Best of 2001: Books

Best of 2001: The Year’s Finest Books
The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band
By Mötley Crüe with Neil Strauss
(Regan Books)
Having pillaged and plundered through the druggy, pornographic, hairy world of ’80s metal, Crüe’s survivors try to remember it all.

Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain
By Charles R. Cross
(Hyperion)
One band’s excess is another band’s tragedy. It doesn’t have a happy ending, but it’s still a page-turning look at the man who fell from Nirvana.

Positively 4th Streett: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina
By David Hajdu
(FSG)
Hajdu, an adept music biographer, this time explores Richard Fariña and the ’60s folk scene more than he does Bob Dylan.

What’d I Say?: The Atlantic Story
By Darius James, Ahmet Ertegun, et al.
(Welcome Rain)
A lavish collection of essays, photographs and oral biography celebrates the influence of Atlantic Records and Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and its other superstars.

Where Dead Voices Gather
By Nick Tosches
(Little, Brown)
Tosches, a champion of musical cranks, recalls Emmett Miller, the king of blackface “entertainment,” and Miller’s influence on musicians from Hank Williams to Wu-Tang Clan.