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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
And one more for the road, August 30, 2007
By tackling an almost impossible task...that of categorizing, rating and recounting the lives of songwriters in the first half of the twentieth century, Wilfrid Sheed has given us a book that is literally all over the map. While offering some fine insights, the author has delivered a hodgepodge of information. It's more than a little bewildering.
Written in a kind of gossip column style, Sheed gets off to a good start with chapters on Irving Berlin and George Gershwin. Without these two men leading the way, it's hard to imagine that the songwriting of the 1920s and 1930s....the heyday of American musical culture... could ever have happened. Add in Cole Porter and you have the great triumvirate of composers. It's always a hard choice to know whom else to include in such a broad sweep of biography and Sheed makes some solid but some strange choices as well. Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen certainly, but Cy Coleman? It seems plausible that Coleman was added because Sheed knew him.
"The House That George Built" doesn't exactly drive a straight line from beginning to end. The book has a circular feel to it. There are very few dates listed and it more or less rolls around as if the author stayed too long at a Hollywood party. But it's Sheed's narrative style that can irritate. Just when you expect him to end a sentence he carries on....and on. Where crisp writing is due, he delivers oatmeal.
Sheed does do a service in comparing New York to Hollywood and why certain composers stayed in one place or the other...or tried one place and returned to the other. He points out that collaboration between composers and lyricists often didn't last long, which must make Rodgers and Hammerstein's time together seem like an eon. There are some good quotes....Richard Rodgers said, "I can pee melody". That's as succinct a delivery as one can get and it's right on target. And Cy Coleman, for all the questions about including him in the book, said something that is remarkably true... "It never occurred to me that the songs were written by different people", Coleman states, "they were all just The Radio".
Side appearances are made by Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra (to name just three) and Sheed is good at connecting the dots between their careers and the careers of the men who wrote songs for them. Yet I'm not sure any song would ever have been written without the ever presence of booze. It seemed to fuel every songwriter and broke many a man along the way.
"The House That George Built" has its moments, but Wilfrid Sheed's delivery is too clever and cute by half. By sticking to a more objective stance he would have toned down the narrative and made a more concise read. It's a shame because he knows his stuff.
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19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
Not as good as it should be, July 30, 2007
I ran out and got this book because of its subject - American music. Also, I listen to Jonathan Schwartz and he raved about on his radio show on WNYC.
I was disappointed.
Sheed's book is a kind of a `riff' on the subject of classic American popular music. He writes about those song writers who penned at least two `standards' that is, songs that everybody knows - or at least everybody who likes this kind of music.
Berlin, porter, Gershwin, Rodgers, Kern - all of the usual suspects are here. But Sheed's take on them is - well, odd. He discusses their personal lives - based mostly on gossip - and takes a liking to none of them - they all were real bastards it seems. Or alcoholic depressives. Or closeted gays. Or too egotistical.
Regarding the music, he claims that no standard is one because of its lyric - all really great pop tunes have great melodies, but not all great melodies end up as standards because the lyric gets screwed up. For this reason, he claims that Porter's way with words never really helped him that much.
I find that hard to accept - or believe.
But it is the reason he thinks very little of Hammerstein and even less of Sondheim.
It is difficult to know exactly what he thinks because he writes in what can be called a `New Yorker' style. Page after page of blather is followed by a gem or two - then back to the pages of blather. On one page, he extols the talents of a Gershwin, and then a few pages later explains why all the songs you thought were great really are just junk.
He runs through a lot of personal opinions on people's personalities - like Sinatra. How he grew more and more childish as he got older. Or Sammy Cahn - how terribly egotistical he was. These opinions color the author's view of their work - why he doesn't say. I mean, what do I care that Richard Rodgers was probably the worse person in the world to work with - I didn't know him and don't care. I just love his music.
He fails to mention an important point about Sinatra. Before him, singers sang the songs of the day - take a look at the output of one Bing Crosby in his early years. It was Sinatra who insisted on singing great songs, no matter that they were written years before. He personally revived interest in such standards as `Night and Day' and `The Song is You' because of his recordings of them.
I was disappointed. I know that the author is supposed to be some kind of stylistic genius - maybe he is, but this book doesn't prove it. It doesn't compare with many of the other books out there that discuss the same subject.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Nostalgia from the thirties, December 17, 2007
I like a Gershwin tune, how about you? I play the piano every night -- Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart, Lerner & Loewe, Harry Warren, Irving Berlin. This is a book of reminiscences in conversational style about the composers of the Golden Age of American popular music -- an age that died in 1950 and will never come back. It was killed off by the electric guitar, the ending of Broadway Musicals, and the death of programs on the radio like the Lucky Strike Hit Parade. It is a good book, but the conversational style gets a little boring after a while.
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3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Snob appeal, August 23, 2007
I couldn't wait to start my reading of a subject I love, the song writers on Broadway and Hollywood. So many great songs came out of the 30's 40's and 50's. But reading Mr. Sheed book makes me think he is upset that he did not write any songs people will remember. He seems to have scorn for some of the greatest writers as if he was envious of them. I would have much rather had the history of the songs written, then a book writen in English and cliche' well above my level.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
The House That George Built, February 13, 2008
I bought this book because of my interest in the subject matter. I was disappointed in the author's (Wilfred Sneed) writing style which became laborious, and at times redundent. I do not, however, argue with his opinion of the various composers...it's his book and he's entitled to state his views. I would recommend this book to anyone with a desire to learn about the great 20th century composers, but unless they have a deep interest I believe they will tire of it before they finish the Berlin and Gershwin chapters.
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2 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Disappointing, August 27, 2007
I was disappointed that the true or false answer to each statement did not come until several paragraphes after the statement. The explanation as to the validity of the statement is interesting and important but a true or false answer should have been stated before the explanation for the answer./.
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