The best books on music

Oh yeah...I also recommend the autobiographies of Duke Ellington (Music Is MY Mistress) and Charles Mingus (Beneath The Underdog) for all you jazz fans out there. Duke never forgot a face or a meal, and Charles never forgot a hooker or a BJ. The two make for an interesting look at the lives of two extrememly different musicians from two very different generations.

This has actually got me thinking,for the last few years my reading matter has been exclusively books about music and indeed have spent 21 years reading the damn things and I'm not really too sure there's too many I can recommend.
Music biographies by nature are patchy,the writers are usually too far removed from their subjects or indeed too close as fans to write a whole book that holds the interest totally.
As such I tend to find music writing is at it's best when it is in essay form.
The best music writer I think is Greil Marcus,with Mystery Train being his best or most complete work/collection however it is at a level that could be considered pretentious,as Garfish once remarked on this forum he doesn't like too much analysis or depth when it comes to music writing.
As a Dylan nut it's hard to say what the definitive book/biography is- probably Shelton's No Direction Home is still far and away the best when considering his formative years,'61-66.
Paul Williams has some fantastic insight on several Dylan books but his overall style can be wearing.
Autobiographies too ain't much fun,Miles Davis is fun and astonishingly honest at times but strangely seems to skip over the music.
One I really did enjoy was Julian Cope's autiobiography-a very funny honest tale.
Also recently enjoyed Craig Werner's book on black music in America-A Change Is Gonna Come.
Another good one is Paul Zolllo's Songwriters On Songwriting a collection of interviews from Song Talk magazine.
The best in depth study of The Beatles which tackles them Marcus style (i.e in depth,social and historical context)and has a detailed analysis of every song they wrote is Revolution In The Head by Britain's best music writer Ian MacDonald.
Finally Joe Klein's biography of Woody Guthrie is supposed to be great-some fifteen years after borrowing it from a friend I must get round to reading it.............

wolfgang flur--I was a robot. Excellent book by kraftwerk drummer and he goes into some detail about the kling klang studio and their equipment, which they built from the transformers forward for better sound than commercial equipment. The group actually had a sharp electical engineer on payroll to design all their equipment. Flur also talks about the drum cube they used briefly in concert which was based upon the theremin idea and utilized by kraftwerk for a guy standing upright in a cube and using hand and foot movements to trigger drum sounds. Also, some details about the famous drum pad he designed and used starting with autobahn & some of their other analog inventions.

I am a big fan of Robert Christgau's books, especially his three Consumer Guide compilations of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. In these books, there are capsule reviews and grades of literally thousands of records--mostly rock and pop, some jazz (fusion) and country (crossover), no classical. I have found all three to be invaluable resources for finding new music and have purchased dozens, perhaps hundreds, of records over the years based on Christgau's recommendations with very few disappointments. Moreover, the reviews are so witty, incisive, and well-written that I simply enjoy them for their own sake. I second the Greil Marcus as well.

I'm looking forward to plunging into that Neil Young opus.

Insightful music books?

Hard to beat the Beatles coffeetable book for reflections and rare photographs

Both Sides Now on Joni Mitchell was nice, as was Talking Heads "THis Must Be The Place".

I also like the MusicHound albums review books by genre
Pop, Jazz, R&B, Folk