Books on music that really sing

This year is the 20th anniversary of landmark grunge albums such as Nirvana's "Nevermind" and Pearl Jam's "Ten." Though music fans have heard the tale of Seattle, Kurt Cobain and Sub Pop Records ad nauseam, a new tome is telling it once more with feeling -- lots of feeling, from lots of people. "Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge" (Crown Archetype, $25) by Mark Yarm, former senior editor at Blender, is exhaustive and exhausting. Its 555 pages are culled from some 250 interviews, probing a scene that lacked many of rock and roll's more colorful notorieties.

Before the media blitz turned Seattle into a cash cow, the city's music was made by bored, snarky kids looking to entertain themselves and irritate the squares. Seattle was hardly in the business of churning out the Sunset Strip rock stars that dominated the charts in the late '80s.

"Our Town" makes clear that it wasn't cool to become that stereotype. Green River and Mudhoney member Mark Arm recounts how he witnessed former Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten throwing a fit because there was no La-Z-Boy in his dressing room. "You're supposed to be punk rock!," Arm says of Rotten's "outrageous behavior." When Soundgarden toured with wild boys Guns N' Roses, the grunge band earned the nickname "Frowngarden" because its members weren't indulging in strippers and cocaine. "We weren't like that," recalls bassist Ben Shepherd. "We were there to play music." Though Seattle had a notorious drug problem of its own, "Our Town" paints heroin as the antithesis to coke, music's favorite party powder.

Anecdotes about the scene's salad days, with its supportive atmosphere, take a grotesque turn once money enters the picture. Bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam sought out the major labels but couldn't control the co-opting of the scene by the mainstream, which seemingly exacerbated all the local bands' existing evils: drugs, ruined friendships, contract wars -- the list goes on. The timeline slows to a halt with a series of low points, including Cobain's suicide, the death of nine fans during a Pearl Jam set in Denmark and the overdose of Alice in Chains' Layne Staley.

By the end, "Our Town" has thoroughly dissected the '90s music scene in Seattle, yet there's no way any book could overstate just how monumental the era truly was.

In contrast to grunge's darkness and unappealing vices, disco was all about feeling good and keeping the party going. Nile Rodgers of Chic was one of dance music's hottest figures, churning out platinum hits like "Dance Dance Dance," "Le Freak" and "Good Times" with partner Bernard Edwards.

But before he held court with mounds of cocaine in the ladies' room of Studio 54 (Really, Nile?), Rodgers was an asthmatic kid who moved back and forth multiple times between New York and Los Angeles. His autobiography, "Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny" (Spiegel & Grau, $27), starts out with surprisingly muted stories about childhood with his drug-addicted radical-hippie mother; the book finds its footing when he achieves massive success with Chic. The advent of the "Disco Sucks" movement stunned Rodgers, who saw a screeching halt to Chic's hit-making power. After the band dissolved, Rodgers went on to create music with and for everyone from David Bowie ("Let's Dance") to Madonna ("Like a Virgin"), often butting heads with record label executives who doubted his vision. (The head of Capitol Records said Rodgers' remix of Duran Duran's "The Reflex" was "too black sounding." It became their biggest-selling single.) Perhaps his most impressive feat was getting sober and overcoming the self-doubt that drugs helped smother for years. Music trends come and go, but good times don't have an expiration date.

One guy who has seen his fair share of the spotlight was never actually its focus. Photographer Ken Regan toured with the Rolling Stones five times, covered The Band's "Last Waltz" and George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh and shot for publications including Time, People and The New York Times Magazine. "All Access: The Rock 'n' Roll Photography of Ken Regan" (Insight Editions, $75) is a collection of his phenomenally intimate pictures of rock royalty (Sonny and Cher making the bed, Alice Cooper playing ping-pong with Santa Claus at Alexander's department store), as well as electric live shots, paired with amusing recollections of his encounters with the stars. Regan wisely keeps his words to a minimum, gets out of the way and makes his pictures the main attraction.