Book Reviews |
| Jim Hurcomb:
Rockin' on the Rideau - 2021
Ever since its days as a rough-and-tumble logging town on the Rideau River, our nation's capital has often played second fiddle to its more metropolitan siblings up and down the St. Lawrence. Ottawa... |
| Ginny Fanthome:
Loose Gravel - 2021
Eighties hardcore was about as underground as you could get. Those who didn't live it will never quite comprehend just how far removed it was from the mainstream. There was no Sex Pistols or Clash f... |
| Jonny Dovercourt:
Any Night of the Week - 2020
Apart from some lingering resentment in the rest of Canada, Toronto is for the most part a respected, even admired, world city. But it wasn't always so. When hard-drinking Hemingway arrived in 1923... |
| Robert Lawson:
Wheatfield Empire: The Listener's Guide to the Guess Who - 2020
The Guess Who were not only Canada's first rock stars, they were the launching pad for Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman, two of this country's most iconic artists.
They started out ... |
| Steve Murphy:
Everybody Wins (Except for the Losers) - 2018
Describing a used record shop as "a graveyard, filled with plaques and monuments to the past that very few pay attention to", as Steve Murphy does in the opening paragraph ... |
| Derek Emerson and Shawn Chirrey:
Tomorrow Is Too Late - 2018
If you were invited round to the pub for an Eighties Night out, I am willing to bet that the last songs you would expect to hear would be Minor Threat's 'In My Eyes', Bad Brains' 'Pay to Cum' or 'Jo... |
| David McPherson:
The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern - 2017
The Tragically Hip's late great frontman Gord Downie immortalized the Horseshoe Tavern in their 1999 song 'Bobcaygeon' when he sang, "That night in Toronto / with its checkerboard floors". Not that... |
| Denim Delinquent 1971 - 1976:
(various) - 2016
What kind of man read Denim Delinquent? Well, Morrissey for one. The erstwhile Smiths singer was apparently a huge fan of the early-seventies fanzine, writing letters to the editors, at one... |
| Jesse Locke:
Heavy Metalloid Music - 2016
One of the more enduring - and it must be said, endearing - remnants of the punk era is the quest for that great lost proto-punk band, a sort of archeological missing link that somehow managed to ke... |
| Nick Smash:
Alone and Gone: The Story of Toronto's Post Punk Underground - 2015
Simon Reynolds, in his Rip It Up and Start Again, still the ultimate document of the late seventies/early eighties years, surmised that post-punk was punk's weirder sibling: well-read, art sc... |
| Geoff Pevere:
Gods of the Hammer - 2014
There is allegedly a saying in Hamilton, the gritty steeltown just down the Q.E.W. from Toronto, that goes something like this: "The only reason Toronto had any punk rock is because Teenage Head dro... |
| Jerry Kruz:
The Afterthought: West Coast Rock Posters and Recollections from the '60s - 2014
Though it was Canada's third city by a long shot, Vancouver in the 1960s had the good fortune to be many thousands of kilometres closer to the epicentre of counterculture than either Toronto or Mont... |
| Sam Sutherland:
Perfect Youth - the Birth of Canadian Punk - 2012
All rock and roll obsessives have their own mythical period, a far-off time or place long before they had ever bent down to flip through that first crate of discs, where the music was pure and the p... |
| Stuart Henderson:
Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s - 2011
The two major works to thus far chronicle the history of Toronto's once-hip Yorkville neighbourhood, Stuart Henderson's Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s and Nicholas J... |
| Don Pyle:
Trouble in the Camera Club - 2011
The plethora of books chronicling the original 1977 punk explosion, from the definitive (John Savage's England's Dreaming or Legs McNeil's Please Kill Me) to the avowedly erudite (Grie... |
| Joe Keithley:
Talk - Action = 0 - 2011
Back in the day, those D.O.A. reviews used to just about write themselves. "Fast and furious", "diehard punks", "breakneck speed", "socially conscious lyrics", "punk's elder statesman"...there have... |
| Liz Worth:
Treat Me Like Dirt (An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond) - 2010
Has their been any other scene in pop music so obsessed about and fawned over as 1970s punk, a movement that lasted a scant two years in its prime, was rejected outright by North American audiences,... |
| David Clayton-Thomas:
Blood, Sweat and Tears - 2010
If you really wanted to know what colour pills Blood, Sweat and Tears frontman David Clayton-Thomas took an hour before writing 'Spinning Wheel', this isn't the book for you. It is, however, a sobe... |
| Warren Kinsella:
Fury's Hour - A (Sort-of) Punk Manifesto - 2005
Though not without merit, Warren Kinsella's Fury's Hour is a frustrating book on a number of levels. The Toronto-based lawyer, ex-Liberal staffer and occasional scribe for the right-wing Tor... |
| Joe Keithley:
I, Shithead - 2003
Vancouver's D.O.A. may not have been the critical darlings that bands like the Minutemen or Minor Threat were, nor did they sell as many records as Black Flag or Husker Du. And they were certainly ... |
| Allen Farrell:
The CHUM Story - 2001
Allen Farrell's memoir of his days at Toronto's CHUM-AM radio station is in many ways a chronicle of a golden age in popular culture. Today's kids may have unprecedented access to music via YouTube... |
| Nicholas Jennings:
Before the Gold Rush - 1997
The major pop-rock scenes of the 1960s, Haight-Ashbury, Sunset Strip and Greenwich Village in the US and Liverpool and Carnaby Street across the pond, have all been done to death, both in print and on... |
| Brian Kendall:
Our Hearts Went Boom (The Beatles Invasion of Canada) - 1997
Unless you were a teenager back in the early sixties, it is impossible to truly fathom the phenomenon of millions of hysterical teenage girls wetting themselves (or worse) at the sight of four flipp... |
