Goodman travels to Oz and dares to pull back the curtain—he finds both snake oil and genius.
Rock music has grown from social pariah to powerful engine of industry. This is an intelligent, honest look at the intersection of rock and business.
Goodman, a music and entertainment reporter with credits from Rolling Stone and the New York Times, doesn't blow the lid off the big-money machinations behind the music of rebellion—he lifts the cover and carefully reveals the personalities and motivations of the industry giants behind rock's superstars. As he covers diverse careers and the business of many record companies, Goodman masterfully conveys an incestuous industry of tightly held power. David Geffen—record industry kingpin and all-around media maven—is a featured player, along with Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Springsteen's manager and producer, John Landau, also figures prominently. The author, though critical of greedy scheming by management, pays respect to those managers, producers, and record executives who made fortunes for themselves and, sometimes, their clients. Springsteen's pages detail his rocky relationship with opportunistic manager Mike Appel and the influential, dominating influence of producer/manager Landau. The book is full of numbers—millions of dollars trade hands according to negotiated percentages. And Goodman makes it all fascinating. It's the focus on the business side that makes the lengthy book cohere. Some rock fans will undoubtedly have a hard time with this story of money changers in the temple. But a character such as Geffen, as Goodman paints him, is to be both despised and admired. Among other exploits, he stole visionary rocker Neil Young from RCA with an offer of $3 million less and a guarantee of artistic freedom, but later sued Young, unsuccessfully, for breach of contract, for failing to make "commercial'' records.
Goodman travels to Oz and dares to pull back the curtain—he finds both snake oil and genius.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8129-2113-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1996
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
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
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