Mitch Myers' book, The Boy Who Cried Freebird: Rock and Roll Fables and Sonic Storytelling, is a lovely thing. He mixes essays, short stories, tall tales, and interviews about rock to get to the core of what it is to be a music geek. "Don't compare me to that guy in High Fidelity," he says. "That dude wasted all his time organizing his collection in some kind of chronological order—everybody knows that you should file your albums by genre."

This is the tall tale that gives the book its title.