Johns comes across as an amiable guy who got lucky, and there must be more to it than that.
A matter-of-fact memoir by the renowned record producer.
Known for his work with the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Who, the Eagles, and Crosby, Stills and Nash, Johns seems like a modest guy with a strong work ethic, self-effacing to a fault. And he’s not much for gossip, which means most of the secrets and scandals from these tempestuous artists are not illuminated here. As he explains of the recording of the Beatles’ “Let It Be,” where fissures turned into large cracks, “[i]t is not my place to discuss any detail of what happened, but it is common knowledge that George [Harrison] left the band and was persuaded to return a couple of days later.” The author does acknowledge that Yoko Ono’s presence was a little intrusive, but that’s common knowledge as well. Readers looking for previously unrevealed dirt will be disappointed, as Johns isn’t looking to grind any axes or settle scores. His revelations mainly concern himself, such as the fact that “most find it incomprehensible to believe that I was completely straight and in fact have never taken drugs of any sort. Other than the odd aspirin.” Little wonder, then, that his favorite Rolling Stone was his one-time roommate Ian Stewart, the pianist who wasn’t deemed rock ’n’ roll enough by the band’s manager, and that he didn’t get on well with Keith Richards or Eric Clapton during the depths of their addictions. “I have yet to meet a heroin addict that I would choose to have any kind of social intercourse with let alone a creative relationship,” he writes, “and I’m sure the feeling would be mutual.” Though the book traces the arc of a half-century’s worth of impressive studio credits, one never gets the sense of what distinguishes his studio approach and generated so many hit singles and classic albums.
Johns comes across as an amiable guy who got lucky, and there must be more to it than that.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0399163876
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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
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
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