Over the course of the memoir that covers Stein’s youth and formative years as an artist up until present day, Stein confronts his own life and artistic legacy with a down-to-earth grace and enlightened candor rarely found in a rock autobiography. And by reliving Stein’s and his group’s past along with him, one is left with the knowing feeling that they most definitely did succeed insofar as leaving a permanent cultural and artistic imprint on the world of music.
Bob Dylan contains multitudes, as articulated in his song riffing on Walt Whitman’s concept, on the 2020 album release Rough and Rowdy Ways. And this is evident once again in Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song.
Throughout his complex and regenerative career, all of his different sides, and the characters within him, are tangible. The best writer is often the most empathic, able to inhabit the world and emotional memory of a character who exists universes away or who does not exist in real life at all. He is a changer, a shifter, malleable, and belonging to the world and all of its individuals and their probable and potential selves, beyond his own assigned self.
Then there is Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone, the publication created in 1967 that gave voice to the youth culture, the hippies, and leant them a stake in the Real World. The magazine invented a pre-internet meeting place where rock ‘n’ roll was given the reverence that it deserved, in which once could connect with likeminded music-mad people. Last month Jann published his memoir Like a Rolling Stone, a weighty tome surpassing five hundred pages. It came somewhat on the heels of the well-received and somewhat character-damning Sticky Fingers by Joe Hagan, Wenner’s biographer who he eventually parted ways with mid-project. Like a Rolling Stone is Wenner by Wenner, period.
Lovelorn music man Lester the Nightfly, a major player on Donald Fagen’s 1982 solo album The Nightfly, is a character with a complex identity. At first contemplation, he’s a jazz DJ on the nightshift during the golden, Camelot era of American life in the early ’60s, fielding calls from a cornucopia of after-hour nutsos while holding steady with his jazz heroes whose music he showcases across the night and out into the airwaves.
