A hard, sobering look at what it really takes to bring live music to the fans.
Musical memoir from the owner of venerable Greenville, S.C., music venue The Handlebar.
Ex-journalist turned club promoter Jeter assures readers that all the hard work, sacrifice, frustration and disappointment that went into building and sustaining his dream “Listening Room” has been worth it. Played mostly in minor keys, The Handlebar’s history is rife with tour managers constantly demanding too much, patrons expecting too much and city inspectors withholding too much. The admittedly naïve author explains how he found himself frequently holed up inside his closet-sized office breaking down over that night’s dismal receipts. It all started out so gloriously, of course, in the early 1990s, when Jeter and his brother decided to throw caution to the wind and rent out space inside a largely abandoned textile factory on the outskirts of town. Although they had absolutely no experience booking performers or running a music venue, they were convinced that they could make it work. What they didn’t count on, however, was a cavalcade of obnoxious tour managers, boorish artists and impossible city officials constantly getting in their way. While these encounters are mostly sketchy, the fallout is heartbreakingly real and begs the question, why? The money never seems to have been there (at least not enough of it), and for every transcendental night with Joan Baez or John Mayer, there appears to have been 10 hellacious nights with snotty eccentrics demanding costumed hamsters in their contract riders. Jeter’s brother eventually decided to leave the business, but the author, with Herculean help from his wife, hung in there, and The Handlebar is still rocking.
A hard, sobering look at what it really takes to bring live music to the fans.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1891885-99-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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