33 1/3 Greatest Hits, Volume 1: v. 1

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Q: There is already a book in the series by the same artist as the one I’m proposing, will you consider two albums by the same artist? New to this submission round*: A one-line description of the book summing up its scope and content.a b https://web.archive.org/web/20151106232635/https://333sound.com/2015/11/04/open-call-2015-results-the-16-new-books-in-the-33-13-series/ Geeta Dayal opens her book on Another Green World by admitting that she had trouble writing it. She penned and discarded multiple chapter drafts, then found her momentum flagging. Finally, she decided to let Brian Eno’s set of Oblique Strategies cards direct and inspire her work. It’s an apt move, as Eno often foregrounds the creative process himself, and it results in a probing and thoughtful book that never falls into formula. Instead, Dayal portrays her subject as a deft artist embracing studio technology and balancing his past accomplishments with all the endless possibilities of the future. The first great title in the 33⅓ series paints a vivid picture of Los Angeles in the 1960s and Arthur Lee’s place in it—or, more accurately, just outside of it. While writing and recording Forever Changes, the Love frontman rented a house high in the hills above Los Angeles, where he could look down on the city and its music scene. His songs comprise an “ode to paranoia” that reveals the decay afflicting the hippie generation even before the fabled Summer of Love. Andrew Hultkrans paints Lee as an American prophet—not predicting the future but passing judgment on society. It’s perhaps the finest piece of writing on one of the finest psychedelic albums of that tumultuous decade. Have an album in mind that you think we should cover? Let us know what you’d like to see in the series in the comments below. In its initial decade, I was obsessed. Reading them like monthly music magazines. I bought every single title for a while there – I had most of the first 100 and I read them all too (at one crazy point in my obsessive-collector-gene life I briefly envisioned having the matching album on vinyl – even if I wasn’t the biggest fan of the work). Instead, I opted for one of my “spiritual cleansing” rituals and promptly sold the whole set, moved them on and out of the house – and didn’t really regret it at all.

Many writers manage to wrangle interviews with their subjects for these books, but few make as much of the opportunity as Bruce Eaton, who got unprecedented access to the “individuals who were actually ‘in the room’ and had a direct and tangible input into the sound and development” of Big Star’s sophomore album. This direct insight from the band members and engineer John Fry steer the book away from the cult mythology that still clings to the Memphis group and creates something much more even-handed and humane. Eaton conducted the interviews in 2007 and 2008, and his book was published in 2009, just a year before frontman Alex Chilton and bassist Andy Hummel both died unexpectedly. Those immense losses, combined with Fry’s passing in 2014, adds poignancy to a powerful story of thwarted dreams.

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You can expect these books to begin publishing in early 2024. We hope that this list includes both some well-loved and new albums for you to explore. As U.S. planes deployed with nukes flew around the world and John F. Kennedy assessed the Bay of Pigs, James Brown was playing a week of shows at Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater. According to Pitchfork contributor Douglas Wolk’s careful reconstruction of the making of Live at the Apollo, nuclear annihilation may have been averted by sheer force of Brown’s will. Of course, the hardest-working man in show business had nothing to do with foreign relations, but Wolk shows how those fears of mass obliteration stoked Brown’s showcase, pushing him to give even more to his crowd and prodding his audience to scream and shout as though their lives depended on it. Fortunately, humanity not only survived a nuclear standoff, but we got one of the greatest live albums ever.

Writing about an album like R.E.M.’s debut can be treacherous. More than 30 years after its release signaled the rise of alternative music, Murmur somehow retains its playful sense of evasion, as though purposefully obscuring its meaning in an attempt to make you listen more closely. Explaining each lyric and riff risks deflating its mystery, yet J. Niimi proceeds with caution. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment is finding the right distance from his subject, so that he can explain how the music works without telling us what it’s about. That is, after all, the whole point: “Murmur is a record that needs to be completed by the listener.” A: This time around we’re asking that you do not re-submit proposals. However, feel free to submit one on a different album. Chapman is also an academic from Dunedin. But I’m more aware of his publishing, and have enjoyed some of his books a great deal. Sometimes there’s a mere surface skim, but always there’s the combination of academia and fan with Chapman, and I think that might be the perfect vibe for 33 1/3. It’s palpable that he had his world changed by seeing Alistair Riddell drip from the TV, sartorial and slightly gender-bender-y (for the time at least, in little old New Zealand). If we know anything about Dr Chapman, it’s that he’s a glam fanatic. And in the right way, this is also a book about himself. The best of the 33 1/3 books always situate the writer within the subject, it’s correct for the authors to put themselves right there in the text. You are reading as much for how the person writing discovered the album as you are for nuts-and-bolts stories around the making. Chapman gives you it all, or as much as he can give. A mix of digging through what’s already written, and fresh interviews with all the principals. It’s also a story of implosion – one album and then done. Band members heading off for success in other directions (Eddie Rayner of course with Split Enz, and drummer Brent Eccles first with Australian act, The Angles and then as artist manager and tour promoter with both Brett Eccles Entertainment and Frontier Touring). Riddell remaining a mercurial presence, written off in various ways by various people as a Bowie pastiche and a one-hit-wonder to boot. Chapman points out with a fan’s love that Riddell did Bowie better than almost anyone else, and also grabbed from a bunch of places New Zealanders in the mid-70s weren’t really looking (Van der Graaf Generator). And if there was really only one radio hit on the album there was certainly more substance than just that. I found this book charming and compelling. Which is exactly the space I want to end up in when reading a 33 1/3. a b c Brown, Harley (February 25, 2015). "How the 33 1/3 Series, In Spite of Two Shrinking Industries, Continues to Thrive". Billboard. Archived from the original on July 26, 2017 . Retrieved May 5, 2016. Yellow Magic Orchestra (October 3, 2024) by Toshiyuki Ohwada, on the album by Yellow Magic Orchestra (1978) [28]