After the Ball

After the Ball composed in 1892 is just the beginning. . .of this very personable, cheeky and charming history of pop music by an ex-student of history at Trinity College, Dublin, ex-teenage hearthrob famous (very briefly) for his rendering of the less-than-immortal You Turn Me On ( Come On Now Honey - You Know You Really Turn Me On! And When, When You Do - Huh! Huh! Huh! Huh! Huh! Huh! - That's My Song! ). Alas, Whitcomb never made it as the second Mick Jagger but this book which is about the pop industry and the taming process does make it. Whitcomb's thesis is simple: the music trade can take on all comers - all the mad men raging from the bush, screaming the blues, rocking to rag - and castrate them. To validate his case he put in a lot of hours searching out old ragtime composers, DJs, Artists & Repertoire, rock stars and crooners on both sides of the Atlantic and let them talk about manufacturing THE SOUND, much of which originally came unsanitized from the tenderloin districts of American cities. From the production of Yes, We Have No Bananas, which Whitcomb calls the archetypal patchwork, industrial folk song, to the perfumed '30's, to Sinatra and Sincerity to R & B which came from the armpits and orifices of America, Whitcomb stays on a nice, raunchy upbeat. Last heard from he was working as an A & R man for Mae West. This boy may go far. (Kirkus Reviews)