1. Gina Schock, Made in Hollywood: All Access with the Go-Go’s (Black Dog & Leventhal/Hachette)
2. Three Pianos, Andrew McMahon (Princeton Architectural Press)
3. Always a Song: Singers, Songwriters, Sinners & Saints - My Story of the Folk Music Revival, Ellen Harper with Sam Barry (Chronicle Prism)
This was a banner year for activity in the world of the Go-Go's.
First came the home video release of the excellent, critically-acclaimed documentary by Alison Ellwood. Then there was a 20th anniversary debut on LP for the studio album "God Bless the Go-Go's" and the musicians' long-overdue induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
"Made in Hollywood: All Access with the Go-Go’s" by drummer Gina Schock arrived this past October. Long known as the member who most often chronicled the band's activities throughout their hitmaking 1980s heyday, Schock had saved all sorts of memorabilia, ephemera, Polaroids and other photos that formed the basis of this great 223-page hardback coffee table book/memoir.
Rife with black and white and color photos of the band and various celebs they met, LP and single covers, tour schedules and posters and more, "Made in Hollywood" is written in a breezy, conversational style that can easily be read in a day.
Bassist Kathy Valentine (who penned the equally fine biography "All I Ever Wanted" in 2020) did the book's forward, while guitarists Jane Wiedlin and Charlotte Caffey contributed full page recollections, alongside Eurythmics' Dave Stewart, Pee-Wee Herman (he was a big Go-Go's fan that introduced them onstage in L.A. during the '80s), Schock's friends and others.
Despite being a fan since the start and having read the memoirs of Valentine and singer Belinda Carlisle, there were still some new things I discovered about Schock's Baltimore upbringing, her early music career before moving to Los Angeles and post-Go-Go's career in House of Schock.
Highly recommended for diehard and casual Go-Go's fans alike.
The Orange County, Calif.-based singer/pianist for Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness does an adept job at his debut memoir.
It unflinchingly describes the musician's difficult upbringing, how three pianos he called "friends" helped him make sense of the world, navigating music success as a young man with Something Corporate (and later with Jack's Mannequin), undergoing a bone marrow transplant to beat cancer and finding happiness as a married man with a child.
Long before she was known as "Ben Harper's mother," Ellen Harper was a major fixture in the Southern California folk music scene from helping run the Folk Music Center in Claremont that her parents started when she was young.
The instrument sales, repair and instruction shop served as a hangout for folk and blues musicians who would tour the area (Taj Mahal, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Jackson Browne) and often do acoustic sets at The Center (something current owner Ben continues to support today).
In "Always a Song," Ellen Harper - also a singer/songwriter/instructor - expertly provides context about what effect the civil rights movement and anti-war protests had on the folk music genre as a whole, especially during the Sixties. She tells interesting stories about the early careers of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and other musicians, reveals the struggles of raising mixed race children as a single mother in the '60s and '70s with nuance and grace, and later takes pride in her son Ben's 1990s success, their 2014 collaboration "Childhood Home" and finally culminating in realizing the dream of recording her own solo album, "Light Has a Life of its Own" in 2018.
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