Both books start out with the story of The Charlatans, but right away
differ on Who Provided The LSD for their audition at the Red Dog Saloon,
Virginia City: did the band bring it themselves like Sculatti & Seay say,
or was it the saloon manager who tried to lift their spirits
as according to Selvin?
Sculatti & Seay are far more critical, and that's of course a winner with me
(`Santana was not latin, not rock and not good ...', `Clapton committed sins
in the name of the blues which may never be erased ... [his] persistent
career as an MOR featherweight.')
Sculatti & Seay present a series of personalities and events that
get together into a narrative, a story that's going somewhere
(well, actually, nowhere);
Selvin shows Bill Graham's negative growth from actor to short-tempered
businessman, and that was very interesting and a
new angle to me, like the great extent of bad drug use;
but especially in the
second half Selvin's book fragments into a jumble of anecdotes, just
chronologically ordered; adding to my knowledge, certainly, a little
here and there, but I'd wish that Mr Selvin would have had more of a vision
to organize his material around.
I would have liked a little more delicacy too, some details are a little
unnecessary, like do we really want to know who slept when with poor Janis
Joplin? The interviews were conducted together with a student working on his
PhD thesis; one wonders what that thesis looks like.
Sculatti & Seay's discography was for a long time a major part of my CD
wish list, fulfilled over the years mostly by the people of
Metro Music and
Critic's Choice Music Catalog;
I did not like all of it but most of it was interesting, and some I
thought great, like the Barry Goldberg Reunion.
Selvin also did not lead me to any music I hadn't heard before, but then
I read Sculatti & Seay much earlier.
Sculatti & Seay have the better book, but it is short and out of print, so
Mr Selvin's is
a must for the information provided on the psychedelic era.
Gene Sculatti & Davin Seay: San Francisco Nights
The Psychedelic Music Trip
St. Martin's Press, New York, 1985
ISBN 0-312-69903-4
out of print
Joel Selvin
Summer of Love
The Inside Story of LSD, Rock & Roll, Free Love and High Times in The Wild
West
Plume Penguin, 1995
ISBN 0-452-27407-9