Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears [Paperback]

Geoffrey O'Brien (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 26, 2005

Dazzling and original, Sonata for Jukebox is a brilliant foray into how pop music has woven itself into our lives since the dawn of the recording age. Geoffrey O'Brien delves into twentieth-century pop music as we experience it: a phenomenon that is at once public and private, personal yet popular. O'Brien's book is more than a history of pop music, although fragments of that history find their way into its pages. And it reaches far beyond a memoir, although it is an entertaining biography of the author's ears and his family's exceptional affinity, with pop music--his father was a leading New York DJ and his grandfather led a dance band in Philadelphia. Ultimately, it is an exploration of what we as listeners hear, what we think we hear, and how we connect that experience with the rest of our lives. The dizzying array of musical references plays like a sound-track as O'Brien explores how our lives are lived in the presence--and in the memory of the presence--of music.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This superb exploration of "some aspects of how lives are lived in the presence—and the memory of the presence—of music" is in some respects a companion piece to O'Brien's earlier The Browser's Ecstasy, his meditation on reading. These 15 new essays show O'Brien's remarkable sensitivity to his chosen subject and a stunning gift for crafting literary gems. But at almost twice the length of his earlier work, this volume allows O'Brien to luxuriate in his ideas, stretching them to touch on various music genres in a way that makes the book a joyous reading experience. The essays are united by O'Brien's search to capture how a listener "hears, or imagines he hears, and how he connects that listening to the rest of his life." Thus, an essay on the revival of interest in composer Burt Bacharach explores the forgotten ways mid-1960s pop music was defined by "genre-bending and marketing crossovers." An essay on Harry Smith's groundbreaking Anthology of American Folk Music collection of recordings examines how, for "a generation that lacked much sense of common national tradition it became the equivalent of Percy's 'Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.' " Most striking, however, are the essays in which O'Brien explores the way music defined—and now defines how he remembers—his own formative youthful experiences, from the impact on his musical sensibility of his father, a popular radio disk jockey, to the way the pop music of the 1960s defined how he and his friends lived "as if we anticipated a world of exhilarated tenderness punctuated by brilliant invention." What emerges in the end is a remarkable book.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The New Yorker

O'Brien, a poet and critic, narrates his life through the recordings he has listened to—45s, LPs, radio jingles—shaping his memoir as a sequence of musical madeleines. Moving chronologically, he expands on the assertion that "the age of recording is necessarily an age of nostalgia": the covers of jazz albums recall a childhood home where music was constant, even when it was "turned down so low it sounds like the scratching of a squirrel trapped in the walls" a Burt Bacharach song exhibits "well-bred melancholia, the hidden side of a Kennedy-era effervescence" and the Bee Gees' "How Deep Is Your Love?" incongruously takes over the lobby of a movie theatre in Osaka. But, for all the luxurious reminiscence, O'Brien is not merely a nostalgist, and finds the present as rich as the past—a healthy state for a critic, because, as he says, "you need ears cleared of that rattling debris to receive new signals."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (April 26, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582433291
• ISBN-13: 978-1582433295
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,586,250 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars O'Brien Pens Another Flawless Volume of Really Cool Stuff, July 12, 2004

By 

Cornelia Read (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life (Hardcover)

Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life is yet another stunning collection of cultural observations from poet/writer/critic/editor Geoffrey OÕBrien, "the thinking manÕs thinking man."

While framed as a series of essays on the history of American pop music, Jukebox is to the average collection of non-fiction pieces as JoyceÕs Dubliners is to a run-of-the-mill short story grouping. OÕBrien is just firing on so many cylinders, operating on so many levels, that the book pretty much transcends classification: one is tempted to appropriate musical terms of art in order to do the thing justice.

These essays use 20th Century pop tunes as touchstones for exquisite, haunting riffs on family, radio, loneliness, love, commercialism, companionship, loss, youth, ageÉ they give voice to ideas that loop and rise and fade, only to crackle forth again when we least expect them--like a snippet of BBC commentary on a shortwave, or some phrase of oboe melody in a Mozart piece--before evanescing once more.

What I found most enjoyable about this collection, however, was the accessibility of OÕBrienÕs references. His commentary is profound and original, but this isnÕt the sort of grandstanding "insider" claptrap that so often typifies music writing. ThereÕs no wink-wink nudge-nudge stuff about how it was really the bass playerÕs second cousin filling in on the B-side during that infamous Hamburg session, because (as "we" all know) PumpkinheadÕs ex-girlfriend had bronchitis that week. The author instead accords highly appropriate gravitas to songs we actually know, e.g. "Surfer Girl" and "Walk on By."

ThereÕs just something so pleasurable about reading the work of a guy who totally GETS the music weÕve been inundated with through the years. OÕBrien summarizes "IÕd Like to Teach the World to Sing" as "a Coca-Cola jingle transformed into the kind of song that a chorus of Chinese orphans might have sung in a late Ô50s movie about missionaries martyred by Communists." He articulates that the trouble with "Tie a Yellow Ribbon ÔRound the Old Oak Tree" is its "ineluctable stridency."

Jukebox doesnÕt bypass the contributions of Alan Lomax or Tin Pan Alley or Jimmie Rodgers or Paul Robeson to musical history, itÕs just that OÕBrien doesnÕt have to beat the underbrush for nuggets of footnotable obscurity in order to be taken seriously. He finds meaning in the ubiquitous, and shares this wisdom with an open handÑaccomplishments which are entirely too rare.

Perhaps the best way to summarize this book is with a description from within it:

"He will walk you through the history of music as though it were the history of the world, and as if both were nothing more than the history of this particular evening, the story of how you will somehow reach dawn."

A writer who can achieve that sonority and then observe, "I will know that old age has arrived when even the oldies are unfamiliar songs of younger generations," is a guy deserving both our respect and applause.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An utterly original thinker, April 11, 2006

By 

George Grella "Urbane citizen" (Brooklyn) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears (Paperback)

This book is pretty much impossible to describe well and truly, but anyone who truly loves music and has found themselves, through the course of life, frequently lost in the act of listening, or reminscing about the experience of hearing particular music, is urged to read this brilliant, imaginative, beautiful and moving work.

O'Brien's book about the experience of movie-going, "The Phantom Empire," estabished him as one of the great, unique movie viewers, and this one does the same for his listening. And that is what this book is about, listening. This is not about music, and that is an important distinction! It's about the experience of listening, and how what we listen to is incorporated into our personal history. But it's also about much more than that: his chapter on American Folk Music is one of the most astonishingly brilliant pieces of critical thinking about music I have ever read, his section on ambient music is subtle, mysterious and extraordinary.

Most of his listening, at least in this book, is of pop music, jazz, rock and other popular forms. But regardless of your listening habits, this book will be a pleasure and a beautiful companion to your own love of music.

0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Imaginative, but unreadable, July 13, 2010

By 

Andrew C. Noone "mezzogiorno" (Worcester, MA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears (Paperback)

While as an elementary music teacher and college piano professor I can appreciate O'Brien's love for pop music and his vast knowledge of it, I found the book to be unreadable. Imaginative writing does not include incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness lists of associations and trivia...I tried repeatedly to slog through it, but found it profoundly dull. And it's no small trick to make the Beach Boys and Beatles insipid.