A hopelessly rambling and combative biography of the seminal punk band. British writer Gray (It Crawled from the South: An R.E.M. Companion, not reviewed) is out to debunk what he calls the Clash Myth: the notion that the Clash were working-class outsiders who despised '70s rock culture as well as England's social status quo, and that they were motivated by righteous political anger, not by the desire to make money. In reality, the teenage Mick Jones played in garage bands influenced by the New York Dolls, only briefly lived in a council high-rise, and wore ultralong hair and flared jeans. Even more damning, according to Gray, Joe Strummer (nÇ John Mellor) attended a posh public school and actually had some pre- Clash musical success fronting the 101ers, a mid-'70s London R&B outfit. The two singer-songwriter-guitarists formed the Clash in 1976. Gray speciously portrays the band's stirring agitprop as sociobiographically suspect: `` `Career Opportunities' . . . came nowhere near to reflecting the realistic employment prospects of the band as a whole.'' Gray never conveys the impact the music had on the public, relying on sniping reviews in the notoriously fickle and trend-gobbling British music press. The Clash were plagued by management and record company conflicts, the heroin addiction of drummer Topper Headon, and the two singers' increasingly divergent personalities and musical tastes, but they produced sophisticated, melodic, incendiary rock and roll. Gray faults them for issuing contradictory political statements over the years and even for earning some money, but given that all concerned were in their 20s and were, after all, a band rather than a political action committee, his myth-busting on these fronts seems misguided. Gray's smug, repetitive prose utterly fails to put the Clash in a coherent context the way Jon Savage's towering England's Dreaming did for the Sex Pistols. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8050-4640-2
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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