Extremely knowledgeable about the rock music scene, Norman tells Clapton’s story with verve and insight.
The renowned guitar superhero emerges as “supersurvivor” in this authoritative biography.
In the latest of his long list of accomplished rock biographies, novelist and playwright Norman (Paul McCartney: The Life, 2016, etc.) turns to Eric Clapton (b. 1945). The author concluded that Clapton’s own autobiography was the only “formidable deterrent” to writing one, but he felt it withheld “as much as it revealed.” Written with Clapton’s approval and access to family members and close friends, Norman’s fine biography, both objective and sympathetic, envisions Clapton as “one of the most thoroughly dissolute rockers of olden times” who became the “most thoroughly reformed.” His unmarried mother asked her mother, Rose, to adopt baby Eric, and he grew up believing her to be his mother. The music of Buddy Holly impressed him mightily, and Clapton was much taken by Holly’s Fender Stratocaster: “That’s the future. That’s what I want.” His doting grandmother bought him a basic guitar, and he practiced by listening to records. At the heart of the book is Clapton’s constant quest for the right band and the right guitars to get the right blues sound. After playing with fledging bands like the Roosters and Engineers, he got his big break with the Yardbirds, famous for their impromptu “rave-ups.” During this “CLAPTON IS GOD” (as a London graffito read) period, he got his famous nickname, “Slow-handclapton.” More bands followed, including John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Cream, and Blind Faith. Clapton also changed girlfriends as often as he changed bands. Norman describes his subject as a notorious “womaniser on the scale of Mick Jagger, a sex addict before the term was invented.” George Harrison was Clapton’s best friend, but he seduced and later married Harrison’s wife, Pattie Boyd; Clapton wrote “Layla” for her. Norman discusses in detail Clapton’s yearslong, devastating addictions to heroin and alcohol and provides countless fascinating stories about his fellow rockers.
Extremely knowledgeable about the rock music scene, Norman tells Clapton’s story with verve and insight.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-56043-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2018
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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