A couple of months ago, Slate.com ran
an article about the 33 1/3 series of books about classic record albums. I'd read a couple of the books, including the awesome
Let's Talk About Love, but the article reignited my interest. When I found a shelf full of
33 1/3 books at Atomic Books in Baltimore, I bought the ones they had at the intersection of the
10 best 33 1/3 books and albums I know well.
I ended up with
Aja (Steely Dan),
Tusk (Fleetwood Mac), and
Fear of Music (Talking Heads). Coincidentally, all three albums came out in the span of a couple of years in the late 1970s.*
The books, like the albums they describe, are very different from one another.
Aja, by Don Breithaupt, uses musicological analysis to explain how Steely Dan's music is jazz fusion without being, you know, "jazz fusion";
Tusk, by Rob Trucks, barely talks about the music at all during tangents about going your own way; for
Fear of Music, Jonathan Letham channels Greil Marcus.
Both the
Aja and
Tusk books offered nearly forgotten tidbits about the music industry in the late 1970s. Breithaupt reminds us about the diversity of styles on Top 40 radio stations by providing an impressively broad list of singles on the
Billboard charts of March 4, 1978: everything from Lynyrd Skynyrd to the
Close Encounters theme song, with "Peg" at #11. Trucks has this to say about the infamous failure of the
Tusk album:
Consensus sales figures total 4 million for Tusk... Consensus sales figures cluster at 23 million for Rumours ... Rumours to Tusk represents the largest drop from one album to the next. Ever.
The 4 million copies of Tusk which represent the ground side of the drop from dizzying heights would now qualify as the best-selling album of the year.
I enjoyed all three books, each in their own way, although none of them truly deepened my experience of the albums.
* It's not really a coincidence, is it? I was in high school in the late 1970s, so a preponderance of "albums I know well" come from the late 1970s.