BOOK REVIEW ROSANNE CASH Composed: A Memoir [Viking Press] First and foremost, Rosanne Cash wanted to write. It wasn’t a call to the stage that inspired the eldest daughter of Johnny Cash to make her first record in the late 1970s at age 23. Performing was simply a medium for songwriting, a craft that fascinated Cash and that she pursued with a fierce intellectualism. Her third book and first memoir, Composed is long on such procedural details about... 

BOOK REVIEW Robert Rodriguez Fab Four FAQ 2.0: The Beatles’ Solo Years, 1970-1980 [Backbeat Books] No act in the history of rock ’n’ roll has been as thoroughly documented and dissected in print as the Beatles, from Hunter Davies’ 1968 authorized biography The Beatles to recent major efforts like Bob Spitz’s The Beatles: The Biography. But just when it seems like every possible angle on the group has been covered, one more writer suffering... 

BOOK REVIEW JACK BRUCE: COMPOSING HIMSELF By Harry Shapiro [Jawbone Books] Jack Bruce was arguably the most influential bass player of his time. One could easily make the case that it was his unbridled improvisational explorations with Cream in the late 1960s (along with bandmates Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker) that led directly to the birth of fusion music in the early ’70s. Before Jaco Pastorius, before Victor Wooten, there was no one flashier... 

BOOK Appetite for Self-Destruction By Steve Knopper [Soft Skull Press] From 8-tracks to Payola, the list of the record industry’s historic mistakes ranges from awful to amusing—but one wrongheaded misstep trumps them all. Appetite for Self-Destruction, written by Rolling Stone contributor Steve Knopper, chronicles in painstaking detail the series of short-sighted decisions labels made in response to the dawn of digital music. The book’s first...