Few first-person memoirs of the rock biz are as smart, honest, and entertaining as this tart, incisive work.
The drummer for a well-known Minneapolis rock band looks back on the group’s oft-bumpy ride from semi-obscurity to success and back again.
Anyone who thinks the rock-’n’-roll comedy This Is Spinal Tap is wholly fiction is directed to this wised-up, dryly funny, and sobering account of one rock group’s rise and fall. Harvard-educated percussionist Slichter offers a wry and sharply realized account of the brainy pop trio Semisonic’s eight-year slog through the music business. With sometimes wide and always wide-open eyes, Slichter recalls his sudden move into music’s big leagues in a group that also featured singer-songwriter-guitarist Dan Wilson and bassist John Munson, veterans of the onetime A&M Records act Trip Shakespeare. The relatively inexperienced skinman takes in the group’s early, sharp shocks—its signing to Elektra Records; its abrupt departure from the label after an executive regime change; and the acquisition of its album by MCA Records, the notoriously maladroit (and now defunct) major known as the “Music Cemetery of America.” He recounts the threesome’s dizzying and costly luge ride through a flop debut album and a massive smash (the ubiquitous 1998 single “Closing Time”), and their enervating failure to connect with a follow-up hit. Along the way, he observes the soul-killing rituals of the record business: fatiguing flesh-pressing with radio station staffers; uneasy appearances on TV and radio shows; expensive, nerve-racking video and photo shoots; countless unsettling encounters with clueless, arrogant label executives; and, of course, the numbing grind of touring in a succession of mammoth, faceless arenas. Books that purportedly expose the music industry’s mechanics from the inside are plentiful, but Slichter’s is one of the few that captures with precision the vertiginous highs and abysmal lows experienced during the climb up the pop ladder and the plummet from the top. He’s a self-effacing, good-humored, and intelligent guide through the musical maze.
Few first-person memoirs of the rock biz are as smart, honest, and entertaining as this tart, incisive work.Pub Date: June 29, 2004
ISBN: 0-7679-1470-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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
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
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