Book Review: The 33 1/3 Series

Although the face it turns to everyday living would suggest that the Cycling ’74 Forum is about people trying to solve problems (not all of which actually involve homework or end-of-term projects), I think there’s something else going on in the background: it’s a center for shared enthusiasms that throbs like the canonical techno-donut.

I love shared enthusiasms, passed from hand to hand or by word of mouth in a community for the things they bring into my life. In fact, for our Book Review series, I’ve occasionally taken the opportunity to depart from talking about what I’d consider to be volumes on the Max user’s essential bookshelf to indulge myself by sharing the occasional enthusiasm of my own (Christopher Alexander and treated Victorian novels, to name two). This time out, what I’d like to share isn’t a single volume, but over a hundred of them: The 33 1/3 Series.

The idea is brilliantly simple: a writer chooses a recording they love or find interesting, and then writes a short booklet about it. But that’s about as deceptive a description as saying “Jimi Hendrix played the guitar.” The authors range from novelists to music critics to rock musicians to scholars to more or less ordinary people who just really really love a particular album.

The idea had its start around the turn of the century at Continuum Press, which was then publishing a series called Impacts - short but seminal works by major thinkers. The series closely resembles the current Oxford Very Short Introductions series that you may know. One of the folks at Continuum back in the day was a serious lover of music, and he had the idea that perhaps it’d be interesting to do a series like that that took a recording rather than a book as its subject. Like the Very Short Introductions series, they were little books, too: bite-sized coat-pocket/back pocket/cargo pocket books with a single cover form: an image of the album cover, a title, and an author (Yes, you can get ‘em in several eBook forms, too).

My first 33 1/3 was Chris Ott’s book on Joy Divisions’s "Unknown Pleasures", which I ran across hunting for something small to read in a used bookstore in Berkeley. It astounded me with the quality of its prose, research, and critical acumen, and I resolved to keep an eye out for new releases in the series. I’ve worked my way through a fair number of them since then, and couldn’t help but notice that I not only started seeing recordings I’d never heard of, but also that I was seeing authors whose names I did know. I’m hard-pressed to name a single volume that hasn’t been enlightening in one of any number of ways – ways beyond what something that’s simply well researched and well written. As a group, they have become something of a form in and of themselves.

Some part of me wondered back then about precisely how many younger readers even knew what the number 33 1/3 meant back in the halcyon days of the Compact Disc when the series first began with a book on "Dusty in Memphis" written by the ex-guitarist for the Del Fuegos (now a scholar). A decade and something later, vinyl is back, and the series is still going strong (it migrated to Bloomsbury Press - who were a bit more willing to think/publish out of the box based on their success with books about some guy named Potter).

As of today (Monday 26 June 2017), there are well over a hundred of 33 1/3 volumes in the series, and the range and styles of the work covered is as stupefyingly broad as popular culture itself. We’re still waiting for a book on, say, Stockhausen’s Gesange der Jünglinge, but – since you can propose a book to the press yourself, you might want to think about correcting the oversight. Is your favorite band there? By now, there’s a good chance of it. Your favorite recording by them? Maybe not – but here’s the next batch to be released. It might be there.

Over time, the series has not only grown, but evolved in interesting ways as a group.

Some of the 33 1/3 volumes use their subject matter as a way to talk about something else – a set of ideas that inform the project, or to treat the recording as an introduction to the culture where the work locates itself written by someone who’s absorbed someone else’s music and used it as a place of departure as a writer – books that begin from the recording and then direct you outward to the world from which they sprang.

In this category, I’d recommend Aaron Cohen’s 33 1/3 on Aretha Franklin’s "Amazing Grace", where the live gospel album wound up teaching me about music and generational differences in the African-American Christian church. Picking up Dan Kois’ book on Iz Kamakawiwo’ole’s "Facing Future" opened up Hawai’ian musical culture to me in ways I didn’t expect. It’s as fine an introduction to the music of Hawai'i as I’ve ever run across - as well as a meditation on posthumous fame (a trait it shares with Amanda Petrusich’s lovely volume on Nick Drake’s "Pink Moon").

Another set of the books in the series has emerged along a very different axis - fiction as a way to write critically about music. The 33 1/3 series has a fascinating couple of these from writers whose names you may recognize Jonathan Lethem’s volume on the Talking Heads’ “Fear of Music” is exactly what you might have guessed it’d be. Some of the fiction comes from musicians whose work you may already know - for example, the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle uses Black Sabbath’s "Master of Reality" as his jumping off point. Other fictional outings include Joe Pernice’s (half of The Pernice Brothers) fictional memoir of Boston boarding school life that rotates around the Smiths' f="fictional memoir that rotates around the Smith’s "Meat Is Murder"">"Meat Is Murder" and music blogger Hayden Childs’ take on Richard and Linda Thompson’s “Shoot Out The Lights”, which is apparently dictated by someone driving cross-country to pick up the body of a deceased spouse (good times!).

Don’t get me wrong, though – while the authors have considerable leeway, they’re writing about something they love for people who may also love it, and the books are full of information/stories on how the album was made, what the producers did or didn’t do, what the people who made the recording thought, and what happened after it entered the world.

There have even been a couple of interesting spinoffs/sparks off the Catherine Wheel of the series that also suggest the ideas in play here. One of them is, I suppose, kind of predictable. Bloomsbury - the press that now publishes the series (33 1/3 migrated from Continuum to Bloomsbury in 2010 or so) - has put out How To Write About Music, which contains an entire chapter on – you guessed it – writing for 33 1/3. A slightly different spin-off could be seen as more a sequel of the work begun by the original 33 1/3 volume on the Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique” – For Whom The Cowbell Tolls picks up there the 33 1/3 volume’s original author left off, and continues the research to produce an entirely separate volume that continues and extends what we know about the recording.

My own suggestion is for transcontinental or transoceanic travelers: pick up two of the books in the series in physical or electronic form:

1. A book about one of the releases in the series that you really love

2. A book from the series on a recording you either actively dislike, or one whose inclusion in the list baffles you

Read one of the books on the way over, and one of them on the way back. They’re nice and bite-sized. You may get a chance to puzzle at the sheer otherness of someone who’s equally passionate about something you value for entirely different reasons and then to have someone explain precisely why it is that the thing you dislike or never gave a second thought to really matters. On the other hand, you may have the enjoyable experience of finding a kindred spirit who shares your enthusiasms and helps to enhance them for part of your trip, and to have Your Worst Suspicions magnificently confirmed.

Either way, I’ve really enjoyed the chance to interact with the works, and with the little volumes’ writers.

Here’s what a few of my Cycling ’74 pals think – I asked several of them to pick a book from the series and tell you about it, and decided I'd do the same.

Zeos Green on "Another Green World"

The groundbreaking ambient and art rock soundscapes of Brian Eno were fueled by random Oblique Strategies cards and numerous theories as a “non-musician”. By delving into these shimmering and jeweled conceptual views as a listener, a whole new dimension in an expansive discography is revealed. In particular, they add to the (very contemplative) fun of his third studio album Another Green World.

After a period of creative turmoil and several complete revisions, author Geeta Dayal managed to generate a compelling framework for this experimental and pop music landmark; a process which interestingly mirrored Eno’s experience making the album itself.

Numerous outside interviews provide direct insight into his wild recording practices, and situate this album in between the pop star days of Roxy Music and current ventures in generative ambient works. Readers of all familiarity levels will find this book very satisfying; as Eno himself remarked during a recording session, “Anyone want some cake?”

Andrew Pask on "Sign o' The Times"

I remember the Night. I remember the moldy brown colour of the walls, the dim incandescent light bulbs, and everyone turning and looking at me when I crashed through the door. 

I remember the dumpy sofas with cigarette smoking people clumped on them. Everything in Wellington is wet most of the time, especially on Glenmore St across from the Botanical Gardens. The whole place had a damp feel to it . But all I could hear was this sound. It was a moving field of big bumpy rounded spikes. And then some whiny voice went

"In September my cousin tried reefer for the very first time / Now he's doing horse, it's June"

This moment represents one of those "someone just parked a spaceship on the front lawn" times in my life. The rest of the night? Let's not let the tone of the newsletter down too far.

Oh yeah, the book.

Anyone who describes Prince's artistic debt to James Brown in terms of the "Brownian" nature of his songs is going to pretty much lose me as a reader.

Despite that......

I'll give Michaelangelo Matos credit - it's pretty awesome how much detail he packs into this slim volume. A number of different ways of considering S 'O' TT are detailed. His love for his subject matter shines throughout. I found myself dipping into it and enjoying finding out stuff as my mind wandered through the verdant gardens of Kelburn in 1987.

Darwin Grosse on "Aja"

Any self-respecting Steely Dan fan probably wants to bathe in specifics. Whether it is the heavy use of 6ths as a harmonic trope, creating lyrical ambiguity through the use of enjambment (per the author: "spilling one line's content into the next line's form") or just dropping details about one's drinking pleasures (Cuervo Gold and Kirschwasser are notorious examples), this stuff is mother's milk for fans of Becker and Fagen. And author Don Breithaupt delivers the goods. While he does fall for the typical Steely Dan trainspotting game (Who was the drummer on Home at Last? Which guitarists tried playing solos on Peg?), he also provides great details on their lyrical constructs, harmonic peculiarities and even historical contexts. This is one of those great studies that reveals the complexity behind artists' work, and - like a good literary critique - offers insight that makes Aja even more impressive.

Gregory Taylor on "Pink Flag"

Wire showed up when Punk was already in swing, but - for me, anyway, they weren't in the same category: Sure, the energy and compressed songs were there (no solos!), but the songs were "about" decidedly non-punky stuff and the forms of the songs themselves had been blown to smithereens in the bargain. Then there were these weird studio noises on the records, too... Wire seemed like a bird whose plumage only vaguely resembled the other creatures in the canopy making a racket (and that seems even truer now in retrospect).

Wilson Neate puts interviews with the members of Wire, their producer, and their admirers alongside a track-by-track sprint through the first of Wire's "trilogy" of albums in a way that starts at the beginning to uncover those bits of Wire's DNA that underlie the band's evolution from art-punk (Pink Flag) to post-punk (154) to sideways Formalist pop (Chairs Missing). It's a book that points not to itself, but to that record you've had on the turntable for the last couple of nights while you read the book.

Tom Hall on "Psychocandy"

I’m stoked on Psychocandy - both the album (obviously before this) and the 33 1/3 book. I got exactly what I was hoping for when I picked this book out of the very long list of available titles.

I wanted to know more about the album, but really I wanted to know more about the band and where they came from. I knew nothing prior to this but had a sneaking suspicion they were working class. My suspicion came from what I’ve always seen as similarity between Jesus and Mary Chain and brit pop band Oasis (of whom I’m also a fan, due to their working class background and shenanigans). Jesus and Mary Chain are a band born out of a post-WWII cookiecutter town a few miles outside of Glasgow called East Kilbride, a Town of Tomorrow. A town where the first generation inhabitants were promised hopes & dreams, but the subsequent generations saw it for what it was... bleak and unnatural. This bleakness provided immense inspiration for Jesus and Mary Chain; they saw the band as their only chance to get out and, in realizing that, spent many years prior to leaving for London to launch the band planning how they would commence - from looks, to lyrics, to albums and songs. This I didn’t know but greatly admire! They’re a true self manufactured band and obviously very successful - I love it when plans go right.