Customer Reviews:

Avg. Customer Rating: 3.8 / 5.0

Good Writing, Some Of It About Music Sort Of:

Make no mistake: this is a Richard Meltzer anthology, not an anthology of music writing. It's a funny and fine autobiography, produced piecemeal through the various obscure journals that indulged Meltzer over the years.

As for music, there doesn't seem to be anyone Meltzer even remotely likes, except for Jim Morrison, and I wish Meltzer had a less embarassing idol than that "crooner in the rock mileau." Also, I was annoyed with Meltzer's potshots at music writers who became bigger than he did,... more info

A mixed bag:

Joe Carducci and Byron Coley are better interpreters of rock music. Lester Bangs was certainly a better writer. If you're looking for good rock writing/good rock interpretation you're not going to find it here, Blue Oyster Cult lyrics or no BOC lyrics.

Meltzer's consistently ambivalent position about what he was doing, married to some rather bogus notions about what rock music actually is (I suspect he's the prime founder of the "rock music is attitude" school) make the first half of the book incredibly... more info

Death by Ego:

Well, here's something new: a music critic who doesn't like music -- kind of makes me want to go to this year's National Embroidery Festival and write 50,000 words on it just for kicks. In truth, Meltzer's a lightweight bore. I'm sure in 1966 (or whenever he started writing about rock music, I forget exactly when it was and the thought of flipping back through this lame, vindictive volume again to check my facts fills me with dread) his stuff was "interesting" -- maybe even "shocking" -- but now it all... more info

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