Music books round-up: A trip from generation Jazz to the Beat movement

Ian Thomson reviews Original Rockers, Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the '60s, and Billie Holiday: The Musician & The Myth

Wondrous sounds: Billie Holiday singing in the early 1950s (Getty Images)

For 30-odd years, Revolver Records was Bristol's premiere independent music shop and hang-out for people to exchange news of the latest Can, Sun Ra, King Tubby or other off-piste release. Stacked with collector's vinyl and giant loudspeaker boxes, the shop opened in 1970 or 1971 (the dates are uncertain) and is the subject of a delightful memoir, Original Rockers (Faber, £18.99) by Richard King, who worked there during the early 1990s after college.

Music has long been the vital expression of Bristol, with its mixed-race, multi-shaded community and old slave port connections, says King. Revolver Records was situated close to the city's edgy, tatterdemalion St Paul's area, where night and day a bass-heavy reggae sound pulsed from street corners. King witnessed the rise of the Bristolian turntable collective Massive Attack, and sold quantities of roots reggae by the likes of the melodica virtuoso Augustus Pablo (whose album Original Rockers gives this book its title).

Original Rockers reflects movingly on the friends, musical mentors and fly-by-nights who helped to make King the fine, rock-savvy writer he is today. The book contains one egregious error (it was not Damo Suzuki but Malcolm Mooney who sang on Can's first album, Monster Movie), but I loved every page of it.

As we know, the 1960s were no longer so fruitful or freak-out free once acid had taken hold. The Charles Manson murders of August 1969 exposed a dark underside of the American counter-culture, when the hippie heyday was beginning to peak and a bad magic had hatched beneath the California palms. Richard Goldstein, the celebrated Village Voice reporter and rock critic, chronicled the highs and lows of the decade in the newspaper's 'Pop Eye' (pun intended) column, which borrowed from the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe to comment on Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and other narcotically wired-up casualties of the times.

Goldstein's memoir of that extraordinary decade, Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life of Rock and Revolution in the '60s (Bloomsbury, £18.99) is tinged with an autumnal sense of loss and the self-examination of a 70-year-old man looking back on his life. Born in 1944 in the Bronx, Goldstein was initially wary of hippie culture with its tie-dye haberdashery and mellow, denim platitudes. ("This is a liberated tree", he remembers one student shouting at police from the top of a tree, "and I won't come down until my demands are met".) In time, however, Goldstein came to appreciate the 1960s as a continuation of the Beat movement of the 1950s and the Jazz generation of the 1920s. As well as being very funny, Another Little Piece of my Heart is an affecting meditation on the author's "budding queerness" and acceptance, finally, that he was gay.

John Szwed's Billie Holiday: The Musician & The Myth (Heine-mann, £20) is a musicologist's appreciation of the jazz singer and her "indelibly odd" voice with its precise diction and phrasing lagging behind the beat. Holiday said she wanted to sing "like Louis Armstrong played the trumpet". On stage she was supremely gorgeous and powerful because (unlike Mick Jagger and other Danny La Rue-style flouncers) she managed to keep still. The slightest raising of her arms in time to the music or silent snapping of her fingers was enough to make her more sexy and hip than any singer before or since. Hounded almost to death by US narcotics agents, she died wretchedly in 1959 at the age of 44, but her songs survive, and these are a marvel. Ian Thomson