’77: The Year of Punk & New Wave By Henrik Bech Poulsen. Helter Skelter, 382 pp, $30, hardcover. For those of us old enough to remember the first wave of punk, the appeal of Henrik Bech Poulsen’s ’77: The Year of Punk & New Wave may be largely nostalgia. The book offers an A-to-Z guide to every nasty little British and Irish punk band that put out a record in 1977, which first-time author Poulsen presents as the miracle year for a self-made movement that set out to rescue rock ’n’ roll and ruin the music industry. The contents of ’77 are thorough to the point of obsessive. Starting with Acme Sewage Company and ending with the Zeros, with some 200 stops in between—for Chelsea, the Damned, Eddie and the Hot Rods, the Stranglers, the Vibrators, you name it—Poulsen documents every last 45-rpm single, every rare mispressing and sleeve. At the same time, the book’s layout, with its Smith-Corona typeface and murky black-and-white shots of frowning teenagers in sunglasses, recalls the late-’70s fanzines that misfits used to assemble lovingly with Scotch tape and school-library mimeograph machines. The middle-aged, Copenhagen-born Poulsen has no lack of pep for that “mythical” time: “Seventyseven. Say it. Say it again. It has a great sound to it, doesn’t it?” But he doesn’t wander down memory lane here; instead, he cordons it off and scours it forensically. For this reason, the book does something more than create warm and fuzzy feelings: by including everything, it shows nostalgia up as selective memory. For every razor stroke of genius by bands like Wire and Buzzcocks, there were flimsy tracks by coattail-surfers like Billy Idol’s vacuous Generation X, with their haircut-based theories of rebellion. At times, it adds up to the feeling you get when you dig out your old boxes of LPs stashed in the basement, only to be reminded that back in the day you were cheerily listening to plenty of utter shite alongside the records that have since been deemed classics. (Yes, here’s your tattered old London Calling. Ah, those were happy times. But what’s this next to it? A play-worn copy of Joe Jackson’s I’m the Man? Well, well.) Still, Poulsen can summon a raft of evidence that 1977 was something exceptional in rock. Any year boasting such a startling range of groundbreaking performers—from XTC to Throbbing Gristle, Elvis Costello to the mighty Sex Pistols themselves—was obviously thrilling. What’s more, any year in which such dissimilar bands not only hit their stride at the same time but also fed off one another creatively, as they did briefly in 1977, was a rare phenomenon. Any gig where, for a few quid, you could see the Clash headlining a bill that included Buzzcocks, Motí¶rhead, and the Heartbreakers, all of them at or near their prime, was clearly worth a lot more than the price of admission. Any self-taught movement that put an end to the dominance of Pablo Cruise and the Little River Band deserves all of the praise that Poulsen heaps on it. Yes, the author’s delivery in ’77 sometimes gets so worked up that it stumbles over itself. (Just what does it mean for a punk band’s single to give “a well-directed middlefinger in the ribs” to an older generation of musicians?) But Poulsen is dead right in arguing that what happened 29 years ago in rock music was fast, ingenious, and reckless enough to create a sonic boom that still echoes today.

The Beatles:The BiographyBy Bob Spitz Little, Brown, 983 pp., $39.95. JohnBy Cynthia Lennon Hodder & Stoughton, 404 pp., $34.95 A key lesson we can absorb from the careers of the Beatles and their manager, Brian Epstein: don't use marijuana as your financial planner, or LSD as your investment counsellor, and especially do not employ amphetamines as your psychiatrist. The band in its heyday was a five-year fireworks display that got more and more colourful, and the world was utterly dazzled by the time a series of drug-drenched emotional explosions sent four young men in disparate directions while consuming Epstein entirely. For a long time their fans waited for a finale that had already come and gone. It is a fascinating story, and writer Bob Spitz takes a shot at claiming it as his own with The Beatles: The Biography. Spitz certainly has done the best job of anyone so far, weaving together thousands of snippets from hundreds of interviews, books, and unpublished accounts to produce a cohesive and compelling narrative that takes readers further into the Beatles's world than any author has taken them before. In the preface to his impressive array of notes, Spitz decries the dearth of reliable facts amid the wishful fantasies and deliberate misinformation that cloud the tale of the Beatles. "What's more, all of it has been told and retold so many times that even [Sir Paul] McCartney is no longer certain where the truth begins and ends-one of the reasons, no doubt, that the wonderful [The Beatles]Anthology [Chronicle Books, 2000] is often referred to as Mythology," he writes. Time, and examination of his text by still-living principles and other Beatles biographers, will tell us how well Spitz has succeeded in teasing truthful threads out of the massive tangle of sources. The Beatles is well organized, artfully paced, and draws you in irresistibly. But in more than 850 pages of text, there are times when the author's selection of which account to include can be questioned. For example, Spitz says Capitol Records resisted releasing the Beatles albums in the U.S. because their first two singles had flopped in Canada. It is possible Canadian sales were disappointing, but I have distinct memories of lying in bed at night in southwestern Ontario in 1963, retuning my older brother's transistor radio from the Motown station in Detroit to a Canadian transmitter out of St. Thomas because it was playing "Love Me Do" and "Please Please Me" every hour for weeks on end. Maybe the St. Thomas station didn't know the records had flopped. The preface has an allegation by Spitz that Cynthia Lennon "mangled facts" in her autobiography A Twist of Lennon (Star, 1978), not even getting the year of her marriage to John Lennon right. Given that Cynthia doesn't take drugs (if she had it just might have saved her marriage for a while), one might assume there was an editing mistake, but Spitz does not seem inclined to cut her any slack. Handily enough, Cynthia has a book of her own out, and John provides some opportunities to compare versions of events. Hers seems to match Spitz's closely enough, with at least one exception. In The Beatles, Spitz asserts that after Cynthia returned from a holiday to find Yoko Ono in her house with John, she fled to the home of George Harrison's sister-in-law, Jenny Boyd, where she succumbed to the charms of Boyd's roommate and Beatles hanger-on Alexis "Magic Alex" Mardas. After a seeming reconciliation with her husband, Cynthia vacationed in Italy, at John's suggestion, where Magic Alex came to her with the message that John was suing for divorce, and Mardas would be testifying to her adultery. Spitz drops the story there, other than a mention of her £100,000 divorce settlement. It is no surprise at all that in John, Cynthia denies screwing Magic Alex, whom everyone agrees she despised, by the way. He did come see her in Italy with the message about the divorce, she says, but the alleged adultery he was going to testify about was based on her being seen dining and dancing with Roberto Bassanini, the son of the owners of the hotel where Cynthia was staying. The divorce decree was granted on Cynthia's countersuit, citing adultery by John and Ono. It was unkind of Spitz to leave that out. Score one for Cynthia, the facts-mangler. In contrast to the enormous breadth and scope of Spitz's biography of the group, Cynthia's story of her ex-husband's life is about as up close and personal as you can get without her actually specifying the dimensions of John's "throbber". John resonates with love both past and present, and when she unselfconsciously descends into catty pettiness about ancient resentments, it at least alerts you that it's only her side you are hearing. Cynthia's thesis is that John went from a grim existence with an obsessive, controlling woman (his Aunt Mimi) to the same thing with another (Ono), and that in between them she provided a several-year interval of relaxed happiness when he could be his funny, carefree, and loving real self. It is a viewpoint that she is entitled to, and it is romantically appealing, but she does talk about "distance" during times when others, according to Spitz, remember screaming matches. Where Cynthia at least acknowledges the reality of the bond between John and Ono, Spitz generally subscribes to the theory that it was a combination of drugs and Svengali-like dominance that put John under Ono's spell. He accepts McCartney's assertion that her presence at recording sessions was always close to intolerable for all the other Beatles, and Spitz makes an emphatic case that Ono should have been barred from meddling with an already fragile dynamic. What Spitz seems unable to see is that if Ono had been shown out of the studio, John undoubtedly would have walked out with her. The world might have been spared "Let It Be", but we also would have lost The Beatles (the White Album) and Abbey Road. Speculate all you want; it is hard to see how things could have turned out any differently from how they did in the end.

Scar Tissue By Anthony Kiedis with Larry Sloman. H.B. Fenn & Company. 480 pp, $34.95, hardcover. Anthony Kiedis has never made a secret of his fondness for drugs. "Under the Bridge", his biggest hit with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, was inspired by shooting heroin below a freeway in Los Angeles, and, as has been well documented, the freak flag-flying frontman has been in and out of rehab enough times to impress Scott Weiland. What Kiedis has never done, until now, is reveal just how bad a junkie he was. Only a committed addict would-unable to score heroin-melt a tab of acid in a teaspoon of vodka and then bang home the drug cocktail. It's this devotion to getting high that makes Scar Tissue as fascinating as it is shocking. Along with cowriter Larry Sloman, Kiedis sets the tone with the book's first sentence: "I'd been shooting coke for three days straight with my Mexican drug dealer, Mario, when I remembered the Arizona show." From there, things flash back to the singer's childhood, spent bouncing between divorced parents, one of them in Michigan and the other in Los Angeles. The City of Angels-home to Kiedis's father, a struggling actor/dope dealer named Blackie-is where the partying starts. With six days out of seven looking like Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights, the future Pepper proves that kids are indeed impressionable creatures. By Grade 7, he's experimenting with booze, pot, Quaaludes, and acid. His first snort of nose candy comes at age 13, after which he quickly decides that injecting it leads to a better high. At 19-while attending UCLA by day and catching shows by Black Flag and the Circle Jerks by night-Kiedis tries heroin for the first time. It will take him nearly two decades and countless attempts to get clean. What's most interesting about Scar Tissue is that he makes no apologies and expresses almost no regrets for what he's done. Kiedis is convinced that everything in life happens for a reason, and therefore no experience should be taken for granted. Scar Tissue isn't all about the drugs. The singer's other obsession is sex, and despite what you might think of people who kiss and tell, his bedroom exploits help make for a page turner. Kiedis pops his cork at age 11 with a girlfriend of Blackie, who arranges the liaison at his son's request. Over the course of the book no relationship is left unaccounted for. When he's not bedding the semifamous actress Ione Skye, the Pepper indulges in the perks that come with being a rock star, including butt-fucking starstruck groupies in the hallways of Sunset Strip nightclubs. Somewhere between the sex and drugs, there's the story of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Formed when L.A.'s legendary early-'80s punk scene was at its zenith, the band was never expected to amount to much. When Kiedis first picked up the mike, he was painfully aware he couldn't sing, instead choosing to ape the rap-speak found on Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message". But it didn't take long for the group's groundbreaking blend of hardcore punk and white-boy funk to build a following. The fact that the first edition of the band-Kiedis, bassist Michael Balzary, guitarist Hillel Slovak, and drummer Jack Irons-performed in neon war paint with nothing but socks on their dicks made them an early must-see. Perseverance made the Peppers the biggest act to emerge from the Lollapalooza-era '90s. Fanatics looking for dirt on their favourite band will be disappointed by Scar Tissue. For every revelation- current drummer Chad Smith is a hesher who basically has zero in common with his bandmates-there are big questions left unanswered. Most glaring of all is the lack of details on the firing of Dave Navarro, the ex-Jane's Addiction guitarist with whom the Peppers recorded 1995's disastrous One Hot Minute. Kiedis fans, on the other hand, will find no shortage of great dope. Scar Tissue, which comes out in paperback in October, is his book, and it's all about him. Written in a straight-ahead style that even the most ADHD-afflicted reader will find engaging, it's chock full of stories so bizarre they'd impress Nardwuar the Human Serviette. Even Kiedis's most obsessed followers will be amazed to learn that Keith Moon used to take him on his knee at Blackie's raging coke parties, and that, as a young boy, he'd sleep naked in the same bed as Cher. Depending on how much time you spend reading the National Enquirer and watching Entertainment Tonight, you may or may not find such trivia fascinating, but that doesn't make it any less shocking.

Macca Masticates in Believing Each One Believing: On Stage, Off Stage, and Backstage By Paul McCartney. Chronicle Books, 224 pp., $48, hardcover. In the latter half of the 1970s, I was surprised to find that Paul McCartney was still publishing a newsletter for his fans. That was the kind of thing late Beatles manager Brian Epstein had been so good at arranging, but it seemed wildly anachronistic at the time, considering everything that had happened to the music world--and to the concept of "fandom"--since Epstein's death in 1967. I could now probably sell for considerable cash the copies of Club Sandwich (yes, that was the name of the McCartney fan club and its publication) that we cut up at the Ubyssey, the student newspaper at the University of B.C. The editors there enrolled the paper in the fan club for a joke, and we enjoyed slicing out the pictures, like that of the future knight and former Monkee Micky Dolenz hamming it up at some society do, so that we could glue the glossies to the wall of the office with captions like, "Two people who used to play rock 'n' roll compare wrinkles." That was 25 years ago. Almost-wrinkleless McCartney is now riding the crest of having mightily pleased the people of the U.S. with "Freedom", a deft counterpoint to the terrorist-sympathizing (and thematically identical) ditty "Give Ireland Back to the Irish". Buoyed up on a wave of such sentiment as only he can appreciate and exploit, Big Macca wowed the world with a tour in 2002, showing he is still toppermost of the poppermost. Each One Believing: On Stage, Off Stage, and Backstage is nearly a kilogram of adulatory Club Sandwich about the tour, with plenty of glossies you might want to stick on a wall with appropriately disparaging captions. John Lennon dismissed fame on one hand but openly exploited it on the other; George Harrison became frankly frightened of it; Ringo Starr seems endlessly amused by it. To Sir Paul McCartney it has become as natural as playing bass, being enormously talented, and having wives with long, blond hair. Celebrity is the ocean he loves to swim in, and part of his public-relations strategy is to remind us whenever possible that he is still just a regular guy who, as Douglas Adams put it, can whistle a tune on his way to the store to buy cigarettes and then the next day buy Yorkshire with the proceeds. Mind you, the popularity in the U.S. of "Freedom" notwithstanding, the 2002 tour might not have been such a wild success if McCartney had played only post-Beatles and post-Wings compositions. He was far too astute for that, with Beatles 1 on its way to sales of 25 million and all of the world ignoring his recent solo work. Instead, the masses came out to hear him play music mostly from his best-remembered period, 1965 ­75. The book takes several spins away from that potential diminishment of ego. For instance, we are reminded several times that McCartney's band was hailed by critics as "better than the Beatles", which one might expect from professionals 20 years older and long familiar with the material, compared to youths whose transitions from composition to studio recording, and therefore to set-in-stone arrangements for live performances, were sometimes a matter of days. We get a lot of McCartney explaining the creative process and his rapport with the band, the kind of stuff people very much wanted to hear about when he was collaborating with Lennon and Harrison--unless he had been this bad at explaining it then. What we get in Each One Believing is less than inspiring, unless you were at one of the shows or just cannot get enough of Sir Paul. A plus is that he does give Paul Wickens, Rusty Anderson, Abe Laboriel Jr., and Brian Ray, the fellows better than the Beatles, plenty of textual and pictorial space. The minus is that Each One Believing is less a document than an advertisement full of uplifting praise aimed at his adoring fans, with plenty of fab pix featuring the man himself. As he puts it: "So the way I look at it is to try to enjoy my day and then enjoy another day, and if you add up enough enjoyable days together, then that's a life, and if you're lucky, it's been enjoyable. I don't have any deeper philosophy than that." On the other hand, he has been a vegetarian for 25 years, can rock like anyone half his age, and (as he often reminds us) has carried on the late Princess Diana's crusade against land mines. Still, with Chronicle Books having over the past few Christmases issued books on Harrison, Lennon, and McCartney, one can only hope they are not currently badgering Richard Starkey for his philosophy of life.