Metal. The horns. The scary kids screaming about Satan or shooting heroin into their eyes, the ones who corrupt the youth of tomorrow into blindly following their anti-leaders dressed in black, ready to snatch babies from their mothers arms. Pure evil. This is the assumption that heavy metal has had to live with through the [...]
Ethan Brown, Shake the Devil Off: A True Story of the Murder That Rocked New Orleans (Henry Holt)
In the fall of 2006, a year after Katrina, Times-Picayune headlines detailed the murder of young French Quarter denizen Addie Hall, murdered by her boyfriend. Her body was found butchered and in pieces in the refrigerator and cooking pots in the couple’s French Quarter apartment. A few days after the murder, the boyfriend, 26-year-old Zackery [...]
Good News
It was nice to see former OffBeat contributor and WWOZ DJ John Sinclair back in town for the funerals of Snooks Eaglin and Antoinette K-Doe. Sinclair is back in another sense with the publication of It’s All Good: A John Sinclair Reader (Headpress Press). The book collects his prose and poetry dating back as far [...]
Jeff Kaliss, I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly and the Family Stone/Eddie Santiago, Sly: The Lives of Sylvester Stewart and Sly Stone
For those who tuned in late, Sly and the Family Stone released seven essential albums, from 1967’s A Whole New Thing to 1974’s Small Talk. Go out and get them. I’ll wait. The seven-strong, five-black/two white, five-male/two-female lineup hardly erased the Negro Problem, but it had a hell of a time, and a heaven too, [...]
James Sullivan, The Hardest Working Man: How James Brown Saved the Soul of America (Gotham)
To New York Senator Jacob Javits, trying to praise him, James Brown was “Jamie Brown.” To Boston mayor Kevin White, whom the singer introduced at Boston Garden that fateful night, James Brown was “James Washington” (mixed up, perhaps, with Walter Washington, first black Mayor-Commissioner of the nation’s capital) until “Brown” stuck in Mr. Mayor’s mind [...]
Sean Manning (ed.), Rock and Roll Cage Match: Music’s Greatest Rivalries, Decided (Three Rivers Press)
Biggest All-Time (Rock/Pop, at Least) Music Rivalry Left Untouched: “Beatles vs. Stones,” maybe because too many readers would find the answer wrong no matter which author wrote which verdict. Finest Speaker of Truth: Richard Hell on “the Rolling Stones vs. the Velvet Underground,” where the irregular rock star and underrated scribe nails serious, subtle points [...]
Randy Poe, Skydog: The Duane Allman Story (Backbeat)
In Skydog: the Duane Allman Story—recently released in paperback—author Randy Poe has written the definitive biography of the late Allman Brother and session guitarist. Since his death, Duane and the Allman Brothers Band have gained mythic status, and Poe not only explains the legends, but also explores how that status came about. He analyzes Allman’s [...]
Ian McNulty, A Season of Night: New Orleans Life After Katrina (University Press of Mississippi)
Ian McNulty’s eye for detail makes A Season of Night important. He recorded the little things that we all experienced but never thought they were more than trivialities. We all felt and talked about the darkness and the quiet in our neighborhoods and the joy we felt when experiencing everyday normal activities. I remember delivering [...]
David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep From Singing? The Ballad of Pete Seeger (Random House)
Among the many anecdotes from David King Dunaway’s anecdote-rich biography of folk music legend Pete Seeger is this one: in the summer of 1955, after a folk festival somewhere in Louisiana, Seeger was invited to a house “outside of town” to learn Cajun songs. Seeger arrived to discover that he was in the home of [...]
