Music critic Scherman (editor, The Rock Musician, not reviewed, etc.) presents the story of drummer Earl Palmer, one of the foundational figures in rock, who witnessed the changes in race relations and the world of popular music from the vaudeville days to the present. Scherman provides the introduction to each chapter of this biography, and then presents transcriptions from his 125 hours of taped interviews with Palmer. This allows Palmer’s particular blend of New Orleans black dialect and vaudevillian wordplay to take center stage in the story of his life. Recounting everything from his very earliest memories of New Orleans’s Treme neighborhood in the 1920s and ’40s up through the rock scene of the 1980s, Palmer presents a very personal overview of the century. While his worthiness as a biographical figure rests largely on his work with such notables as Ritchie Valens, the Righteous Brothers, Tina Turner, the Beach Boys, and dozens of other rock musicians, he also worked with jazz luminaries like Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, and Dizzy Gillespie, and thus is able to offer a look at the intersection of these musical realms. Unfortunately, nearly half the book is spent on the minor details of his early life, prior to his arrival in the halls of fame. The oral style also doesn—t serve the book well: Palmer has a tendency to ramble (reading occasionally to a page containing two and three short, vaguely related anecdotes). Palmer’s speech is also far from G-rated; among many crudities are such recollections as “I got bombed off homemade vodka and fucked one of the only chicks that wasn—t big and fat.” Somehow, this fails to seem charming. The final sections detailing his work with major musicians are more engaging and funny, as when he says incredibly of a recording session with rock superstar Neil Young, “I—m telling you, man, I don—t remember it.” While the discussions of rock’s formative years make for interesting reading, Palmer’s personal story does not, and this book will probably appeal most to rock history completists. (32 b&w photos)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-56098-844-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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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