Tom Piazza’s dazzling new biography-cum-memoir, Living in the Present with John Prine, began life as an article for Oxford American magazine. In spring 2018, Piazza met Prine when the musician played a concert in New Orleans. The two hit it off immediately and agreed that Piazza would visit Prine and his wife Fiona at their vacation home in Florida to write about the experience. They ended up taking a day-long road trip in a 1977 Coupe de Ville that John had just purchased on eBay and had shipped down from Pennsylvania. It was, to steal a quote from Casablanca, the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
After John and I had known one another for a year and a half, he asked me to help him write a memoir. He didn’t want it to be a conventional, linear biographical narrative, but rather a conversation that would take us wherever it led. We got a start on that book over a long and very fruitful weekend in February 2020, but our next meeting was postponed due to wariness about the onslaught of Covid, and six weeks after that February session—on April 7, 2020—John became one of the first high-profile casualties of the pandemic.
So instead of a full-length memoir all in John’s voice, our work-in-progress transformed into a portrait of our two-year friendship, containing the story of our road trip, our work on John’s memoir, the results of that work, and finally the challenge of managing the loss of a person who had become a close, dear friend. The other books that have interested me, especially those about music and musicians, tend to also offer some interesting perspectives on point-of-view. Here are a few of my favorites.
1. Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan
John and I shared a great admiration for this memoir, and John referred to it often as a point of reference for what he wanted to bring off in his own. In Chronicles, Dylan fashioned a form that could jump around in time and land in several different points in his life and career. The book has a strongly improvisatory quality, and it mixes sharp observation of his surroundings, a finely tuned awareness of how he is perceived from the outside, and a vision of what is necessary to protect the interior life that allowed him to function creatively.
2. Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll by Peter Guralnick
From his first two collections, Feel Like Going Home and Lost Highway, through to his underappreciated portrait of Sam Cooke and his monumental two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Guralnick has been justly regarded as one of the finest writers about American roots musicians. Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock n’ Roll is one of his best books, bringing a towering figure in American music to vivid life. Guralnick gives a widescreen vision of the visionary producer who discovered Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Howlin’ Wolf, Carl Perkins, and many others. He manages to weave a magisterial view of Phillips as well as his associates, including producer and songwriter Cowboy Jack Clement, an outsize personality who became a friend and mentor to John Prine. What is remarkable, aside from the intense readability of his books, is Guralnick’s willingness to reveal his own vulnerable, self-reflective response to the characters and times he writes about.
3. On the Road with Bob Dylan by Larry “Ratso” Sloman
This loose-limbed collection of dispatches from Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour by a renegade Rolling Stone contributor is a very enjoyable quasi-epic ride of about 450 pages that brings alive not just Dylan, but figures like Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Roger McGuinn, Kinky Friedman, and various band members, hangers-on, and tour personnel. Sloman trails the tour through its early stops, and the ride is alternately illuminating, annoying, hilarious, and ingenuous. Sloman blends his subjective and objective points of view by using a trick that Norman Mailer popularized in books like The Armies of the Night, referring to himself in the third person in order to create an ironic distance between his observing eye and the actual texture of his adventures.
4. The Rolling Thunder Logbook by Sam Shepard
This slim companion volume to Sloman’s expansive canvas loosely follows the progress of the same 1975 tour, but approaches it with a very different narrative personality. Shepard uses his dramatist’s chops to summon the edgy, shifting experience of life among that legendary caravan in terms that alternate between distant and deeply personal. Paired with Sloman’s book, the two would make for an excellent syllabus on point-of-view in music writing.
5. Traps, the Drum Wonder: The Life of Buddy Rich by Mel Torme
The partly-requited friendship between Torme, a vocalist, and Buddy Rich, a virtuosic drummer with a volatile, outsized ego, is chronicled in this low-key, touching memoir. At an advanced point in their 30-year acquaintance, Rich asked Torme to write his biography, and Torme delivers not only an elegant portrait of his friend and the times they lived through, but a moving and balanced rendering of a relationship that withstood a lot of abuse but survived because of the author’s genuine admiration and empathy for a great artist who was also a notoriously mercurial personality. Torme shows a resolute wonder, and even love, for the man behind the talent.
6. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music by Greil Marcus
Marcus’s 1975 tour de force was, and remains, a highly influential book that treated rock and roll with a seriousness previously unheard of in rock criticism. Marcus always brings to bear on his work a trademark mixture of erudition, critical detachment, and fully committed subjective response. He trains a wide lens not just on music but on American political and cultural life. In chapters on Robert Johnson, the Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman, and, most significantly, Elvis Presley, you feel him wrestling with the material, bringing a deeply felt response while trying to make intellectual sense of it all as part of a larger cultural pattern.
7. Bass Line: The Stories and Photographs of Milt Hinton by Milt Hinton and David G. Berger
Hinton, one of the finest bassists in jazz history, was born in 1910 in Vicksburg, Miss., where he witnessed a lynching at a very young age before moving to Chicago with his mother. Throughout the late 1930s and 1940s, he traveled with the Cab Calloway orchestra, often through the most treacherous parts of the Jim Crow South. Then, in the late 1940s and ’50s, he broke through the barriers keeping Black musicians from Broadway pit bands, television, and radio, helping to clear a path for future players. He was also an amateur photographer of considerable talent, concentrating on fellow musicians in the confines of recording studios, in onstage performance, and at their most relaxed in bars and other after-hours hangouts. At their best, Hinton’s images give you a sense not just of his subjects’ public and social lives, but of their interior lives, because he understood them from the inside out.
