In “We Were Famous, You Don’t Remember,” directors Daniel Fetherston and Danny Szlauderbach approach this great left-of-center Kansas punk band. 

Throughout his sixty-year-plus career, Bob Dylan has combined an “incredible skill with a wildness of spirit,” as magician Penn Jillette recently put it. He towers above others—Bruce Springsteen, John Prine, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell—through volume, range, and brash unpredictability. In the past decade he has retooled Frank Sinatra crooning (Triplicate) and wrung suspicious reverie from Covid crazy (Rough and Rowdy Ways). In this latest book, he submits essays on sixty-six recordings, having his say about cherished records in a voice that favors wildness over skill...

The latest rockcritics podcast features Tim Riley, author of one of my favourite Beatle books, Tell Me Why: The Beatles: Album by Album, Song by Song, the Sixties and After. A couple weeks prior to our chatting, I asked Tim — currently completing a large-scale John Lennon biography — to submit a list of some of his favourite Beatle books, and it’s that list which forms the basis of our conversation. We delve into more than a dozen titles here, including a few obscurities, a few ancillary titles (Aesthetics of Rock, Peter Doggett’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On) plus, of course, Tell Me Why, which, among other things, is notable for its annotated (in-need-of-an-update!) Beatles bibliography.

Big thanks to Tim for taking time out to do this (and for putting up with my usual nonsense and semi-competence).

Titles discussed:

• Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head
• Mark Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions **+ **The Complete Beatles Chronicle
• Devin McKinney, Magic Circles
• John Lennon, In His Own Write and Spaniard in the Works
• Bob Dylan, Tarantula
• Allan Kozinn, The Beatles
• Wilfid Mellers, Twilight of the Gods
• Peter Doggett, Art and Music of John Lennon + There’s a Riot Goin’ On
• Ringo Starr, Postcards From the Boys
• Chris Salewicz, McCartney
• Jim O’Donnell, Day John Met Paul
• Beatles, Anthology
• Michael Braun, Love Me Do
• Richard Meltzer, The Aesthetics of Rock

Musical interludes (in order of appearance) by: Al Green, David Hillyard & the Rocksteady Seven, DJ Dangermouse, Bongwater, Peter Sellers, Irvin’s 89 Key Marenghi Fairground Organ, unknown house artist (“Revolution”), Rainer, Sunshine Company, First Moog Quartet, Los Fernandos, Cristina, Candy Flip, Bryan Ferry, P.M. Dawn, Sunshine Company (redux).