![]() Myers's goal in Anatomy of a Song is to produce a "love story." It doesn't "purport to be a list of the best songs ever recorded," he writes. He's not trying to produce breathless fan writing or promotion all the songs he examines have that inexplicable power of persistence, classics that have entered the permanent deposit of popular song, and none of them needs a sales agent. There's an odd dichotomy in Anatomy of a Song, for Myers in the book seems a highly developed critic, fascinated by the technical aspects of musical production, and yet at the same time the least judgmental writer about music since the folding of Teen Beat magazine. The book runs from Lloyd Price's 1952 "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" to R.E.M.'s 1991 "Losing My Religion." The entries tend toward an interview format, an oral history with songwriters, performers, and producers all given their say about how, for example, Dion's 1961 "Runaround Sue" began life as a sing-along at a party, or Pink Floyd's 1979 "Another Brick in the Wall" was prompted by the group's desire to hide from their fans behind a brick wall. Nesmith's Facebook post is a wonderful summary of everything that's fascinating, silly, naive, charming, and pretentious about the figures chronicled in Myers’s Wall Street Journal writing-and in the new book that gathers 45 of those columns about popular song (in homage to the 45-rpm singles on which they first appeared). He does a column called 'Anatomy of a Song,' and we were talking about 'Different Drum.' I tried to explain the idea of the spiritual center of a song, but I don't know how well I did." She died in 1980, leaving an inheritance that would finally dig her struggling son out of the financial hole he had been in since he paid an absurd premium to escape his contract with the Monkees in 1970.įewer people know that Nesmith also wrote some songs along the way, including a near hit for the young Linda Ronstadt called "Different Drum." But the jazz critic Marc Myers remembers, and in a Facebook post in October 2013, Nesmith noted, "I had a nice talk with Marc Myers at the Wall Street Journal the other day. She sold off the resulting company to Gillette in 1979 for $48 million-and it was a brilliant move, unloading the invention at perhaps its peak value, given that the dot-matrix printers of the computer revolution would soon render Liquid Paper without much of a market. ![]() ![]() It has the shape of an urban legend, the kind of silly rumor that similarity of names would produce back in the pre-Internet era, but the tale of his inventor-mother turns out to be true: Bette Nesmith Graham really did invent the typewriter correction fluid in 1958.
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