Friday, March 2, 2012

Even More Rock Family Trees


Music journalist Peter Frame has been drawing and telling the history of rock, using"family trees" since the late 70s.
I don´t know how many hours I have been smiling, reading the first two volumes, published in 1979 and 1983 (unfortunately I have missed a couple of books too), and now he´s at it again with "Even More Rock Family Trees" (Omnibus 2011).

I don´t care if this is perfect history telling or not, or if some details are missing or wrong, because this is great fun. It´s almost as you may watch the history of rock from a bird´s view, with lots of good stories, an all of them hand written!

In this volume Frame also includes some trees made by Paul Barber, the only other tree worker he admires. Barber made the "Miles Davis Live Bands 1955-75" tree. This is not a jazz book of course, but I was a bit surprised to find Elton Dean and Mark Charig in "Elton John´s Extended Family Tree", in the band Bluesology with Long John Baldry.
Other artists/topics/fields regularly mentioned in this blog, may be found in Martin Carthy´s and Fairport Convention´s trees.

The other rock family tree volumes are :
Rock Family Trees (1979)
Rock Family Trees Volume 2 (1983)
The Beatles & Some Other Guys (1997)
More Rock Family Trees (1998)

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