L ifestyles /C ulture
Books: Music’s ‘Hot,’ ‘Malice’ Mystery Is Not
BO OKS
JESSE BERNSTEIN | JE STAFF
A Chronicle of Philly Music
The Hot Shot Heard
’Round the World
Andy Kahn
BearManor Media
ANDY KAHN’S MEMOIR
The Hot Shot Heard ’Round the
World is a victory lap for the
musician, a guided tour of a
lifetime of success and spectac-
ular evenings.

The title comes from Kahn’s
1978 hit “Hot Shot,” performed
by Karen Young, which sat at
the top of the disco charts for
two weeks.

Thankfully, the title is a lit-
tle misleading; there’s far more
in this book than an account of
two weeks during which a sin-
gle record sold more than other
records in one genre.

Kahn, a South Philadelphia
native, co-founded the Queen
Village Recording Studios, a
Philadelphia institution that
hosted everyone from Stevie
Wonder to Grace Kelly. An
alternate perspective of Kahn’s
career is provided by his
primary musical partner, Bruce
Klauber, interspersed through-
out Kahn’s recollections of his
unconventional parents and
25-year break from music,
among other tales. There’s
also Kahn’s other Bruce, Bruce
Cahan, his long-time partner
and husband since 2015.

Along the way, Kahn can’t
help but run into everyone from
Charles Mingus to Norman
Mailer, partying with Shirley
MacLaine and Jacob Javits. He
rubs elbows with a laundry list of
jazz musicians from Philadelphia
and beyond after he starts Queen
Village with his brother, and gets
written up everywhere from The
Philadelphia Inquirer to now-de-
funct local Jewish papers like The
Main Line Jewish Expression and
the Philadelphia Jewish Times.

Oddly enough, Kahn is at
his strongest when he writes
about other people.

Thinking through his inter-
actions with his mother, his
uncle, his father and Karen
Young, for example, the por-
traits he draws of them give
you a much clearer idea of
who Kahn himself is as well.

The section about his Uncle
Lloyd, who Kahn believes
would have been diagnosed
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with a mental illness today,
and his obsession with the jazz
records that would be the early
soundtrack to Kahn’s life, are
an interesting contrast with
Kahn’s own singular focus on
music. Additionally, both he
and Klauber’s fascination with
Karen Young all these years
later attest to what a fascinat-
ing character she was in her
own right, and the way Kahn
writes about her, displaying his
affection, awe and worry, often
at the same time, is a highlight
of his memoir.

It is these portions of the
book, along with the excite-
ment and anything-goes spirit
of the first days of the record-
ing studio, that make the book
successful and outweigh the
lesser moments in the book,
like a picture of a letter prais-
ing Kahn as a “gifted child”
in 1962 and a two-page list
of ways in which “Hot Shot”
was used “without produc-
ing any significant income for
its creators.”
For fans of disco and The
Sound of Philadelphia, The Shot
Heard ’Round the World should
JEWISH EXPONENT
be a delight, especially with the
added local flavor. And as a
self-portrait of a songwriter,
performer, businessman and
husband, among other roles
that Kahn has played, it is both
tender and candid.

ANDY GOTLIEB | JE MANAGING EDITOR
A Review With Malice
Toward Malice
A Town Called Malice
Adam Abramowitz
Thomas Dune Books |
St. Martin’s Press
On an increasingly frequent
basis, I find myself watching, lis-
tening to or web surfing content
that really isn’t aimed at me.

As one of the first people in
Generation X (born in 1966),
I’ve aged out of the coveted
Nielsen broadcast demo-
graphic of 18-49 and find
myself simply tuning out of
content clearly aimed at mil-
lennials or Generation Z.

The same apparently holds
true in reading, as I found
myself struggling to complete
Adam Abramowitz’s A Town
Called Malice.

The book’s reasonably
well-written and was inter-
esting enough to keep me
engrossed for a while, but
ultimately it became a slog.

That’s because the book jumps
around from topic to topic —
kind of like someone who has
their face buried in their cell-
phone as they watch TV and do
a couple other things.

In A Town Called Malice,
we get mysteries, run-ins with
gangs, details about casino
chips, assorted dead bodies, a
tough-guy rabbi (yes, there are
some Jewish elements), some
investigations, lots of slang and
even more talk.

In fact, there’s too much
talk entirely. The book isn’t
overly long, but it feels like
Abramowitz would have done
better to incorporate some ele-
ments of the spare style used by
a writer such as James Ellroy,
author of The Black Dahlia and
L.A. Confidential.

A Town Called Malice is about
See Books, Page 26
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