A spry study that should inspire listening with newly informed ears to old tunes, from “Bulldozer Blues” to “Teenager in...
A dean of rock journalism delivers the first volume of a magnum opus on a subject that never ceases to fascinate.
When does the rock ’n’ roll genre properly begin? Clearly well before Elvis Presley took the stage. By Fresh Air correspondent Ward’s account, it began in the 1920s, its outlines traced in the parallel development of blues, ragtime, swing, and country. In that genealogy, players such as Ernest Tubb and Bob Wills become ancestors just as surely as are Wynonie Harris and Big Joe Turner, while the blues and vaudeville join hands to produce phenomena such as Mamie Smith and Blind Lemon Jefferson. All contribute to an authentically American idiom. Ward (Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall of an American Guitar Hero, 2016, etc.) complicates the story by weaving in notes on the sometimes-uneasy meeting of races that the genres forced. In that exchange, Johnny Ray, “a gay white singer who wore hearing aids and broke down crying during his act,” became an unlikely R&B hero, and white kids flocked to “race” record shops to find the originals pilfered by clean-scrubbed collegiate quartets in the mold of Pat Boone. So it was with the canonical “Earth Angel.” Even though the original, by the Penguins, was “primitive and seemingly uncopyable,” a white group inauspiciously named the Crew-Cuts turned in—in one of Ward’s favorite words—an “anodyne” version of the song that sold reasonably well but never won over jukebox-crowding teenagers. Turning the back pages of history to look at the likes of Johnny Horton and Etta James and turning up plenty of surprises and fresh insights as he does, the author ends this installment on more or less familiar ground with the rise of the British Invasion, which would take an increasingly denatured American rock onto new ground—and provides the author a springboard for the next volume.
A spry study that should inspire listening with newly informed ears to old tunes, from “Bulldozer Blues” to “Teenager in Love” and beyond.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07116-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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