Nick Tosches, "Who Killed the Hit Machine?" You either like Tosches' (ahem) "muscular" prose style or you hate it (I fall into the "hate it" camp), and that will probably color your reception of this article. Mock profundities like, "Skip to 1958. Yes, skip. That is what records do. Even CDs. They skip," certainly don't help. For all that, this is a great story, and Tosches is surprisingly on top of it. The piece is, of course, a failure, but even I can't blame Nick for that: there's simply not enough space to cover the Warner Brothers story here. On balance, he does as well as one could with great material and a limited word count. Even though you'll have to slog through some tough prose, this is, unfortunately, required reading.

"Beyond the Sea" vs. "La Mer." It may just be because I love the song, or it may be that Friedwald has a way with words, but I recommend that you read this piece.

The British Invasion. Best thing in the book, and the one piece that made me feel marginally less sad for blowing four bucks. What strikes me (my parents experienced the British Invasion firsthand, if that gives you some sort of generational hook to hang my hat on) is how genuinely exciting and vital the whole thing actually was. A fairly obvious point, one would think, but, as is so often the case, one would be wrong. The mists of time and the inability of the Sixties generation to recount any event in their lives without also asserting its truly cosmic significance have served to dull the astounding social import of the event. (The shorthand: nothing, Elvis, Beatles, Ed Sullivan, Stones, Woodstock is pretty much what the typical member of my social set maintains in terms of cultural knowledge for the era.)

I'm certainly no nostalgist, but it is, on occasion, important to lay aside the cynicism and really try to understand how we got from there to here. Pieces like this are a good way to do that. Plus, it's in oral history format, which makes for really easy reading. Highlights: Freddie Garrity: "[A]ll of a sudden you've got girls coming out of your ears! And, you know, I didn't want to go deaf," Marianne Faithfull: "I think [Bob Dylan] was really irritated that I wouldn't run away with him to America, or whatever it is that he wanted. And then I went off with bloody Mick Jagger! I can see what he means, quite frankly," and a tragically self-deluded Dave Davies postulation that maybe, "... all us crazy guys from the 60s are alive and well for a reason, and there's still something I've yet to say." Far be it from me to endorse the purchase of Vanity Fair, but if you do feel compelled, this article is the rationalization.