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January 1970: the Beatles assemble one more time to put the finishing touches on Let It Be; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young are wrapping up Déjà Vu; Simon and Garfunkel are unveiling Bridge Over Troubled Water; James Taylor is an upstart singer-songwriter who’s just completed Sweet Baby James. Over the course of the next twelve months, their lives–and the world around them–will change irrevocably.

Fire and Rain tells the story of four iconic albums of 1970 and the lives, times, and constantly intertwining personal ties of the remarkable artists who made them. Acclaimed journalist David Browne sets these stories against an increasingly chaotic backdrop of events that sent the world spinning throughout that tumultuous year: Kent State, the Apollo 13 debacle, ongoing bombings by radical left-wing groups, the diffusion of the antiwar movement, and much more.

Featuring candid interviews with more than 100 luminaries, including some of the artists themselves, Browne’s vivid narrative tells the incredible story of how–over the course of twelve turbulent months–the ’60s effectively ended and the ’70s began.

Editorial Reviews

Associated Press, 6/1/11
“Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY, and the Lost Story of 1970 is a worthy addition to anyone’s collection of such music histories…the nuanced account of the struggles inherent in making music is more than enough to satisfy, as are the delightful surprise connections and asides scattered throughout the book. . . . I couldn’t help but be riveted by the account of this group of immensely talented people who also, when they weren’t at each other’s throats, seemed like they’d be cool to hang out with.”

Chicago Reader, 5/26/11
“Its principal task is to dive into the 60s hangover on a day-to-day level, describing the tensions that drove U.S./UK rock culture—emblematized by the four artists in the subtitle—toward the sweet, consoling embrace of Let It Be, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Sweet Baby James, and Deja Vu,  …  Browne renders this somnambulant period with such care that he makes it seem alive.”

Amid ‘Fire And Rain,’ The End Of An Era

NPR Book Review – June 21, 2011 (Excerpt)

The 1960s might have ended on Dec. 31, 1969, but it’s not as easy to know when “the Sixties” — the era that brought us the Sexual Revolution and the birth of the hippies; a new environmental movement; and strides in civil rights for African Americans and women — came to a close. Did it end in 1968, with the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., or not until 1972, with the Watergate break-in and the re-election of Richard Nixon?

Music journalist David Browne argues that the Sixties really ended in 1970, “the lost year” when “the remaining slivers of the idealism of the ’60s began surrendering to the buzz-kill comedown of the decade ahead.” In his fascinating new bookFire and Rain, he makes his case convincingly, with a look at the year through the careers of four of the world’s most famous rock acts.

Browne follows The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young through 1970, as their careers take unexpected turns, and the youth movement struggles to make sense of events like the Kent State massacre and the convictions (later overturned) of five of the Chicago Seven. The year was as eventful in music as it was in society as a whole: 1970 brought the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, as well as the break-ups of The Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel, whose final days as bands are chronicled here. [Read the full article...]

Why 1970 Deserves Its 15 Minutes of Fame

The New York Times Book Review – June 23, 2011 (Excerpt)

The Beatles broke up, the Weathermen accidentally torched a Greenwich Village brownstone, and pop music went really soft. (Except when it didn’t.) That’s the tale, in a nutshell, told by “Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY, and the Lost Story of 1970,” which proposes to wrap together a year in the life of several loosely connected artists.

David Browne, a Rolling Stone editor and frequent contributor to The New York Times who has written books on extreme sports, Jeff and Tim Buckley, and Sonic Youth, wants to chronicle what he calls a misunderstood year in American history. He’s looking for a link between these musicians and their era — to consider “how these remarkable artists both shaped and reflected their times,” as the jacket copy has it.

Mr. Browne begins promisingly enough, with puckish descriptions of his early ’70s childhood, when the chiming guitars, miniskirts and brash optimism of the ’60s already felt distant. “Compared to that, our era was an even darker Dark Ages,” he writes in his introduction. “Welcome to the world of Watergate, KC and the Sunshine Band, ’50s nostalgia and gas rationing.” Many of the great ’60s bands had shattered; in their place came “flaxen-haired troubadours.” American society seemed to have become sick, its culture gone limp.

On reflection the author realized that 1970 was the hinge between two eras: “I couldn’t resist revisiting a moment when sweetly sung music and ugly times coexisted, even fed off each other, in a world gone off course.”

As lively as much of it is, “Fire and Rain” rarely regains the bite of this introduction, nor does it resonate the way the book’s framing suggests. What follows is a prologue set in January that begins with three of the Beatles working on “Let It Be”; four sections (each set, like a Yasujiro Ozu film, as one season fades into the next); an epilogue in gray December; and a coda bringing his main characters up to date. [Read the full article...]

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Boiled Peanuts

A Novel by John Patrick Doyle

A Peeping Tom Goes Nuts Over A Blind Girl

Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents.  In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding.

Then Paul meets Bronwyn, a counselor who is lovely, independent and blind. She has inherited her Aunt Phyllis’ house and is newly arrived in town. When Paul first sees Bronwyn at church, he knows he wants to be part of her life. As the mystery of Aunt Phyllis unfolds, Bronwyn and Paul become more deeply involved as they learn about Phyllis’ secrets and how they relate to Bronwyn and her past, but Paul’s peeping ways may ruin it all. [Read more...]

Boiled Peanuts is available through Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Two of the world’s preeminent music journalists tackle the liveliest debate in rock history: which band is the greatest ever–the Beatles or the Rolling Stones? More than two dozen topics of debate are addressed, with cases being made both for the lads from Liverpool and rock’s proto bad boys. From the Cavern and Crawdaddy clubs through head-to-head comparisons of specific albums (e.g.,Exile or “the White Album”?), members’ roles within the bands, the Svengali-like managers, influential producers, musical influences, and more, this is the book that dares confront the topics over which fans have agonized for years. Illustrated throughout with photography and memorabilia, the book also features a lenticular cover piece that alternates between the two bands.

About the Authors

Greg Kot has been the Chicago Tribune’s rock music critic since 1990. He co-hosts the nationally syndicated rock ‘n’ roll talk show Sound Opinions (soundopinions.org) on public radio and is the author of Wilco: Learning How to Die and Ripped: The Digital Music Revolution.

Jim DeRogatis is the former pop music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times, co-host of Sound Opinions, and the author of several books about music and culture, including Velvet Underground (Voyageur Press) and Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs.

Review

If you happen to be a huge Beatles fan, you may have a friend or two who argues that they really weren’t all they were cracked up to be. Likewise, you might be a Rolling Stones devotee always trying to argue their superiority to your Beatlefan friends. Or maybe you are one of many who like both groups, and are fascinated by the differences in their music.

Whatever the case, this book will be a fun conversation piece. It’s a hardcover coffee table book with a cool lenticular cover. The book is loaded with photos – many of which are pretty rare. The authors are both experienced rock critics who share a mutual respect for both bands.

At times the book is almost diplomatic to a fault. It’s not like one author is a rabid Beatlemaniac and the other is a Stones fanatic. Early in their respective forewards, the authors (neither of who are old enough to have been first-generation fans, but rather came of musical age during the ’70s) both admit their bias towards the Stones. But as they examine the bands in a variety of contexts, they never denigrate one group or the other. I almost wish there had been a tad bit more passion – even righteous indignation (which has been the case many a time in my own debates with friends about this topic). But they are informed about their subject matter and intent on being as fair as reasonably possible.

So who do they think had the better guitarists? And what about the better bassist, McCartney or Wyman? How about the drummers, was Ringo better than Charlie or vice-versa? Giving away their conclusions would be dirty pool. If you’re intrigued, get the book and find out. Again, if you have a lot of music-loving friends and you set this out on the coffee table, it will spark discussion and maybe a few arguments. – Amazon Review

Beatles vs. Stones: debate continues

Boston.com Book Review – October 28, 2010 (Excerpt)

In their first written collaboration, music critics and radio cohosts Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis tackle the quintessential rock question of which was the superior band.

As DeRogatis writes in his preface, the only real answer is both. So it’s not surprising that (spoiler alert) the book does not reach a definitive conclusion. Rather, “The Beatles vs. the Rolling Stones’’ stacks the two legendary acts head to head in chapters covering a rubric that includes the contributions of individual members, each group’s “cool’’ factor, and the role of drugs on their music. Though both DeRogatis and Kot confess to a personal preference for the Rolling Stones, this bias doesn’t prevent them from offering well-considered and, importantly, subjective debates for each set of criteria.

On their weekly public radio show, “Sound Opinions’’ (billed as “the world’s only rock ’n’ roll talk show’’), DeRogatis and Kot bicker like an old married couple, arguing passionately about musical acts past and present. That dynamic translates seamlessly to the book, the text of which is mostly transcriptions of verbal sparring between the pair. The technique perfectly captures their enthusiasm for the subject and breathes extra life into what might otherwise be seen as a dry, professorial take on this pop culture enigma. [Read the full article...]

Excerpt from an article by Richard Williams
The Observer, Sunday 26 September 2010

Poor John. He’s got old Macca on one side, fruitlessly trying to reverse the hallowed songwriting credits to make it clear, in case there were any doubt, that he wrote “Eleanor Rigby” and forever claiming (with some justification) that, of the two creative pillars of the Fab Four, he was the one who was really interested in the avant garde. On the other, there’s old Yoko, flogging off his image to motor manufacturers and fountain pen makers and adding ludicrous credits to his albums (on my CD ofRock ‘n’ Roll, the oldies album John recorded in 1973, with and without Phil Spector, it actually says: “Production personally supervised by Yoko Ono”).

And in the middle there’s Julian, his son by his first wife, already – can you believe this? – older by seven years than John was when Mark Chapman fired the fatal shots, emerging to complain about the cost of collecting memorabilia connected with a father for whose prolonged absences during his childhood a legacy reputed to be £20m appears to be, understandably enough, scant compensation.

In two weeks’ time, on October 9, John would have been 70. On December 8, it will have been 30 years since his death. The remains of the record industry he helped create, its pistons still warm from the fevered launch of the Beatles Remasters series and the Beatles: Rock Band video game a year ago, is cranking itself up again. Next week, the troubled EMI Music will put on a happy face and issue not just remastered versions of eight existing Lennon solo albums, but a bunch of new compilations and boxes, squeezing yet more blood from the carcass of the group whose phenomenal success brought it the prosperity that has subsequently been frittered away.

Yoko has been heavily involved in all this activity. How could she not be when a line on the cover of all the reissues of her late husband’s work states: “The copyright in these sound recordings is owned by Yoko Ono Lennon/EMI Records Ltd”? Much more satisfactory, of course, to have it owned by the widow and the original record company than by some bunch of hustlers to whom the Rat Pack represented the pinnacle of 20th-century popular culture, which is what happened to the Rolling Stones’ early recordings. If barrel-scraping has to be done, then better that the royalty cheques should be paid into a bank account bearing the name Lennon. [Read the full article...]

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Growing up as a teenager in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and loving contemporary pop music, I saw the release of a great number of songs that have not lost their popularity up to this day. One of these songs is Catch The Wind by Donovan Leitch.

Donovan (Donovan Phillips Leitch, born 10 May 1946, in Maryhill, Glasgow), is a Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist. Emerging from the British folk scene, he developed an eclectic and distinctive style that blended folk, jazz, pop, psychedelia, and world music. Donovan came to fame in the United Kingdom in early 1965, and his popularity spread to the USA and other countries. He scored a string of hits in the UK, the USA, Australia and other countries, including several British and American #1 hits and million-selling records.

He became a friend of leading pop musicians including Joan Baez, Brian Jones, Bruce Springsteen, and The Beatles. He influenced both John Lennon and Paul McCartney when he taught them his finger-picking guitar style in 1968. Some of his most popular songs are Catch The Wind, Sunshine Superman, Colours, Universal Soldier, and many more.

His first hit song Catch The Wind was used just lately as background music for a car commercial, which is remarkable, because the original version they used in the commercial was from 1965. This original version is very basic, just Donovan, his guitar, and his harmonica. Later the producers added some strings. That is the reason why most Donovan compilations contain two versions of the same song.

There is, however, a forgotten third version, which was released a few years later. It is a more romantic version, and it is quite longer than the original. For many years I have been trying to get my hands on this version, but it seems it got lost in history. The only version I did find and which comes closest to the last release is on Donovan’s record Donovan: Best of Live. So, the search will continue.

The CD also contains a live version of Hurdy Gurdy Man, one of his more psychedelic songs, and this is where we come to Donovan, Four Beatles, One Beach Boy, and Mia Farrow. During the song Donovan explains how George Harrison suggested a verse for Hurdy Gurdy Man, but he never recorded it. His exact description, with his strong Scottish accent, is as follows:

“When I wrote this song I was in India with four Beatles, one Beach Boy, and Mia Farrow. We were gathered together one day in Maharishi’s bungalow, these four Beatles, one Beach Boy, and Mia Farrow. There was an embarrassed silence in the room. Maharishi, he sat cross-legged on the floor. And John Lennon, the wit and the humorist, he decided to break the silence. So, he walked up to Maharishi as he sat on the floor, and he patted him on the head and he said, ‘There’s a good guru!’ We all laughed! And Maharishi laughed the loudest. Later that night, as we were gathered together on the roofs of our bungalows under the tropical Indian stars, we brought out the guitars, and I started to write this song. And George Harrison, he turned to me, and he said, ‘I could write a verse for this song, Don.’ And he did. But I didn’t record it.”

And here is the long lost verse of George Harrison:

When the truth gets buried deep
Beneath a thousand years of sleep
Time demands a turnaround
And once again the truth is found

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Hurdy Gurdy Man

by Donovan Leitch

Thrown like a star in my vast sleep
I open my eyes to take a peep
To find that I was by the sea
Gazing with tranquillity.

‘Twas then when the Hurdy Gurdy Man
Came singing songs of love,
Then when the Hurdy Gurdy Man
Came singing songs of love.

Hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, gurdy he sang.
Hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, gurdy he sang.
Hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, gurdy he sang.

Histories of ages past
Unenlightened shadows cast
Down through all eternity
The crying of humanity.

‘Tis then when the Hurdy Gurdy Man
Comes singing songs of love,
Then when the Hurdy Gurdy Man
Comes singing songs of love.

Hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, gurdy he sang.
Hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy.
Hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, gurdy he sang.
Hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, gurdy he sang.

Here comes the roly poly man and he’s singing songs of love,
Roly poly, roly poly, roly poly, poly he sang.
Hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, gurdy he sang,
Hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, hurdy gurdy, gurdy he sang

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.