequented sex bars around New York. For around four years, Reed was romantically involved with a transgender woman named Rachel, whom he mentions in “Coney Island Baby.” The couple’s relationship was tempestuous, and there were rumors of street violence surrounding Rachel; as one person recalls in Lou Reed: A Life, she drew a switchblade on a female friend of Reed’s backstage at a New York music venue.

  “To be involved with a transgender woman very openly in the 1970s was totally bold,” DeCurtis says. “At the same time, by all accounts, Rachel had a secret life of her own as a transgender hustler, which was how Lou met her at an after-hours bar. I don't think she ever gave up that life. To the degree she maintained her edgier life on the street, I think Lou found that compelling.”
  Reed’s Lovers Became His Employees… Before Laurie Anderson Came Along

  In the book, DeCurtis interviews Reed’s college girlfriend, Shelley Albin, as well as his ex-wives Bettye Kronstad and Sylvia Morales. Along with Rachel and Reed’s future wife, Laurie Anderson, they served as the inspirations for several of his songs, including “Pale Blue Eyes,” “Perfect Day,” and “Adventurer.”

  “Whether they were called his manager, assistant, or lighting designer, they all went to work for him and they all got swept up into Lou's world,” says DeCurtis of Reed’s ex-paramours. “Ultimately, he insisted that they do that, and then resented it.”

  However, when Laurie Anderson entered the picture, this pattern changed. “Laurie’s way of handling herself, and why their relationship worked and lasted for such a long time, is she never gave up her independence. She had her own career and reputation,” adds DeCurtis. “The earlier women, I think, just tried to please him, and that was never going to work. The fact that Laurie always maintained her independence was something that kept Lou’s interest up. Anytime I was around them, he was extremely deferential to her.”
  Reed Tanked a Lucrative Velvet Underground Reunion in the 1980s

  In the late 1980s, Lou Reed and his former Velvet Underground bandmate John Cale collaborated on what would become Songs for Drella, a tribute album to the Velvets’ former patron, Andy Warhol. It was a prelude to the classic Velvets lineup of Reed, Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Mo Tucker reuniting in 1993 for a European tour. But friction between Reed and Cale reemerged when the former insisted on producing an album taped during a potential “MTV Unplugged” set, plus taking an additional producer’s fee. Plans for the “Unplugged” episode and a U.S. tour soon fell apart.

  According to DeCurtis, the fiasco was yet another example of Reed asserting his control. “Ever since he kicked Cale out of the Velvets in 1968, Lou had come to think of the Velvets as his band,” he says. “The live reunion album [Live MCMXCIII] reflects that—it’s less a VU album than a set of Velvets songs performed by Lou Reed, with the other members backing him. Looking at the big picture, Cale, Sterling, and Mo went along with that, however reluctantly. But when it came time to think about an American tour and the ‘Unplugged’ show... Cale finally couldn’t stand it, and that was the end of that.”

• Newsday
  https://www.newsday.com/entertainment/books/lou-reed-review-anthony-decurtis-biography-struggles-to-capture-elusive-rocker-from-long-island-1.14369899
  Word count: 772

  ‘Lou Reed’ review: Anthony DeCurtis biography struggles to capture elusive rocker from Long Island

  "Lou Reed: A Life" by Anthony DeCurtis Photo Credit: Little, Brown
  By Glenn Gamboa
  glenn.gamboa@newsday.com @ndmusic
  Updated October 12, 2017 2:59 PM
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  LOU REED: A Life, by Anthony DeCurtis. Little, Brown and Co., 519 pp., $32.

  The late Lou Reed was almost as famous for his provocative, yet private, personality as he was for his influential work with the Velvet Underground and solo hits like “Walk on the Wild Side.”

  That raises the stakes for any biography of the two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, especially one like “Lou Reed: A Life,” from Rolling Stone contributing editor Anthony DeCurtis, who talks in the introduction about knowing Reed and moving in the same social circles. It also creates a daunting task for anyone seeking to write seriously about Reed, who grew up in Freeport and spent his final years in East Hampton with his wife, performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson.

  Reed, who died in 2013 at 71 from complications related to liver failure, was a complex bundle of contradictions — sometimes tossing out one inflammatory quote after another in interviews, sometimes so circumspect that he would decline to answer any questions.
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  DeCurtis shows examples of both sides, trotting out Reed’s infamous quote about his Long Island roots in the first chapter. “Hempstead’s like the crotch of Long Island,” Reed told the SoHo Weekly News in 1978. “If you run into a diseased criminal mind, it’s from Great Neck.”

  Did Reed say that to shock, or did he believe it? Was his anger about Long Island caused by resentment of his parents’ decision to have him undergo electroshock therapy to “cure” him of his bisexuality? Or was it all a big joke? DeCurtis dutifully rolls all those scenarios out, but there isn’t a definitive answer because Reed never really offered one in public, and those in his inner circle aren’t interested in speaking for him now.

  “Lou Reed: A Life” is engaging at the beginning, as DeCurtis is able to tell the story by interviewing high school bandmates and former girlfriends. However, as he moves into Reed’s time in the Velvet Underground, DeCurtis is rarely able to talk to those directly involved. Soon the book’s structure of using Reed’s albums and their critical reception as a lens on his life begins to feel predictable.

  This ends up making “Lou Reed: A Life” feel more like “Lou Reed: The Work” — a worthwhile endeavor, but not one that lives up to the well-reported early and late chapters. At times, you can almost feel the elusive Reed slipping out of DeCurtis’ grasp.
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  Rob Bowman, who wrote the liner notes for Reed’s box set “Between Thought and Expression,” tells DeCurtis about an encounter where the artist who long championed New York City’s fringe elements had a homeless man removed from an ATM vestibule so he could make a withdrawal. The action shocked Bowman, but DeCurtis tries to spin it by making a point that he’s not quite sure of: “It’s certainly possible to speculate that his outsize response to the sight — and smell — of the homeless man was generated by the specter of a fate that he had become too close to suffering and that he needed to have immediately removed from his presence.”

  The firsthand accounts are far more enlightening. Bill Bentley, Reed’s publicist at Sire Records, comes close to summing up his career best. “He’s written things that inspire you, give you hope, fuel your dreams,” he said. “He’s one of a handful of rockers who did that over and over, forever, as long as they created.”

  But in the end, it is Reed’s own evaluation that should carry the most weight.

  “I believe to the bottom of my heart, the last cell, that rock and roll can change everything,” Reed said at British GQ’s Man of the Year awards in London in 2013, the month before his death. “I believe in the power of punk. To this day, I want to blow it up. Thank you.”
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• Spectrum Culture
  http://spectrumculture.com/2017/12/06/lou-reed-life-anthony-decurtis-book-review/
  Word count: 741

  Lou Reed: A Life: by Anthony DeCurtis
  Pat Padua Pat Padua
  December 6, 2017

  A reassuring document of autumnal romance in the New York underground.
  3 / 5

  As the new biography of iconoclastic rocker Lou Reed (1942-2013) enters its final quarter, Warner Bros.’ Jeff Gold is quoted in a candid and prescient remark. A long-time fan, Gold was excited about a personal invitation to the star’s home in the early ‘90s. “I was thinking, ‘Wow, what a trip—going to Lou Reed’s house!’” After patiently listening to the legendary rock star show off his guitar collection, Gold sadly noted, “It was so mind-bogglingly uninteresting.” Anthony DeCurtis does somewhat better than that with the 500-page tome Lou Reed: A Life, but for such a pivotal musical career, there shouldn’t be a dull moment in the book. Surprisingly, there are more than a few.

  Reed had a reputation for being something of a crank, especially when it came to journalists. But DeCurtis, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone who has spent more than 30 years at the music rag, was a rare exception; Reed actually considered him a friend. DeCurtis would then seem a natural to publish this major posthumous biography of the Velvet Underground founder, whose music has been so influential that it’s entirely fair to call him the Godfather of Punk. Yet while the author doesn’t shy away from his late friend’s more unpleasant traits, the book is only intermittently intriguing, and it’s further marred by indifferent editing.

  A foreword briefly describes the unusual trust that Reed placed in the author, and DeCurtis is indeed best when he charts Reed’s personal life. When he was a child, Reed’s parents pulled up roots from scrappy Brooklyn for a Long Island suburbia that the rebellious teenager would refute at every turn; it’s suggested that Reed’s sexual exploration was in some part an act of defiance against restrictive parents who were so concerned about his mental state that they sent him to shock treatment.

  These early years are described with a mostly dry journalistic tone, though DeCurtis touches on a promising thread when he suggests that Reed’s drug use and attempt to “nullify my life,” as he wrote in “Heroin,” was a kind of spiritual path to negate the self and find some kind of enlightenment.

  It’s an easy enough read, especially if you’re not familiar with Reed’s life story. Yet, look at Victor Bockris’ book Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story by comparison. First published in 1997 and updated in 2014, Bockris opens his book with Reed’s teenage shock treatment sessions. It may be a sensationalistic approach with some degree of poetic license, but it immediately brings Reed to life in a way that DeCurtis just doesn’t do.

  After mapping out the foundations of Reed the man, DeCurtis threads the life by way of the artist’s recording career, with each album marking a new book chapter. As much as Reed’s career took unsuccessful turns—sometimes willfully—these chapters stall with Reed’s solo career. As an ex-Velvet, Reed fell into a pattern of following a success—say, the commercial hit of Sally Can’t Dance—with something guaranteed to fail: Metal Machine Music, anyone? But in terms of prose, the ‘70s can seem like a blur as DeCurtis’s interest seems to occasionally flag, only to pick up again with more personal stories of Reed’s second wife Sylvia and his creative resurgence in the ‘80s.

  Throughout the book, stylistic tics can be distracting; it’s hard not to mentally edit out every instance of “at around the time.” Fans who know Reed’s career well may gripe at omissions—there’s no mention at all of Get Crazy, the 1983 movie that co-starred Reed as a fictional rock star and resulted in one of this greatest songs of the ‘80s, the non-LP ballad “Little Sister.” If DeCurtis doesn’t always seems engaged with his subject, Reed’s late-life relationship with Laurie Anderson becomes a final redemption for the musician and for Lou Reed: A Life, which becomes a somehow reassuring document of autumnal romance in the New York underground. In the end, the book does capture something of Reed’s solo career: the frustration that it could have been better.

• New York Review of Books
  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/11/23/lou-reed-wild-side/
  Word count: 539

  Lou’s Wild Side
  David Yaffe
  November 23, 2017 Issue
  Lou Reed: A Life
  by Anthony DeCurtis
  Little, Brown, 519 pp., $32.00
  Steve Schapiro/Corbis/Getty Images
  Lou Reed and Nico at Scepter Studios during the recording of the Velvet Underground’s first album, New York City, 1966

  “Just a perfect day/You made me forget myself/I thought I was someone else/Someone good.” These lines—sung indifferently over swelling, glam rock strings—are from “Perfect Day,” an achingly gorgeous and brutally honest song by Lou Reed, who died of liver disease four years ago at the age of seventy-one. Some people thought the song was about addiction—how a junkie escaping from reality also feeds on the escape of romance. But the song could also be about how pleasurable, yet impossible, it is to escape from your true self, and about how easy it is to deceive yourself when you’ve disappointed your own expectations.

  The songs of Lou Reed are a manual of sorts for how to keep living after you have let yourself and everyone else down, or after the world has done that for you. Reed doesn’t judge anyone for shooting heroin or defying societal norms, or for making sweet, gentle love to someone right before they OD. His songs are not sentimental about death, and they never, ever try to make you like the person who is singing them. He was more lacking in guile than most in rock and roll and he was notoriously cantankerous. When he had a liver transplant a few months before his death, The Onion ran a satirical piece:

  “It’s really hard to get along with Lou—one minute he’s your best friend and the next he’s outright abusive,” said the vital organ, describing its ongoing collaboration with the former Velvet Underground frontman as “strained at best.” “He just has this way of making you feel completely inadequate. I can tell he doesn’t respect me at all. In fact, I’m pretty sure he’s already thinking about replacing me.”

  The joke worked because it was so true: anyone who got close to Lou—bandmates, lovers, archivists—invariably had such an experience after a while.

  It is a recurring theme in Anthony DeCurtis’s new book, Lou Reed: A Life. Lou goes to Syracuse, falls under the spell of a completely ruined Delmore Schwartz, writes “Heroin,” gets busted for pot, makes enemies. He moves to New York City, falls under the spell of Andy Warhol, ditches him, collaborates with the classically trained John Cale—who adds viola and avant-garde credibility to Lou Reed’s limited musicianship—forms the Velvet Underground, the most influential small-time band in the history of rock and roll, balks at sharing credit, and ditches Cale. He meets the captivating German model and barely tonal chanteuse Nico, who sleeps with him despite insisting, “I cannot make love to Jews anymore.” (Nico upheld this policy with Leonard Cohen, who never forgave Lou for his tryst.) The relationship did not end well.

  And so it goes: David Bowie produces Reed’s only mainstream hit, “Walk on…

• SF Gate
  https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Lou-Reed-A-Life-by-Anthony-DeCurtis-12474423.php
  Word count: 1047

  ‘Lou Reed: A Life,’ by Anthony DeCurtis

  By James Sullivan Published 1:46 pm, Thursday, January 4, 2018

  "Lou Reed" Photo: Little, Brown

  Photo: Little, Brown
  Image 1 of 3
  "Lou Reed"

  Quick: Who are the most influential recording artists of the rock ’n’ roll era? Longtime Rolling Stone contributor Anthony DeCurtis names four in his new book. Bob Dylan, of course. The Beatles, certainly. James Brown, sure. Who would argue?

  But the fourth name — the subject of DeCurtis’ book — might draw a few doubters. Other than the Bard, the mop tops and the Godfather of Soul, “no one has exerted as great an influence on popular music,” he claims, as Lou Reed.

  On first glance such a statement might seem like a blatant provocation, an invitation to the kind of verbal sparring for which Reed himself was infamous. Ask a random stranger — make sure he’s over, say, 40 — to name a Lou Reed song, and he may come up with “Sweet Jane,” from Reed’s band the Velvet Underground, or “Walk on the Wild Side,” or maybe “Perfect Day,” which was featured in a commercial for the PlayStation 4.

  But DeCurtis’ biography (not the first since Reed’s death four years ago at age 71, and it won’t be the last) makes a case for Reed’s influence that’s as durable as black leather. Reed combined literary aspirations with a fearless eye for deviance and, by extension, a staunch defense of freedom of expression. The sum of these parts made him the dark prince of rock, a black-hearted antihero with the sheer gall to make unpopular music. He was an influencer — of punk, metal and even hard-core rap — in spite of himself.

  In DeCurtis’ analysis, Reed knew from an early age, when he was kicking against his parents’ suburban Jewish lifestyle, that rock ’n’ roll could be a medium for the kind of subversive literature that was, by the late 1950s, challenging the polite middle class he’d been born into. Rock ’n’ roll’s rebelliousness — “its ability to get under the skin of adults generally and authority figures in particular” — provided an untapped opportunity, he believed, to mess with conventional morals just as William Burroughs and Hubert Selby were doing in prose. “If you were going to be attacked anyway, why not say something that truly unnerved the powers that be?” DeCurtis writes.
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  Not that Reed was recommending his own choices — the speed, the Johnnie Walker, the streetwise transvestites. “Maybe listening to my music is not the best idea if you live a very constricted life. Or maybe it is,” he said. “I mean, Othello murders Desdemona. Is that a guide to what you can do? The guy in Berlin” — his third solo album, from 1973 — “beats up his girlfriend. ... Maybe they should sticker my albums and say, ‘Stay away if you have no moral compass.’”

  From the beginning, when the Velvet Underground became the house band of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, Reed embodied a persona. As one old friend from his college days recalled, he was cultivating an “aloofness that, in his mind, he thought a rock star should have.” Reed successfully maintained that attitude, at least in the public eye, for half a century.

  Apparently, though, he was armoring his own vulnerability. In fact, plenty of Reed’s music exposes the side of him that craved the kind of domesticity his whole being seemed to oppose. “Perfect Day” was written for his first wife (or so she swears). Reed’s mid-’70s live-in relationship with “Rachel,” a male by birth who identified as female, is treated here with compassion, and Sylvia Morales, Reed’s second wife, explains how she became his manager by default: “There’s a lot of need there,” she said. “Here’s Lou the great artist in this misunderstanding world. ‘You understand me. Help me with this.’”

  Even as he remained adamant about speaking for no one but himself (“I didn’t write anybody’s national anthem,” he once groused to the New York Times when asked about the long shelf life of “Walk on the Wild Side”), he gave voice to the misunderstood. “Reed would always regard himself as among the damned — the addicted, the deviant, the impulsively cruel, the mad,” DeCurtis writes.

  As Brian Eno once suggested, if the Velvet Undergound sold 30,000 copies of their debut album, everyone who bought a copy went on to start their own band. Reed’s “Transformer” helped define the glam era. His “New York” album (1989) stuck up for the ugly beauty of his beloved hometown during one of its low points, and the notoriously unlistenable “Metal Machine Music” was “a screeching f— you” not just to his record company, but his own fans.

  If Reed could dish it out, his admirers could take it. One young man who was in attendance at the Velvet Underground’s first paying gig, at a New Jersey high school — the guy went on, unsurprisingly, to become a rock musician — explained the perverse appeal.

  “I felt like someone turned a blender on inside my head,” he recalled.

  Former Chronicle critic James Sullivan is a regular contributor to the Boston Globe and the author of four books. Email: books@sfchronicle.com

  Lou Reed

  A Life

  By Anthony DeCurtis

  (Little, Brown; 519 pages; $32)

• Washington Independent Review of Books
  http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/index.php/bookreview/lou-reed-a-life
  Word count: 988

  Lou Reed: A Life

  By Anthony DeCurtis Little, Brown and Company 528 pp.

  Reviewed by Michael Causey
  October 15, 2017

  This well-balanced biography separates the man from the icon.

  When Lou Reed’s now-classic “Sweet Jane” became a surprise hit, where was the man who had cavorted in Manhattan’s gay leather bars, later lived with a transvestite, and held court at the vanguard of what Tom Wolfe called the heroin chic?

  Answer: Licking his wounds quietly in his parents’ Freeport, Long Island, house, working as a nine-to-five typist in his father’s accounting firm. I point this out not to make fun of Reed. Retreating to your family’s home in a time of crisis is nothing new. (I speak from experience.) But it’s illustrative of the opposing forces that dogged Reed until he died of liver disease in 2013. It wasn’t always easy to separate Lou Reed from “Lou Reed.”

  Reed’s first serious band, the Velvet Underground, was undone by bad management and a cult status that marginalized them financially. Being a critic’s darling doesn’t pay the rent. After Reed left the seminal band to go solo, his work flicked at the lowest rung of the Billboard charts for a week or two before falling off the map. Desperate, he went back home and sought refuge with Mr. and Mrs. Reed.

  Then came “Sweet Jane.” Buoyed by the attention, Reed transformed to “Reed” and moved back to Manhattan. The enfant terrible was back in action, mentally fencing with the likes of Andy Warhol, John Cale, and, later, performance artist Laurie Anderson. His third wife, Anderson was more than a match for Long Island’s bad boy.

  Like Bob Dylan or Tom Waits, Reed didn’t exactly possess the voice of an angel; it’s hard to imagine any of them lasting long on “America’s Got Talent.” I’m not sure Heidi Klum would get it if Lou auditioned the great track “Dirty Boulevard” with his atonal vocal: “Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor, I’ll piss on ’em/that’s what the Statue of bigotry says/your poor huddled masses, let’s club ’em to death/and get it over with, and just dump ’em on the boulevard.” (Maybe Howard Stern would like it.)

  “Lou doesn’t sing. He’s Lou,” an insightful Reed producer once remarked. It’s his lyrics that set him apart from the Kelly Clarksons of the world. At their best, they’re raw and honest with the keen observational, detached eye of a novelist. Poet Delmore Schwartz was an early idol.

  Critics gravitate toward good lyricists for a simple reason: It gives them more to talk about. Pop-music scribes tend to give more ink and lavish a different kind of praise on a Lou Reed or an Elvis Costello than on a Paul McCartney or even the Rolling Stones.

  Critics of the Stones tend to get as excited about their hedonistic lifestyle as their songwriting. It’s not exquisite poetry or Aeolic cadences that made “Start Me Up” a rock ’n’ roll classic. And how much can you say about a great pop song like Macca’s “Listen to What the Man Said” beyond calling it a great pop song? The lyrics don’t exactly invite deep discussion. Who is the man? What is he saying? I doubt Paul knows or even thought about it much.

  Biographer and esteemed music critic Anthony DeCurtis knew Reed moderately well, yet does an admirable job maintaining objectivity, especially when confronting some of Reed’s episodes of cruelty, violence, and pettiness, while balancing those with positive qualities of quiet tenderness and mentorship he often showed, especially toward the end of his life.

  DeCurtis does get a bit carried away when praising Reed’s body of work, however. It’s a stretch, for example, to call a so-so song like “Doing the Things that We Want To” off the New Sensations album a “masterpiece.” It’s not even the best song on the album.

  DeCurtis, or an overzealous marketer writing the press release accompanying the book, also claims Reed was “an icon whose influence on popular music was rivaled only by that of Bob Dylan, James Brown, and the Beatles.” Hmm. Did anyone check with the estates of Elvis Presley or Jimi Hendrix, to name but two with stronger claims to that exalted status?

  The rock journalist is also guilty of what we might call “insider trading” when praising a song whose backstory he has special knowledge of. His proximity to the music might give him a perch from which to better appreciate it, but the rest of us just listen to it as a song. Maybe it’s good. Maybe it’s not. We didn’t get to chat about it with Reed backstage before a gig or hang out with the woman it may or may not have been based upon.

  On balance, though, DeCurtis gives us a compelling bird’s-eye view of an amazing life. After decades walking on the wild side of New York City, Reed sought domestic succor with Anderson on Shelter Island. Though he’d traveled far and wide literally and emotionally, the rock-music trailblazer ended his life quietly not far from where he started.

  Google Maps says it’s about 84 miles from Freeport to Shelter Island. In their own way, Reed, “Reed,” and biographer DeCurtis understand it was a much longer journey.

  Michael Causey frequently writes about music, and is the co-host of the Monday-morning program Get Up! on WOWD 94.3 FM Takoma Park, takomaradio.org
  Like what we do? Click here to support the nonprofit Independent!

  Purchase title from: Amazon.com Powell's.com

• Brooklyn Rail
  https://brooklynrail.org/2017/12/books/Lou-Reed-A-Life
  Word count: 969

  WEBEXCLUSIVE
  Anthony DeCurtis's
  Lou Reed: A Life
  by Ben Tripp

  Anthony DeCurtis
  Lou Reed: A Life
  (Little, Brown and Company, 2017)

  A teenage Lou Reed wrote under his High School yearbook photo that he had “no plans, but will take life as it comes.” It sounds like a Lou Reed song already. Young Lewis also wrote that he liked basketball, music, and “naturally, girls.” The adverb is conspicuous, as Anthony DeCurtis points out in this new biography. The same Reed who would later achieve cult fame for romanticizing cross-dressing and BDSM still felt obliged in the early 1960s to enact some kind of a discrete parody of heteronormativity. He had probably read Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs' books too. He read Raymond Chandler. Lou played in bands that performed at school dances. He dated hip intellectual girls his same age, listened mostly to Doo-wop records and studied literature with poet Delmore Schwartz at a prestigious upstate university: Syracuse, N.Y. He also experimented with hard drugs, including the opiod heroin. From this using, he contracted a form of hepatitis while still a teenager.

  The same parents who made Reed undergo electro-shock treatment, supposedly to cure his depression (or homosexuality, as Reed has claimed...) would also come to help him, driving him back to his childhood home from Max's Kansas City the night after The Velvet Underground broke up. Speaking with Terry Gross on NPR, DeCurtis admitted he never got that family/car story fully confirmed, though he believes it's true. He left it out of the book. Lou Reed: A Life does, however, tell of how the Brooklyn-born singer took a little break from music before launching his solo career. He briefly (and willfully) took a menial job as a typist in his father's accounting firm out on Long Island. Lou's parents continued to support him in various ways even after he made grotesque caricatures of them for songs like in “Kill Your Sons” off of Sally Can't Dance: “Mom informed me on the phone / She didn't know what to do about Dad / Took an axe and broke the table / Aren't you glad you're married?” In many ways, Lou radically embraced and embodied all the so-called sins of the city that his parents thought they had successfully left behind by moving to the suburbs of Long Island in the 1950s.

  Lou, with his Sally Can't Dance‑into‑Metal Machine Music-era toxic blonde hair-dye, aviator sunglasses, and black leather assaulted countless societal and artistic norms, while also influencing fashion, new alternative lifestyles, and a generation of younger musicians, many of whom already worshiped the Velvet Underground. Then one day, Lou decided to get married (to a woman) on Valentine's Day—and he meant that with all his heart too. In another fit of conventionality, Reed gave his longtime friend, girlfriend, and muse Sherry Albin a giant heart-shaped box of chocolates. Countless other gestures that might seem cliché by someone else's hand became something hyper-real and textured with meaning when they came from Lou Reed. DeCurtis includes a transcript of Reed's famous Australia airport press conference:

  Why is your music so popular, Lou?
  I didn't know it was popular.

  Do you think it's a decadent society we're living in?
  No.

  Would you describe yourself as a decadent person?
  No.

  How would you describe yourself?
  Average.

  Reed would later sing “I'm just an average guy” while juxtaposing references to transformation, redemption, masks, Halloween, parades, and animality. This straight-ahead, heavily fact-checked biography couldn't have been written while Reed was still alive, DeCurtis said on the radio, “...because it sees Lou in a way he didn't always want to be seen,” which is to say it is unbiased, fairly objective, heavily fact-checked and verging on encyclopedic.

  Reed hated being alone. He would draft his wives into working double-time for him as a manager on more than one occasion. He alienated industry colleagues and musical collaborators with a neurotic desire for always-greater control. Some of this might've been leftover from his experiences collaborating with pop artist/Svengali Andy Warhol. If the band had stuck with Warhol, they never would've been taken seriously at all. Reed wanted to make rock ’n’ roll songs where the lyrics might also appeal to brazen, high-minded literary aesthetes like Delmore Schwartz. Sadly, Schwartz didn't live to see the realization of that with albums like Street Hassle, or Reed‘s ’89 comeback simply titled New York.

  As a solo artist, Reed recorded 22 studio albums, eighteen of which (excepting Metal Machine Music, The Raven, and Hudson River Wind Meditations) charted somewhere on the Billboard peak top 200; half made the top 100, with 4 gracing the top 40. As DeCurtis kindly phrases it, Reed's record sales had a habit of “plateau-ing” like in the ‘70s after Transformer pretty much ran its course. The audience (and the record companies), rightfully wanted more. The collaboration with Metallica in 2011, Lulu—the last album he recorded before dying—hit 36; the highest since Transformer in 1972.

  Lou Reed always eschewed the labels of glam, punk, gutter rock, experimental, and avant-garde that got thrown at him because he felt he could be a genre by himself. Musically at least he showed himself to be more than just the guy from the Velvet Underground. “Walk On The Wild Side” assured him special freak status in the rock ’n’ roll pantheon; it even got him on the FM radio, something the Velvets never accomplished.

  Contributor
  Ben Tripp

  BEN TRIPP is the author of What About Frasier (Gauss PDF, 2015). More of his writing can also be found via BOMB, Hyperallergic, CCM Entropy, and HTML Giant.
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