In the current issue of Spin, a photo on page 69 shows punk-rock girl Brody Dalle - originally lead singer of the Distillers, now with Spinnerette - snuggling up with a good book. A really good book, actually. One of mine. Brode is lovingly clutching the me-edited anthology Abuse Your Illusions: The Disinformation Guide to Media Mirages and Establishment Lies.

Thanks to Brody and Spin for the product placement, Darren Ankenman for the photo, and Richard Metzger and Bradley Novicoff for the heads-up.

The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock & Roll, written by Eric Segalstad, illustrated by Josh Hunter (North Atlantic Books, 2009)

Amazon | publisher’s page

From North Atlantic Books:

Excess and tragedy are the stuff of music legend, but it is only with hindsight that deeper patterns emerge. None of these is more striking than the deaths at age 27 of some of the greatest musicians of our time.

Jimi Hendrix. Janis Joplin. Jim Morrison. Brian Jones. Kurt Cobain. Founding bluesman Robert Johnson. All died at 27. Their stories, as well as those of ill-fated members of the Grateful Dead, The Stooges, Badfinger, Big Star, Minutemen, Echo & the Bunnymen, and The Mars Volta, are here presented for the first time as a profound and interlocking web that reaches beyond coincidence to the roots of artistic causality and fate.

The 27s is the first comprehensive account of the lives and legacies of the thirty-four musicians who make up (to date) rock’s most notorious myth. It is also a capsule history of rock & roll, twisting and turning through decades and genres, unfurling layers of numerology, philosophy, and astrology along the way. The text is complemented by compelling and multifaceted artwork that brings a nonlinear graphic-novel edge to this major contribution to the study of rock culture.

Audio and photos of Morrissey reading a passage from Within a Budding Grove (aka In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower), the second volume of In Search of Lost Time:

Those few steps from the landing to Albertine’s door, those few steps which no one now could prevent my taking, I took with delight, with prudence, as though plunged into a new and strange element, as if in going forward I had been gently displacing the liquid stream of happiness, and at the same time with a strange feeling of absolute power, and of entering at length into an inheritance which had belonged to me from all time.

This was at a show by Howard Devoto’s Luxuria, whose song “Mlle” opens with the original French version of this passage.

{Via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog}