Few first-person memoirs of the rock biz are as smart, honest, and entertaining as this tart, incisive work.
The drummer for a well-known Minneapolis rock band looks back on the group’s oft-bumpy ride from semi-obscurity to success and back again.
Anyone who thinks the rock-’n’-roll comedy This Is Spinal Tap is wholly fiction is directed to this wised-up, dryly funny, and sobering account of one rock group’s rise and fall. Harvard-educated percussionist Slichter offers a wry and sharply realized account of the brainy pop trio Semisonic’s eight-year slog through the music business. With sometimes wide and always wide-open eyes, Slichter recalls his sudden move into music’s big leagues in a group that also featured singer-songwriter-guitarist Dan Wilson and bassist John Munson, veterans of the onetime A&M Records act Trip Shakespeare. The relatively inexperienced skinman takes in the group’s early, sharp shocks—its signing to Elektra Records; its abrupt departure from the label after an executive regime change; and the acquisition of its album by MCA Records, the notoriously maladroit (and now defunct) major known as the “Music Cemetery of America.” He recounts the threesome’s dizzying and costly luge ride through a flop debut album and a massive smash (the ubiquitous 1998 single “Closing Time”), and their enervating failure to connect with a follow-up hit. Along the way, he observes the soul-killing rituals of the record business: fatiguing flesh-pressing with radio station staffers; uneasy appearances on TV and radio shows; expensive, nerve-racking video and photo shoots; countless unsettling encounters with clueless, arrogant label executives; and, of course, the numbing grind of touring in a succession of mammoth, faceless arenas. Books that purportedly expose the music industry’s mechanics from the inside are plentiful, but Slichter’s is one of the few that captures with precision the vertiginous highs and abysmal lows experienced during the climb up the pop ladder and the plummet from the top. He’s a self-effacing, good-humored, and intelligent guide through the musical maze.
Few first-person memoirs of the rock biz are as smart, honest, and entertaining as this tart, incisive work.Pub Date: June 29, 2004
ISBN: 0-7679-1470-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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