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SMOKE SNORT SWALLOW SHOOT

Name: SMOKE SNORT SWALLOW SHOOT
Author: Jacob Hoye
ISBN: 978-1-944713-03-4

LEGENDARY BINGES, LOST WEEKENDS, AND OTHER FEATS OF ROCK 'N' ROLL INCOHERENCE

edited by Jacob Hoye ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 7, 2017

An overwhelmingly sad and consistently vulgar anthology.

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Rehashed tales of rock ’n’ roll excess prove that even the most powerfully creative voices in music can be tone deaf about drug addiction.

And so it goes. Johnny Cash loses it in Nickajack Cave, Ozzy Osbourne snorts up a bunch of ants, and Lemmy slips into premature rigor mortis. The lives of drug-addled recording artists over the last 50 years or so have been nothing if not predictably awful—and, unfortunately, cliché. Editor Hoye takes a steadfastly permissive approach, presenting the collection of coked-out confessionals without benefit of outside commentary or context; the pieces are merely excerpts from previous books. The likes of Aerosmith, Marilyn Manson, Slash, Dee Dee Ramone, Gregg Allman, and Anthony Kiedis drone on about how the pills and the smack drove them to the depths of depravity and degradation and back again. In one instance, Nikki Sixx and Osbourne seemed locked in a battle to become the most repulsive human being on tour. Osbourne won. In another all-too-familiar case, Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Kiedis details how heroin actually cost him his multimillion-dollar gig. Heroine also looms large in the tawdry and twisted lives of multiple members of Guns N’ Roses. Aerosmith’s insufferable exploits at an out-of-the-way recording studio dubbed the Cenacle in the late 1970s are equal parts toxic and tedious. Only the late Cash seems to possess any self-awareness about the well-trodden road he’s traveled. “The journey into addiction has been described so often by so many people in recent years that I don’t believe a blow-by-blow account of my particular path would serve any useful purpose,” he writes, “…so while I do have to tell you about it, I’ll try to avoid being tedious. Hit just the lowlights, so to speak.” Alas, these rock stars and their copycat crackups are more gross than glorious.

An overwhelmingly sad and consistently vulgar anthology.

Pub Date: March 7, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-944713-03-4

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Lesser Gods

Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)