Customer Reviews

Let It Be (33 1/3)

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1 star:		(5)

 

 

Colin Melroy writes off discovering the Replacements through a mix tape made by his Uncle. If you are looking for a breakdown of the albumn Let It Be this book is not for you. What this book did for me is bring back the joy of discovering a new song on a cassete mix tape made by someone. Then going out and trying to find the whole albumn. This book is great for discribing how amazing it is to find a new artist when you are stuck in a small town where the artist will never get airplay. Meloys discovery of the Replacements by way of his Uncles' tape is parelell to how the early 80's indie bands gained thier fans. Someone who heard them on a college stations passes along the music to a friend who would never get the chance to her them without the mix tape. Very good book about the joy of dicovering music in your early teen years.

I ordered this book because I am taking a class in Pop Music. Our instructor asked us to read one book from the 33 1/3 series and to prepare a short presentation on the book. I chose this book on The Replacements "Let It Be" album.

I expected the book to be a schematic on each of the album's tracks. I was happy that the book was small (just slightly over 100 pages), because I didn't feel ready to read a huge tome deconstructing one Replacements record. I was surprised to find that this book is written by Colin Meloy, lead singer of the Decemberists, a band that I had decided I liked around the same time that I had discovered the Replacements.

This book does not deconstruct each lyric of the album and explain any kind of broad sociological or musicological meaning. This book is more a short autobiography of Meloy himself, but he never strays from explaining the soundtrack of his life as he ages from middle school to high school. And the Replacements were always a big part of his adolescence to early adulthood. Meloy explains how the album affected his own life: how he came to discover the Replacements, how he took the album with him on bus trips with his basketball team, how he shut out the world during play practices and listened to "Androgynous" while others rehearsed, how he cried while feeling rejected by his classmates and listening to "Unsatisfied."

Meloy writes the book from the perspective of a listener, not a musician, journalist or amateur musicologist. His style makes this book appropriate for any reader, because all readers are also listeners.

I highly recommend this book to any music lover, whatever your tastes may be. Listeners from every niche of the music matrix can glean something from this. All listeners understand the power that music, or even one record, can have on a person's life. The point is not how many albums were sold, or how many singles went gold or platinum but rather what the music means to the listener. And Meloy understands this.

I'm a huge fan of the Decemberists, and have never heard this Mats record - probably for the best, as the book is really an evocation of Colin Meloy's childhood, not a consideration of the album. As a biography, it's lovely, both quirky (when he and a friend play a video game, they "compete for the affections of a pixellated geisha") and universal enough to recall your own uneasy surburban adolescence, if you had one. It's the perfect length and the perfect format. My one problem: lack of editorial oversight. Weird, continuous homophone problems, like "a rye smile" and the "bow of a tree," could have ruined the book if it weren't otherwise so charming.

Yesterday, a box of (expected) goodies from Amazon.com came in the mail for me. I ripped it open with glee and my eyes fell upon Colin Meloy's book (above). About an hour later I had finished reading it and was off to The Decemberists message board (where I heard about it) to post my delight.
I don't know if you guys have heard of the 33 1/3 series... I had, but only vaguely. Basically its a series of short books written by artists about the most important album in their life- or something to that effect. Colin wrote about The Replacements' album "Let It Be."
It reminded me a bit of the Aerosmith autobiography "Walk This Way" in its narration and stylings... although MUCH shorter. It is a great, fun little read.
I'm sure many of you would also see the similarities between yourselves and Colin's touching and freshly honest account of childhood and music appreciation. From his discovery of bands, to first record purchases, its a story any true music fan can identify with. Like Colin, I too have a box of old cassette tapes under my bed... I used to make mix tapes religiously. I remember seeing the skater kids and wanting to be hardcore like that, but I just wasn't and couldn't swallow that fakeness of pretending to be.

Anyhow, if you're a real music fan or have an interest in getting to better know any of the specific people who wrote books for 33 1/3, its a GREAT series and I can't wait to read some more of them. If you're a Decemberists fan, you have to read Let It Be.

I don't consider myself overly well-versed on the 33 1/3 series -- I've probably only read 6 or 7 titles at this point. A lot of the reviews of Colin Meloy's contribution rightly point out that this one is far, far from a comprehensive "breakdown" of the making of "Let It Be", the Replacements' most enduring classic, or even about the finished product itself.

That's okay -- after reading only a handful of titles in the series, it's clear that not every book is, or needs to be, a thorough dissection of the album in question (like, say, Michael Fournier's hyper-detailed take on "Double Nickels On The Dime"); some titles are much more personal takes (like, perhaps, Shawn Taylor's memoir revolving around "People's Instinctive Travels"), and some (like Kevin Courrier's "Trout Mask Replica" entry) revolve more around a band itself, and how a group deals with leading up to -- and living up to -- their most seminal work.

Meloy's book, however, isn't ANY of those models -- it's a rambling, semi-pointless narrative about growing up in a small town, focusing mostly on his relationship with his best friend and uncle. Mix tapes (made by the uncle) introduce Meloy to "college rock", inluding the Replacements, among many others.

But the 'Mats play only the tiniest, most tangential bit role in this personal story -- in 100 some-odd pages, it would be a grossly generous estimation to calculate that "Let It Be", or even the Replacements themselves, are mentioned in maybe (a whopping) 15 pages. (Meloy himself states early on in the book that after narrowing down his top 10 albums, it would be too difficult to choose one as being his absolute favorite -- not surprising, since the supposed subject of the book could really be ANY random record, for all the precious little whatsoever it seems to have to do with his stories about camping, videogames, talent shows, etc etc...)

While the book itself isn't too poorly written (other than some fairly odd grammatical errors sprinkled throughout), anyone expecting to glean any (ANY) information or thoughts on the Replacements OR "Let It Be" (I know, I know -- a far-fetched notion, considering the title and photo featuring that same album on the cover, right???) is in for a massive disappointment. For the Meloy fans looking to discover more about his cutesy experiences as a pre-adolescent at the end of the college-rock era -- well, there's more than enough here to satisfy.

The back cover summary was an instant sell for me; singer from a band I like writing about the influence of a band I like, with the added depth of adolescent discovery of music in a time before the internet made indie rock accessible to anyone. Being a music nerd, I wanted to read some hardcore fandom over The Replacements. I learned nothing about the band that I didn't already know. This is more of a musing of Colin Meloy's coming-of-age with music in general. It doesn't seem to fit with the 33 1/3 series.

Also, I wanted to see more of a voice in the writing. It's not bad, and there were snippets where I thought, Yes! This is what this book should be! But too much of it meanders in a very basic fashion that feels more like a book report than an inspired memoir.

Now I love the Decemberists and even enjoy the Colin Meloy sings Morrissey Ep but if you are looking for in-depth, fly-on-the-studio-wall-type account of this seminal album or even if you are looking for breathtaking critical rundowns, you should look elsewhere. The book is charming as autobiography but reads as a weak entry in this series when read against the tour de force of say Franklin Bruno... yes I know they all almost read as underplayed compared to the boook on Armed Forces but I didn't buy those.

I think the 33 1/3 book series is an interesting premise, having a musician write about how another band or musician influenced or inspired them. It provides an insight into both realms, and who better to convey a musicians world, then a fellow musician?

I purchased this book, because I really appreciate the band "The Decemberists" and admire the uber-wordsmith Colin Meloy. Having read an interview where he stated that he had considered a career in writing, I thought this book would not only be well written, but be an interesting insight into the singer himself.

And so it was. It's filled with detailed memories of his growing up in Montana. It's a very honest recounting, and he doesn't spare himself from including some painful personal moments. It starts off with his first purchase of a Replacements Album when he was about ten, all the way through to his Jr. High years, and has a sort of epilogue like chapter where he plays in the bands hometown and is able to sort of personally walk in their footsteps.

The Replacements were the soundtrack to his coming of age years, reading this book takes you back, you simply can't read it without thinking about your own elementary school and junior high years, and about the bands and musicians that kept us company through those moments, channeling and giving voice to our own emotions.

Meloy's book is a decent autobiographical look at his experiences discovering music as a child, but it really tells you nothing about the making of (or meaning of) the Replacements' most famous album.

After reading the incredible 33 1/3 book on Paul's Boutique, I was expecting to actually learn about the Replacements, or about the creation of Let It Be. Instead, I learned about Meloy's childhood buddy and hiship uncle who introduced him to music. The book was indeed well-written, but not at all what I was expecting.

If you want to learn about the making of Let it be, STAY AWAY!

I've read the other reviews and I noticed the poorer ones concerned the fact that this is not a typical 33 1/3 book -- it is mainly the coming-of-age musings of The Decemberists' singer/songwriter Colin Meloy and how "Let It Be" had a major influence on his life and music.

If you've never heard of Colin Meloy or The Decemberists, I must be honest and say you may not enjoy this book nearly as much as I did. Meloy is one of the best at what he does at the present moment, and this nostalgic book takes us back to his elementary school days in Montana where there were only two local record stores that mostly sold Top 40 music.

It's Meloy's uncle that first introduces the him to The Replacements, and the record (actually cassette) was soon to be the main soundtrack for his adolescent years. You won't find Meloy picking through each song and breaking down what Paul Westerburg was thinking or feeling when he wrote them. Meloy talks about how these songs affected HIM, and he sparingly quotes lyrics that were comforting to him at the time, an awkward pre-teen who shied away from mainstream music once he heard such bands as Depeche Mode, Robyn Hitchcock, Guadalcanal Diary, and many others. "Let It Be" spoke to Meloy in grand ways, enabling him to grow up with a sense that *someone else* out there knew exactly how he felt.

This book brought back so many memories of my own early youth (Melow is only 4 years younger than me) and listening to bands like R.E.M. and The Smiths and how my friends would just stare at me when I talked about them and couldn't believe I wasn't into AC/DC or Judas Priest. Bands like The Replacements changed my life, much like Meloy, opening up a a broad spectrum of emotions and feelings that made me feel like I was perhaps just a little different from my friends, but in no way odd. "Let It Be" the album is the soundtrack for an entire disaffected generation of music listeners raised on Top 40 but who rebelled against it. This book is a perfect complement.