Lost in the Grooves: Scram's Capricious Guide to the Music You Missed

For the past 12 years, the L.A.-based magazine Scram has championed the work of musicians who might otherwise fly beneath the mainstream critical radar. Here, Scram co-editors Cooper and Smay display the sense of fun that distinguished their previous collection, Bubblegum Music Is the Naked Truth, in an immensely entertaining, informative and sometimes exasperating encyclopedia, in which more than 75 contributors offer over 250 entries (a series of ""miniature love letters"") about their favorite artists and albums. With praise offered for works by Captain Beefheart alongside the Cowsills, no genre or artist is considered outside the sphere of this book's interests: a sampling from the ""Ks"" includes late-'60s pop master Andy Kim, mid-'90s blues minimalist Junior Kimbrough, early-'70s conceptual art-rockers King Crimson and an overlooked 1971 masterpiece by the Kinks, Muswell Hillbillies, which influenced plenty an alt-country boy. While most of the albums and artists fall into the vast category that is pop music, there are also interesting offerings in the areas of Latin jazz (Cal Tjader), dub reggae (Scientist) and soul (Swamp Dogg). Spirited, knowledgeable writing by rockers (Meat puppets drummer Derrick Bostrom), novelists (Rick Moody and George Pelecanos) and a host of self-proclaimed music geeks might actually make you want to go out and buy Buckner & Garcia's Pac-Man Fever.