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Guide Picks - The Top 10 Greatest Oldies Books
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Here's a list of the best books and reference materials about oldies music and oldies artists, handpicked. It's subjective, of course, but it covers the 50s, 60s, and 70s in search of what your Guide considers the classic books about Oldies music. This will be an ongoing resource that I'll be adding to constantly; if you have any suggestions for this list, feel free and e-mail me!
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Elvis, Dave Marsh
You don't have to know Elvis or love him to enjoy this book: respected rock critic Marsh discusses the Fifties, the South, America in general, the birth of rock and roll, and the King himself, describing how all of these elements influenced each other. An absolutely fascinating read; one of the best written rock books ever.
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Complete Beatles Chronicle: The Only Definitive Guide to the Beatles' Entire Career, Mark Lewisohn
Lewisohn's Complete Recording Sessions is still the Bible of Beatles books, but it's out of print, which means all eyes now look to this career retrospective. Since there are few (if any) critics who know the details Lewisohn does, this is still an essential Beatles book and a great read for novices or experts.
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Top Pop Singles, 1955-1999, Joel Whitburn
Whitburn is the world's acknowledged Billboard chart guru, compiling every single Hot 100 chart over the last half-century into this weighty tome. It's expensive, and there are plenty of other excellent Whitburn books of the same stripe, but this is the place to start.
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Rock and Roll: An Unruly History, Robert Palmer
Palmer was widely considered rock's greatest historian, and this history of its early days is one of his finest works, covering the well-known and the obscure in an attempt to paint the definitive portrait of the cultural landscape which birthed the form.
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Lost Highway: Journeys & Arrivals of American Musicians, Peter Guralnick
In selecting iconoclastic American outlaw geniuses to profile, Guralnick takes the obvious rags-to-riches cliches inherent in most rockology and stands them on their ear, suggesting that wild men like Merle Haggard and Rufus Thomas will always be destroyed by the culture that deifies them.
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New Book of Rock Lists, Dave Marsh, James Bernard
A fun resource that's nothing but lists - the past 50 years of rock and roll chopped up into little orderly bits. The strange thing is, this is actually a very revealing way to experience (or re-experience) rock and roll history, yet its coffee-table nature means you can open this one up on any page and enjoy.
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The Fifties, David Halberstam
Not a book about music per se, but for those who want to understand or relive the decade that gave us rock, it's invaluable, describing how the postwar America transformed itself along two different - and contradictory - paths. Not a dry history but a serious look at how the American mind was evolving in the Ike years.
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Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll, Nick Tosches
If you're the type of person who gets upset when people refer to Elvis (or even Chuck Berry) as the creators of rock and roll, this book is for you. It looks at the ten-year period before Elvis' rise to popularity and proves that the musical groundwork for rock had already been laid by countless R&B, country, and blues oddities.
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Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, Lester Bangs
Lester Bangs is wisely considered the world's greatest rock critic, because his strange and often vulgar prose reads like rock and roll sounds - anarchic in an unstudied way. It's still about the music, though, as Lester rhapsodizes over and rips into everyone from Van Morrison to the Fugs.
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Mystery Train, Greil Marcus
Very possibly the greatest book ever written about rock and roll, this tome is subtitled Images of America in Rock N' Roll Music, which is a fitting description. Offers up telling portraits of everyone from Robert Johnson to Randy Newman while making a case for rock as America's greatest postwar artistic contribution to the world.
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