Review by New York Times Review
ALL ROCK BIOGRAPHIES/MEMOIRS agree on one point. As Gregg Allman tells it in "One Way Out," an exhaustive oral history of the Allman Brothers Band by Alan Paul, escaping the workaday lot of "a shock-absorber washer-jammer in Detroit ... is why I became a musician in the first place." Or as Joey Ramone sang: "It's not my place in the 9-to-5 world." Whatever form the music might take, it promised a palatable alternative to the routine assembly-line life. Learn how to play an instrument, be able to clutch a mic and project some personality or attitude, and you too might ascend from the pits of menial-labor, desk-job drudgery, or the "Do you want fries with that?" service industry. Not only were shimmering nonunion perks like sex, drugs and fame on the table, but you could sleep until the afternoon, not be penalized for lapses in hygiene or deportment and, with luck, get paid to be utterly irresponsible. What wasn't to love? You didn't even have to be a musician to tap into that life. In 1969, you could be a young substitute teacher in Harlem who started working after school in the office of a syndicated music writer/D.J./would-be record producer named Richard Robinson, and in no time find yourself skating down a yellow brick road of free record albums, concert tickets and record company buffets straight into the spanking new field of rock journalism (while marrying the boss in the process, a union that would also stick). As Lisa Robinson says in her winning THERE GOES GRAVITY: A Life in Rock and Roll (Riverhead, $27.95), she wasn't like the "boys who had ambitions to become the next Norman Mailer": She took over her new husband's column and was off to the races. A dedicated Manhattan girl, she adopted a very laissez-faire, New Orleans attitude to the rock circus - let the good times roll over you and leave the existential-metaphysical-political implications to others. Robinson wasn't a partyer, though. She came for the music and the warped conviviality of the milieu (a professed "drug prude," she passed on the cocaine hors d'oeuvres). Observing Mick Jagg er or Robert Plant in their offstage habitats was almost as entertaining as seeing Keith Richards or Television's Tom Verlaine play sublime guitar licks. By the '70s, Robinson was writing a cheeky gossip/ fashion column she called "Eleganza" for Creem magazine. This led to her being hired as the press liaison for the Rolling Stones' 1975 Tour of the Americas. (Annie Leibovitz was the tour photographer.) Robinson's account of this semidebacle is full of telling vignettes, but fuzzy on the overview. The bassist Bill Wyman spent his free time obsessively videotaping old Laurel and Hardy movies, which is a perfect snapshot of his distance from his mates - the odd man already out of the band in spirit if not body. Robinson's take on Jagger's mindfulness of public opinion is less satisfactory: If the tour was intended to counter a growing perception that the Stones were creatively bankrupt, how was this bloated show - featuring a million-dollar stage rig and a truly ridiculous inflatable 15-foot penis among its props - meant to do that? She writes: "Much to my dismay but to the delight of the crowd, Mick initiated his incredibly corny shtick of hitting the stage with the belt during 'Midnight Rambler.'" Precisely. Her curious assertion that "punk was peaking" at that moment - mid-1975, just when the Sex Pistols were forming and most of her beloved CBGB bands hadn't even scored record deals - doesn't help matters either. (I'm shocked she doesn't mention the Stones' stomach-churning 1974 video for "It's Only Rock 'n' Roll," where the boys performed in wee white sailor suits while being covered in soap bubbles.) Lapses in context aside, Robinson is often delightful company. She spins good yarns and drops nifty tidbits about a litany of the great and the weird. Meet Lou Reed after hours (she and her husband videotaped him singing an early version of "Walk on the Wild Side" on their couch), kibitz with the New York Dolls' peerless David Johansen, visit Michael Jackson (spanning the whole career from boyhood to total dissolution). You can dine with a voluble Phil Spector, delve into the pontifical all-things-to-all-people contradictions of U2 and recall a certain Ms. Smith's prestardom cabaret act: "Patti wore a feather boa (yes, she did), sang Kurt Weill's 'Speak Low' and paid homage to Anna Magnani and Ava Gardner. This did not catch on." "There Goes Gravity" aims to entertain, but it also illuminates more than enough. On the subject of one group of "hairy, sweaty boys, wearing makeup and costumes," though, Robinson is virtually dumbstruck: "I was appalled that this foursome, dressed as cheap cartoon superheroes, were ripping off the music of the adored New York Dolls. Badly. Without a modicum of wit." This would be Kiss, whose chief architect and bottle washer, the guitarist and singer Paul Stanley, has written FACE THE MUSIC: A Life Exposed (HarperOne, $28.99) to Set the record straight. In all modesty, he lays bare the truth of how the former Stanley Bert Eisen, a shy Jewish boy born with one deformed and deaf ear, overcompensated by orchestrating nearly every aspect of his band's eventual success. ("I would be the Wizard of Oz: the awkward little man behind the curtain operating this huge persona.") "Face the Music" straddles the entrepreneurial (think Ray Kroc as rock Svengali) and therapeutic (it is published under an imprint whose website boasts of channeling "the full spectrum of religion, spirituality and personal growth"). The personal-actualization lingo sits awkwardly beside typically Kiss-centric statements like "Detroit became the first place we could headline a theater. I would always recall it as the first city to open its arms, and its legs, to us." So much for, um, "self-empowerment." Conquest was the band's mission, and spectacle was inevitably its main weapon: Kabuki faces and wrestling archetypes, fire-breathing indoor pyrotechnics and comic-book-meets-Penthouse-Forum misogyny all bundled into a worldview of unreconstructed (and undeconstructed) male projection. It isn't fair to say Stanley ripped off the Dolls: Kiss came about via a shrewd instinct for what was marketable and a fanatical determination to eliminate everything else (nuance, emotion, ideas) from the equation. He is actually more generous in crediting their manager, choreographer and record producers for help in forging the Kiss brand than he is with his bandmates, who are presented as unruly children in constant need of his guidance and supervision. Comparing Stanley's book with SHINING STAR: Braving the Elements of Earth, Wind & Fire (Viking, $27.95), the born-again, even more uplift-conscious memoir by the singer Philip J. Bailey, the parallels be- tween Kiss and E.W.F.'s tightly costumed and choreographed pop-funk packaging are apparent. E.W.F.'s desire to "signify universal love and spiritual enlightenment" boiled down to a New Age-y, "Boogie Wonderland" equivalent to the "Rock and Roll All Night (and Party Every Day)" gospel. The leader Maurice White had a Concept for the group that was just as theatrical and systematic: a high-gloss production that wedded mild jazz-fusion jams, falsetto flights (Bailey's specialty) and airbrushed sonorities to an ecumenical Sly Stone/Parliament-Funkadelic template. This neo-laidback vibe was achieved through guesswork (as with Kiss, more a matter of subtraction than addition) and a boot camp mentality. For all his gee-whiz enthusiasm, Bailey's "Shining Star" reveals how an open-ended, semihip aesthetic evolved into its own regimented 9-to-5 grind - with time running from p.m. to a.m. instead of the reverse. The gold records and groupies, the power struggles and Bailey's finding God are all subsumed in the show business machine; the past 25 years are covered in as many brusque pages. Even the description of E.W.F.'s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000 has a terse, hollow ring to it - the thrill is gone, hard as Bailey tries to put a big happy face on Life After Relevance. Performing at different times for Presidents Clinton and Obama was all swell and good, but it was as an oldies act. Like so many Hall inductees (now including Kiss), E.W.F. became their own tribute group. The story of the Allman Brothers Band is more complicated and more moving, though by the time you get through all the Skydog ups and strung-out lows, you still have a case of the Yogi Berra "déjà vu all over again" blues. Alan Paul's ONE WAY OUT: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band (St. Martin's, $29.99) is nothing fancy, but its alternating-voices format lays the band's mottled history out with a convincing sense of how its triumphs and hard times were wholly interwoven. The book's virtue is the way its democratic ethos mirrors that of the Allmans' racially integrated, communal aspect: The roadies play nearly as large a part in the story as the band members themselves. And in its 1969-71 heyday, it was a less hierarchal band than most: a very assertive rhythm section, the singer-organist-songwriter Gregg Allman's voice seldom a dominating factor, the twin lead guitars of Dickey Betts and Duane Allman serving as sonic signature to their rolling blues-jazz-psychedelic-bluegrass caravan. The death of Duane Allman in a motorcycle crash at the age of 24 (followed soon by the similar death of the bassist Berry Oakley) hangs over the band: A musical seer whose vision hadn't had time to fully coalesce, Allman was a well-read, forward-looking, self-effacing prodigy who might have guided the group down any number of avenues. Members in the meantime have come and gone, but a collective estimation of What Would Duane Have Done? prevails even as it locks them into a permanent holding pattern. It's easy to sentimentalize someone with Duane Allman's potential, but just look at what happened to Eric Clapton after the two collaborated on "Layla": plop, right through the easy-listening trap door to "Lay Down Sally" and decades of wine-in-a-box insipidity. The many perils of rock genius (in or out of scare quotes) are on full display in Holly George-Warren's poignant, invigorating a MAN CALLED DESTRUCTION: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (Viking, $27.95). The book makes a perfect companion piece to the 2012 documentary about Chilton's hard-luck band, "Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me." It fleshes out the back stories, the wild personalities and the Memphis bohemian milieu where he developed, thrived and imploded: growing up in a house that doubled as an art gallery, on tour at 16 as a precocious soul singer for the Box Tops and hanging out with the Beach Boys (waking up one morning on a couch next to Charles Manson). Then Big Star, three classic albums, each a different incarnation, a different sensibility: "#1 Record," with the tortured, reclusive pop perfectionist Chris Bell; "Radio City," merging that Beatles-esque sound with Velvet Underground undertones; finally, "3rd" a.k.a. "Sister Lovers," which morphed into an ad hoc art project or exercise in Quaalude-coated chaos (what if we rewrote Lou Reed's "Berlin," but made it funny?), with the producer Jim Dickinson and the engineer John Fry playing crucial roles in pulling the whole unhinged mélange together. But everything fell apart: Chilton's relationship with Lesa Aldridge, his muse and collaborator on "3rd," at least until he erased most of her vocal parts from the master tapes, and with the record label (yet again). Hopscotching thereafter from eccentricity to eccentricity, the singer exiled himself from his legacy; as Dylan would put it, he threw it all away. Yet George-Warren's book isn't a downer. Chilton had his own brand of tenacity and perverse integrity. He found ways to keep creating intriguing, low-key music and before his death in 2010 had made some peace with the personal albatross that was Big Star. In the Memphis tradition of Dickinson and the photographer/ fellow-traveler William Eggleston, he was a weirdo to the manor born: In shambolic concert, covering Furry Lewis's "I Will Turn Your Money Green" or Benny Spellman's "Lipstick Traces (on a Cigarette)," he sounded raw, sweet and set free at last. Chilton was the ultimate cult-rock figure, but the hardy, truly hard-core Bob Dylan cultists get a book to themselves with David Kinney's fascinating, though underdeveloped, little volume THE DYLANOLOGISTS: Adventures in the Land of Bob (Simon & Schuster, $25). George-Warren's love-letter biography of Chilton ponies up far more great anecdotes and heartbreaking stories of staggering waste, but Kinney's tale of the peculiarly symbiotic triangle between Dylan obsessives, his music and the inscrutable man himself poses some interesting conundrums. In one sense, the people who follow Their Bob around on tour, scrounge his unreleased studio recordings or buy the manger he was born in are like refugees from a Coen brothers reality show: "Inside the Hoarders of Highway 61." But there is also a tantalizing sense that Dylan, as hostile or plain indifferent to them as he might appear, has his reciprocal moments too. There is a recent vignette of him visiting John Lennon's childhood home just like a Dylanite soaking up the imposing atmosphere at Hibbing High School. Kinney charts the love-hate-love pendulum Dylan's fans have with the Master's own attempts to get out from under the burden of being BOB DYLAN, poet, prophet, messiah at large. (The best way to view "Masked and Anonymous," the dystopian comedy he co-wrote and starred in about what a pain and a prison that persona is, might be as his verbose version of "Monty Python's Life of Brian.") Stuck with all those overweening expectations, it's a wonder he hasn't become another J. D. Salinger, hiding out in a walled compound in North Dakota or on an island off the coast of Scotland. Kinney's book chronicles the meandering trail of Dylan's "Never-Ending Tour" (which started in 1988 and shows no sign of ending before he dies with his boots of Spanish leather on at Little Big Horn). By excavating and reconstructing his own canon, he's succeeded in keeping it alive through an act of persistent creative destruction. He's the opposite of a custodian, the faithful Civil War re-enactor - he's the defiant imperfectionist embracing his own mortality and vocal decay, part ragged crooner, part aged illegitimate son of Charley Patton sending Daddy's ghost random notes on what's rotten in the Delta of Venus, Miss., and all points north. A curious deficiency of Kinney's book lies in his decision to take only the amateur side of the Dylanological urge into account. The serious critics and artists who have engaged Dylan with as much passion and sometimes leap-in-the-dark impetuousness as civilian monomaniacs are passed over with sparse comment. Jonathan Lethem gets acknowledged vis-à-vis his thoughts on appropriation/theft, some theological interpretations are touched on, but others are virtually banished from consideration. Sean Wilentz and Christopher Ricks are barely name-checked, and Greil Marcus's three Dylan books come up only in passing. (If nothing else, you'd think Marcus's tunnel-visionary study of "Like a Rolling Stone" might generate some amused debate for how cavalierly it accentuates the affirmative and gives Dylan's propensity for sadistic negation short shrift.) What are Todd Haynes's fan-fictionalized "I'm Not There" and Martin Scorsese's sprawling "No Direction Home" if not eminent personal acts of Dylanology? Dana Spiotta's 2006 novel "Eat the Document" could have made a nice mirror to illuminate some of the fringe figures Kinney tracks down. "The Dylanologists" seems to be rushing to the finish line when a more considered, burrowing approach would be way more gratifying. Pondering what makes Dylan so gripping and elusive, I was listening to one of the thousands of bootlegs his fans have graciously made available. "Looking for Maurice Chevalier's Passport in America" is a compilation of 2002 performances; here are a number of fond versions of Warren Zevon songs, as he was dying of cancer. This, and Dylan's terminal-case version of his own "Love Sick," made me recall something Lou Reed, as he too lay dying, told his sister, Merrill: "I don't want to be erased." The Zen of Dylan - or a Big Star fortune cookie - therefore might go: Live in the moment of your own death. Beats working for a living. HOWARD HAMPTON is the author of "Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 1, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Perhaps no music journalist has written as extensively about the Allman Brothers Band as Paul, who has tracked the rock group's career for 25 years. And his deep familiarity with the band and its music shows everywhere in this fluid account. Framed as an oral history, the biography includes extensive, insightful comments not only from band members but also from players at all levels of the music business, from loyal roadies to gifted producers (including the late Tom Dowd) to money-minded record-company executives. They take us through the milestones, from the early days, when the band crisscrossed the country in the dead of winter packed into an underheated van, to the cusp of massive success and the deaths of bandleader and guitarist Duane Allman and bassist Berry Oakley, to the group's decision to soldier on in spite of the losses. From the beginning, Allman had a certain vision for his band that included two lead guitarists, two drummers, and the soulful, whiskey-soaked vocals of his brother, Gregg. Improbably, Duane spearheaded a long-haired, multiracial band in the Deep South in the late '60s, but he was supremely confident, at the tender age of 23, that his blues-based music would transcend any barriers. Augmented by photos and fascinating sidebars, this candid oral history has appeal beyond the Allman Brothers Band's loyal fan base.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Music writer Paul catches up with the legendary band in this entertaining, compulsively readable oral history of the Allman Brothers. Through interviews with every member of the band except Duane Allman and original bassist Berry Oakley, their friends and music associates, as well as in sidebars about various aspects of the band's history and a "highly opinionated" discography, Paul traces the ups and downs of the band and its music from Duane's and Gregg's early bands in Jacksonville, Fla., the earliest days of the Allman Brothers as they developed their signature sound with the original members of the band, Duane's side projects with Derek and the Dominoes and Muscle Shoals, through the deaths of Duane and Berry in the early '70s to the various incarnations of the Allman Brothers over the past 20 years. In many ways, Duane's ghost haunts the book. As Gregg recalls of his brother: "He was always up to something. he either had his head in a book, his arm around a woman, or his arm around a guitar and it was singing to him." According to original drummer Jaimoe Johnson: "After Duane died, a lot changed. Everyone wanted to be Duane, but no one knew how to do shit except play music." On the mystique and power of the Allman Brothers' music, Dickey Betts reflects: "We seemed to have the longevity of an elephant." (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Guitar World magazine writer Paul (Big in China), who has written about eclectic Southern rock pioneers the Allman Brothers Band for over two decades, recounts the notoriously dysfunctional group's nearly 50-year-long saga in this extensive collection of interviews with past and present band members, collaborators, managers, producers, roadies, and even a few fans. This chronologically linear oral history offers an impressively candid, in-depth, and balanced look at the various intraband feuds, radical lineup changes, legal problems, drug abuse, and tragic deaths that have threatened to derail the band from the very beginning. The book's emotional core is the death of 27-year-old guitar genius and band cofounder Duane Allman, who perished in a 1971 motorcycle accident just as the group was becoming a commercial and creative force. Duane's spirit pervades the entire book, and he is mentioned in many of the conversations. Dan John Miller narrates with a heavy Southern drawl that hardly varies in tone from one contributor to another. This is a minor complaint about an overall satisfying audiobook. VERDICT Recommended to rock music fans seeking insight into the Allman Brothers' long and drama-filled career.-Douglas King, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
"I have viewed everything with the eyes and ears of a journalist but the heart and soul of a fan," writes Guitar World senior writer Paul (Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues, and Becoming a Star in Beijing, 2011), who spent decades and hundreds of interviews earning the trust of musicians who didn't always trust each other. "The Allman Brothers Band, I believe, has no equal." One need not share the author's belief in the band's supremacy to find its story engrossing. The majority of the book takes the form of oral history, which on other projects might sometimes seem slapdash and lazy but here proves crucial, for there are so many different perspectives--on everything from the band's name to leadership and songwriting credits--that having dozens of different voices serves readers well. Nobody disagrees on the overwhelming talent, inspiration and legacy of guitarist Duane Allman, who formed the band, saw it coalesce into something special, and died recklessly and young before the music reached its popular peak. Explains one fellow musician, "Duane died just on the downstroke of the diving board, as the band was about to launch." The loss of Duane and founding bassist Berry Oakley a year later would have brought an end to a less determined band, but the ABB somehow flourished despite a leadership void and decades of tensions exacerbated by drugs and alcohol. Perhaps the most complex relationship was between Gregg Allman and Dickey Betts, as the former was never considered an equal partner with his brother, and the latter resented the implications of the band's name as he attempted to fill the guitar void and rule more by dictatorship than the universal respect Duane commanded. In the wake of Betts' departure and Gregg's sobriety, the responsibility has largely shifted to a new generation of guitarists, as the band improbably boasts its strongest dynamic since its original leader's death. The author doesn't pull punches, but all involved should find it fair as well as comprehensive.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
