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COLUMN rmartin@wweek.com A La Recherche de Temps Perdu: Little Richard says he invented it. Some trace its origins to Robert Johnson or Hank Williams or Woody Guthrie. Bob Dylan's switch to the electric guitar surely had something to do with it. A Southern man with sideburns who shook his pelvis and a Liverpool foursome that wore tight trousers popularized it. The history of rock 'n' roll is built on colorful facts and vibrant myths, on now-household names and forgotten geniuses. Two new books look at rock's development with fresh perspectives, illuminating the music's rise from curiosity to cultural movement to established art form. One attempts to canonize the unsung acts whose only claim to fame has been as an influence to well-known figures. The other satirizes rock stars, skewing their biographies in comic strips with biting, fictionalized commentary. In The Secret History of Rock--The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard (Billboard Books, 280 pages, $18.95), occasional WW contributor Roni Sarig makes the scholarly assertion that dozens of worthy musicians were left with their thumbs outstretched along the road that leads to the pantheon. He states his thesis in the introduction: "What we have, then, are two histories of rock, one determined by what the mainstream public heard in the past and the other determined by what has a recognizable impact on current music." Sarig settled on 80 artists known primarily--if not solely--to the avid collector, amateur musicologist or rock critic, then divided them into chapters based on genre. The "Frayed Roots" section includes Nick Drake and Gram Parsons, for example, while "Absurdists and Eccentrics" celebrates Captain Beefheart and the Residents. Sarig based his choices on interviews with current popular musicians, tallying the responses into a sort of poll about who were the most worthy of the overlooked artists and peppering each entry with quotes from the admirers. He's thorough: The "Swell Maps" segment begins with comments from noted acolyte Scott Kannberg of Pavement, and Scott Walker earns kudos from Luna's Dean Wareham and Palace's Will Oldham, two modernists who owe a debt to the moody British crooner. Sarig's book makes for an informative if dry read, perhaps most enjoyable for those who fancy themselves fonts of rock knowledge; in this case, the reader can test his knowledge about the author's suggested alternate canon. If Sarig traces rock's secret history, Colin B. Morton and Chuck Death--the latter a pseudonym for Mekons/Waco Brothers guitarist-vocalist Jon Langford--unveil rock's sordid past and present. Their sharp-witted collection of comic strips, Great Pop Things: The Real History of Rock and Roll from Elvis to Oasis (Portland's Verse Chorus Press, 232 pages, $16.95), begins with an introduction by Greil Marcus and then delves into uproarious anecdotal assessments of many of rock's best known fables and stars. At the outset of each band's story, Morton and Death brilliantly summarize the frames that follow. Pink Floyd? "They tried to change the world with their early songs that mention colours rather a lot." The Velvet Underground? "They tried to change the world with their nihilism and sunglasses." The British authors are clearly more obsessed with their countrymen, especially ready-made characters like Sting, David Bowie and the Fall's Mark E. Smith. But this doesn't stop them from defrocking Yankee heroes such as Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen and Frank Zappa in brilliantly terse tales. The authors' exaggerations and embellishments are hilarious, as when Bob Dylan--who changed his name "to avoid confusion with the Welsh poet Dylan Zimmerman"--suffers a motorcycle accident at the conclusion of nearly every segment in his three-part history. Great Pop Things, culled from the duo's regular comic in the LA Weekly and NME, approaches a subject that has come to take itself too seriously with a needed and spot-on irreverence. Morton and Death sarcastically subtitled their book "the real history of rock," but in a way they're not joking; rock's history has been so mythologized and twisted that their cheeky skewering of it makes as good a sense as any. Pacific Northwest Postscript: The Seattle band Nevada Bachelors, which includes two members from the defunct Portland act Thistle, recently had its self-released debut CD picked up and reissued on Popllama. The Bachelors' Carrots & So On negotiates pop hooks and melodies with an understated retro sensibility. The quartet performs Saturday at Berbati's Pan.
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