The dirty, dangerous and demented side of punk rock will be exposed tonight in a conversation at the Grammy Museum when some old hands sit down to talk about their new books.

The conversation will feature an appearance by David Thomas, frontman of Pere Ubu. He may talk about his script for the stage performance "Bring Me the Head of Ubu Roi," which is available on the Kindle, and he may talk about his experiences on the vanguard of punk and rock.

His roots go deep in the Cleveland music scene, and he's joining three musicians-turned-authors whose careers all overlapped there; they've been traveling together as the Cleveland Confidential Book Tour. Thomas and Cheetah Chrome both played in Rocket From the Tombs, breaking off into different bands in the 1970s. Chrome became guitarist for the Dead Boys, as the title of his memoir makes clear: "Cheetah Chrome - A Dead Boy's Tale From the Front Lines of Punk Rock." It recounts his ups, downs, very loud music, epic drug use and improbable survival.

Also on the bill is Mike Hudson, who turned to writing after his stint in the band the Pagans. He'll be reading from two of his books -- "Jetsam" and "Diary of a Punk" -- expect more ups, downs, very loud music, epic drug use and improbable survival.

Slightly off that path is Bob Pfeifer's debut novel, "University of Strangers," a fiction of murder and celebrity. Pfeifer was president of Hollywood Records and an executive at Epic/Sony who worked with a diversity of bands: Alice Cooper, Ornette Coleman and Screaming Trees.

The authors will read and then have a conversation with moderator Chris Morris from Variety. The event, which begins at 7:30 p.m., is free, although reservations are required. Details and reservations are available here.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: David Thomas in 2003. Credit: Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times

The letters of John Lennon will be published in October 2012 by Little, Brown, the publisher announced Friday. "The Lennon Letters" have been compiled in cooperation with Yoko Ono, Lennon's widow. It's the first time she has given permission for a selection of his letters to be published.

Editing the book and writing its introduction is Hunter Davies, the official Beatles biographer, who has tapped Ono's own archives as well as tracked down correspondence from Lennon that is in the hands of collectors, dealers and the original intended recipients.

In the release about "The Lennon Letters," the publisher points out that Lennon, who died in 1980, never had a chance to convert to email. He was inclined to reach for pen and paper:

He lived -- and died -- in an age before emails and texts. Pen and ink were his medium. John wrote letters and postcards all of his life; to his friends, family, strangers, newspapers, organisations, lawyers and the laundry -- most of which were funny, informative, campaigning, wise, mad, poetic, anguished and sometimes heartbreaking....many of the letters are reproduced as they were, in his handwriting or typing, plus the odd cartoon or doodle.

Letters by John Lennon that have come up for auction in recent years tend to do well. Apparently, even people who got lambasted in a letter by Lennon -- like an art critic at the Syracuse Post-Standard -- wanted to save what he'd written. That letter to the art critic, handwritten by Lennon in 1971, sold in 2003 for more than $38,000.

Although the price for "The Lennon Letters" has not yet been announced, it will be considerably less.

After the jump: a video of John Lennon's "Starting Over," for your Friday afternoon enjoyment.

Kate Bush had hoped to use the words of Molly Bloom for a track on her 1989 record, "The Sensual World." However, she was not able to get permission from the estate of James Joyce to use words from his seminal work, "Ulysses," and instead wrote song lyrics of her own.

Now, more than 20 years later, Bush has been given permission to use Molly Bloom's soliloquy as song lyrics. "I am delighted I have had the chance to fulfill the original concept," Bush told the BBC.

Bush has recorded "Flower of the Mountain" -- the song formerly known as "The Sensual World" -- with Molly Bloom's words from "Ulysses." The song will appear on her upcoming album "Director's Cut," slated for release May 16 in England.

RELATED:

James Joyce and postmodernism: a conflicted catechism

Bloomsday all over

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photos, from left: Kate Bush in 2005 (credit: Trevor Leighton); James Joyce in 1931 (credit: file).

Radiohead launches its own newspaper Tuesday, a one-time freebie that the band is distributing worldwide. Some fans in New Zealand and England have already picked up their copies of The Universal Sigh.

OK, it's a funny name for a newspaper -- but The Radiohead Star-Ledger wouldn't have had been quite so Radiohead-y.

The newspaper is reported to include pieces from Robert McFarlane ("Mountains of the Mind"), a nonfiction writer who explores remote regions in England and Ireland, and Jay Griffiths, a woman who writes both fiction and nonfiction.

The British newspaper the Guardian got its copy of The Universal Sigh from a very special newspaperman:

Shortly after noon all became clear, when a small figure in skinny jeans and a brown hat stepped into an old-fashioned newspaper booth outside the shop. "That's Thom!" Thom Yorke, the band's lead singer, began handing out copies of the paper, pausing for a handshake and a photograph with each fan, occasionally even smiling. Someone shouted "We love you, Thom!" but there was no press forward to see one of the biggest rock stars in the world. It wasn't that kind of queue.

The Universal Sigh is a collaboration between the band and the artist Stanley Donwood, and, in the sense that it is printed on newsprint and contains both words and images, might indeed be described as a newspaper. The news courtesy of Radiohead is unlikely to trouble Newsnight, however. "Everything was normal and as it should be until one day I woke up and there was something wrong," opens the first story in the paper. "I didn't know what it was, but it was a kind of persistent thing that I couldn't quite ignore."

It might be a stretch to expect him to show up here in L.A., but on Tuesday The Universal Sigh will be handed out at two locations: in Silverlake and at Amoeba Records in Hollywood, both at 1 p.m. Our sibling blog Pop & Hiss found a photo of the Universal Sigh that leaked last week.

The band is expected to release a "newspaper album" version of its new record, "The King of Limbs," which the Telegraph reports will include a CD, two vinyl records, artwork and a newspaper different from Tuesday's.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Top: Radiohead's Colin Greenwood and Thom Yorke performing at the Hollywood Bowl in 2008. Credit: Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times

Sammy Hagar can't drive 55, but he can have mind-melds with aliens, according to his new memoir,  "Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock." It happened around 1970, when Hagar was a struggling musician on welfare with a wife and small child, living in Los Angeles before moving to San Francisco. Hagar writes:

I was lying in bed one night at the Anastasia Street place in Fontana, asleep, dreaming. I saw a ship and two creatures inside of this ship. I couldn't see their faces. I just knew that there were two intelligent creatures, sitting up in a craft in the Lytle Creek forest area about twelve miles away in the foothills above Fontana. And they were connected to me,  tapped into my mind through some kind of mysterious wireless connection. I was kind of waking up. They said, in their communication to each other, no words spoke, "Oh, he's waking up. We've got to go."....  I didn't even know the word "UFO." I didn't know my astrological sign. I didn't know anything about astronomy or numerology or anything. But I dug into it.

In the book, cowritten with Joel Selvin, Hagar also writes about his Cabo Wabo nightclubs and tequila brand, but Hagar's stories of being a musician are the most interesting (except maybe the aliens part).

Hagar is particularly candid about his time playing with Van Halen, which was both good and bad.  Rolling Stone has an exclusive excerpt, in which Hagar praises Eddie Van Halen and writes rivetingly (and often profanely) about his dissipation. In one passage, Hagar writes:

He told me he cured himself by having pieces of his tongue liquefied and injected into his body. He also told me when he had his hip replacement, he stayed awake through the operation and helped the doctors drill the hole. What a fruitcake.

Hagar is currently on tour -- book tour, that is -- with "Red." Angelenos who missed him at Book Soup on Sunday can catch him at Barnes & Noble in Hungtington Beach on Monday at 7 p.m.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Sammy Hagar at a Borders book signing in New York on Tuesday. Credit: Mike Coppola /Getty Images

In our spring preview coming in this Sunday's paper, book critic David L. Ulin talks to Steve Earle about his debut novel, "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive." The book, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, will hit shelves in May, a week or two after Earles' album of the same name hits.

If the title of Earle's book sounds familiar, it should -- it was the last song recorded by Hank Williams before he died in 1953, at age 29, in the back of a car after taking a fatal combination of alcohol and drugs. Ulin writes:

That lonesome death, because of drugs and alcohol, centers the novel, which revolves around a character named Doc, a physician fallen into heroin addiction, who gave the singer his final injection. Ten years later, Doc is living in a San Antonio flophouse, performing back-alley abortions, haunted by his failures and his sins. "I'd always heard," Earle notes, "that there was a doctor traveling with Hank when he died. When I buckled down, I discovered that Hank had been seeing a guy named Toby Marshall, who was not a doctor; he was a quack who claimed to be able to cure alcoholism with chloral hydrate. But I thought it would be more interesting if my character was a real doctor, so I went with that."

Earle is, of course, known as a musician, one whose past struggles with substance abuse were widely publicized (he went to prison in the early '90s, and was paroled in 1994). But he doesn't see writing a book as being all that different.

"I've always written stories," he says. "My songs are stories. A lot of people wonder how to write a story in three minutes. With a book, you have to figure out what to prolong and what not to."

Still, he admits, "Wrestling a novel to the ground was about 100 times harder than I expected. In the middle of it, I swore I'd never do it again. But now that it's done, I've got another idea."

There's more to the book, which includes young Mexican immigrants and an unexpected turn into magic realism; read the complete article about it here. And after the jump, another music video from Steve Earle: his 1988 breakthrough hit, "Copperhead Road."

Yony Leyser had been kicked out of CalArts and recently celebrated his 21st birthday when he landed in Lawrence, Kan., and decided to try to make a documentary about William Burroughs. 

Despite the fact that Burroughs had been dead for a decade and Leyser had never made a documentary before, the result is the quite excellent "William S. Burroughs: A Man Within." It's a star-studded portrait of the author, his peculiarities and the deep saturation of his persona through underground arts and culture in the late 20th century. It's been playing in festivals for the last year; it airs Tuesday night on PBS stations nationwide.

Leyser came to Burroughs through his iconic book "Naked Lunch," which someone gave to him as a high schooler in Chicago. "It was so obscene in such a good way, shocking and amazing all at once," Leyser told The Times in a phone interview from Berlin. Burroughs' book was, he says, "my entry point to punk rock, surrealist art, literature, the Beat Generation -- it was an amazing diving point."

So how did a kid with no experience and few connections get directors David Cronenberg, John Waters and Gus Van Sant, actor Peter Weller, rockers Iggy Pop, Laurie Anderson, Patti Smith, Genesis P-Orridge and literary agent Ira Silverberg to talk to him? "When you're young, people want to help you out," he says. "When they heard it was about Burroughs, they were very receptive."

Much of the film's rarely seen archive footage came from this general goodwill toward the project, people digging up old films and videotapes that had been stashed away in basements. "Even Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth had Super-8 that had never been transferred," Leyser says.

As fitting a documentary about Burroughs, the film isn't exactly linear. Leyser uses stop-motion animation with wire figures to frame sections focusing on different aspects of Burroughs' life: his books, his boyfriends, the accidental killing of his wife in Mexico, his move to Kansas from New York, his art, his drugs, his guns.

And through it all, there is Burroughs' distinctive voice. "If you had a choice, would you rather be a poisonous snake or a nonpoisonous snake?" he reads in voiceover. And later: "I bring not peace, but with a sword."

The version of "William Burroughs: A Man Within" that will broadcast Tuesday night on PBS has been cut to fit the slot of the show Independent Lens. A longer, 88-minute version that has been showing at festivals is available on DVD from Oscilloscope Pictures for $23.99. 

The trailer for "William Burroughs: A Man Within" is after the jump.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: William Burroughs at the Earl McGrath Gallery with his art piece, "Don't Sit On This Chair." Credit: Michael Edwards / Los Angeles Times 

On Monday, the Hairpin paged through an old Janis Joplin bio, revealing what was in the iconic rocker's purse, circa 1970. Amongst the chaos of motel room keys, vintage cigarette holder, makeup, matches and (empty) bottle of Southern Comfort, there were two books.

The books were "Zelda," the biography of Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald by Nancy Milford, and Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward, Angel."

In 1969, L.A. Times writer Robert Hilburn called Joplin rock ’n’ roll’s biggest star. "People seem to have a high sense of drama about me," she told Hilburn backstage at the Hollywood Bowl. "Sure, I could take better care of myself. I suppose I could eat nothing but organic foods, get eight hours of sleep every night, stop smoking. Things like that. Maybe it would add a couple years to my life. But what the hell?"

Though reading "Zelda" might have served as a cautionary tale against a kind of recklessness, Joplin was living her life to excess. In October 1970, just months after that tour where she dumped out the contents of her purse, she was found dead in her motel room in Hollywood.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Janis Joplin in 1970. Credit: Associated Press

Photographer Autumn de Wilde will be signing copies of her Death Cab for Cutie photo book, called, appropriately, "Death Cab for Cutie," on Thursday night at Silverlake's Intelligentsia coffeshop.

The book includes more than 200 photos of the band, reminiscences and ephemera. '"It's really important to document these artists long-term," De Wilde told Spin in November, when the book was released. "Certain parts of these artists go away forever if you don't capture them in photos."

De Wilde will be signing "Death Cab for Cutie" (the book, not the band) from 8 to 10 p.m. at Intelligentsia, and Skylight Books will be on site with copies for sale.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Death Cab for Cutie in 2005. Credit: Autumn de Wilde

KISS drummer Peter Criss will pen a memoir, publisher Scribner announced Tuesday. "Makeup to Breakup" is slated for release in the fall of 2012.

Criss will write the book with the help of Larry "Ratso" Sloman. Scribner's press release promises, "From sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll to multiple brushes with death, 'Makeup to Breakup' will be Peter Criss' unvarnished and eye-opening life story."

While bandmate Gene Simmons has taken his outsize personality to reality television, Criss has had a quieter public persona. He is a breast cancer survivor. "I am so blessed that I am finally going to write my autobiography, and I hope you enjoy the ride," Criss said in the release. "The best of all is I get to share my true feelings of my love for God, family, friends and fame. It's been a wonderful life."

In addition to playing drums in KISS, Criss provided some of the vocals. In fact, he wrote and sang the band's biggest hit, the ballad "Beth."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: The rock band KISS recieves a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1999. Peter Criss is third from left. Credit: Vince Bucci / Associated Press.

The musician known as John Wesley Harding writes books as Wesley Stace. That's one of the things he tries to explain to comedian Eugene Mirman in the video above, a promo for Stace's upcoming novel, "Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer." Set in Europe in the early part of the 20th century, it tells the story of a critic, the gifted composer Jessold and his tragic love triangle. The book is due out in February, and Stace -- Harding? -- will be in Los Angeles in March, appearing at the L.A. Public Library's nighttime event This is Your Library.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

The poetry of musician Tom Waits will see publication next year in the book "Hard Ground," published by the University of Texas Press. "Hard Ground" is a collaboration with photojournalist Michael O'Brien and  will be a visual and poetic look at homelessness.

It is not the first time Waits' poetry has appeared in print (even if NME says it is). Waits attended a poetry workshop at Beyond Baroque, the literary center in Venice, Calif. A poem he read there -- an early version of "Diamonds on My Windshield" -- was printed in  the Sunset Palms Hotel, an occasional early '70s 'zine (the cover featured a line drawing by Charles Bukowski).

But don't call him a poet. In a 1975 interview with the Los Angeles Free Press (dug up by TwentyFourBit), Waits said, "I don't like the stigma that comes with being called a poet."

Again last year, Waits resisted the idea that he be identified as anything other than a musician. Talking to the L.A. Times about his role as the Devil in "The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus," he insisted that he not be called an actor. Despite having appeared in 20 films, Waits said only that "I do some acting." He continued: "Nobody wants you to be good at two things. They'd rather get a specialist, a guy who just works on eyes or scalp or ankles. Nobody wants a general practitioner. But the arts are such that there's a place where they overlap."

Waits' life has often been conflated with the lowlife characters he created in his songs. Indeed, the page describing the book on the University of Texas Press' website reads:

Tom Waits, described by the New York Times as "the poet of outcasts," to create a portrait of homelessness that impels us to look into the eyes of people who live "on the hard ground" and recognize our common humanity. For Waits, who has spent decades writing about outsiders, this subject is familiar territory.

But in 1985, Waits told he told British rock journalist Barney Hoskyns, "People think I'm down on Fifth and Main at the Blarney Stone, throwing back shooters and smoking a cigar, but I'm really on the top floor of the health club with a towel in my lap, watching Johnny Carson." Hoskyns wrote the 2009 biography "Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits" without Waits' cooperation, trying to tease out the private person from behind the public persona.

Whatever we call him, Waits has written lyrics that tell better stories than most. Come March, we'll get to see how they read on the page in "Hard Ground" -- not to be confused with "Cold Cold Ground," which is a song on "Franks Wild Years."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Tom Waits in 1989. Credit: Los Angeles Times