needs more demons? no.

My first CD Baby order was #17697, for 8 discs, in 2000. When I got the now-famous colorful shipment notice I thought I’d actually been the first brand new customer to order as many as 8 albums. I thought the email had been crafted for me, in particular. I felt special.

A little later, I placed an even bigger order, and it happened to be while CD Baby was moving across the country. It was delayed long enough that I eventually contacted support, and I promptly got a very nice and apologetic email from Derek Sivers himself (along with the discs, in short order). Again, I felt special.

Later on I learned that everyone got the crazy shipment notice, even for ordering a single disc, and that at the time Derek emailed me, he was one of just two people in the CD Baby “organization.”

And for a little while I felt less special. But eventually I realized that a key part of CD Baby’s value proposition for customers — artists and purchasers alike — was making everyone feel special.

Which, when you think about it, is no small trick.

Reading Sivers’ story of how and why he started, grew, and sold CD Baby, I was strongly reminded of interviews with Dischord’s Ian MacKaye. Partly because they say some of the same things, particularly about not having business growth as a goal. Both describe awkward conversations with “suits” who really can’t grasp this.

But both also display an element of self-contradiction. Sivers says the money didn’t matter — an easy thing to say when your life is not severely constrained by the lack of it — but he did, after all, build a music store, not a music give-away service. Perhaps more tellingly, some of his biggest regrets are about decisions with significant cost impacts. And although Sivers repeatedly says that growth wasn’t a goal, but not only did he consistently make decisions that furthered growth, one of his most provocative epigrammatic guidelines is explicitly about facilitating growth. (It’s to try to make your business practices support double your current volume, which sounds very smart. If you, you know, want to grow the business.)

These cavils aside, this is a pretty great book. Sivers is unusually candid about his mistakes as well as what he did right, and he’s lucid and entertaining. (He says he learned to prize clarity and brevity when crafting emails to CD Baby’s subscriber list, and demonstrates mastery of both here.) You’ll probably be thinking about the contents of this brief book for much longer than the time it takes to read it.

needs more demons? no.

What I was after was simple: the end of the record industry as we knew it. I wanted to see the collapse of the major labels’ stronghold on music . . . since we despised the way they did business, we figured we’d be only too happy to stand by and watch it happen.

Benatar’s co-writer Patsi Bale Cox remains very unobtrusive throughout, the book feels very much like sitting down for a long and engaging conversation (well, monologue) with Benatar.

needs more demons? no.

Joe Pernice, if you don’t know the name, has one of the most honeyed voices in all of indie rock and a heaping helping of songwriting skill, displayed for the past several years/records in his band Pernice Brothers. Joyce Linehan is Pernice’s partner in Ashmont Records. This book is literally culled from Joyce Linehan’s twitter stream, mostly focusing on communication to and from Joe, about the business of being in a touring/recording band (although Massachusetts residents might note a few poignant moments not directly related to Ashmont Records).

I read Pernice to Me compulsively in a single sitting — not hard to do, it’s short — and while it certainly entertained me, it left me a little sad.

Pernice to Me has a mean side in more than one sense of the word. I couldn’t help but be reminded of seeing excerpts of Johan Sebastian Bach’s correspondence with the great composer whinging about shillings and farthings. And if you’d have a mental image of Pernice as a “gentle, fragile sad sack”, that you want to keep intact, you should avoid Pernice to Me, because that’s the perception that Linehan explicitly sets out to destroy. She presents Pernice as epically grumpy, a quintessentially high-maintenance and self-involved artist.

But the format of Pernice to Me dramatically reinforces its artificiality. It may be generally acknowledged that reality show editors can paint any cast member as either the villain or the long-suffering hero, but when the stuff from which a work is assembled is exclusively 140-character-or-less soundbites, it really hammers home how very much the selection of exactly which tweets to include or exclude affects the shape of the work as a whole. I was also keenly aware how much I was lacking anything that might put the tweets in context: how long Pernice had been on the road, how much sleep Linehan had, what tone of voice the words were spoken in (many of the tweets are transcribed telephone exchanges).

It also implicitly makes the point that the music industry wasn’t wrong back in the days of Napster: the sky really is falling. Something is wrong with the picture if an artist with all of Pernice’s gifts finds it difficult to eke out a living. And if releasing one of the first books based on a Twitter stream helps Ashmont get some media attention and helps Pernice sell a few more records, more power to them.

needs more demons? not exactly.

• half-page half-tone snapshots
• a purported multi-page e-mail* thread between Handler and her siblings
• a purported multi-page letter of complaint from a tenant of her father’s rental property
• whining (in multiple chapters) about the need to write another “stupid book.”

Otherwise it was sometimes amusing and often offensive. And of course it’s been solidly lodged in the bestseller lists since its release.

* I live in Boston.

needs more demons? here’s what’s needed: if I show signs of reading another one of these, I need somebody to stage an intervention.

I liked My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands much better than the other one, partly because it’s raunchier, but mostly there’s something approaching character development. I also thought it was funnier.

needs more demons? I do find it kind of amusing to imagine a smallish demon horde materializing at one of Chelsea’s parties and giving her more significant challenges to overcome than a shortage of Ketel One vodka*. And you know what? I think she might think it was funny, too. That is, if it happened to somebody else.

Hopefully she got some free cases for all the product placement.

Klausner also seems to feel compelled to imbue I Don’t Care About Your Band with some sort of social relevance. Sometimes I think she hits on a genuine insight, but scattered throughout are cringe-inducing bits of armchair sociology derived from from observing a small population with an intrinsic selection bias. Few things get my dander up like sweeping generalizations about gender and sex role behavior, e.g., the “only women can be bisexual, men can only be in the process of turning gay” trope, which gets aired here.

* some versions of this pull-quote substitute Cat Power, which would have made me somewhat less likely to read the book.

needs more demons? just a few

And he delivers at least a few that stick for me. I learned things about the amygdala and the fear response that will be helpful when I’m allowed to ride a bike again; since I don’t remember the accident itself, I can expect not to be particularly afraid. And now I understand why for the past several years I’ve reacted so strongly to the sight of a car door opening ahead of me, even ones I can easily avoid and that pose no signficant threat.

I was also especially fascinated by Johnson’s chapter on laughter and tickling. After discussing compelling research that illustrates that laughter has very little to do with humor — maybe this is one of the hallmarks of the long-decay idea; it sounds counter-intuitive at first blush, but makes increasing sense as you think about it — Johnson stops just short of suggesting that laughter may have been a precursor to language. He argues that it’s a form of communication, and I’m inclined to think that what it communicates is largely “I’m going to interact with you in a non-threatening way.” (Even though we sometimes use it now to communicate the reverse.)

I didn’t find Johnson’s insight all equally affecting (and I’d bumped into some of them before, blunting their impact a bit) but they were all certainly interesting. As with The Ghost Map I found Johnson an exceptionally lucid writer.

But my naval-gazing response to his fear response chapter was no accident. Throughout Mind Wide Open, Johnson draws parallels between his personal anecdotal experience and the research he is writing about. The Ghost Map was so good that it earned Johnson a lot of leeway with me, and I’m glad I started with it instead, because otherwise I think I might have found passages like this irksome:

As I write these words, my attention is divided roughly between tw primary actions: thinking about the words as they are geneated in my head and materialize on the computer screen, and half listening to familiar songs playing in the background…I also have a vague background sense of mood — a bright midmorning working alertness, slightly caffeine enhanced.

Fortunately, that’s about the peak of the book’s self-involvement, but I can really recommend it strongly only to those who don’t mind a good bit of Steven Johnson the writer/husband/father mixed in with their brain science.

Perhaps predictably, I also became interested in the things Johnson might be saying without intending to say. He lives in New York and the book was written (judging from the interview dates) during 2001-2003 — and even so it was startling to me just how much of a shadow the events of 11 September 2001 cast over this book. (Speaking, for what it’s worth, as a resident at the time of the other city in which an airplane was flown into a building.)

needs more demons? perhaps just a touch fewer personal demons, actually

Matlock’s musical contributions to the band also fascinate me. I’m convinced that the strange alchemy between Matlock and Steve Jones is at least as important to the band’s enduring success as Lydon’s characteristic sonic sneers and McLaren’s image-mongering. Matlock wrote lovely pop songs and Jones stripped away the fiddly bits and reduced them to their elemental essence. (The fantastic EMI documentary Never Mind the Bollocks has many examples of this process in action).

Matlock (with help from co-author Pete Silverton) proves a breezy and entertaining narrator unburdened by false modesty. He’s got about as little patience for the myth that the Pistols couldn’t play as I do. He portrays McLaren as more of an opportunist than a master manipulator, and since he worked in McLaren’s shop even before it was renamed Sex, his is presumably a well-informed opinion. His account of the infamous Anarchy tour is markedly different than the others I’ve read; he was insulated from the press furor and mostly remembers being dead bored in hotel rooms.

A brief quote will give you a feel for the book’s flavor, and also show why Matlock didn’t ultimately fit well with the band:

…What they were interested in was prostitutes. It was all, let’s go and get Glen a tart. It may sound like I was a party-pooper but I wasn’t interested. One, I had my eye on a girl at the Paridiso [the club where the band was booked]. Two, I had a couple of songs to work on and one of the songs I wrote there turned out to be “Rich Kids” which sold 100,000 copies, thank you very much. So sod going off after a tart.

I read the original 1990 edition, but glenmatlock.com indicates that Matlock has revised the book with new material covering the recent reunion tours. Dang. I might have to read it again.

Needs More Demons? Not really.

But Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be is by no means only for aspiring record-deal-signers, or obsessive students of music culture. In fact, one of the awesome things about the book is how thoroughly outside-the-industry Trynin’s vantage point is. She found herself the object of an archetypical major label bidding war without having much prior knowledge of how such things work, and she doesn’t expect the reader to bring that knowledge either, nor does she get bogged down with business specifics. Although I think this memoir works well as a cautionary tale, it’s also a highly entertaining rags-to-riches-to-rags story, and Trynin brings the same sort of not-quite-what-you-expect sly wit and acuity to her prose that she once brought to her songs.

Needs More Demons? No. The only thing I want to change about this book is to tack on a feel-good happy ending where Trynin had a long, productive, if perhaps niche-y career as an independent artist. Unfortunately, although she played guitar with Loveless for a while, that hasn’t exactly come to pass so far.

While I don’t want to change the book, I do hope somebody assembles a glossary of all the names-changed-to-protect used in it, and I’m not steeped enough in Boston-ania to get very far. “Flint Raft” would seem to be Gravel Pit. “The Front Load” seems to be The Middle East. And…? Please feel free to help in comments.