Fats perches with rightful ease atop his pedestal.
One of rock-’n’-roll’s founding fathers gets full and loving treatment in this biography from music journalist Coleman.
In the 1950s and ’60s, Antoine “Fats” Domino helped usher in rock-’n’-roll with galvanizing numbers like “Ain’t that a Shame,” “Blueberry Hill,” “Going Home” and “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.” Along with such contemporaries as Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry (the author also credits the influence of Joe Turner, Roy Brown and Louis Jordan), Domino brought the big beat to recognition, adding the distinctively swinging sound of his native New Orleans. Take that beat, touch it with “the heartache of the blues and the hope of gospel,” infuse it with lyrics that celebrate a passion for life, and you’ve got a sound that proved to be “ground zero for integration,” writes Coleman. He fully explores rock’s African-American roots, particularly rhythm and blues, call and response, piano triplets and the offbeats that Domino loved. Well before the British Invasion reintroduced African-American music to white American audiences, Domino had been the harbinger: he crashed a host of mainstream venues (Steve Allen, Ed Sullivan and Dick Clark, for starters) and played everywhere from the Apollo to all-white clubs. He was proud that his subversive, sensual music caused riots. Coleman covers all the gigs, all the dazzling band members and all their various travails with booze, egos, drugs and gambling. Domino and his cohorts were epic figures, but they were human, enthusiastic participants in the pleasures their music celebrated. The biography ends on a lovely last, lingering note: Domino survived Katrina and the destruction of his beloved Ninth Ward; he now lives across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, quietly with family and piano.
Fats perches with rightful ease atop his pedestal.Pub Date: May 30, 2006
ISBN: 0-306-81491-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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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