Author: brendanmstewart

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Who Are You: The Life of Pete Townshend, by Mark Ian Wilkerson

Mark Ian Wilkerson’s massive biography of Who guitarist/songwriter Pete Townshend is a long-overdue look at one of rock music’s greatest talents.

For all of their legendary status, The Who is a band whose career hasn’t seen all that many books. There was Dave Marsh’s excellent Before I Get Old, but that was back in 1983 or so, and there was Tony Fletcher’s masterful biography of the Who’s drummer, Moon (also titled Dear Boy in some editions).

But the main guiding force behind the band has received very little attention from biographers. Geoffrey Giuliano wrote a slim bio called Behind Blue Eyes a few years ago, but Giuliano is an atrocious writer whose main research tool is previously published interviews. So Who Are You: The Life Of Pete Townshend marks the first serious bio of one of rock music’s most towering figures.

It’s a qualified success. There is no question that the book is exhaustive. At more than 600 pages, it’s about twice as long as the average rock biography, and with good reasons. For starters, Pete Townshend is still alive and still making music more than 40 years after the Who first smashed their equipment. There’s a lot more to cover than there is in books about Hendrix, the Doors, Janis Joplin or any of the other dead-too-soon rock icons.

Another reason is that Pete Townshend agreed to be interviewed by the author, and God knows that once Pete starts talking he doesn’t shut up. Fortunately, he’s been the single best “rock interview” since about 1965, and age hasn’t mellowed him a bit. He’s still every bit as cantankerous and opinionated as the 19-year-old punk who wrote “My Generation.” So by all means, let the man talk. He’s almost invariably fascinating.

Where the book does not succeed is in giving much information about the man. Much of the first half of the book is virtually indistinguishable from a more general biography of the Who. Mentions of Townshend’s marriage, affairs, and other aspects of his off-stage life are skirted (the one exception being his devotion to the guru Meher Baba). Townshend’s childhood is covered briefly, but once the Who is formed the book becomes the story of that group, with a slight accent on the guitarist.

It is only around the time of the aborted Lifehouse project and the slightly later Quadrophenia that the author starts spending more effort on Pete’s life. This may be because these were quieter years for the Who. The albums were more spaced out, the tours not as endless. There was more time for Pete to be Pete. Whatever the reason, this is where Wilkerson’s book achieves lift off and becomes a truly world-class addition to the “rock bio” library.

Surprisingly the Who’s “Farewell Tour” (their first, that is, in 1982) happens at around the halfway mark. That leaves fully half the book to be about a small spattering of solo albums and some Who reunions. More surprisingly, this is the best part of the book. Seeing Townshend groping for meaning in his life and bouncing between solo artist, book editor, and writer…all while feeling the irresistable undertow pulling him back to the Who…makes for a fascinating story.

Townshend remains something of a mystery in the book. For someone as loquacious as Pete, the idea that there can be any mystery about him or his motivations may seem difficult to believe. But for all of his talk, Townshend has a tendency to stick to general philosophies: about the nature of art in rock music, about the meaning of life as expressed in lyrics, etc. He’s much less specific about his actual life. The closer one gets to Pete, the more closed he becomes. Dissing Roger Daltrey can be great fun, but he’s much more reticent to discuss his relationship with his wife.

This is why Who Are You is an excellent title for an excellent book. You will close the book knowing much more than you ever knew about Pete Townshend. What you won’t know is who he really is.

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Forever Changes, by Andrew Hultkrans

I’ve read several of the slim volumes about classic albums that Continuum publishes in the “33 1/3” series. Most of them have been very enjoyable. The books on Electric Ladyland, Highway 61 Revisited, and Exile On Main Street were particularly enjoyable, and I came away with a much deeper appreciation of those classic albums.

So I had very high hopes when I saw that someone had the exquisite good taste to write a book about Love’s 1967 masterpiece, Forever Changes. When I first heard the album, back in the early ’80s I fell in love with the sound. In a year that saw the release of many classic albums by legendary artists (Sgt. Pepper, The Doors and Strange Days, Are You Experienced? and Axis: Bold As Love, Surrealistic Pillow…just to name a few), Forever Changes stands shoulder to shoulder with any of them. It has been in my “Top 20” albums of all time since 1981…one of the extremely few that has never fallen out of my favor.

Unfortunately, the book written about this classic album is one of the unfunniest jokes I’ve ever had the misfortune of reading. I have no idea who Andrew Hultkrans is, but I know his type. In grad school, he was one of the extremely earnest guys who sat in the front and uncritically swallowed whatever “lit-crit” the teacher of the moment was spewing. After class he went to the bar with everyone else, but he ordered a mixed-drink when beer was the order of the day, and when the subject turned to baseball he tried desperately to drag it back to Jacques Derrida’s or Stanley Fish’s latest assault on Western civilization. He was a drag, and a well-known drag.

I know this despite never meeting the man. I know it because I read his atrocious book about Love’s Forever Changes.  It reminded me of all those awful late 20th century “critics” I had to read in grad school…the ones who wrote about Shakespeare in prose so convoluted and so inarticulate that it made you hate the Bard of Avon…until you realized that your anger was misdirected and that it was the critic who was deserving of scorn and opprobrium.

Hultkrans mentions almost nothing…nothing!…about the gorgeous music on the album. The strings and horns that are perhaps the most perfect ever put onto a rock album, the sublime acoustic guitar that serves as the foundation for every tracks, the intricate drums…none of it worth even a brief mention.

Similarly the recording of the album: how Neil Young was the original producer, but left; how the band was so strung out on drugs that the famous Wrecking Crew of L.A. session musicians was brought in to play the album until the band managed to pull itself together; the push and pull of the band personalities, lorded over by the supreme egoist, genius and eccentric Arthur Lee…yeah, none of that gets mentioned either.

What does get mentioned? Page after page about Gnosticism, Marat/Sade, The Crying Of Lot 49, the Manson murders, and several other irrelevancies. The author’s contention here is that Arthur Lee was a prophet, perhaps a mad prophet, in the jeremiad tradition. Late in the year of the Summer Of Love, Forever Changes cast a darker, bleaker view of flower power and hippiedom, while still coming from that tradition. Lee saw a different vision of the hippies, one that directly anticipated the Manson murders. I wonder if Hultkrans ever heard the first two Doors albums, both of which preceded Forever Changes, and both of which were considerably darker in tone and sound.

But other albums that took a similarly dim view of what was happening culturally in California in 1967 don’t figure in. Prophets don’t come in droves after all, and if you make the case that Lee’s pessimism about Flower Power was shared by artists as diverse as the Doors and the Mothers of Invention, well, then Hultkrans doesn’t have much to write about.

Throughout the book, lyrics are twisted and bent out of shape to fit Hultkran’s thesis and to forge allusions with other more literary works and critical theories. It’s all a buncha crap, if you ask me. I’m not saying the songs don’t have meaning; I’m saying they do. By twisting the meaning to match his overblown theories and overheated rhetoric, it is Hultkrans who is saying the lyrics mean anything he wants them to mean. Makes my head hurt just to think about it.

Eventually Hultkrans resorts to the sort of hideous wordplay that the lit-crit types love so much because it makes them seem so much smarter and more sophisticated that the bourgeois proles who just want to read about an album full of great songs. Let me be the first to say that anyone who seriously uses the word “zeitgeisticide” in a sentence should never be allowed to write again. Not even a letter to a friend.

Back away from the pen, Andrew Hultkrans, before you attempt to ruin another album with your bloated eggheadery.

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Just After Sunset, by Stephen King

Fresh from the stellar return-to-form novel, Duma Key, Stephen King is back with his latest collection of short stories, Just After Sunset (not to be confused with Four Past Midnight). It’s an apt title. These are not the standard King horror stories of the darkest nights. These are twilight tales. Horror is present, but it exists on the edges, lurking in the lengthy shadows of sunset.

What you get with Just After Sunset is standard King. All of the conventions of his style are present, and it is (in King’s own words) the "literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries." I think King sells himself short with that facile quip. At his best, King has written tales of horror that rank with the very best. The Shining can sit proudly on the bookshelf next to Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece, The Haunting Of Hill House, and ‘Salem’s Lot (despite a few "young author" missteps) is a worthy addition to vampire literature. At his worst, King can be terrible (The Tommyknockers, Needful Things).

The stories in Just After Sunset range in between. Only one story, the cryptically titled "N." really rises to the highest standards of King’s earlier short fiction. The story, as King admits in his notes, owes a great debt to Arthur Machen’s "The Great God Pan," but also at least a passing shout out to H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu myth. This tale of obsession and the fabric of reality stretched thin is the high-water mark of the book. The rest of the tales fall below that standard.

The oddest story, from a stylistic perspective, is "The Cat From Hell." This is the closest story in the book to the ones you will find in King’s earliest collection, Night Shift. The reason is that this is the oldest story in the book, written when King was an unproven author selling stories to men’s magazines for money to pay the phone bill. As such, the story has a kind of heat and intensity that most of the other tales lack. King may be a better writer today, but he was a far more intense writer back then. To make a musical analogy, Eric Clapton may be a better guitar player than he was in 1965, but the young buck’s recordings with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers have a heat and intensity that the elder statesman is missing.

Most of the other stories are creepy, though none are really scary. "Willa" is a nice, but forgettable, tale of true love in a dive bar; "Ayana" posits a miracle worker who passes her gift on, but with a price; "Mute" is a tale of guilt with a Strangers On A Train-type setup; "The New York Times At Special Bargain Rates" bears a resemblance to a story King wrote many years ago for the television show Tales From the Dark Side; "The Things They Left Behind" is a touching story of trying to come to grips with life in a post-9/11 world. On this last story, King strikes all the right notes.

Perhaps most notable is "A Very Tight Place." The final story in the book is not a great tale but it does give King the one opportunity in the book to really go for the gross-out: in this case a man trapped in a Port-A-John that has been tipped over onto its door. The gross-out here is not one of dismembered bodies or strewn viscera, but more natural bodily functions. There’s nothing supernatural or even horrific in this story (well…the poor guy getting covered in human waste is pretty horrible, but you know what I mean), and the conclusion is pretty limp, but there’s no question that the story is memorable. The problem is that it is memorable for the setup, whereas a story like "N." is memorable because it is a great story written well.

Most of the rest aren’t all that memorable. There’s nothing that compares to Skeleton Crew‘s "The Mist" and "The Raft," or Night Shift‘s "Strawberry Spring" and "I Am The Doorway." But there’s also nothing here that is a complete waste of time, either. The stories are good. Nothing more (except, again, for "N."), nothing less. Here’s hoping his next novel picks up with the same focus on character and story that made Duma Key so surprisingly refreshing, and not where "A Very Tight Place" leaves off.

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Watch You Bleed: The Saga Of Guns ‘N’ Roses, by Stephen Davis

First it was Slash’s autobiography, cleverly titled Slash. Now it’s Stephen Davis’s latest entry into the rock bio sweepstakes, Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N’ Roses. And I’m even listening to Chinese Democracy right now. I haven’t given this much attention to Guns N’ Roses since 1991, when I was driving around in my 1987 Toyota Celica with my “best of” the Use Your Illusion discs blaring out at top volume.

As rock biographies go, Watch You Bleed has enough debauchery to satisfy even the most jaded rock fans. Axl’s nuts, Slash, Izzy, and Steven are junkies, Duff’s a drunk, Dizzy’s wondering what on earth he’s doing on stage with these guys. Youth and good genes are the only reasons any of these guys are still alive. Their intake of both legal and illegal substances is legendary. I mean, come on, Duff’s pancreas ruptured causing third degree burns to his guts…that’s some serious indulgence. And Slash died a couple of times (he got better).

Watch You Bleed does a very good job of describing the Los Angeles music scene from which the Gunners emerged. But though they came from the same scene as bands like Poison, Guns were never really a part of that scene. They lived a life of total squalor, selling drugs to get the money to buy more drugs, using women to get them places to sleep and food to eat. The picture of the guys in this band that emerges is that none of these guys were the kind of people you wanted to associate with if you had even the slightest sense of normalcy in your life. These were genuinely bad guys, and the music they did reflected it: gritty, angry, determined, violent, and real. “Talk dirty to me,” sang Poison as they pranced around the stage, looking like girls playing dress up, mugging for the camera. “You’re in the jungle, baby/You’re gonna die,” countered Axl, face contorted in a very unphotogenic grimace of pure rage and adrenaline.

That first Guns album, the timeless Appetite For Destruction, remains their testament. They were a street gang at the time they recorded it. Largely homeless, broke, strung out, and carrying a massive chip on their collective shoulder, the resulting music is a roller coaster ride of whiplash riffs and Axl’s vicious, sometimes unearthly, vocals. At a time when the boys of Los Angeles were dressing like the girls of the Sunset Strip mall and doing anything they could to get on MTV and the radio, Guns filled an album with songs many of which couldn’t be played on either format because of FCC regulations. The album sold over 15 million copies based on a lot of airplay for the safest songs: the lovely “Sweet Child o’ Mine” and the anarchic “Paradise City” I have no doubt that there were more than a few people who purchased the album for “Sweet Child” and were…um…shocked by the casual misogyny and brutality of “It’s So Easy.”

But damn, that album rocked. Followed by the hodgepodge of Gn’R Lies, half bogus live tracks, and half stunningly good acoustic songs, this was clearly a band bigger than the stupid scene they came from. I can still remember hearing “Patience” for the first time and being so surprised and happy that the first verse wasn’t followed by the usual hard rock bombast of the “power ballads” that were all over the radio. No, “Patience” stayed an acoustic ballad, and it was awesome.

Stephen Davis does a very good job of tracing these years of forming the band, getting the record contract, and heading out on tour as an opening act for bands like Aerosmith. I was very surprised to learn that Guns didn’t do a major tour as a headliner until the Use Your Illusion tour, despite being arguably the biggest band on the planet in 1988 and 1989. Despite all the depravity going on behind the scenes, the early Guns were a juggernaut. By the time of the Illusion albums and tour, the excess had taken a severe toll and Axl, who was surprisingly non-toxic (well, less toxic) in his habits but completely poisonous in his attitude, was going off the rails in a cataclysmic collision of therapy, arrogance, paranoia, and megalomania.

Davis gives all credit to Appetite and Lies, despite spending a lot of time on decrying the lyrical content of Axl’s “One In A Million” (from Lies). Davis never misses an opportunity to wag a politically correct finger at Axl for his decidedly non-PC views and turns what was a small controversy into a seemingly major debacle.

Unfortunately Davis also slams the Illusion albums mercilessly. I’m the first to admit that there is a whole lot of filler spread out on those two discs, and there are some songs that should have never seen the light of day (“Get In The Ring,” “My World,” and their atrocious cover of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”). But the highlights of the Illusion albums are standout tracks. From the opening salvo of “Right Next Door To Hell” to the closing fever dream of “Coma” the first of the Illusion discs has more good songs and is a more consistent disc. The second, with “Civil War,” "Yesterdays," “Estranged,” “Breakdown” among others has some of the best songs, but also the most filler. Between the two discs, you can make one solid album that rivals Appetite For Destruction.

The book came out before the release of Chinese Democracy, and ends with the tormented story of that album, asking the musical question “Will it ever come out?” Well it has and, as Bart Simpson might say, “Meh.”

Where Davis fails miserably in this book, and in his others, are the errors of fact. The book is full of little things that are just flat out wrong. Paul Stanley is the bass player of Kiss? The Replacements were "the best new band of 1990"? That’ll be news to all those people who had been listening to them since 1981. There are dozens of examples, and I usually find many of these whenever I read one of his books. I get the impression that Davis is most interested in telling a savage tale in his books, and that he is more motivated by his love of the sales that sensational stories engender than he is by any love of the music these people create. Look at the subjects for his books: Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Jim Morrison, the Rolling Stones, Guns…the most drug-addled, groupie-shagging reprobates on the planet get the Davis treatment, and his books linger lovingly over every stained sheet and discarded needle. Music is always secondary to a good overdose story. It caught my eye in Watch You Bleed that Guns is frequently compared to other bands: Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, the Stones, the Doors…hmmm, all subjects of previous Davis bios. While his research about the band itself is thorough, I get the impression that his knowledge of the broader history of rock music is fairly limited.

It’s a good story, told well, but I have a feeling the author is in it for the money, and that’s not very rock ‘n’ roll.