Alaska Employment Law

What do old professors do when they want to hang on to their rock and roll roots? They write a “legitimate” book about their musical heroes, of course.

Tom Kitts, Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City, gives us Ray Davies: Not Like Everybody Else, an engaging critical biography of the lead singer and principal songwriter of the Kinks, a band much loved by this writer. If you know the work of the Kinks (and I mean really know it, so you can hear the songs in your head when Professor Kitts writes about them), you’ll love this volume, which focuses on the 45 (and counting)-year career of Raymond Douglas Davies, told from the viewpoint of how events in Davies’s life influenced, or are reflected in, his songs. Mr. Davies is touring again, but not in Boston this time, alas. For true fans, a 6-CD box set, Picture Book, the first and only such set to cover Kinks music across every label for which they recorded, is due out in England in December. Kinks fans were a hardy cult, once upon a time. Am I the only one here who stood in a crazy audience at The Music Hall or The Orpheum or even the Providence Civic Center in the 1970s singing “Lola” at the top of my lungs? God Save the Kinks!

Even better as literature, I think, is a book by Professor Philip Lambert of Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, whose previous big hit was The Music of Charles Ives. Lambert, a musicologist, brings us Inside the Music of Brian Wilson: The Songs, Sounds, and Influences of the Beach Boys’ Founding Genius. I’d recommend this book pretty much on the same basis as I recommend the Davies book. If you can have the work of Brian Wilson playing in your head, not just the early stuff but over most of his and the band’s career - the Beach Boys were not really a surfing band, thank you - Lambert’s commentary and his ability to link Wilson’s music to other music that influenced him is brilliant. Lambert, unlike Kitts, is a musicologist, and thus some of what he says was way over my head: I can’t even read music. But it doesn’t matter if you really know the songs, because the good Professor’s analysis is so helpfully keen. The compilation of Wilson’s music in the back of the book is astounding. Despite their juvenile name, the Beach Boys were probably the greatest American pop group of the 20^th century. Like Keith Richards, Brian Wilson should be dead already. But here he is, singing his own lyrics off teleprompters at concerts and looking all the while like a deer in the headlights.
 

After six hours of school I’ve had enough for the day
I hit the radio dial and turn it up all the way!