A professional memoir too exactingly detailed and personal to engage a general audience.
Brownrout recounts his multifaceted career in the music industry during its tumultuous transformations of the 1980s and 1990s.
The author grew up in a suburb of Buffalo, New York, during the ’60s and ’70s, when the city boasted a vibrant live music scene and was a magnet for new wave and punk bands. In addition to his love of music and pop culture, he was “driven by the entrepreneurial gene and an innate sense of opportunity,” managing local bands and organizing concerts by the time he was 15 years old. These side gigs became a full-time job as soon as he graduated high school in 1980, and he was soon bringing internationally recognized acts (like Billy Idol) to Buffalo. His ambitions outgrew Buffalo, and in 1983 he headed for New York City in search of a career in the music industry. Brownrout spent the next 20 years performing several different professional roles, including road manager, agent, and business manager, and he worked with “punk-pioneers” including Richard Hell and Johnny Thunders as well as top acts in metal such as Metallica and Megadeth. The author’s discussion of the heavy metal music scene is among the highlights of this exceedingly intelligent book, written by a thoughtful “student of music business history.” Brownrout eventually started his own record label, Mercenary Records, which signed the Goo Goo Dolls to their first contract. Ultimately, he became excessively focused on financial success, a preoccupation that threatened to overwhelm the love of music that drew him into the industry in the first place. The author describes his predicament with admirable candor: “My spirit and passion for music collided with the greed and opportunism of the dot-com-crazed ’90s. I used to read the music trades every morning. Now stacks of The Wall Street Journal obscured them and copies of Barron’s littered my floor. I was losing sight of what I had set out to do.”
Before returning to Buffalo to become an art dealer, Brownrout lived through a time of extraordinary transitions for the music industry in which vinyl records were replaced by CDs, which themselves were rendered obsolete by the shift to digital releases. While the author discusses these tectonic shifts, he doesn’t dwell on them at great length; instead, his focus is largely on his own professional evolution, documented with a painstaking attention to minute detail and an aim to achieve an encyclopedic comprehensiveness. Brownrout dissects deal after deal in all their particulars, reflects on the people with whom he worked, and details his own financial trials and triumphs. The plight of the industry—much more fascinating and dramatic than a narrated curriculum vitae—is relegated to the background. The author isn’t averse to celebrity name-dropping—he has worked with and befriended a lot of famous people—but he refrains from sharing gossip and only mentions the “debauched music industry affairs” he attended in order to assure the reader that their “secrets will die with me.” Of course, this discretion is admirable, but absent showbiz scandal or a commentary on the industry’s metamorphoses, readers are left with a granular account of the author’s career. This memoir will undoubtedly fascinate those who were involved in the scene or know Brownrout, but it is unlikely to titillate a readership beyond that narrow perimeter.
A professional memoir too exactingly detailed and personal to engage a general audience.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781771839099
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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