Riley books page

TELL ME WHY: A BEATLES COMMENTARY (Knopf/Vintage)

HARD RAIN: A DYLAN COMMENTARY (Knopf/Vintage)

FEVER: HOW ROCK'N'ROLL
TRANSFORMED GENDER IN AMERICA (St. Martin's Press 2004)

by Tim Riley

TELL ME WHY: A BEATLES COMMENTARY

(ISBN 0-679-72198-3, first published by Alfred A. Knopf in May 1988; Vintage, 1989; Da Capo Second Edition, 2002

REVIEWS:

In "Tell Me Why," a labor of loving obsession, Tim Riley minutely examines the music of the Beatles. A better title might be "Tell Me How," because Mr. Riley, a pianist and composer born in 1960, generally steers clear of biography and social history; he concentrates on the artifacts--the recordings--rather than the artists. Song by song, he notes the subtleties of craft and inspiration that keep the Beatles' recordings contemporary, illuminating music so familiar it's often taken for granted. Mr. Riley is remarkably attentive. He follows not just lyrics, melodies and chord progressions but the textural elements--essential to understanding rock--that don't show up in sheet music: bass and drum parts, shifts in instrumentation, vocal inflections. In fact, "Tell Me Why" works best as program notes for serious listening to the Beatles' albums; the author shines a spotlight on the songs' most important details. His larger-scale observations, though aren't always so convincing. While Mr. Riley has no patience with George Harrison, for him John Lennon and Paul McCartney can do little wrong. He is remarkable perceptive about the ironic nuances of the early love songs but labors mightily to make sense of psychedelic non sequiturs. He also has a Beatles-centered perspective; about "the Word" Mr. Riley writes, "That the Beatles had publicly denounced Vietnam made this song relevant in ways pop had never been before," implicitly dismissing the likes of "Blowin' in the Wind," or "Eve of Destruction," if not Woody Guthrie. "Tell Me Why" isn't the last word on the Beatles. But it brings new insight to the act we've known for all these years.

--JON PARELES from THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, June 19, 1988.

Riley's method succeeds in making familiar material seem fresh...He offers many new, thought-provoking interpretations of songs, and his powers of description are potent.

--Ken Tucker, Philadelphia INQUIRER

Perhaps the first serious analysis of the Beatles' work and its impact on popular music, TELL ME WHY is meticulous in its purpose and long overdue....Of the hundreds of books written about the Beatles none bring the musical knowledge AND the familiarity with the period that Riley offers here.

--THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER

Shrewdly balanced--with musicology as important as sociology--Riley offers Beatles criticism of unprecedented fullness.--KIRKUS REVIEWS

BOOK EXCERPT: From the Introduction

"Give Me Love" by Rosie and the Originals. An amazing record. It's one of the greatest strange records, it's all just out of beat and eveybody misses it--they knocked off the B side in ten minutes.--John Lennon to Jonathan Cott in 1968.

ROSIE AND THE ORIGINALS released their only 45-rpm single in early 1960. "Angel Baby," the A side, reached number five in America, but it never even saw the light of day on the British charts. The song is dismissible, a one-hit wonder from singer Rosie Hamlin that didn't deserve a follow-up. But the B side is something else entirely. Fore one thing, one of the Originals is hogging the mike, and Rosie is nowhere to be heard--a mystery that the label doesn't explain. The record is much as Lennon describes: after a revved-up guitar intro, the drums vanish and leave everyone else playing straight off the tope of their heads. The listener eavesdrops on a sloppy rhythm-and-blues concoction, with jealous lyrics sung to unrehearsed riffing--it's so sloppy, so incoherently diffuse, that it's more laughable than it is danceable. To say "Give Me Love" sounds spontaneous doesn't begin to describe its strangeness; the musicians themselves don't seem to know where the next downbeat is going to land. The listener has trouble making sense of the music--but then again, so do the musicians. Far from backing up Rosie's willful debut, it sounds as though someone left the tape machine running during an early-morning musical reverie--sounds that were completely random became crystallized on tape. It exposed the would-be Originals as crudely inspired amateurs, who weren't even able to sustain their facade as a group from one side of a 45 to the other.

To the young John Lennon, this was what pop music was all about. That he prized this oddity says a great deal about what he listened for: he put the FEEL of a record above everything else, and treasured the magic and humor of ordinary situations where most heard unkempt discord. To John, Paul, George, Ringo, and their Merseyside peers, the singles like these which they begged off the Cunard Yanks at the Liverpool docks meant much more than they could really express. They would practice their guitars to these records, mimic their favorite singers, go nuts over their favorite moments, and crack up at inside jokes they shared. In the beginning, they weren't much different from millions of other teenagers in the late fifties: the invested a lot in their fantasies. It was youths like the Beatles all over the world who helped invent the outrageous dimensions that Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly Elvis Presley--the undisputed King--inhabited.

Pop completed their world in ways that television and movies couldn't--it made them feel connected up to something that confirmed their adolescent impulses and gave voice to their most private emotional secrets. Because the Beatles were avid participants in the pop life, they learned a lot from it, not only about themselves and their own capabilities but about the medium they would go on to transform....

HARD RAIN: A DYLAN COMMENTARY (Knopf/Vintage)

(ISBN 0-394-57889-9, first published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992; Vintage 1993; Da Capo Second Edition 1999

REVIEWS:

"A book that allows us to understand exactly why Bob Dylan is so celebrated...Riley ponders the lyrics, arrangements and delivery of Dylan's work, from his first album in 1962 to the most recent outing of the Traveling Wilburys."--LOS ANGELES TIMES

"Finally, in Tim Riley, Dylan has a critic who can at once place him in the Woody Guthrie troubadour tradition AND probe the music knowingly."--BOOK PAGE

JACKET NOTES:

Rock iconoclast, street poet, social critic, pop icon--Bob Dylan's influence on American culture and music is unrivaled. Here for the first time is an album-by-album look at the most influential figure in American popular music since Elvis Presley, and a chronicle of his journey from little-known folk music legend.

In HARD RAIN, Tim Riley, author of TELL ME WHY, gives us an in-depth portrait of Bob Dylan's ever-changing persona--his relationship with his songs, his players, his critics, his audience, and ultimately himself--through careful analysis of Dylan's music and performances. Riley examines all of Dylan's incarnations--folksinher rock star, gospel proselytizer, country-and-western singer--as well as his stints with the Band, the Traveling Wilburys, and the Grateful Dead, all within the context of rock's "least likely longest-running act." The author traces Dylan's humor and social conscience back to Woody Guthrie, and his eccentricity and subversiveness to Presley and early blues singers. And he shows how Dylan stretched the boundaries of the music industry and informed America's consciousness in the sixties and beyond.

Comprehensive in detail, provocative in its interpretive insight, HARD RAIN is a richly original evocation of Bob Dylan's work and career. It is essential reading for both longtime Dylan fans and anyone interested in American popular culture.

MADONNA: ILLUSTRATED (Hyperion)

(ISBN 0-394-57889-9, first published by Hyperion in October, 1992)

MYSTERIOUS MISSING PAGE--For many years, unsuspecting readers have been puzzling over the unexplained leap between the word "it." on page 16 and "ideas" at the top of page 18. It stood alongside the misspelling of "Griel" Marcus on Knopf's first-edition hardcover of STRANDED as among publishing's great erratta, and spawned a cult as satanic and forbidden as the Nixon Monument. The infamous conspiratorial publishing glitch can now be redressed. Here, in its entirety, is the lost page 17 from MADONNA: ILLUSTRATED:

MTV conjured different stars and, as Neil Postman put it in AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH, created its own agenda. How you looked suddenly became at least as important as how you sounded.

The "Borderline" video created such a striking Madonna look that it made her earnest, Betty Boop-ish voice seem secondary. This was because earlier video breakthroughs like Michael Jackson's "Beat It" and "Billie Jean" (first boycotted by the network because Jackson was black) had featured dancers instead of backup singers. And although Bob Dylan had pioneered the way for nontraditional pop vocalists in the 1960s, even he couldn't have foreseen the onslaught of acts in the 1980s which made no pretense of vocal talent. Instead, we got drummers (Phil Collins), dancers (Paula Abdul), and hack songwriters (Billy Joel) whose singing couldn't even atone for their looks. Madonna was not the only MTV figure to reap scorn in the vocal department. (The flip side MTV's visual emphasis gave rise to over-singers like Cher, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, and Michael Bolton, who sang holes through their material because they couldn't dance.)

At this point, Madonna wasn't interested in singing holes through anything. These early videos were stylish enough to earn her some time to let her mousy vocals develop. Madonna had already learned a lot from MTV's treatment of music, and she proceeded to teach a lot back to MTV.

MTV was visual radio. Visual footage was edited to fit the MUSICAL track; a video like "Borderline" fit the visual story line to the music, not the other way around. This baffled Hollywood. In a typical Hollywood movie, the music score was one of the final elements grafted onto a director's edit. Composers would screen a finished picture, develop musical ideas for the footage already shot, and fit their music to a time tape on the film.

The typical MTV spot lasted three to four minutes--an infinity for ad copywriters used to thirty-second pitches. In combining TV-commercial ideas with pop songs, something unexpected happened: nonlinear, impressionist narratives ruled, and whatever stories remained became more compact...

Regress to the Tim Riley page

Retreat to the millennium pop page

Reconnoiter to the Riley Speech page