OK.  I’m of Ukrainian descent.  Covid.  A sleet storm outside. Everything costs 30% more.  And yet.  Nearly every day there’s a surprise in ARC’s mailbox.  Sure the mail is running 3 days late, but then again, packages like the one above, rare and amazing, are placed on my desk…

This 1963 autobiography by the recently deceased Ms. Ross has an eye-catching title and tells a great story of an important pioneer female songwriter.  She was the top pop woman songwriter in the late 50s and 60s writing “Lollipop” (No. 2 for the Chordettes in 1958 ) and “Judy’s Turn to Cry” (Lesley Gore’s version reached No. 5), a tune I remember from roller-rink days. Keeping that sweet-tooth theme a-goin’ she wrote “Candy Man” with Fred Neil in 1961.   It was a short stint working with a young Phil Spector, and his theft of a riff she penned, that made her eventually quit the industry and led to bouts of depression.  She survived to write this revenger, live off her royalties and later in life move to Nashville to write Country tunes. 

While we’re toying with the subject, just a few days earlier, these two gems arrived.

  
Now that there Jimmy Morrison is not the same guy down in Père Lachaise, despite the book’s citation in the Library of Congress Catalog. This fanciful novel suggests how things would go if that certain rocker gave finance a spin.  The best parts are the disclaimers occupying a large portion of the preface, insisting the copyrighting of names is a mere bagatelle, tale to tell.  One of those.

The spiderman book claims to be taken from a abandoned xerox copy of the text Mr. Dylan decided not to publish, prior to his change of mind, reproduced here page by page, as a public service. 

All of this is to say that our collection of nearly 25,000 serious music books is growing a tad sideways. We save the canon AND the fodder…