Off the Record: An Oral History of Popular Music. Ed. by Mitchell Fink.

by Joe Smith, Mitchell Fink (Editor)

A plethora of musical legends, ranging from Pat Boone to David Lee Roth, tell of their careers in music, providing an exhaustive pop music history

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

429 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Librarian Note: There are more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Sally Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good oral history with musicians, producers, and business-folk. There's no thesis or agenda save for letting some folks talk about their experiences. This one will be on the shelves of rock historians as a resource.

[Don Gorman · Rating 2 out of 5]

(1 1/2). Joe Smith was a major player in the music business for decades. He ran labels, he signed artists, he was a prominent DJ early on. So I thought this book was going to be a really fun memoir. Wrong again. This book is snippets. About 100 or so short reveals by different folks from the music industry spanning over 50 years. Some artists, some songwriters, some producers, from the Big Band era to the present. You pick and choose the ones you are interested in. A tiny bit of new information here and there. Not what I expected, not what I wanted. Mediocre stuff.

[Tony Sannicandro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good book. Short one or two page interviews of people in the music business. These are part of longer interviews that you can listen to online thru the Library of Congress. Some funny stuff comes out in the book, sometimes funny "ha ha", sometimes funny "Mmmmmmmmmmmm". A must read for anybody who loves music and have heard how screwy the business is.

[Chris C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved reading this as a teenager. I think I've only heard of some singers, musicians and industry people just because they were interviewed for this book. Lou Levy? Les Brown? Les Baxter? Bob Marcucci? Jerry Ragavoy? Nick Ashford? Chris Squire? Didn't matter to me, I just liked the format of the book. Basically Capitol Records president Joe Smith sat down with dozens of people and a tape recorder and said "tell me a story" and off they went. There's no question and answer thing here, just the interviewees saying whatever they wanted about their own story. There's a few funny omissions which are explained by Smith, Joe Cocker gave overly vague directions to his house, Colonel Tom Parker demanded money, Springsteen procrastinated too long, Sinatra couldn't be bothered, Chuck Berry's excuse for saying no made no sense etc etc. Luckily though, many people said yes and I recommend this highly and if there were audio tapes on youtube of the original interviews then I'd love to hear them Joe.

Oh, I just read he died 4 years ago.

[RA · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very entertaining, lots of stories by a wide variety of musicians, even the significant number of those whom I do not know. Anyone interested in the music biz needs to read this.

[Ensiform · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection credited to Joe Smith, edited by Mitchell Fink (1988). This 430-page tome is a collection of brief anecdotes culled from interviews with over 200 music personalities, from Artie Shaw to David Lee Roth --- featuring huge luminaries such as Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Ben E. King, Buddy Rich, Ella Fitzgerald, Tom Jones... an impressive assemblage. However, I take issue with the authorial credit: in no sense is this a book “by” Joe Smith; his writing here consists of about eight pages in total. These are stories told to Joe Smith, which is how the credit ought to run. Why is he listed as the author? Basically, this is a vanity project: Smith was the CEO of Warner’s, and who’s the publisher? Warner Books! What a coincidence! Sure, he made the interviews and culled them down into anecdotes, but... well, then, what did the editor, Mitchell Fink, do?

Anyway, Smith’s ego aside, this is an interesting collection to flip through. Its broad scope is impressive, but also works against the book in that each interviewee’s remarks are brief, three pages at the most. So you get very little substance from each subject. As a whole, it’s an adequate, skim-the-surface overview of pop music from the jazz era to the late ‘80s, and it does offer a nice idea of how the business has changed over the decades, but the interviews are unfortunately ultimately forgettable.

[Babs M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly recommend this read to rock and roll fans. It was published in 1988 but very interesting to read these 1-3 pages from integral people in R&R and the business of R&R. I would give it 5 stars and it is pretty comprehenisve but lacking a few people that were/are still alive I would have enjoyed hearing from.

[Anne Barkema · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's not a "sit down and read from cover to cover" type of book but it does have some nice biographies of many greats. And some introductions to folks that I might not have explored otherwise.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of interesting interviews, but also a lot of boring interviews. Worth a read if you're really into music.