Crawdaddy! The Magazine of Rock

Many books come out each year deconstructing rock music: The musicians, their albums, their songs, their showering habits, and their other habits. It’s here where we’ll take an excerpt of a book for you to check out before you make the purchase. As of now these will exclusively feature the venerable 33 1/3 series, which picks apart an album by a band or musician. In the future, we hope to include more rock books of all varieties.

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The only trouble with talking to Jerry Wexler is that, again, he is a conversationalist of the old school. Which is to say, if as a professor I’m well versed in digression, Jerry is fully capable of following me wherever I so digress. The topic of Dusty in Memphis could have taken us anywhere, and it did. But we’d return to the subject when my own sense of responsibility, sometimes dormant, was awakened—or when Jerry helped me to remember why I’d called in the first place. He did, after all, have other things to do.

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