[bomp] Re: review of Brett Milano's book

["Crawdaddy Simon" <crawdaddy.simon@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Worst. Review. Ever.

  Comic Book Guy


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Louis Shukat" <louis_shukat@yahoo.com>
To: <bomp@xnet2.com>
Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2007 4:34 PM
Subject: [bomp] review of Brett Milano's book


>
> from our friend Joe
>
>
> REVIEW:
>
>
>
> Brett Milano is passionate about the music he likes,
> but "The Sound Of Our Town: A History Of Boston Rock &
> Roll" (Commonwealth Editions, 2007) is more about
> Milano's tastes than what actually transpired.  This
> book is his version of the Boston music scene, and
> doesn't even scratch the tip of theiceberg.
>
> Looking for information on the highly influential
> Wayne Wadhams, Berklee Professor and producer of Full
> Circle, singer in The Fifth Estate? Don't look here.
> There should be a lot more about Moulty & The
> Barbarians, there's nothing I could find about Jon
> Butcher's Axis & Johanna Wild bands, Farrenheit (one
> mention of Charlie Farren?), Girls Night Out, Didi
> Stewart & The Amplifiers(one mention of Didi that I
> could find), MCA artist The Rings, two mentions of Fox
> Pass - nothing on Fox Pass founder Jon Macey who went
> on to produce demos for Elektra Records'.  Maxanne
> Sartori is not discussed and with only two references
> to Sartori - a powerful scenemaker responsible for
> helping Billy Squier, Aerosmith, The
> Cars, Fox Pass...in fact, why is Squier and his band
> Piper merely glossed over?
>
> If you want to read about "Brett Milano's Favorite
> Boston Rock & Roll Bands" - The Pixies, Mission of
> Burma, The Lyres and a few more essays from the Milano
> scrapbook, the list is $24.95.  If you want to read an
> objective overview of the Boston Music Scene just put
> "Boston Music Scene" in google, you'll get much better
> results.    Brett is a much better
> writer than this and needed to be more objective and
> less tunnel-vision.  This is hardly "The Sound Of Our
> Town" and by leaving so many important individuals
> out, or putting other acts higher up on the
> ladder, Milano does a great disservice to the scene he
> is claiming to document.   There are thousands of
> hours of interviews on audio and videotape and tens of
> thousands of articles on the Boston area scene that
> Milano could have accessed if he really wanted to
> write "a history of Boston Rock & Roll".  That he
> failed to do put the elbow grease into this
> collection of thoughts is an insult to the thousands
> of hard-working musicians who built the scene long
> before Brett Milano joined the party after-the-fact.
> A critical moment in scene history, when The
> Neighborhoods defected from original manager Richard
> Nolan, lead singer of Third Rail, is not even
> mentioned.  Nolan wrote a lengthy article for
> Boston's THE REAL PAPER "I created Frankenstein's
> Monster".  It is harrowing stuff, and it is that
> information that is missing in this text.
>
> But far worse, after the few pages on The
> Neighborhoods the unfocused Brett Milano writes a
> paragraph about The Fools - a band that can
> still out-draw and out-sell The Neighborhoods.  So
> this material isn't about what the community wants or
> what happened in real time in 1975, 1976, 1980, 1985,
> it is only what Brett wants to discuss and put his
> blessing on.  There's no doubt that Maxanne Sartori
> was more important to the launching of the Boston
> music scene than Oedipus Hyson, a man who -
> like Milano - jumped on later and capitalized on the
> hard work of others, but Milano goes to Hyson instead
> of Sartori for his information.  A better
> source would have been the wife of a member of Blue
> Oyster Cult, Deborah Frost, who wrote for New York
> Rocker and had a punk show before Oedipus on
> the rival station WHRB (Oedipus was on WMBR).  With so
> much missing and much too much revisionist history
> don't expect Volume 2 because it is obvious Mr. Milano
> thinks he has the final word on the Boston scene.  If
> Mission Of Burma are featured, yet leader Roger Miller
> hailed from Ann Arbor, why couldn't Milano have done
> pages and pages on other huge figures
> like Al Kooper, Stones producer Jimmy Miller, Herb
> Reed of The Platters and author of Grammy winning song
> "A Natural Man" and "Sunny" Bobby Hebb
> who lived in the Rockport area for decades.  Scruffy
> The Cat and The Neats were fun, but hardly as
> influential as Brian Maes and RTZ (featuring Brad
> Delp and Barry Goudreau of the band Boston). If you're
> looking for extensive information on Ron Scarlett,
> Childhood, Little Joe Cook (with a
> world's record number of appearances at The Cantab),
> Mickey Bliss, John Kalishes (of Susan and the Ben Orr
> Band), Jonzun Crew/Peter Wolf/New Kids
> On The Block guitarist Tony Rocks, Quill (a sentence
> and a half or so), Shane Champagne, Gary Shane & The
> Detour, Pure & Easy Records and other key figures
> there's always Wikipedia.   The New York Dolls get
> more coverage than the band New England.  Don't let
> Milano try to tell you that Hirsh Gardner, Gary Shea &
> John Fannon were too mainstream because the
> author does cover the band Boston which was just as
> arena rock as New England.
>
> Andy Pratt gets a mention but Clint Conley gets pages
> and pages and pages.
>
> Is Milano trying to pass Clint Conley off as a bigger
> star than Andy Pratt?
>
> How is that objective?
>
> Conspicuous In Their Absence is a play on an album by
> Grace Slick's The
> Great Society.  It is a perfect title for Brett
> Milano's revisionist
> history of The Boston Rock & Roll Scene.   It is a
> travesty.
>
>
> Thank God we have the internet
> http://bostontheeighties.blogspot.com/2007/07/80s-boston-rock-roll.html
>
> -- 
> Joe Viglione
> p.o. box 2392
> woburn, ma 01888
>
>
>
>
>
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