BOOKS

HARDENING ROCK

edited by

Little, Brown

Hardening Rock is decidedly the best rock photo/lyric collection to come down the pike. Chipman and his collaborators not only had access to a wealth of material from Time-Life’s photo files, and apparently enough bread to get rights to print all the lyrics, they also had a true sensitivity for rock and trashy pop music. Hardening Rock gleams where almost all other attempts have flunked.

Chipman is a bit of an academic, and both he and X.J. Kennedy in their brief introductions try to make a little more of the music than is there. It’s all offset, though, with the good taste to open the book with:

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to sing a song that tells a little story, that makes a lot of sense: A wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom” —Elvis Presley

The photo selection is the best part of it, by far. Not merely star photos, but pictures of audiences and bizarre ' ’50’s relics (the book sort of pretends that it’s about the ’50’s, though songs as current as “Dead Man’s Curve” are featured).