Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


More Nostalgia, Less History

Canyon of Dreams: The Magic and Music of Laurel Canyon by Harvey Kubernik

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It is obvious from the get-go that Harvey Kubernik, a veteran music journalist who hails from Laurel Canyon, loves his subject. The problem is that love, and the love of his version of the Canyon, may have artificially narrowed his view of his subject. This is no small book, while its dimensions don’t quite fit the definition of ‘coffee-table book,’ it is a large and difficult book to hold that is chockfull of photos which make it a good choice to casually peruse at a […]

Don’t expect depth, but do expect to bust out your old records

Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll's Legendary Neighbourhood by Michael Walker

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As a teenage Doors fan (albeit in the nineties rather than when they were actually happening), Laurel Canyon has long loomed large in my imagination. A few minutes drive from the Sunset Strip and cheap, the canyon was home to a feast of late sixties/early seventies music legends (although really, at the time they were just starting out), and always seemed to me like such a cool and collaborative community. Reaching middle age has changed my idea of how much I’d actually enjoy living in […]

Gimme Shelter

Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock's Darkest Day by Joel Selvin

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Everything I know about The Rolling Stones at Altamont and what went down I think I’ve pretty much gleaned through cultural osmosis, scattered throughout the various rock biographies, articles, interviews and documentaries I’ve consumed over the years (that decade loomed particularly large in my imagination as a teenager, so I consumed a lot) This is an excellently written look at everything that led up to the concert, what happened during it and the fallout from it that reads like a blend of some of the […]

Who’d win in a wrestling match, Lemmy or God? Trick question, Lemmy is God.

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Starting a trend of music related read for my Cannonball Read, the second book I have read is White Line Fever: The Autobiography by Lemmy Kilmister with Janiss Garza.  In case you did not know, Lemmy Kilmister is the leader of the band Motörhead, a primary example of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) of the ‘70s and thought by some to be the origin of speed/thrash metal seen later in the ‘80s.  Although this band is traditionally lumped into the NWOBHM category […]



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