Barney Hoskyns

Hoskins story is too big for his book, each chapter could be its own volume. Thus we get a laundry list of various bands and performers, but the story seems spotty. There are at least three other narratives concurrent with the one he chooses to tell.

Like most writers not from the area, he has a tendency to blur over the culture of Southern California with adjectives like "plastic," "phony," and by comparisons to Disneyland. There's a lot of sermonizing about race and class, but he never suggests that boundaries between the races can be easily crossed, even as he gives numerous examples of such crossings. I was disappointed that the Bus Boys go unmentioned and Fishbone is barely noticed.… (more)

Steely Dan are easily one of my favourite bands (up there with the Beatles, Pink Floyd, the Eagles, Tom Petty, and Bowie). I love each of their original run of albums deeply. I do, however, feel they lost some of the magic after 1980 and, while I enjoy their solo albums, and the two Dan albums after they came back together, nothing matches those initial seven albums between 1972-1980.

That being said, I kind of got exactly what I was looking for out of this book, but also...not.

I know that Becker and Fagan (also known as "Manson and Starkweather"...so named by Jay of Jay and the Americans) were notoriously hard to interview and never forthcoming on much of anything. They dodged and weaved and tossed out obscurities in interviews with the same gleeful abandon they applied to their lyrics. So, while they were frustratingly obtuse all the time, they were also hilarious, and it's quite enjoyable to watch the interviewers tie themselves in knots just to try and get something coherent enough to print.

Unfortunately, what they printed was often the same rehash of Fagan's and Becker's backgrounds, how they met at Bard, and their subsequent attempts—and mostly failures—at songwriting prior to the first Steely Dan album release.

I say unfortunately, because that history of the two is repeated in almost every single interview reprinted in this book. It becomes annoying after a while.

Still, for all that, Becker and Fagan are intelligent enough and amusing enough to elevate any interview well above your standard dick-waving, guitar-slinging, drug-taking, hotel-wrecking rock star.

One more reason to love them.… (more)

I loved this book by British journalist Barney Hoskyns. Published in 2006 in hardcover, it is an oral history of the Southern California scene from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, which I read while listening mostly to music on You Tube from the very same artists quoted in the book. It describes in vivid detail the artists, their music, the movers and shakers, the cash, drugs, and sex that defined and ultimately destroyed the idealism and optimism of the time as the Sixties rolled into the Seventies. A fascinating roller coaster ride.… (more)