got this for the lester bangs essay on astral weeks:

"But in the condition I was in, it assumed at the time the quality of a beacon, a light on the far shores of the murk; what's more, it was proof that there was something left to express artistically besides nihilism and destruction. It sounded like the man who made Astral Weeks was in terrible pain, pain most of Van Morrison's previous works had only suggested; but like the later albums by the Velvet Underground, there was a redemptive element in the blackness, ultimate compassion for the suffering of others, and a swath of pure beauty and mystical awe that cut right through the heart of the work."

...

"What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It's no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment's knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt." ( )

“He triggers memories like you were a jukebox and he was the man with all the quarters.”

This quote comes from an amazing book that I have just rediscovered…Stranded: Rock & Roll for a Desert Island by Greil Marcus.

Sometime in the 70′s, Marcus decided that it would be really cool to ask music critics and performers what music they would absolutely have to have if they were stranded on a desert island. This book is a compilation of those answers, and it contains some brilliant essays on rock and roll and the people who made it part of the fabric of our lives. Most notable is the astonishing essay by Ariel Swartley, “The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle.” She dissects Springsteen and his band at a time when they were at their most raw. This was before The River and Born in the U.S.A., back when Bruce and the boys were still those grungy “boy-prophets” from the streets of New Jersey….before Bruce married and divorced a super-model, before he had kids and moved to Beverly Hills, before he became, well, unimportant.

The whole book is filled with essays like Swartley’s, and it is a psychadelic memory romp that includes music as diverse as the Ronettes and the New York Dolls. If you were alive and listening in the 70′s, you need to read this book. It will make you remember what it was like to feel the music you listened to.

It’s believed that certain smells can trigger strong memories. I believe the same is true for certain songs. There are songs that always take me back to a certain time, place or person. For instance, Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain takes me back to the parking lot of Grants on Jefferson Road, Rochester, NY oh, maybe 1973. It was the first time I heard a song that made me want to stay in the car and listen instead of heading inside with my mother. Then there’s Peter Gabriel’s Solsbury Hill, which transports me to 1983, and the Journey’s End bar in Canton, NY with Tom Wanamaker, Jeni Armeson, Mike Collins, and Alan Haberstock. And of course, Genesis’ Follow You, Follow Me always puts me in 1985 at the bar of the Holiday Inn at the Airport in Rochester, with my husband Very likely the night we fell in love. ( )

A lifetime in publishing and bookselling combined with the limited space of a city apartment-dweller means that I am forced to get rid of most of the thousands of books that have passed through my hands and mind, the exceptions being volumes that somehow have accumulated totemic emotional importance. Somewhere in my parents' house is a battered copy of the 1979 Knopf paperback edition of Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, in which Rolling Stone writer Greil Marcus asks a Murderer's Row of rock writers -- Lester Bangs, Ellen Willis, John Rockwell, Dave Marsh -- the ultimate parlor game question, and then supplies his own annotated and highly idiosyncratic discography, a kind of ur-canon for the rock genre. As a teenager in a small town with only one pallid Top Forty radio station to keep me company, I felt stranded myself; the book was a lifeline, an education, a statement of solidarity, an expression of faith. It taught me how to think and write about music, and therefore about life; in some small way, everything I have done since is an attempt to imitate the voices -- sardonic, knowing, passionate -- that I first heard in Stranded. From the NBCC blog "Critical Mass," December 6 2012. ( )

Essays from various rock critics about what they'd take and why. I found some of the essays very interesting ( )

A wonderful collection of essays. I'll never forget the experience of reading Ed Ward's "Dedicated to You" (about the 5 Royales); the end took me aback, made me laugh, and left me a wiser man. ( )