Pleasant enough, but in the end little more than a fan's notes.
The author recalls his years on the road with volatile and complex jazz musician Miles Davis.
In 1973, guitarist Murphy received a call to join Davis's entourage. He worked for the trumpet-player off and on through 1983, first as a stagehand and then as road manager, helping with everything from sound systems to procuring women. A startling, innovative talent, Davis began his career with Charley Parker's quintet in the 1940s, then broke away to become the embodiment of “cool jazz” in the ’50s. He reinvented himself several more times, even experimenting with rap before his death in 1991. In the ’70s, Davis rolled the influences of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone into his repertoire, more or less inventing fusion. Many of Davis's loyalists from the good old days hated the extremely loud, amplified band (whose members used a lot of drugs) that Miles presided over during the period Murphy chronicles, but rock fans loved it, making Bitches Brew the bestselling jazz album in history. Murphy does little more here than string together anecdotes, with many a cameo from Bob Dylan to Waylon Jennings to the members of U2, but at least he manages to make Davis come across better than he did in Miles: The Autobiography (1989) and puts into context rumors of his bisexuality. Toward the end of Murphy's gig, Davis is in physical decline, much of it brought on by drug abuse, and these are the best, most affecting pages. Gratifyingly, a strong woman comes into Miles’s life: In part because of Cicely Tyson, Davis made another big comeback in the early ’80s with a series of concerts at the Lincoln Center. Though Murphy has his moments, he’s also quite idiosyncratic: His lengthy comparison of Davis with Ernest Hemingway seems odd at best, and his structure throughout is jagged and unbalanced.
Pleasant enough, but in the end little more than a fan's notes.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56025-361-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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