Read alongside Ray Davies’ X-Ray (1995) and Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming (1992) for a vivid account of a bygone musical...
A rueful, funny memoir of a doomed life in rock ’n’ roll.
Dubbed (mostly posthumously) Britain’s answer to the New York Dolls, the Hollywood Brats cooked up a mighty roar now enshrined in one very hard to find LP. The Brats—a name with “a dash of louche decadence to it”—began life as The Queen but were forced to change the moniker when another band with a record contract lay claim to it. No sweat for mastermind and axman Matheson, who is, as the narrative finds him smack in the middle of 1973, desperately seeking a record deal of his own. His representative made the rounds, tape in hand, and the record company executives listened. “They listen,” he writes, “their smiles disappear within seconds, they turn him down flat. Old colleagues question his sanity.” So it is in the glamorous world of glam-era rock music in swinging London, whose airwaves, as Matheson’s spry yarn opens, are dominated by a tune called “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep,” which, he rightly growls, “makes you want to drive spikes into your ears and crucify your brain.” The author recounts the hard work of putting together a band, especially one with a drummer who can hold a beat and a bass player who doesn’t look like he’s trying out for Jethro Tull. If we’ve heard the story before—band squabbles over lack of money, band gets gigs, band squabbles over presence of money—Matheson writes with an easy, loping gait, covering the four years when Hollywood Brats tried to make their mark on the world, only to wind up a cult favorite 40 years on. If he’s sometimes a little too breezy—his asides to rock stars of the era, Bryan Ferry and Mick Jagger among them, verge on cloying—it’s a minor demerit for a book that’s long on laughs and even insight.
Read alongside Ray Davies’ X-Ray (1995) and Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming (1992) for a vivid account of a bygone musical era.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-18533-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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