Unsparing tell-all biography of country-music icon Buck Owens (1929–2006).
Although Owens always played up his country-gentleman public image, former Tennessean and Washington Post editor Sisk (Honky-Tonks: Guide to Country Dancin’ and Romancin’, 1995) exposes him as a cutthroat businessman, a dishonest and abusive bandleader and a wife-beating womanizer, among other things. Through in-depth interviews with Owens’s former bandmates, wives, girlfriends and business associates, the author provides a hatchet job with a heart. Sisk posits an all-consuming fear of poverty behind Owens’s take-no-prisoners pursuit of money; however, the author never apologizes for any of her subject’s dirty deeds. Growing up in small-town Texas during the Depression, in the 1950s Owens moved to Bakersfield, Calif., to make it as a guitar picker, inadvertently founding the “Bakersfield” sound, a harder-edged alternative to the syrupy Nashville style. By the early ’60s, there was a worldwide audience for his music—the Beatles even covered his signature song, “Act Naturally.” But as soon as Owens had a modicum of power, writes the author, he abused it. His crack backing band, the Buckaroos, not only served as Owens’s underpaid sidemen but also as his general factotums. He took pleasure in ruining careers and sometimes even had the FBI investigate his rivals. Meanwhile, he slept with thousands of women on the road, mostly while married to one of several wives he abused over the years. Ultimately, the mindless hayseed romp Hee Haw and its decades-long TV syndication confirmed Owens as one of the wealthiest stars in any musical genre. After amassing a fortune of more than $100 million—in addition to music, he built an empire of TV and radio stations and cattle ranches—he retired quietly in the 1980s. Yet Sisk suggests that Owens died a lonely miser who could buy everything except a satisfied mind—the classic Faustian victim of success. A tough but fair portrait of Owens’s three faces: talented musician, genius businessman and despicable creep.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-55652-768-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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