A series of lively postcards from a peerless journey. “Definitely long, definitely strange—and definitely a trip,” said band...
Like a Grateful Dead concert, McNally’s authorized biography of the great band is amiable, digressive, and transporting, capable of minor misadventures but always worth witnessing.
McNally was anointed official Dead historian in 1980, by Jerry Garcia, who admired the accuracy and sensitivity of McNally’s book on Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady (Desolate Angel, 1979). He hasn’t let the band down. Working in linear fashion—punctuated by chapters that convey a you-are-there atmosphere: equipment setups, interview snippets, stage snafus, and moments of glory—McNally keeps the writing liquid, mellow despite all the detail it sheds, exhaustive without being exhausting. McNally’s job couldn’t have been easy, considering the general chaos and disorganization that surrounded the band, not to mention the unbridled use of recreational intoxicants. (It is a measure of the anecdotal pleasures here to learn that the Dead were introduced to LSD by the CIA.) But he does a yeoman’s job of tracking both their footsteps and their mindsets, setting them within (or outside) the context of the country’s evolving politics and culture, conjuring a sense of their genuine eccentricities, the irritants that generated their pearls: the lightning in a bottle of “Live Dead,” the endlessly unfolding “Dark Star,” and “St. Stephen,” with its “medieval vision set inside a psychedelic ambience.” The Dead made music that defined their lives and then shared it with friends; the stage was their living room. They were cooperative, leaderless, real-time, Dionysian, ready to follow their emotional and artistic vicissitudes. So they did, as McNally chronicles, alone and together, brilliant and abysmal; some survived, others did not. But what a time: be-ins, Woodstock (yes, they were there), Fillmore East and West and every stage in between, turned on and tuned in—and the music, it was always about the music, though “we never failed to have some fun,” Garcia pointed out.
A series of lively postcards from a peerless journey. “Definitely long, definitely strange—and definitely a trip,” said band member Phil Lesh. Wish you were here.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-7679-1185-7
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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