An entertaining, thoughtful account of the music business, one that would-be machers will want to study closely.
“I always know in a few seconds.” Music mogul Reid reveals the secrets of the producer’s trade.
Exhibit A is a young man named Usher Raymond IV, who came into the Atlanta headquarters of LaFace Records at a time when the label was suffering the inevitable growth pains, among them demands from its lead act, the hip-hop group TLC, for more money. Money is, as might be expected, a constant presence and preoccupation in Reid’s narrative, but happily, not at the expense of the music. He writes of having grown up in Cincinnati in the shadow of the King Records building, James Brown’s label. “Rhythm intoxicated me,” he writes, “and eventually it occurred to me that I wanted to play along.” He did so as drummer and driving force for the regionally popular combo called The Deele, which crafted hits for itself and other acts—notably Pebbles, whom Reid would marry. None too star-struck with himself, the author writes of learning his way around the music business, motivated in part by the desire to get out of his mother’s home: “I had no real prospects in the music business,” he notes, “but that didn’t occur to me.” Instead, he kept at it, realizing, critically, that he had a good brain as well as talent. He worked hard to learn as much as he could about that business and eventually stepped from behind the drum kit to take the lead first as a producer, then as a label owner, and then as an executive for the biggest hit-makers—a job, he notes, that is full of infighting and ugly politics. Throughout, Reid conveys his love of music and his open-minded search for new talent, no matter what the genre, including recent discoveries the Kongos and Meghan Trainor. (Incidentally, Usher passed that audition in a few seconds, and the rest is history.)
An entertaining, thoughtful account of the music business, one that would-be machers will want to study closely.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-227475-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered...
The inspirational and ultimately redemptive story of a teenage girl’s descent into hell, framed as a parable of faith.
The disappearance of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002 made national headlines, turning an entire country into a search party; it seemed like something of a miracle when she reappeared, rescued almost by happenstance, nine months later. As the author suggests, it was something of a mystery that her ordeal lasted that long, since there were many times when she was close to being discovered. Her captors, a self-proclaimed religious prophet whose sacraments included alcohol, pornography and promiscuous sex, and his wife and accomplice, jealous of this “second wife” he had taken, weren’t exactly criminal masterminds. In fact, his master plan was for similar kidnappings to give him seven wives in all, though Elizabeth’s abduction was the only successful one. She didn’t write her account for another nine years, at which point she had a more mature perspective on the ordeal, and with what one suspects was considerable assistance from co-author Stewart, who helps frame her story and fill in some gaps. Though the account thankfully spares readers the graphic details, Smart tells of the abuse and degradation she suffered, of the fear for her family’s safety that kept her from escaping and of the faith that fueled her determination to survive. “Anyone who suggests that I became a victim of Stockholm syndrome by developing any feelings of sympathy for my captors simply has no idea what was going on inside my head,” she writes. “I never once—not for a single moment—developed a shred of affection or empathy for either of them….The only thing there ever was was fear.”
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered rather than how she recovered.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-04015-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.
This chronicle of a chaotic year filled with deep losses and rich epiphanies finds the writer and performer covering a whole lot of ground.
In terms of the calendar, Smith’s latest memoir has a tighter focus than its predecessors, M Train (2015) and Just Kids (2010), which won the National Book Award. The titular year is 2016, a year that would begin just after the author turned 69 and end with her turning 70. That year, Smith endured the death of her beloved friend Sandy Pearlman, the music producer and manager with whom she would “have coffee at Caffé Trieste, peruse the shelves of City Lights Bookstore and drive back and forth across the Golden Gate listening to the Doors and Wagner and the Grateful Dead”; and the decline of her lifelong friend and kindred spirit Sam Shepard. She held vigil for Pearlman at his hospital deathbed, and she helped Shepard revise his final manuscript, taking dictation when he could no longer type. Throughout, the author ponders time and mortality—no surprise considering her milestone birthday and the experience of losing friends who have meant so much to her. She stresses the importance of memory and the timeless nature of a person’s spirit (her late husband remains very much alive in these pages as well). Seeing her own reflection, she thinks, “I noticed I looked young and old simultaneously.” She refers to herself as the “poet detective,” and this particular year set her on a quixotic quest, with a mysterious companion unexpectedly reappearing amid a backdrop of rock touring, lecture touring, vagabond traveling, and a poisonous political landscape. “I was still moving within an atmosphere of artificial brightness with corrosive edges,” she writes, “the hyperreality of a polarizing pre-election mudslide, an avalanche of toxicity infiltrating every outpost.”
A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-65768-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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