The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music by Dave Grohl

Kindle edition

The Husband read this book first and loved it. It's funny - he knew who Dave Grohl was, knew who the Foo Fighters are, yet wasn't really into them until we went to see them in concert a few back. Then he reluctantly came around to liking them. The Husband is a rap music fan. That's almost exclusively all that he listens to. Anything that isn't rap really isn't on his radar. So when he likes something other than rap, it takes a while for him to freely admit he likes it. 

Well, after feeling good enough to admit he likes the Foo Fighters and that he wants to be best friends with Dave, he saw that this book was out and got it from our local library. He told me I'd like it too.

I started this on September 15 and finished it on September 23. Now, I'm super behind on reviewing the books I've read, I'm writing this book in 2023 and I finished this in September of 2022. So it's been a minute. Forgive me if I don't offer too many specific details, as they've left my brain already.

I can tell you that this book was great! It's the story of how Dave became Dave - through his early years and the different bands he grew up liking, became a member of, to Nirvana and the gross apartment and room he lived in with Kurt Cobain, through the death and end of Nirvana, to beginning the Foo Fighters. And so much in between.

Dave is a storyteller, for sure. Not only in this book. If you haven't seen it, check out the Sonic Highways documentary from 2014. It's streaming somewhere, I'm sure. It follows the band in making their album of the same name. They go to different cities and the music and history of those cities influences the song, lyrics, and sound. It's really great! And gives me, at lest, a deeper appreciation for the music, knowing the back-story and not just trying to infer it from the lyrics.

Great book. Highly recommend it.

Post written on June 4, 2023. Publication date reflects date I finished the book.

The Speed of Sound by Thomas Dolby

So, after turning in The Angel of History back in December, I got the next book The Husband requested from the library for me - The Speed of Sound: Breaking the Barriers Between Music and Technology by Thomas Dolby.  Yes - THAT Thomas Dolby - as in She Blinded Me with Science.  I was listening to NPR on my way home or somewhere and Thomas Dolby was on talking about his new book - The Speed of Sound.

So, if you are anything like me, you know Thomas Dolby as a musician from the 80s.  What you don't know is he is so much more than just She Blinded Me with Science.  The book starts with a recollection in 1984 where Dolby is hopping off his tour bus in the middle of the Nevada desert to use some fancy not yet widely adopted machine to transmit a song over a pay phone line to none other than Michael Jackson.  Yes.  Michael Jackson.

Dolby grew up in England and used to work at a grocery / fruit stand.  He was very into music at the time, but was barely eking out a living at the grocery store.  He eventually got fired from the store and the rest is history - a fascinating, crazy history.

He writes about seeing Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, XTC, Roxy Music, Siouxie and the Banshees, and more all in the very early days of these performers.  He started helping a sound guy set up for shows, and eventually graduated to handling sound set up on his own.  He longed to be in a band making music.  He placed an ad in a local paper and eventually ended up playing with several different local bands - his first was Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club.  Eventually, though he had one record deal, but it crashed and burned.  He took off for Paris to lick his wounds.  While there, he got a call from Mutt Lange asking if he would play with Foreigner on their new album.  Off to America he went and worked with them for about a month.  Then he worked with a small label that didn't do much for him.  Then he happened upon a deal with EMI that was the best he thought he'd get.  Sadly for him, the terms of that contract said that EMI owned in perpetuity any and all music he recorded while he was working with them.  He ran into bands such as Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, and others during his time with EMI.

He writes about his journey in creating more music, dabbling in music videos (and directing them), meeting Michael Jackson, who really liked She Blinded Me with Science, and gave Dolby his phone number in Los Angeles.  He details how on a trip to America, he came down with mono, played a live set on Richard Blade's (of KROQ fame) show, ended up in a limo with record execs and not wanting to go out with them, so called the only person he knew in LA - Michael Jackson.  And guess what - Dolby went to Jackson's house and hung out with him for a while.

The music portion of the book is full of crazy tales of encounters and time spent with a ton of very famous people.  In 1985 he performed on the Grammys with Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, and Howard Jones.  He was hired to produce songs for Joni Mitchell in 1985 (and was fired by her that same year), played with David Bowie for Live Aid at Wembley Stadium.  I could go on and on about his music experiences - if you want to know more, read the book.

But where I was blown away was learning about how Dolby eventually made his way to Silicon Valley, founded a company called Headspace (then Beatnik), was almost in on the tech IPO fever, but didn't quite make it.  Dolby's goal was to sound-ify this new thing called the internet by using the RMF digital music format he created.  He had a big deal with Netscape that crashed and burned.  Sadly for Dolby (there's a lot of "sadly for Dolby" in his book), his dream to sound-ify the internet didn't immediately catch on.  He moved on to other ways to use sound for things, and eventually changed the way these new devices called mobile phones rang.  He worked with Nokia to change their ringtone and invented their tell-tale tone (listen here).  He played poker with Chris Anderson (who created the TED conference), the San Francisco chef (Howard Bulka) who founded Howie's Artisan Pizza, and Rob Reid (of RealNetworks).

This book is full of revelations (at least to me) about Thomas Dolby - the musician, the tech geek, the entrepreneur, the CEO.  Ultimately, his main interest was music and sound and how to create and invent new and interesting ways to play and hear sound.  He was in Serra Monte mall in Daly City (I've been to this mall - in the range of malls, it is one of the more janky malls) and he had an epiphany - some girl's phone ringtone blurted out a song by Eminem.  Dolby's epiphany was - RINGTONES - that was where he could do something.  Downloadable ringtones (for a fee, of course) playable through the software he created at his company, Beatnik.  Nokia was onboard, but with a nonexclusive license to Beatnik.  Soon, Samsung, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, and Panasonic were using his software and paying a royalty.  And chipmakers got in on this and licensed code to embed in their chips.

After resigning from Beatnik, Dolby founded another company called Retro Ringtones and made deals with mobile carriers to create new ringtones from Top 40 chart hits and feed them to the carriers' mobile portals for users to download (for a fee, of course).

Now, Dolby the musician, the entrepreneur, the techy nerd, the husband, the father, the inventor is a professor and spends "eight months a year in Baltimore, Maryland, where I am teaching my students some of the things I've learned in a lifetime of breaking the sound barrier."

This book was AMAZING.  Unlike Angel of History - this was a quick read, had grammar, punctuation, structure, and made sense.  I started it on 12/24 and finished it on 1/3.  I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes music or has experience in Silicon Valley, the tech industry, the dot-com-boom, the dot-com-bust, or is just curious about why they can play a song on their cell phone.  Two enthusiastic thumbs up from me.

Los Angeles Stories, by Ry Cooder

After finishing The Martian, by Andy Weir around July 14, I picked up Los Angeles Stories by Ry Cooder.  The husband and I were killing time in North Beach (San Francisco) one evening waiting for Tosca Cafe to open and some friends to arrive (side note:  GO HERE - the drinks are absolutely AMAZING).  

We wandered into City Lights Bookstore and browsed around.  I happened upon Los Angeles Stories and read the first few pages.  It was intriguing and I wanted to read more, so of course, I bought the book.  I started reading it on July 26th, and finished it on August 30th.  It took a little longer than other books for me to read, partly because it was strange, and partly because I wasn't reading it as much at night because I was tired, and because it was so strange.  Upon reflection, I guess I should have known it would be strange after reading the note on the back of the book:

"What's that you say?  Nothing ever happens in Los Angeles?  Ask your downtown friends and neighbors, working folks you pass on the street - the cross dressing piano player, the Filipino labor agitator, the Mexican bolero singer, or the steel guitar-playing dental technician - buy them a cup of coffee and they'll tell you their stories.  Sit down, take a load off, try some pork fried rice.  Dig it and pick up on it, it happened like this.

Ry Cooder is a guitarist, singer and composer known for his interest in roots music, and for his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries, including the Buena Vista Social Club.  He has composed soundtracks for more than twenty films, including Paris, Texas.  This is his first published collection of stories."

Um, yeah.  Strange, intriguing, weird, bizarre.  Yes, all of those things and more.  But for some reason, after reading the first few pages while killing time in the book store, I wanted to read more.

I grew up in Los Angeles, so I have a soft spot for books set in the area because it is interesting to me to read about other peoples' takes on the area, and it always lends a more visual setting to books when I know and have been to places that are being described in the book - it makes it seem all the more real.

The book begins:

"1940:  I work for the Los Angeles City Directory, a book of names, addresses, and job descriptions.  I am one of many.  Our job is to go out and collect the facts and bring them back.  Other people take our work and put it in the Book, but we do the important part.  Los Angeles is a big city, and the City Directory, is a big book...

I made the aquaintance of a Mr. John Casaroli.  Mr. John, as he was known, was a retired opera singer and teacher.  I listed him as Casaroli, John, vcl tchr, New Grand Hotel 257 Grand Ave.  It turned out we got along, and I was often a guest in his apartment.  One evening I arrived there to find police and onlookers crowded around what looked like a body on the sidewalk.  The police said Mr. John had jumped from the roof just minutes before and was dead.  They asked me if I was an 'associate' of his, and I explained that he was my friend and I'd been invited for a spaghetti dinner.  They took me to police headquarters and I was questioned for an hour.  When I asked why, the officer told me it was routine.  That's when I learned that Mr. John had made a will and left his record player and all his records and Italian poetry books to me."

Each of the 8 short stories in the 232-page book has to do with musicians, some kind of crime, and how the main character deals with it or gets out of a bind.  The stories are gritty, colorful, and full of details.  It wasn't until the end of the book that I realized that some of the characters in each of the stories had small supporting roles in other stories.  Some of the stories were more engaging than others, but they were all quite strange.

There is one about a cross-dressing piano player (a woman dressing as a man) who falls for a young girl (who thinks the piano player is a man), and the young girl ends up killing someone, and the main character of the story, Al Maphis, and the piano player, Billy Tipton, need to get her (Betty  Newlands) out of Arizona and away from the cops.  So Al drives her to Los Angeles and gets her in with a band that plays at a Filipino club...

"I introduced Johnny to Betty.  He was suave, Latin-esque.  He huddled with Betty in a booth, making diagrams in the air with his hands: I go from here, you come from there.  They went onstage and did some steps.  Johnny spun her around.  He threw her down and picked her up.  Betty was a cheerleader, she got it.  He counted off "Hernando's Hideaway" - a pop tango for straight-life moms and pops.  Johnny gave it the twist - a domestic scene from the dark side of town.  The man is aroused, the woman is coy.  He slaps her around a little just to get a mood going.  He preens, checks his attitude.  They embrace, they dance, she stabs him in the crotch with a big prop knife.  Olé, thank you ladies and gentlemen, especially you, ladies."

Colorful, strange, detailed.  John Lee Hooker makes an appearance in the story about Betty.

This book is eclectic, like most musicians are, I gather.  I liked it though, in a strange sort of way.

I don't give this book two overwhelming thumbs up, nor do I give it any thumbs down.  If you are in the mood for something strange, and off the beaten track, something the likes of you haven't ever read before, this may be just the thing for you.

Until next time..