Whats the Story, Sound and Fury?
By Simon Warner In the dim and distant, pre-punk Seventies, books on rock’n’roll for the British reader were hard to come by. Picture annuals or fan-aimed publications, echoing earlier obsessions with movie stars, abounded. But there were very few volumes, between hard or soft covers, that gave popular music serious consideration, or tried to make sense of the accelerating cultural juggernaut. It would be some years before American paperbacks like Jonathan Eisen’s The Age of Rock cropped up on second-hand bookshop shelves over here. There were though, even then, some magazines that were beginning to regard rock music and its attendant styles as more than mere adolescent adulation and pubescent angst. In the UK, Melody Maker and, gradually, NME, were handling pop with respect and reverence and leaving behind the obsequious fawning of their Sixties coverage; in the US, Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy!, Creem and others had established a young tradition of music writing that had flair, authority
