* i read somewhere that there was a second edition of Nik Cohn's Awopbopalooboplopbamboom that came out in the early Seventies in updated form. I'm curious if anyone's got it and if it has any substantive comment on early 70s music, like what did he make of Bolan Bowie Alice Cooper etc say?
The edition I have is the paperback that came out on Paladin in 1970 (see above), now this has an extremely brief update (less than one and a half pages) tacked on called "Afterthoughts" that deals cursorily with the "so many changes" that had occurred in the eighteen months since the Weidenfeld and Nicholson hardback came out in '69. The "so many changes" don't appear to be that plentiful in truth: the return-to-greatness of Elvis and the Stones, the enfeeblement of pretty much every other major Sixties figure, and the emergence of "just three good groups": Bonnie & Delaney & Friends, The Band, and the Flying Burrito Brothers. Which is odd, because short of including the Allmann Bros, that little list couldn't have been further from Cohn's vision of Superpop as expressed in Awopbop (which vision I tend to think of as the absolute polar opposite of Last Waltz/Stranded, even though there's a lot of overlap in terms of the pantheon that the two visions/ideologies are built on...
* what do you know, Greil Marcus has the same birthday as me. And who knew that Mystery Train was only his second book, preceded by the co-authored Double Feature: Movies & Politics, which - if wiki can be trusted--preceded it by three years.
I actually have the first thing with his name on the spine, the collection Rock and Roll Will Stand (1969), which he edited. I first perused this in the rare books section of the New York Public Library -- you didn't have to wear white gloves to touch it but you were definitely in an inner sanctum type area, with an eye being kept on you. Later chanced upon it for 10 bucks used and snapped it up. Like other early rock books (Paul Williams's Outlaw Blues also from 1969, The Age of Rock ed. Jonathan Eisen, Carl Belz's The Story of Rock) it's a curious snapshot of a moment: everything's very much in flux, the way things were going to go not at all clear, the signficance of recent events not yet settled. (C.f. this Woebot, sorry Cybore, post). Actually, Marcus's essay "Who Put the Bomp in the Bomp De-Bomp De-Bomp" not only has a title that parallels Awopbop but it contains a Cohn-like celebration of rock and roll in terms of repetition, immediacy, and energy. I guess this must have been written in 1968, before rock's Historical Turn: Creedence and The Band writing songs about Dixie's defeat and Mississipi paddle steamers and debt-laden 1890s farmers... when the weightiness of history (rock's own, America's) had yet to encumber the music and make its very sinews creak with craft and worthiness... before Ry Cooder and Randy Newman and post-Astral Van became a critical generation's definition of the righteous path...
* what the fuck?
who is this Books LLC anyway? check this, this, this and this... also this and this and this... and about hundreds of other examples of what would appear to be unsanctioned, photocopied reprints bound in identikit covers....