An entertaining account by an ’80s radio icon.
A radio DJ recounts his years as a participant in the new-wave scene in this debut memoir.
Blade—a longtime DJ at the Los Angeles radio station KROQ and a television personality credited with helping to popularize new-wave music in America—seems like one of those people who should already have written a book or two. Not so. Blade has only recently put down in print his stories of coming up during the zenith of rock radio, a time when the tastes and personalities of DJs truly shaped the musical landscape. The author recounts growing up in England in the 1960s and discovering rock ’n’ roll via Radio Luxembourg: “The British government frowned upon this intrusion into its airwaves but could do nothing as suddenly every kid in the UK was listening to 208 and buying the songs they heard on the station.” As a young man, he worked as a club DJ in Europe before relocating to Los Angeles to find himself at the epicenter of the music business, interviewing and mingling with some of the greatest stars of the ’80s. From watching “Rio” debut (and bomb) at the Roxy while standing next to Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon to having his heart broken by Terri Nunn of Berlin, Blade takes readers back to 1982 in all its sexy, druggy, synthy glory. The author’s prose is simple, but he’s a natural raconteur who never quite shakes off his own awe at the situations in which he found himself: “We were working long hours, under crazy conditions with drugs and guns in plain sight and doing it all for free.” Like all books of this genre, the work drops a parade of names and delivers a good deal of romanticizing, but Blade’s aversion to drugs and alcohol makes him a more reliable reporter than most from that milieu. Fans of his era of music will find much to appreciate in this autobiography, which manages to capture not only the life of the author, but also the experience of a generation (perhaps the last) for which rock was the greatest force in the world.
An entertaining account by an ’80s radio icon.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9990210-7-1
Page Count: 530
Publisher: Indigo River Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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