When I was in High School, our senior class was shown the documentary film Scared Straight, a cautionary tale in which a group of hardened criminals serving life sentences at New Jersey’s Rahway State Prison spend a day terrifying a group of smart ass juvenile offenders in an effort to deter them from pursuing a life of crime. I’m not sure if this film – which probably seems quaint in retrospect – is still part of the curriculum in a day when metal detectors are installed at the entrance of most schools (and I was never in any way what one might consider a delinquent kid) but Scared Straight scared the shit out of me. Continue reading Recommended Reading: Don’t Shoot! I’m The Guitar Man, By Buzzy Martin→
Earlier this past summer, British music journalist Mark Blake published his book Is This The Real Life?, an engaging biography of the band Queen. Blake’s book is crammed with amazing personal information on the band’s members – Freddie Mercury, John Deacon, Roger Taylor and Brian May – in addition to chronicling their success as a group. Blake had a good deal of assistance in gathering his researched material from a guy named Peter Hince, who was a member of Queen’s road crew for over a decade, in addition to also being the personal roadie to both Freddie Mercury and John Deacon. Continue reading Recommended Reading: Queen Unseen By Peter Hince→
Few true tales have the power to compel and transport the reader quite like the life story of a bona fide Rock & Roll Survivor. Of Rock’s innumerable legends with stories worth telling, so many of them – Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison; the list is endless, really – never lived long enough to write their histories in their own words. And of those that have written autobiographies, no one ever really gets – or takes advantage of – the opportunity to go back and revisit his or her life on the written page, updating the tale or adding details that were perhaps forgotten or too painful to tell the first time around. Cherie Currie, former lead singer of the teenage all-girl rock band The Runaways is an exception to that rule.
Last summer, I spent a few minutes penning a witty foreword to a Rock & Roll Tell-all biography called A Shot of Poison, written by my friend Christopher Long. A Shot of Poison is crammed full of Chris’s true-life escapades and various forms of torture that he endured while working as part of Poison’s road crew for years and years. Since part of Chris’s duties involved being the handler/ babysitter/whipping boy for bassist Bobby Dall, a good part of the book concerns what a Doucheasaurus Rex Dall is. But there is a lot of other good dirt that you are not going to know even if you are the world’s biggest Poison fan, and it was a fun read! Here’s what Amazon.com has to say: Continue reading A Shot of Poison Coming Soon to a Bookseller Near You!→
Around the time that The Strokes were first being hyped-up-the-ass in the press as the Saviors of Rock – while simultaneously confounding my senses with their hopelessly derivative, shitty music – I found myself in the NYC office of that band’s publicist. This particular guy, who I’ll call Ken, because that is his name, had formerly worked as a publicist at the once mighty Atlantic Records and, in addition to working with upstarts like The Strokes, had maintained his relationships with some of that label’s artists. Continue reading Recommended Reading: Fall to Pieces By Mary Forsberg Weiland→
