WAMC's Ian Pickus speaks with Dylan Jones, the British GQ editor and author of The Biographical Dictionary of Popular Music: From Adele to Ziggy, the Real A to Z of Rock and Pop.
Jones doesn’t pull punches in his thoughtful, often hilarious and sometimes biting new book, an 800-something-page survey of all things pop that he finds worthwhile – and many he doesn’t.
I enjoyed the heartfelt rumination on the meaning of Brian Wilson, one of the longer entries in The Biographical Dictionary of Popular Music: From Adele to Ziggy, the Real A to Z of Rock and Pop, a book published by Picador. So I could only laugh when, hoping for a similar treatment of one of my favorites, I turned to the Crosby, Stills and Nash entry to read the following line: “A varnished log cabin.”
So it goes in this collection, which Jones writes was a project he had long flirted with but has only now completed, against the advice of his novel-minded editor. Lucky us.