The Heroin Diaries

The Heroin Diaries

A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star

By Nikki Sixx

As I get older, I've become much more discerning about the culture I digest. I'm 37 years old and I have a family, a job and hobbies. I can't read, listen and watch everything (unless someone pays me to do so). With the seemingly bottomless amount of culture out there to peruse, you have to set parameters lest you drown in the tsunami of books, music, television and film that comes out every year. So I've become a bit picky with my culture. I maintain a strict diet of nutritious culture (a term I have not yet had time to define, but I'm hoping strikes a chord enough so that you know what I'm talking about) and try to avoid junk culture (i.e. reality television, nonsensical Hollywood blockbusters, radio friendly pop music and bad YA fiction). I do this by asking myself before hand: "will anyone remember this in 5-10 years?" If the answer is yes, then I'll give it a shot.

Some might call me a snob, and that's fine. I have no problem with that. A snob, with all its negative connotations, implies someone who is judicious and shrewd in their choices and life is too short to waste on things covered by Perez Hilton and TMZ. In fact, whenever I hear someone invoke those terms (along with other including buy not limited to Paris Hilton, Dancing with the Stars, The Bachleor, Twilight and any television show that ends in the word "Wars") I instantly think less of their culture choices and will think carefully about following up on anything they recommend. Harsh, I know, but like I said... I'm not interested in wasting my time on crap.

Which is why my lifelong love affair with glam metal makes almost zero sense. Glam metal is the very definition of junk culture. Glam metal from the 1980s is formulaic rock at its worst. If you don't believe me, go listen to every album ever recorded by Poison, Warrant, Extreme and Whitesnake and get back to me. Bet you don't get past Cherry Pie.

Oh sure, my musical tastes have expanded over the years to incorporate everything from Bluegrass to African music to minimalist techno (I even own a copy of Trout Mask Replica, though I admit that I don't get it). But come Saturday night when a couple of beers have lubricated my sense of decency I like nothing else but to crank up Cinderella, Ratt or my all-time personal favorite: Motley Crue.

Full disclosure: Motley Crue's Shout at the Devil was the very first album I ever owned, and I owned it on vinyl (yeah, I'm that cool). I got it for my 8th birthday and I played the living shit out of that record for years. I remember that the album was all matte black with a glossy black pentagram on the front (I still cannot believe that my mother bought it for an 8 year-old). The album folded out to reveal the four members of the band. I knew they were all men because their names where men's names, but they sure looked like girls. But holy fuck did they look cool with all that leather and metal. I wanted desperately to be that cool. And of all the guys in the band it was Nikki Sixx I wanted to be.

Even after I discovered Nirvana and moved on, I have remained a Motley Crue fan my entire life. I wrestle with this because despite their reputation as the dirtiest, nastiest, most reviled band in a dirty, nasty and reviled style of music (metal) and their perceived place as noting more than a musical sideshow (Vince Neil and Tommy Lee's foray into the realm of reality television didn't help matters) I still, to this day, believe that they have a canonical place in the history of music, and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise. OK, sure, they aren't the best musicians and their music is uneven but they defined what a band should look and act. Motley Crue personified metal. They were everything. And the reason for this was Nikki Sixx. Without Sixx, Motley Crue was simply Ratt, The Scorpions or (good God!) Dangerous Toys. Sixx, the bassist and primary songwriter in Motley Crue, was the man who brought the band together and was the driving force behind this rise to stardom. He seemed to drag the band, whose exploits seemed to indicate an ambivalence to fame and fortune, kicking and screaming into the limelight and held them there even while his physical, personal and psychological life crumbled.

Say what you will, but for a seven year stretch between 1983 and 1990 Motley Crue was arguably the biggest band in the world. Sure, they are/were misogynistic, drug-addled maniacs, but they were the logical extension of trashy, glam rock established by the likes of The New York Dolls (and if you've never listened to The New York Dolls, do yourself a favor). But in that span, they recorded four multi-platinum albums (Shout at the Devil, Theater of Pain, Girls Girls Girls and Dr. Feelgood) even though their primary songwriter (Sixx) was descending deeper and deeper into heroin addiction, an addiction that would take him to the brink of death on a fateful evening in late 1987 when he ODed and was declared dead.

The Heroin Diaries is essentially Sixx's diaries from Christmas 1986 through Christmas 1987 which coincides with the recording of Girls, Girls, Girls (Motley's sleaziest album by far), the subsequent tour and the worst days of Sixx's addiction and depression. It's a diary, and one written by a guy who was either freebasing or recovering from a night of freebasing almost 300 of those 365 days so I'm not really going to discuss the caliber of the writing. It was a personal journal for God sakes. The subject matter however, is dark, repetitive and downright scary. The Heroin Diaries takes you into the deepest recesses of six's mind at a time when he himself thought he was losing it. As an added bonus, there is commentary from the primary players (Nikki, his bandmates, various record execs, friends, family and his then girlfriend, Vanity) after most of the entries to provide context.

I know that rock and roll biographies and autobiographies always seem so indistinguishable one from the next what with their expectedly lurid tales of sexual and narcotic one-upmanship but this one is different in that it was written first hand and largely under the influence of the substances that musicians tend to glorify once they sober up and look back. The Heroin Diaries deserves recognition for its brutal honesty, not about music or the industry but rather about Sixx himself and the way in which he deals with his addictions day in and day out (and the way in which he hides his addictions). It is the most candid look into the psychotic mind of a junkie that I have ever read (this includes Naked Lunch and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas).

On thing, however, troubled me about The Heroin Diaries. It's a shame that either the publisher (MTV Books?) or Sixx himself thought so little of these diaries that they were packaged as a full color book with photos and graphics on every page. The paper itself is magazine glossy and the entire package unfortunately takes away from the gravity of subject matter. These are the intensely personal ramblings of a rock and roll junkie and deserved better than a pseudo-magazine. I would have liked to have seen this published correctly, by a more literary press who might have given the diaries the treatment they deserved as an insight into the mind of a rock and roll junkie and as a piece of pop culture history.

Motley Crue may look the part of junk culture, but they most certainly are not. It's high time we all owned up to the fact that they played an important role in the evolution of rock and roll, glam and metal and stop selling them short by taking their output and treating it like an article in Metal Edge Magazine. Nikki Sixx may not be a musical genius but he's done enough by now to garner some serious respect.

Narcopolis

Narcopolis

By Jeet Thayil

Note: Apologies, this blog post is rushed and poorly written due to the fact that my wife and I have just recently had our first child and things are a little hectic around the house. I hope I can figure out how to maintain the quality of this blog over time without neglecting my duties as a father. Let's see.

It's tough to write a different book about India.

Lots of writers write about India. It's one of those mystical locales that was tailor made for story telling with its bouquet of culture, its irrepressible sights, sounds and smells and its rich history, India has been the setting for dozens of novels that have achieved serious critical acclaim. In fact, since 1997 three Man Booker Prize winning novels have been written by Indian novelists and if you go back through the history of the prize you find that, aside from the Indian winners, many of the winning novels were set in India. 

But something I have noticed over the years is that every modern book I read about India invariably returns to the same themes over and over, most notably the continuous reverberations of colonialism and a level of navel-gazing that rivals Canadian literature. While they are always well written and interesting, I have been waiting to get my hands on something a little different from the sub-continent for some time. Jeet Thayil's novel Narcopolis is just that book.

While Narcopolis didn't win this year's Man Booker Prize, it did make the short list, and thank god for that. Thayil dared to write a novel about India without resorting to the aforementioned safe themes of his contemporaries. Instead, Thayil's narrative is a gritty, no holds barred view into the world of drugs and prostitution in the slums of Bombay. It is a side of India that is rarely mentioned in the English literature from India. While I'm not sure if I'd want to read a glut of books about opium dens in Bombay, I sure would like to read about India from some new angles.

Fittingly, the novel begins with a seven page run-on sentence and doesn't let up from there. I say "fittingly" because what follows is a dream-like narrative that follows the lives of several noted junkies and prostitutes that frequent the opium dens that were popular in Bombay prior to the 1990s. The story begins in a sort of heyday and the slow demise of the den's popularity parallels the decay of the characters.

Written as a series of entwined anecdotes surrounding Dimple, an opium addict and prostitute in Bombay. Dimple was born a boy but was castrated during childhood and lives her life as a woman. Other characters bob in and out of the narrative and each have their own debauched story to tell. The entire book exudes a certain hazy tone and the novel progresses like the literary equivalent of opium smoke languidly wafting through the air. Often many of the stories drift off into nothingness while others that seem like tangents join with the larger narrative structure and continue on from there. Stories braid themselves around each other throughout and Thayil's style has a lazy, unhurried feel as if he is chewing on the sentences one word at a time, thoughtfully relishing each word and placement in relation to the entire work. The language is debased, vile and at time shockingly graphic, but in the hands of Thayil they are impossible to ignore.

Narcopolis is the first of the 2012 Man Booker Prize short-lister that I have read. For the language alone it is worth the read. Given that it did not win, I am excited to see what may have been deemed better than this carefully crafted work. Furthermore, it's really nice to see some more unorthodox Indian literature getting recognition. Perhaps this means we can expect a run of post-post-colonial literature out of India over the next few years.

One can hope.

Son of Rage and Love

Son of Rage and Love

By Thomas Raymond

A couple of weeks back when I reviewed the Hunger Games I got a little nasty on the subject of Young Adult fiction. I didn't (and still won't) say that I dislike the genre, but it bores me to tears more often than not. A few days later I got an email from Thomas Raymond, the author of the YA novel The Son of Rage and Love. Raymond agreed with me on many of my points about the formulaic nature of YA novels and assured me that his novel was different.

Turns out he was right. (Well, he would know... he wrote it, after all).

The Son of Rage and Love is about Daniel the 12 year-old son of an irresponsible C-list celebrity named Maya. Due to her career (and drinking problems), Daniel and his sister are being raised by their over-bearing grandmother. Daniel has been diagnosed as ADHD and takes medication to maintain his mood though the pills he takes cause all sorts of side effects such as hallucinations and paranoia. A steady diet of television, video games and structured time-wasting organized by his materialistic grandmother keeps Daniel out of trouble. Daniel's sister has spent years in therapy in order to prepare her for the career in acting she does not want. Needless to say, the sedated calm (or fog, as Daniel refers to it) that envelopes the household is a virtual prison for Daniel and his sister. That is, until a publicity gaffe forces Maya to adopt a precocious 13 year-old Haitian orphan named Jean-Maurice in order to rescue her ailing career. That's when the house of cars comes tumbling down.

The Son of Rage and Love is a breath of fresh air in the YA fiction genre for a few reasons. First and foremost, there are no wizards or vampires and it doesn't take place in a dystopian future. The protagonist does not possess a superpower and the ending is not a neither a neat little ball nor the launching point for a sequel. In fact, The Son of Rage and Love has more in common with Ken Kesey's celebrated novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and anything published in the Young Adult genre over the past few years. That's a step in the right direction, if you ask me.

In the Grandmother, Raymond has created an antagonist for the ages. Part Nurse Ratched, part Joan Crawford a la Mommy Dearest, the Grandmother is so unlikeable that the reader would cheer for Voldemort himself to strike her down. I'm always on the lookout for strong, memorable characters and if this book had one it was Grandmother (though I must admit that I have strong affinities toward bad guys). Sometimes a novel needs an over-the-top antagonist to tie all the themes together in a nice little package. Daniel's grandmother is precisely that character.

But the real reason this book succeeds is the themes it addresses throughout, many of which affected me personally as many of them are precisely the reasons why I have decided to live overseas, away from North America. Raymond explores the issues of over-medication (and unnecessary medication) of children and adolescents, the slippery slope of child psychology, the perils of a sedentary lifestyle, the cult of celebrity, the pratfalls of the Nouveau rich, alcoholism, pornography, latent violence, loneliness and social isolation. By introducing a character from a third world nation Raymond makes the unique decision to magnify the problems in North America rather than focus on the problem of poverty in Haiti. Not that poverty in Haiti isn't a problem, but having Jean-Maurice juxtapose a life in poverty against the complex anxieties of modern living in America is a novel approach.

Without being heavy-handed, Raymond weaves these concepts into the narrative. There is no preaching. There is no editorializing. These problems just are, as they would be in Daniel's life. And since Daniel's existence is both limited and encompassed in a narcotic haze, one cannot expect him to have strong opinions about his life (or anyone else's for that matter). Daniel is smart enough to understand that these problems exist but like most normal 12 year-olds not named Harry Potter or Katniss, he feels (and ultimately is) powerless to do anything about them.

What I think this novel delivers is a dose of critical thinking to young readers. Raymond has forced his readers to look at their own lives and the lives of their friends and family. Are we over-medicating our youth? Are were over psycho-analyzing our youth? If so, for whose benefit? Our kids or ourselves? Do we focus too much on the cult of celebrity? Why do their personal lives matter so much to us? The list of questions Raymond attempts to raise is interesting and IO wonder whether this would be an interesting book to study with a class of 11 or 12 year old kids.

If I had one complaint about the novel is that Raymond is long on the set up and a bit short on the follow-through. At 159 pages, The Son of Rage and Love could have been a little longer if it meant a bit more focus on the climax. I felt that the novel ended just a bit too abruptly and would have liked a little more in terms of elaboration. Still, I appreciate that this novel attempts to deal with adolescent adventure in a more realistic fashion and often reality isn't the storybook ending we expect after hundreds of hours of television, movies and video games. So, it's all good.

Anyway, if you are a fan of YA fiction (or even if you aren't) check this one out. Even if you aren't it has enough elements of classic adult fiction to keep you going. As I mentioned before there was so much about this book that reminded me of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and if that isn't endorsement enough, I don't know what is.

One word review: Refreshing.

The Candy Machine

The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took Over the World

By Tom Feiling

The story of how I came into possession (heh... possession) of this gem of a book is perhaps as interesting as the book itself. But I have to be decidedly vague in retelling it due to the sensitive nature in which I may put the person I am speaking about, but it's a good story, so I'm going to change a few details to protect the innocent.

Last year a friend of mine visited from back home. His job is as a customs officer in a major international airport somewhere on the North American continent. While putting around to all the usual tourist spots along the east coast of Taiwan we were always deep in conversation, usually about his job.  My friend regaled my wife and I with stories of drug seizures and would-be smugglers coming in on flights from Jamaica and Honduras and... yes.... Colombia. By the end of his two week vacation he was probably sick and tired of rehashing the same tired stories of his mundane job in the airport. But to us, he was James Earl Jones with a story to tell. We'd scotch up close with our knees to our noses to get another of his entertaining stories of middle-aged women smuggling keys of coke into the country.

Fast forward a few months and I get a message via Facebook from said friend who tells me to expect a book in the mail. And lo and behold: The Candy Factory: How Cocaine Took Over the World. Given our undivided attention to all things coke during his visit (stories, not snorting), I was more than a little excited to break the spine on this one.

Before I get to the book... Full disclosure: I have never done cocaine.

It's true.

I do drink. At this point in my life, I wish I didn't, but I do. I'm not an alcoholic but i don't think I could quit if I tried, either. I smoked a lot of marijuana through my late teens and early 20s but haven't bothered with it for well over a decade (so much for that legend of pot being the gateway drug. It was the gateway to nothing for me). I've tried ecstasy exactly once but disliked the "come-down" so much that I never bothered again. That's my entire narcotic curriculum vitae. I know... I'm prudish by my generation's standards. What can I say? I've never been all that interested.

I've had more than my fair share of chances to try cocaine. It was prevalent at parties throughout my 20s when I was living in a major North American metropolis (read: Toronto) and it has been offered to me more times than I can count. But I never did bother. It didn't seem like something I wanted to try, so I didn't and according to The Candy Machine, I'm not alone. Despite what the media might say about the dangers of cocaine and crack and crack babies etc... a very small number of people actually use cocaine on a regular basis.

The Candy Machine is an extraordinarily detailed book that cuts through the acres of propaganda and misunderstandings about the coca leaf and its derivative, cocaine. Anyone who has succumbed to the wild and oft-times silly urban legends about the instantaneous addiction that follows your first hit of crack or wild eyed crack babies littering inner-city hospitals would be well served to check this book out. Tom Feiling has delivered a sane, rational expose on the world of cocaine and anyone with a vested interest from government officials on down should take heed.

The book is well organized and is divided into three parts: the past, present and future of cocaine and the other narcotics in america, Europe and the Third World.

The first part of the book chronicles the history of the plant from its origins as a stimulant among the indigenous populations of South America at the time of Pizarro's landing, its popularity during the latter part of the 19th century (when it was used by all sorts of European luminaries including Sigmund Freud and Sherlock Holmes as a brain stimulant), its prohibition in America (along with virtually every other narcotic on the planet) in 1920, its role on the War on Drugs through the advent of crack cocaine. It was especially interesting to note that cocaine remained not only legal  but also widely available prior to prohibition and the cases of addiction remained consistently low throughout that period. It was only during prohibition that the mystique of cocaine grew and its use soared (at cocaine's height in popularity during the late 70s and early 80s, less than 15% of the population admitted to have tried it while over 60% had tried cannabis and over 90% had tried alcohol).

In the second part, Feiling goes onto to discuss the politics of cocaine and the way in which America's schizophrenic obsession with its "war on drugs" has essentially forced narco-economies such as Jamaica and Colombia to ramp up production in order to remain competitive on a global scale (if one doesn't include cocaine, Peru's number one global export, according to the World Bank, is asparagus... it doesn't take a genius to see why a Peruvian farmer would turn to coca cultivation). Furthermore, Feiling provides an almost over-comprehensive account of how America's war on drugs has failed. From the streets of Baltimore (made famous in The Wire) to the fumigation of fields in Colombia (which, ironically, tends to devastate all crops except coca), Feiling interviews all sorts of frontline soldiers in the war who have seen its abject futility as well as its latent racism (although only 13% of hardcore drug users in America are black, over 60% of those imprisoned on drug-related crimes are African-American). The politics of cocaine are so muddled that America often supports presidents and dictators who are the very same people they are trying to put out of business in the drug trafficking world. It's a convoluted mess that would leave even the most ardent anti-drug crusader scratching their heads trying to decide their allegiances.

But it's the final part that really did it for me. In discussing the future of cocaine and the business of narcotics in South america and the world, Feiling presents a rational and well-researched discussion on the subject of legalization. I have been an advocate for universal, across the board legalization of all drugs for a long time now. From my perspective, it solves so many more problems than it creates. while I'm not going to go through all the reasons why legalization is the best option going forward (Feiling does a far better job of that than I) I did appreciate the way in which he discussed the definition of the word addiction, applied addiction to all sorts of non-psychoactive things such as the Internet, sports, shopping and gambling. How are these addictions socially acceptable but not a heroin or cocaine addiction?

Furthermore, Feiling, like me, believes that taking drugs off the streets and out of the hands of the criminal element would enable governments to not only provide addicts the help and support they need but also a revenue stream unparalleled since the the rise of oil. Nations such as the Netherlands and Switzerland are already moving in that direction with a great deal of success and neither nation has seen an increase in drug use. Certainly nobody is advocating an overnight legalization policy but rather something akin to the process of prohibition whereby governments first decriminalize drug use for medicinal purposes and slowly inch toward full legalization over a time frame similar to that of the original criminalization.

To be fair, Feiling gives ample time and space to the counter-arguments but seems to have very little trouble refuting the claims of the current American drug policy. At its current pace, America will only continue to lose the war on drugs which wouldn't be such a big deal if it didn't cost tax-payers a bill that escalates into the tens of billions of dollars each year... to absolutely zero effect.

For anyone that has an interest in the reality of the global drug market, how it works, what it's actual impact has been on our society and the way in which we, as a a society, have dealt with the growing problem, you'd be doing yourself a favor by picking up this book., It has literally every fact and statistic concerning the drug trade that anyone could possibly want, and more. If nothing else, The Candy Machine is an eye opening look at the reality of drugs... and it's worse than you thought, but not in the way that you thought.

Iggy Pop: Open Up And Bleed

Iggy Pop: Open Up And Bleed

By Paul Trynka

Unrelated note about this blog post. Sheila from Book Journey challenged me to use the term "awesome sauce" in a blog post this week. I have fulfilled the challenge. Read on and see how...

Boy, do I ever read a lot of rock and roll biographies. And if you look at them, you can trace a very obvious interest in artists famous for their self-destruction. In the past two years I have read biographies (or autobiographies) about Keith Richards, Ozzy Osbourne, Motley Crue and Anthony Keidis. Iggy Pop: Open Up And Bleed seemed to be the logical end point in a reading trip to the pits of rock and roll depravity and beyond. So to say that I was looking forward to this book it a bit of an understatement. I love rock and roll depravity and there is simply nobody more depraved than Iggy Pop (except, perhaps Phil Spector, but I'll have to wait for that biography).

For anyone who has never read a rock and roll biography, allow me to explain the basic formula. They all follow the predictable pattern from precocious childhood into an adolescence full of talent and promise, a difficult rise to stardom which, in turn, provides the inevitable introduction to drugs, a brief episode of hyper creativity and bliss is always followed by the long, slow and often painful descent into depravity (the bulk of the biography). What follows is the ultimate rebirth of the artist, a phoenix rising from the ashes of self-destruction. It's a career pattern as cliche as rhyming "cry" and "die."

I've been a fan of Iggy Pop and his band The Stooges for a long time and I have always found Iggy Pop to be one of rock and roll's more enigmatic figures. He also stands outside rock and roll to a certain degree. During his peak creative years between 1969 and 1979, Iggy Pop (first with the Stooges and then with David Bowie) created music so ahead of its time that it was seen as (at best) a curiosity or (at worst) noise.

Only year later would critics and music fans comprehend the very real impact that Iggy Pop had on both the punk and new wave movement in the late 1970s and pop music as a whole. But Iggy Pop is simply the myth behind the very real man known as Jim Osterberg. I was ready when I opened the book. I wasn't going to be surprised to find out that Iggy Pop was simply a talented man with substance abuse problems like all the rest. He was (and to a degree, still is) rock and roll's wild child and the stories are legendary. Iggy Pop is the unpredictable madman famous for cutting himself onstage with a steak knife, rolling around in broken glass, throwing feces on his band, exposing himself at every turn and vomiting his awesome sauce all over the audience. If anything, Iggy Pop was known as the performer most likely to die onstage rather than the influential artist he has become over time. This book was going to follow the pattern to a tee and I wasn't going to be surprised.

Except I was.

And for a good portion of the book I was confused.

To say I was disappointed in this book is an understatement. A biography about Iggy Pop should write itself. It's not like there's a shortage of stories about a man who sacrificed his body for his art night in and night out and survived to tell the tale. I mean he spent a large portion of his life in and out of mental institutions and snorted enough blow to power a mission to Mars. He once performed a show entitled: Killing a Virgin. How could this book fail? Get these stories down on paper and let his fans bask in their depravity.

This book bothered me from the very beginning. Paul Trynka's work is so exhaustive, so expansive and so detailed I had to continually check to see whether I was reading the biography of Winston Churchill or John F. Kennedy or some other such historical heavyweight. And for a time I was inclined to trash this book when it came time to write this blog. I very nearly did. But I figured out what it was about this book that was bothering me.

Trynka's research is so painstakingly thorough. He has collected interviews from literally everyone from Jim Osterberg's life (everyone that was still alive in 2007, that is) and combed through reams and reams of material (school records, newspapers, magazine articles, medical records etc...) in order to put this work together. It's not really a rock and roll biography at all. Paul Trynka has written an academic work on the life and work of Jim Osterberg. The book is so scholarly (the endnotes by themselves would make a decent sized biography) that there were points where I had to read passages two or three times over. Iggy Pop: Open Up And Bleed is an opus. It's so definitive that I can't imagine anyone ever writing another word on the subject of Iggy Pop, unless it was a revisionist history (and if someone did hypothetically write another academic work on the life of Iggy Pop, I suppose someone would then have to write the historiography. Egads!).

While the research is obviously sound, Trynka's agenda is sometimes suspect. Trynka often overstates Iggy Pop's contribution to the world of pop music. While I would, personally, place Iggy Pop extraordinarily high on the list of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Trynka often oversteps academic objectivity and proceeds into hero-worship and often dives straight into pretension. I actually tossed the book aside in disgust at one point when he compared Iggy Pop's collaboration with David Bowie as the greatest meeting of creative minds since Gauguin and Van Gogh worked together at the Yellow House. C'mon! Really? Such nonsense has no place in a scholarly biography and only served to pile on the pomposity and compromise the integrity. Unfortunately, this book has stretches when it drips with pomposity.

In the space of 375 pages, Trynka managed to name-drop literally every single human being of consequence since the French Revolution. Again, I know Iggy Pop is an influential character in the history of rock and roll, but dropping names like Vaslav Nijinsky and Napoleon Bonaparte and Eldridge Cleaver even though hey have little to no importance to the life of Iggy Pop. I got the feeling that Trynka was trying (valiantly at times) to authenticate the mythology of Iggy Pop while his thesis was obviously an attempt to humanize him. This conflict was apparent to me throughout the book.

Despite this, Paul Trynka is fast on his way to becoming a very erudite biographer of artists that have, until now, not been given the academic treatment. This is probably a good thing. I just hope  he can keep his myth-making in check. That's the artist's job (and Iggy Pop has spent his career shrouding himself in his own myth). The biographer's job is to cut through the myth. Trynka seems to do this inconsistently at best.

However, it's difficult to dislike this book. Paul Trynka has put everything he had into this book and it will stand as the conclusive work on the career and legacy of Iggy Pop. For that reason alone, it's a must read for anyone who is interested in this particular genre of music. But it's not a typical rock and roll biography. I have since learned that Trynka has written a similar work on the career of David Bowie (which makes sense since Bowie plays such a major role in the career of Iggy Pop). I can only imagine that it too will prove to be conclusive.

I Am Ozzy

I Am Ozzy

By Ozzy Osbourne

I like to follow-up light reading with something a little deeper, more intellectual. That's why I picked up Ozzy's (auto)biography as a follow up to Milan Kundera.

I keed!

Anyway, I think I've hit critical mass for rock n' roll biographies about rockers who have no business still being alive (Keith Richards, Anthony Keidis and now Ozzy). Unless something really interesting falls into my lap, this is probably the last chronicle of drug and alcohol abuse I will read this year. I need to branch out, you know. Spread the proverbial wings. Maybe read Charlie Parker's biography.

Anyway, Ozzy.

I can't figure this book out. One the one hand, it's hilarious. Ozzy is a lot of things: madman, alcoholic, rock legend, television icon, lover of animals, walking dead. His stories are, literally awesome. Anyone who has a cursory knowledge of rock and roll history is familiar with at least a half dozen of his stories and he seems to be a natural story teller (through his ghost writer, of course). He's so self-deprecating it's endearing. You can't help but love the guy. He's the lovable loser from school. The guy that always seemed to end up spilling water on his own pants right before an assembly, forcing him to endure endless ridicule about pissing himself but takes it in stride. There's simply nothing to dislike about Ozzy. He's the original reality celebrity (long before The Osbournes, I might add) and despite all the stories, he always comes across as one of the coolest people on the planet.

On the other hand, the book reads like a hangover the day after the mother of all benders (in this case, 40 years). But didn't I already know all this? Did I have to read the book to come to this cup of black coffee and greasy food?

This all raises the question: Was there any need for this book? Ozzy professes that he wants to set the record straight about his life. But who's going to read this book? Ozzy fans, that's who. People like me who think the first four Black Sabbath albums are the pinnacle of rock and roll (I'm listening to Volume 4 as I write this. Snowblind to be specific... sublime). People like me who actually freak out when they play Crazy Train at sporting events ("Dude! Ozzy! Let's buy more beer!). People like me who think Supernaut just might be the greatest heavy metal song ever recorded (do not even think of retorting with Iron Man... You will lose all credibility). These are the sorts of people that are going to read this book. People who already know the score.

For example, I sincerely doubt that my mother, who I know reads this blog (Hi Mom!), would ever, in a million years, think to herself: "You know? I simply don't know enough about that guy Fozzy Ossburn. Maybe I should pick that book up and brush up on my knowledge of classic heavy metal." No sir. I can absolutely guarantee this book is not falling into the hands of non-Ozzheads.

Furthermore, this book is essentially a rehashing of all the classic Ozzy tales: The formation of Black Sabbath from the wreckage of Earth, the recording of Paranoid. Tony Iommi's finger deformity. Ozzy getting fired for being a drunken fuck-up. Marriage to Sharon. Solo career. Biting head off live bat. Biting head of live dove. Touring with Motley Crue. Suicide Solution trial. Near death experiences. The Osbournes. Drunken debauchery involving women, guns, mountains of drugs, eyebrow shaving and, like all rock and roll biographies, repeated rehab stints. No new ground covered, here.

Don't get me wrong, the stories are great. Ozzy is a fine story-teller. But we've all heard them a million and one times! Anyone who is even a casual fan of Ozzy Osbourne is familiar with the bat story and the dove story and most people know the straight dope on it as well. And even if you didn't, I'm sure The Osbournes reality show cleared a lot of things up. There's no real reason, at this late date, to set the record straight. As memoirs go, this one wasn't especially enlightening. But then again, what secrets could Ozzy possibly have? His entire career was an open book.

All that being said, I like Ozzy. I can't say a bad word about him. He comes across as one of the most genuine people in the world in print, on record and on television. Sure, he's got a boatload of problems both physical and psychological, but who doesn't? If you are a fan, go ahead and pick it up. It's a quick read and it's fun. In fact, open up a bottle or four of Hennesy while you do. I bet it would make it that much better. But if you don't like him or have no idea who he is, forget it.

It will just give you a hangover without the benefit of the Hennessy.

And nobody wants that.

P.S. I can't believe that Ozzy passed up the opportunity to title his memoirs Diary of a Madman. I mean, come ON! That shit writes itself!

The Rolling Stone Interviews

The Rolling Stone Interviews

Edited by Jann S. Wenner

Before I get into this, I want to note that I really did like this book. As an entirety, it's a good read and I blasted through its monstrous girth in three days. I don't want the rest of this blog post to sway anyone from reading The Rolling Stone Interviews. It is very, very worth it.

This book made me feel old. Allow me to explain in a slow and convoluted way.

Growing up, I was obssessed with rock n' roll. Not so much with the cult of personality that surrounds the genre, although that was part of it, but rather with the virtually instantaneous legend-generating power it carried over to its performers. I liked the fact that stuff I was listening to went from obscure to relevant, then iconic then legendary, often in the span of a single calandar year. It's a fun process to watch from the sidelines. I always wondered what it would be like for the performers.

And, of course, I really dig music. Still do.

I never really got into the People Magazine side of the equation. Who was screwing who, what band was suing what other band and what sorts of drugs so-and-so was using at the Grammys last night. That stuff didn't concern me nearly as much as the music and the energy it conveyed. Who cares what Kurt Cobain thinks or does? It's all about the guitar riff, It's about the lyrics. It's about the rock. I would like to assume I was too punk-rock for all the other nonsense, though, if I'm honest, I know I wasn't. I was simply nose deep in Michael Creighton novels and Martin Scorsese movies.

So it was interesting to find The Rolling Stone Interviews fall into my lap a couple of weeks back. I'm certainly not insinuating that Rolling Stone Magazine is akin to People Magazine but I never read either growing up. I was blissfully unaware of the personal lives of most of the bands and musicians I enjoyed. I wasn't entirely ignorant, but the details simply didn't interest me at the time. So this book was a revisitation to my music-listening past from a different perspective.

The book itself is an anthology of dozens of interviews ranging back to the beginnings of Rolling Stone Magazine in the mid 1960s and includes interviews with everyone from Jim Morrison in 1969 to George Lucas in 1977 to The Dalai Lama in 2001. It is organized in chronological order so once I got into the interviews conducted after 1980, it was fun to watch my childhood pass as I was reading the chronicles of the stars.

Many of the non-musical interviews proved to be quite interesting. I really enjoyed reading the interviews with Bill Clinton, Johnny Carson, David Letterman and Bill Murray. Other interviews were captivating because Rolling Stone chose an unorthodox interviewer. Andy Warhol with Truman Capote, Robert Palmer with Eric Clapton. But the vast majority of the musician interviews read like laundry lists of petty disputes, drugs and personal problems leaving me wanting to slap the Holden Caufield out of them all.

The fundamental problem with rock and roll interviews is that when you get down to it, rock stars are as humdrum as lawyers, teachers or doctors. Oh, they think they are different (in the case of John Lennon... he knows he's a genius). But when you begin to read these accounts of their lives they all begin to sound oddly consistent.

They have gone from struggling musician (and have you ever talked to one of those? Yeesh!) to ultra-famous and mega-rich, pretty much overnight. And each of them from Pete Townshend to John Lennon to Axl Rose to Eminem answer questions as if they were the first musician in the history of the world to encounter troubles in the trappings of fame. Don't these guys read Rolling Stone Magazine? Didn't they ever listen to The Wall? Or Bob Seger's eponymous hit Turn the Page? It's hard no to notice the droning pattern.

This is a generic sample of the sort of answer you get from (insert name of famous musician here):

"I hooked up with {insert name of mildly famous session musician name here} in (insert the name of American or British city here). We decided to crash at {inesrt hip record company exec name here)'s house for the night. We ended up staying there three weeks tripping on acid and peyote, shooting guns and playing old {insert name of eccentric musical style here} records. It was a wild time, man. We shared something real. The (insert decade here} were a truly magical ride."

Seriously, when did being a rock star become so boring. From Pete Townsend to Eminem and virtually every pop star in between was like reading the same interview over and over. From complaining about singing the same songs night after night to to battling their heroin addictions to dealing with their "personal demons." It's all such a stereotype.

This isn't to say there weren't some really interesting bits. I quite enjoyed reading about David Letterman's friendship with Johnny Carson and Bill Clinton's musings on the evolution of the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy. Jack Nicholson's philosophies on monogamy were a riot, Truman Capote and Andy Warhol were hilariously pretentious, and Tom Wolfe is fascinating.

Nor is it to say that there aren't any musicians with something interesting to say. Patti Smith, Mick Jagger and Leonard Bernstein deliver eloquent interviews that delve a little deeper into the music and the creative process. Perhaps it has something to do with their ages when they were interviewed. Each of them had been in the industry for over two decades once they sat down with Rolling Stone.

Which gets me back to the thesis of this entire blog post. The book made me feel like an era had passed in my life. These guys (Ozzy Osbourne, Kurt Cobain, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, Jim Morrison etc...) who I idolized so much when I was younger just turned out to be snivelling, whiny kids with too many toys and not enough friends. Who really wants to read an interview with a kid with very little of anything to say other than how many drugs he took last weekend? Perhaps to many this isn't such a momentous realization but for me, someone who didn't read the gossip rag side of the music indusrty until recently, it has really spilled the smack out of the plunger.

Ironically, it is old man Mick Jagger who puts it so succinctly when he says:

"I think it's very important that you have at least some sort of inner thing you don't talk about. That's why I find it distasteful when all these pop stars talk about their habits. But if that's what they need to do to get rid of them, fine. But I always found it boring."

Amen, Mick.

Of course, egoism is not nearly enough to devalue the wonderful music many of them made. I will simply go back to listening to the music and turning a deaf ear to their nonsensical ramblings. It only reenforces my opinion of recluses. The less you speak, the more you say.