Selvin has provided an authoritative account full of rich details (sometimes too many) of the San Francisco music scene from 1965 to 1971. Armed with material from archives, nearly a hundred taped interviews, and his own recollections, Selvin, San Francisco Chronicle pop music critic (then and now), weaves together the stories of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Santana, and other bands that were part of the scene that redefined American pop music. Standing behind much of the story is promoter Bill Graham (and the many pretenders to his throne), whose ambition and effort kept the scene from falling apart completely, at least for a while. Starting with the emergence of LSD as a legal, underground drug, Selvin shows how the various well-known and not so well known bands played psychedelic musical chairs with managers, venues, and record companies. Along with insider accounts of band feuds (such as the chilling tale of Joplin walking out on her first band on her way to an untimely and lonely death), Selvin presents a broad canvas and manages to both undermine and enhance prevailing myths about the psychedelic scene. Graham's benefits and concerts, with their chaotic scenesters running amok, and the discomforting violence of the Hell's Angels at Altamont and other places are straightforward reminders of just how extreme the Bay Area was. The book's biggest problems are its portrayals of female hangers-on (``toothsome'') and groups involving people of color (Santana is ``a pack of wolves''), and an overabundance of characters in the early chapters that will leave many readers desperate for a familiar face like Jerry Garcia. An often dramatic and compelling story that will serve as necessary reading for those who are too young (or too straight) to have been there and which will strike a chord of nostalgia among those who were. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-525-93675-0
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
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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