Hardback : £46.03
Unless you lived through the 1970s, it seems impossible to understand it at all. Drug delirium, groovy fashion, religious cults, mega corporations, glitzy glam, hard rock, global unrest—from our 2018 perspective, the seventies are often remembered as a bizarre blur of bohemianism and disco. With Pick Up the Pieces, John Corbett transports us back in time to this thrillingly tumultuous era through a playful exploration of its music. Song by song, album by album, he draws our imaginations back into one of the wildest decades in history.
Rock. Disco. Pop. Soul. Jazz. Folk. Funk. The music scene of the 1970s was as varied as it was exhilarating, but the decade’s diversity of sound has never been captured in one book before now. Pick Up the Pieces gives a panoramic view of the era’s music and culture through seventy-eight essays that allow readers to dip in and out of the decade at random or immerse themselves completely in Corbett’s chronological journey.
An inviting mix of skilled music criticism and cultural observation, Pick Up the Pieces is also a coming-of-age story, tracking the author’s absorption in music as he grows from age seven to seventeen. Along with entertaining personal observations and stories, Corbett includes little-known insights into musicians from Pink Floyd, Joni Mitchell, James Brown, and Fleetwood Mac to the Residents, Devo, Gal Costa, and Julius Hemphill.
A master DJ on the page, Corbett takes us through the curated playlist that is Pick Up the Pieces with captivating melody of language and powerful enthusiasm for the era. This funny, energetic book will have readers longing nostalgically for a decade long past.
Unless you lived through the 1970s, it seems impossible to understand it at all. Drug delirium, groovy fashion, religious cults, mega corporations, glitzy glam, hard rock, global unrest—from our 2018 perspective, the seventies are often remembered as a bizarre blur of bohemianism and disco. With Pick Up the Pieces, John Corbett transports us back in time to this thrillingly tumultuous era through a playful exploration of its music. Song by song, album by album, he draws our imaginations back into one of the wildest decades in history.
Rock. Disco. Pop. Soul. Jazz. Folk. Funk. The music scene of the 1970s was as varied as it was exhilarating, but the decade’s diversity of sound has never been captured in one book before now. Pick Up the Pieces gives a panoramic view of the era’s music and culture through seventy-eight essays that allow readers to dip in and out of the decade at random or immerse themselves completely in Corbett’s chronological journey.
An inviting mix of skilled music criticism and cultural observation, Pick Up the Pieces is also a coming-of-age story, tracking the author’s absorption in music as he grows from age seven to seventeen. Along with entertaining personal observations and stories, Corbett includes little-known insights into musicians from Pink Floyd, Joni Mitchell, James Brown, and Fleetwood Mac to the Residents, Devo, Gal Costa, and Julius Hemphill.
A master DJ on the page, Corbett takes us through the curated playlist that is Pick Up the Pieces with captivating melody of language and powerful enthusiasm for the era. This funny, energetic book will have readers longing nostalgically for a decade long past.
John Corbett is a writer, producer, and curator based in Chicago who has written extensively on jazz and improvised music. A regular contributor to DownBeat magazine, he is the author of several books, including Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein and Microgroove: Forays Into Other Music.
"Appropriately, in the aptly titled Pick Up the Pieces, some 85
separate albums and groups are part of the author's own personal
excursions, all surging forward at breakneck speed attempting to
creatively reflect the times in which they lived and worked, all
looking for what rare magic, if any, could come next after the
decline and fall of an admittedly unique band and the equally
dreamy decade before them. Where to now? That is the schematic
blueprint for Corbett's captivating and highly personal musical
map. And it works beautifully."--Donald Brackett "Critics at
Large"
"Pick Up the Pieces challenges us to attempt an understanding of an
era's crazy contradictions and to do so through putting on an
album, preferably with friends, and letting its sounds tangle
around us as we live. If only we could all describe our
experiences--with music and with everything else--as perceptively
as Corbett does."-- "Spectrum Culture"
"'Time takes a cigarette and puts it in your mouth'--Bowie croons,
addressing a weary soul at the start of 'Rock 'n' Roll Suicide.'
The singer/prophet/alien holds out a hand to pick YOU up. Listen!
Exalt! And like a fellow space commuter, Corbett clocks the tunes
and throws out lines to the untethered. Dear reader, forget your
age. The 'seventies' is an abstract pattern. Doesn't matter if you
were an adult, a teenager, a tot, or not yet conceived in that
decade, turn-on with Corbett in this one."-- "Gregg Bordowitz,
artist and author of Tenement and Volition"
"This is a love cry. A cornucopia of zappy chapters, dedicated to
the question as to what '70s music means. Deliciously nonpartisan,
curious, open-eared, Corbett honors cross-pollinating musical
fusions in a fleet, polymorphous prose that wears great knowledge
lightly. There are bits of memoir here--but no dull
autobiographical trudge. There are famous names--but deep
obscurants, too. Above all: no yawnsome retreads of ye olde rock
lore. It helps that Corbett's right about everything. Pick Up the
Pieces is another gem in a maverick diadem."-- "Lars Iyer,
philosopher and author of Wittgenstein Jr. and the trilogy
Spurious, Dogma, and Exodus."
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