Three musical notes

#301: Remembering a book, a club, and a drummer

Today’s edition is a potpourri of sorts covering a few bits of musical news from the last few days. Let’s start with a few thoughts about the music book I’ve read more than any other, and the author who wrote it.

Dave Marsh died last week at age 76. If you were a child of the ‘70s and grew up reading rock magazines like Creem and Circus and Rolling Stone, you probably know his name. He was a rock critic for 50-some years, writing about pretty much every major band of the last half-century, including books on Bruce Springsteen and The Who. He also wrote an entire book about “Louie, Louie.”

But the book that meant the most to me is his book THE HEART OF ROCK & SOUL: THE 1001 GREATEST SINGLES EVER MADE.

That book came out in 1989, way before streaming, when you had to listen to the radio or go to the record store to hear new music. By the time the book came out I had absorbed a ton of music in college, and I had been out in the world making money for a few years. I spent a lot of that money at record stores. I thought I knew a lot about music. Marsh’s book taught me that there was so much I didn’t know. He really did list his 1,001 favorite singles,* and there were hundreds of them I’d never heard.

*Remember if you look at the list that the book is nearly 40 years old, meaning that the most recent song in there is “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns ‘N’ Roses from 1988.

For years afterward I’d look through the bins at record stores hoping to find a song or two that Marsh had listed but I didn’t know. My white whale for a long time was his very last entry, an obscure R&B track called “No Way Out” by Joyce Harris. Marsh’s story about how he heard the song—it was on a mixtape from a friend who spent years not even knowing who the singer was—fed into the lore and mystery that has always been one of my favorite things about music. Sometimes you hear a song once, only half-remembering it, but it embeds itself in your brain forever. THE HEART OF ROCK & SOUL is full of those moments for me. I’m on my third copy of the book—I read the first two so hard that they fell apart. Copy #3, which is threatening to crumble any minute, is next to me on my end table as I write this. Sometimes I open it and read a few pages at random before I go to sleep.

Years ago, along with a few friends, I made a list of my 100 favorite singles. I can’t find it now—it’s on some ancient hard drive—but I do remember that I put “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5 at the top. That’s still a solid pick. But I’m sure some of the other songs on that list were there because Dave Marsh led me to them.

FYI, here’s “No Way Out.” I didn’t hear it until a few years ago when somebody posted it on YouTube. It was worth the wait.

I was startled to hear the news this week that Columbia House was ending its mail-order service after more than 70 years—startled because I had no idea Columbia House was still a thing.

Apparently they’ve been selling DVDs for the last several years. But what I remember as a young music fan is the subscription cards jammed into pretty much every magazine I picked up:

If you’re a younger Shedhead, you might be wondering about those rectangular slabs stacked up there in the ad. Those are eight-track tapes. Every car on the road used to have an eight-track player. Eight-track players featured all the audio hiss of cassettes with the bonus of having four separate segments (like sides of an album) per tape, but none of the segments was very long and also they changed automatically, which meant sometimes the tape would switch from one segment to another in the middle of a song.

Carry on, my wayward son…

(pause)

(KA-CHUNK)

(pause)

…there’ll be peace when you are done.

Columbia House always had incredible deals: Seven records for a penny, or sometimes 13 for a dollar, or nine for the price of one … it always felt like you were stealing from them. Plus those ads were EVERYWHERE—not just in magazines, but on little cards that felt like they arrived in the mailbox every day. It made you feel like a fool if you didn’t sign up. So when I was maybe 14 years old I signed up, and sure enough I got my 13 cassettes for a dollar—I think that’s the first time I bought Fleetwood Mac’s RUMOURS, probably Boz Scaggs’ SILK DEGREES, I suspect there were a couple of Eagles albums in there somewhere.

Then I soon found out two things.

One, you were required to buy several more records at full price (plus shipping and handling) over the course of the membership. That cut into the savings pretty quick.

Two, every month Columbia House chose an album as its Selection of the Month—and unless you sent them a card saying you did NOT want that album, they sent it to you and you had to pay for it. This is called “negative option billing” and it’s not considered an ethical business practice. It preys on people who are too lazy or forgetful to send in the little card opting out every month … people like, I don’t know, 14-year-old boys.

Before long I ended up with a stack of albums that I most definitely did not want—it felt like the Selection of the Month was always either Barry Manilow or Barbra Streisand—for a bunch of money I did not want to pay.

So I guess I should thank Columbia House for teaching me that important lesson: If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Finally, RIP Frank Beard, ZZ Top’s drummer for more than 50 years. ZZ Top is, to my mind, one of the great underrated American bands. Most people know them now for their MTV-era hits like “Gimme All Your Lovin’” and “Sharp Dressed Man,” but they have a deep bench of albums going all the way back to the early ‘70s. They played boogie-rock as well as anyone ever has, but they were also funny and clever and weird. Beard’s job was to hold it all together and he was perfect for it. He almost never played fancy but he was always on time.

If you want to make a list of all-time memorable drum licks, the little gallop he plays on the rim of the snare in the intro to “La Grange” has to make the top five:

And for a little bonus, here’s Phish playing “La Grange” last month at Madison Square Garden. How can you not love ZZ Top?

—TT

My books DOGLAND and THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM are available in all formats pretty much everywhere books are sold.