Give me back my $13.87: reading Rock Talk, The Great Rock And Roll Quote Book

It's not as bad as the laddish The Wit & Wisdom of Music, another music quotes book I waded through a few years ago, but it's still ... pretty bad. I'm talking about Rock Talk, The Great Rock And Roll Quote Book (edited by Joe Kohut and John J Kohut). It's one of those "stocking filler"-style quasi-books, a shallow little thing I ill-advisedly picked up a few days ago and ripped my way through in a near-constant sense of derision in a few spare moments this week. It supposedly has around 600 quotes from musicians (and a few adjacent people such as managers and critics), which is pretty staggering, really, because I reckon the book contains all of eight half-decent quotes. And here they are: 

"The kids want misery and death. They want threatening noises because that shakes you out of your apathy" - John Lydon 

"Funk is its own reward" - George Clinton

"A song is three chords and a grudge" - Dee Dee Ramone, as cited by Tina Weymouth 

"I always wanted to be Brigitte Bardot" - Bob Dylan

"We wouldn't have girlfriends if we weren't in the Ramones" - Johnny Ramone

"A good guitar riff is better than a solo. There are some like The Last Time by the Stones that are just one big riff" - Sterling Morrison

"What you can never get in your book is the utter, total boredom of being in a band [on tour]" - John Lydon

"Mainly, I helped wipe out the sixties" - Iggy Pop

The Kohuts' book (coffee table: blogger's own)

Yeah, these are not bad, but bons mots are very few and far between in the bland-tastic Rock Talk. Mostly it's eminently dull stuff from the likes of John Oates, the Replacements' Paul Westerberg, Frank Zappa, Aerosmith's Steven Tyler, Clarence Clemons, Sting, John Lennon, Dr John and Pete Townshend. Sure, these - and many others quoted in Rock Talk - are also, by and large, musicians whose output I don't like, so I guess I'm not well-disposed to them or their utterances. And by the same token, the quotes above (my Chosen Eight) are by musicians whose stuff (at least some of it) I do like, so maybe I'm just being a music snob (as usual). But no man, these eight quotes are pretty good, right? I think Sterling Morrison's dead-on with his riffs-not-solos thinking (has this been widely pointed out by others?), while the other remarks are basically funny because they're clearly true (or partly true), or funny because, er, because they're just funny. Meanwhile, as with the Wit & Wisdom book, it would be remiss of me to ignore the worst quotes in Rock Talk. And here they are. Just six, though there were many more where these came from:

"Probably the best work the English have done since the empire. We took and ran with it ..." - Keith Richards on rock-and-roll

"It will replace nothing except suicide" - Cher on hearing the Velvet Underground for the first time

"Being realistic, the Sex Pistols were a total failure, when you consider how much we had going for us, and how we blew it" - Glenn Matlock

"While I was a junkie I learned to ski and made Exile On Main Street" - Keith Richards 

"I don't like people that jump around ... Pushing rhythm and soul across. It's got nothin' to do with jumping around" - Bob Dylan 

"You'll never see me rolling on the floor or crawling across a stage. It has something to do with grace" - Eric Clapton 

Hmm, it seems Dylan is both a good and a bad quote-maker (quite possibly this sums him and his entire career up). Anyway, these six quotes are definitely terrible: from Cher's tin-eared wrongness, Clapton's insufferability and pomposity, Dylan's bizarre attempt to damn about 80% of all music (ie music which is made for dancing), through to Keith Richards' apparent support for the British empire (aka colossal land theft, mass murder, enslavement and massive material appropriation). Glenn Matlock's remark on the Sex Pistols being a "failure" is also surely completely wrong. Or it is depending on how you define success/failure. Maybe Matlock wanted the Sex Pistols to be a Status Quo-style stadium band or something, because apparently being part of one of the most influential bands in the history of rock music wasn't enough. Punk - in some form - was presumably going to happen without the Sex Pistols (the Ramones, the Voidoids/Television, Pere Ubu, Devo and others would surely have ensured this), but the Sex Pistols were so incendiary they basically changed everything. So yeah, I think Matlock should "settle" for this. Failure is good, Glenn. Anyway, speaking of failure, Rock Talk is - as I've been saying - very much a damp squib of a book which delivers hardly any memorable quotes while allowing some of rock and pop music's biggest bores to pontificate and preen. Where - for example - is a waspish Smiths-era Morrissey quote or two when they're needed? Compared to the shamelessly dumbed-down Wit & Wisdom of Music, Rock Talk is almost highbrow (there's a list of sources and an index), but it's still an eminently disposable coffee table book. My copy has the price printed on the back ($13.95), which is, I'd say, about $13.87 too much. Eight cents would be a fair price for this book. Eight quotes at a cent a piece. Yeah man, you can quote me on that.