There’s much sleaze to be found in these pages, but precious little about how the Stones forged their rock-’n’-roll art.
Decadence, death and, oh yeah, the making of the quintessential Stones album.
Journalist Greenfield is no stranger to the Rolling Stones’ camp: He penned STP: A Journey Through America With the Rolling Stones, the 1974 fly-on-the-wall account of the English rock band’s ’72 U.S. tour. The current volume is a sort of prequel about the making of the epochal titular two-LP set, cut in 1971–72 under unusually taxing circumstances. Adopting the amused, ironic tone of an 18th-century novelist, Greenfield recounts the aberrant birthing of the album during a blazing summer of sessions at guitarist Keith Richards’s rented mansion in the south of France, where the five Stones escaped tax exile. The writer devotes a few pages to the tensions that arose between his putative “hero” Richards and lead singer Mick Jagger, as a newly detoxed Richards grappled (unsuccessfully) with his heroin addiction and Jagger wrestled with the highfalutin’ demands of his jet-setting new wife Bianca. Engineer Andy Johns chimes in on the difficulties of recording in a jerry-built basement studio so hot that guitars would instantly go out of tune. But the bulk of the book is devoted to the adventures of the Stones’ hangers-on (many of whom would meet dope-related demises not long after that fateful season), the machinations of the local dope-dealers (“les cowboys”) and the addled antics of Richards’s beautiful, deranged significant other, Anita Pallenberg. Exactly how Richards and Jagger managed to find time to write the material for their classic album amid all this madness remains obscure. What matters most to Greenfield are the plentiful sensational aspects of the tale, and the grim fates that awaited the pop stars, Grand Prix drivers and errant heiresses who serve as colorful minor players. The narrative peters out when the Stones travel to the relatively subdued environs of Los Angeles to finish their tortured masterwork.
There’s much sleaze to be found in these pages, but precious little about how the Stones forged their rock-’n’-roll art.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2006
ISBN: 0-306-81433-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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