Product Description

One of the greatest moments of College Rock in the 1980s, Let It Be had a huge impact on the fans who fell under its spell. For Colin Meloy, growing up in Montana – a state that’s strangely missing from the tour itineraries of almost every band – the album was a lifeline and an inspiration. In this disarming memoir, Meloy lovingly recreates those feverish first years when rock music grips you and never lets go.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #129297 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 106 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780826416339
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Booklist
Frontman for the band the Decembrists, Meloy reflects on his teenage discovery of the rock ethos and early appreciation of the Replacements, to whose work he was introduced by his uncle. Oddly, Meloy doesn't go into much detail about the recording of the album Let It Be. Instead, he offers an interesting coming-of-age story as an appropriate salute to an album and a band that were a consuming passion for him at an impressionable age. A nice period piece. Mike Tribby
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Colin Meloy is the lead singer and songwriter for the Decemberists. Their first two albums, Castaways and Cutouts and Her Majesty the Decemberists, have been released to widespread critical acclaim. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The fact that the Replacements had to endure that sort of Midwestern environment while trying to keep up a hard-case punk-rock image really appealed to my predicament. That they had to live through 40 below winters and frozen pipes, while surrounded by what I perceived as being a wholesome cultural backwater, brought the Replacements closer to me, closer to Montana. They seemed like the kind of band that could be practicing in my garage, my basement, and still be crunching out the same indelible music.

Customer Reviews

Surprisingly fresh
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.

Good Stuff
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.

Soundtrack: Decemberists, not Replacements
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.