California disk jockey Ladd, the ``Lonesome L.A. Cowboy,'' queues up an all-too-loose history of FM free-form radio, from the rock revolution of the Sixties to the ``classic rock'' stations of the late 1980's. Although he calls this ``a true story based on actual events,'' Ladd has inexplicably changed the names of many of the personalities and radio stations involved, providing only an unannotated general list of the real names. The origins of the ``tribal drum,'' ``the soundtrack of our lives,'' Ladd says, go back to 1967, when ``Big Daddy'' Tom Donahue (apparently not a pseudonym) set up shop in Haight-Ashbury and ``treated the music as an art rather than a product.'' Ladd's own FM history began in Long Beach as a gofer at ``KBRK.'' He soon moved to a network ``format'' station that even in 1969 was highly mechanized and corporate. After syndicating his own program, ``Innerview,'' featuring the likes of John Lennon, Alice Cooper, and the Grateful Dead, he refused an order to give it up and ``defected'' to ``KAOS.'' He was there for 15 years before he was fired for a midnight tirade against ``formula radio'' and his refusal to do ``dentist office music for yuppies.'' Ladd's confrontations with management over running ``commercials for the military,'' the behind-the-scenes glimpse he provides of Patty Hearst, and excerpts from his interviews with Lennon and others provide some fun and interest. And his story of initiating a telephone campaign to the Carter White House to protest the spraying of marijuana with herbicides is a gem. Unfortunately, the good parts are dwarfed by lengthy stretches describing how uptight management could be and how groovy everyone else was—although apparently not groovy enough to use their real names. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: June 20, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-05952-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1991
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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