Essential for any devotee of the Band, Dylan, or rock music in the last half of the 20th century.
Nothing forges the bonds of brotherhood like life in a band, especially when it’s the Band.
“When you awake, you will remember everything,” Robertson once wrote; true to form, this debut memoir—covering the life of Robertson and the Band up to the legendary “Last Waltz” concert in 1976—doesn’t miss a thing. Whether running interference for a gangster uncle, taking B12 shots with Edie Sedgwick, or hanging with Bob Dylan at Big Pink, Robertson recalls all the key moments of an eventful life with a songwriter’s eye for detail. Part Indian, part Jewish, and a Canadian native who would adopt and reinvent American music, Robertson learned his trade as a barely legal member of the Hawks, the backing band of rockabilly American transplant Ronnie Hawkins. After years of playing together, the Hawks left Hawkins and were soon touring with Dylan. It was a Faustian bargain—the group famously endured nightly boos as Dylan tortured the folkies with his electric guitars and amps—but the association also led to the most productive periods in the lives of everyone involved. Robertson is especially strong at capturing the Band’s life with Dylan, where a shared spontaneity would inform both Dylan’s legendary “Basement Tapes” and the Band’s classic first albums. “Songs poured out of Bob and we tore through them; if lightning struck and you weren’t around, the show went on without you,” writes the author. What distinguishes the book more than anything is that, besides being Robertson’s story, it’s also a memoriam for the Band, a deeply felt thanatopsis for a group of renegades who were never better than when they were together. The picture may be a bit too rosy; post-breakup, Robertson was permanently at odds with the late Levon Helm over publishing credits. The author addresses the issue but not the fallout.
Essential for any devotee of the Band, Dylan, or rock music in the last half of the 20th century.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-307-88978-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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