Gifts for your music lover

REVIEWS BY ROBERT L. DOERSCHUK

Fun, fun, fun

In The Beach Boys, Keith Badman takes the long view of "America's greatest band" by unfolding its history chronologically. Following a first chapter that notes childhood performances as early as 1950, The Beach Boys switches to a near-daily account of events in the group's formation and rise to fame, beginning with singer Mike Love's marriage in January 1961 and winding to the reconstruction this year of Brian Wilson's lost and epochal Smile project. Scores of black-and-white photos and notes on recording sessions, concerts and personal crises accelerate into a current of information, much of it even more fascinating in detail than in its broad flow. We learn, for example, the names of two hitchhikers that drummer Dennis Wilson picks up in Malibu on Saturday, April 6, 1968-both followers of Charles Manson, who shows up at Wilson's door five days later.


Back in the U.S.S.R.

In contrast, Caroline Grimshaw's Each One Believing takes a tighter focus on a more benign giant, P aul McCartney, documenting his 2002-03 world tour. There's no shortage of spectacle, especially in photographer Bill Bernstein's color shots of concerts given outside the Kremlin and inside the Roman Coliseum, but it's mundane elements that bring McCartney to life: his determination to speak at least a few phrases onstage in the language of each country where he performs, his fondness for warming up before shows by jamming on "Hey, Hey, We're the Monkees." The picture that emerges is one of a nice guy, who loves life, is devoted to family and friends, and other than having changed history through his songs, is as regular as any other working-class bloke who made good.


Like a rolling stone

Far more complex and elusive, Bob Dylan takes shape through his own words. Chronicles follows an unusual structure: linear yet free-associative, closer to how we think than how we speak. In a more typical memoir, for example, an author might focus on a serious hand injury as a dramatic epiphany, building toward this moment, sustaining and then resolving the tension. Dylan, however, mentions it initially in passing, as just one stop in a rumination that ends with him taking a whiff from a pot of stew that his son's fiancÈe is stirring in the kitchen. Details about his hand are left obscure; what lingers, with greater apparent significance, is the aroma of his future daughter-in-law's whiskey sauce.

These shifts happen throughout Chronicles, yet they grow less distracting as they lead deeper into Dylan's essence. His early days in Hibbing, Minnesota, his accounts of the folk music scene in Greenwich Village, his reflections on what it means to lose and then rediscover your motivation, all unfold in his unique language. Sometimes it runs a little too rich, when he scatters rustic imagery like a kid kicking through piles of vivid, fallen leaves. Some of his metaphors don't hit home: it's not clear what he means when he writes that Roy Orbison "sang like a professional criminal." There are minor errors of fact: Dylan recalls a negative review of presidential daughter Margaret Truman's piano recital that was in fact a vocal performance. Yet this is of little concern; never a custodian of fact, Dylan is a cultivator of myth, more comfortable rummaging through microfilmed newspapers from the Civil War than yesterday's New York Times. Dreamy and introspective, he saw his dreams translate into headlines almost without his consent and responded by dreaming again, of taking his kids to the movies, of going to school plays, of abdication and escape.

The parallels between his writing techniques for Chronicles and Dylan's songs are evident in Lyrics: 1962-2001, which is exactly that: page after page of lyrics from his songs, displayed with austere elegance and arranged in sequence from his first album to Love and Theft, with one full-page photo marking each LP or CD. Without any analysis, without even an editor's byline, Lyrics makes the case that nothing more need be said about Dylan's output. Whether trivial or eloquent, and there are many examples of both in his catalog, these works confirm Monk's advice-except, in this case, it's the words, not the sounds, that speak for themselves.


Robert L. Doerschuk, a music journalist for nearly 30 years, concluded long ago that as a vocalist, Margaret Truman was in fact a pretty good novelist.

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