Somebody To Love? - Grace Slick

   1998; 364 pages.  Full Title: Somebody to Love? – A Rock-and-Roll Memoir.  New Author(s)? : Yes (and Yes).  Genres: Music History; Rock Music; Autobiography.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

 

    Jefferson Airplane.  They were one of the top rock bands of the 1967 “Summer of Love”, thanks mostly to their fantastic breakout album Surrealistic Pillow, which had two songs, Somebody To Love and White Rabbit, that later made it onto Rolling Stone Magazine’s list of “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”.

 

    Most people don’t realize that Surrealistic Pillow was actually the band’s second release.  Their debut album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, had been released a year earlier, and garnered almost zero excitement.

 

    There were a couple of personnel changes between the two albums: a new drummer, and a new female vocalist, with Grace Slick replacing Signe Anderson, who quit to devote time to her newborn daughter.

 

    Interestingly, Grace Slick is credited with writing White Rabbit, and her then-brother-in-law is credited with writing Somebody to Love.  The two songs on the "500 Greatest" list.  So, was Jefferson Airplane's adding Grace Slick to the band and their simultaneous meteoric rise to stardom a case of causation or correlation?

 

    Let’s read her autobiography Somebody To Love? and find out.

 

What’s To Like...

    Somebody to Love? was published in 1998, when Grace Slick (neé Grace Wing) was 59 years old and retired from the music scene.  The book includes lots of great photographs of Grace’s life, loves, career, cohorts.  It was co-written by a friend of hers, Andrea Cagan (you can see her name in the bottom right-hand corner of the cover image), and the Author’s Note at the beginning of the book gives a nice thank-you to Andrea by Grace as well as detailing how the whole writing thing worked.

 

    The first hundred pages or so chronicle Grace’s childhood, schooling (she went to a snotty “finishing school for girls” for a while), and first marriage, all of which was surprisingly interesting.  You’ll learn why her family nickname when growing up was “Grouser”, what her slang word “toodles” refers to, tag along for her “first time”, and marvel that her first songwriting effort managed to offend a bunch of “preppy boys” at a college party, causing them to ask her to leave and never come back.

 

    The next two hundred pages are pretty much an extended discourse about sex and drugs and rock-and-roll, and booze, all of which Grace embraced with passionate persistence.  Musically, these chapters cover her time with the bands The Great Society, Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, Starship, and a short-lived solo career.

 

    Grace Slick does a lot of name-dropping here, which is a plus, not a minus.  Besides her bandmates, some of the notables include: JFK (before he was president), Jerry Garcia, Neal Cassady (a Merry Prankster), Wavy Gravy (who?), David Crosby, Mick Jagger, Frank Zappa, Abbie Hoffman, Craig Chaquico (who?), and Mickey Hart.  She credits Randy Newman, Odetta, and Lenny Bruce with each having a significant impact on her musical career.  Oh yeah, there's also a threesome involving Grace, Jim Morrison of the Doors, and a plate of strawberries.  Chapter 26 is devoted to that.

 

    The last 70 pages show us the present-day (in 1998) Grace Slick: calm, content, and gratefully retired from the excesses of being a rock-and-roll star.  She wishes her parents were still alive, is proud as any mother can be of her daughter China, has had enough of cheating husbands, offers some thoughts about geezer-aged rock bands reuniting for a brief time (one tour, one album), and introduces us to her current flame, Buckminister Ratcliff Esquire III, whose fat, furry body Grace loves to play with.  Get your mind out of the gutter, he’s a lab rat.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.4/5 based on 405 ratings and 175 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.74/5 based on 1,345 ratings and 113 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    Girl-ask-boy dance.  Okay.  I went straight to the top by asking the school’s star quarterback to be my date.  He was older and he didn’t know who the hell I was, but he said yes.  Polite, I guess.  I bought a pink, flower-covered, wedding cake-like monstrosity of a dress and went with Mr. Hotshot to a pre-dance party thrown by a senior cheerleader.  She opened the door in a red, body-hugging floor-length number with four-inch dangling earrings, which made me look like an exploding cotton candy machine.  (pg. 49)

 

    In 1988, Paul called together all the original members of Jefferson Airplane and suggested a short (one album, one tour) reunion.  After some brief discussion about logistics, we all agreed to the adventure.

    Fantastic, I thought.  This time Airplane will be assisted by one of those professional management teams in L.A. (as opposed to well-meaning hippies from San Francisco) who really know how to put a rock-and-roll package together.  Now that we’re all old enough to prefer seamless negotiations, it’ll be a snap.

    Sure, Grace, and polar bears use toilets.  (pg. 323)

 

I was naïve enough to be sucked in by the “Wanna see my Bugatti?” routine.  (pg. 60)

    I don’t really have any great quibbles about Somebody to Love?  Yes, there was some cussing, but a lot less than what I expected – just 9 instances in the first 20% of the book.  Yes, Grace hopped into bed with all sorts of guys, especially musicians, including most (but not quite all) of her fellow members of Jefferson Airplane.  But there were no lurid details (not even about those strawberries), and hey, most readers expect a rock star’s bio to include some romantic trysts.

 

      Personally, I would’ve liked more pages devoted to the Jefferson Airplane/Starship  years but let's remember that Somebody to Love? is story about Grace Slick’s life, not about those bands.  And perhaps some negative details are omitted due to not wanting to dwell on the trials and tribulations of the daily coexistence with one’s bandmates.

 

    Finally, it would be nice to have an updated version of this book, since it’s been 23 years since Somebody to Love? was published, and Grace Slick is still alive and in her early 80s.   But if you’re dying to know what she’s been up to in the last quarter century, you can read Wikipedia’s post on her here.

 

    All in all, I enjoyed Somebody to Love?  The content is a nice balance between the flower-power lifestyle of the 1960s, the human side of being in a top-tier band, and the challenge of having a stable personal life all at the same time.  The chapters are short (54 of them covering 364 pages) which made this a quick, easy, and informative read, and since I was a teenager myself in the 1960s, the book brought back some great memories of my salad days.

 

    8½ Stars.  Here’s a few other noteworthy highlights of the book: Grace’s introduction to LSD (pg. 94); her first peyote trip (pgs. 90-91, which also brought back old memories), getting busted again and again (ch. 30), playing “butt bongo” on the Howard Stern Show (pg. 332), and her love for the music of The Gipsy Kings (pgs, 351 and 359).

Come As You Are - The Story of Nirvana - Michael Azerrad

   1993 (except the last chapter); 358 pages.  Full Title: Come As you Are – The Story of Nirvana.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Music; Biography; Grunge.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

 

    Nirvana was a three-man band from the greater Seattle area consisting of Kurt Cobain (lead singer & guitarist), Krist Novoselic (bassist), and, after five or six others early on, Dave Grohl (drummer).

 

    Nirvana is arguably the poster-child for the alt-rock subgenre “Grunge”, which first sprang up in the late 80’s and 90’s in the Seattle area, fusing together elements of heavy metal, pop, and punk-rock.  Nirvana is certainly not the first band to be labeled “grunge”, but it’s fair to say that they were the ones who propelled it forward from a local phenomenon into the mainstream music market via their incredibly popular album Nevermind, 

 

    Inherently, Rock-&-Roll needs to go through periodic revitalization in order to keep it fresh, vibrant and worthy of each new teenage fanbase's attention.  Punk had done this a half-dozen years earlier, providing an “in-your-face” alternative to the bland, rock-pop songs marketed by record companies for their mass appeal to listeners of all ages.  But now commercial success had tamed the punk rockers, and it was grunge’s time to give voice to the next generation of music-lovers looking for something new, raw, and edgy.

 

    Nirvana’s rise in the grunge scene was meteoric, but also sadly short-lived, ending abruptly in 1994 with Kurt Cobain’s suicide.  Come As You Are is their biography, as told by the respected music journalist Michael Azerrad.

 

What’s To Like...

    In preparation for his book Come As you Are, Michael Azerrad spent more than 25 hours interviewing Kurt Cobain, starting in February 1993.  The book was published the following October.  There were 18 chapters, the title of each one being a short quote from that chapter.  The book closed on a tenuous-yet-hopeful note, then Kurt committed suicide a half year later, on April 5, 1994, forcing Azerrad to add a nineteenth chapter.  I was struck by just how many suicide “clues” (Azerrad rightly calls them “announcements”) Kurt gives during the interviews, although of course I had the advantage of knowing how it would all turn out.

 

    As the title states, this is a story of Nirvana, not just Kurt Cobain.  Michael Azerrad also interviewed Krist and Dave, plus several ex-members of the band.  The result is an even treatment of some of the more-sensitive band-related material.  When Kurt laments that he had to fire one of the former drummers, said drummer remembers it differently – he says he quit.  Azerrad details intra-member band tensions the same way, which results in some enlightening insights.  Kurt may grouse that he has to do all the songwriting, but Krist and Dave point out that Kurt never asked for their input.  Courtney Love’s role in the rise and fall of Nirvana is similarly revealing.

 

    The book is a trivia buff’s delight.  You’ll read how Nirvana once got kicked out of their own record release party and learn that not one Nirvana song ends with a fade-out; why the author calls Frances Farmer (who?!) “the Cobains’ patron martyr”, that the name “Cobain” is a corruption of the name “Coburn”, and that people who live in Kurt’s hometown of Aberdeen are called “Aberdonians”.    Michael Azerrad also gives brief reviews of every track on every Nirvana studio album (plus the demo tapes), explaining the meaning of the lyrics (when there is one), and how each song, album title, and cover art, came to be.  Scattered throughout the book are some great photos (taken mostly while on tour) and some of Kurt’s sketches.

 

    Michael Azerrad namedrops a slew of other bands – some local, some “grungy”, and some Nirvana's touring partners, and I loved that.  Kurt adored some of these, such as Sonic Youth, but openly mocked others, such as fellow grunge bands Pearl Jam, and Guns N’ Roses, particularly Axl Rose.  I was surprised to learn that Nirvana in the early days covered songs from diverse genres, including CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising”, Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”, and even Cher’s “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves”.  Equally astounding was the fact that Tori Amos once did a piano version cover of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.6*/5, based on 233 ratings.

    Goodreads: 4.05*/5, based on 8,346 ratings and 190 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    Finally, the band settled on Nirvana, a Hindu and Buddhist concept which Webster’s defines as “the extinction of desire, passion, illusion and the empirical self and attainment of rest, truth and unchanging being.”  (,,,)

    “I wanted a name that was kind of beautiful or nice and pretty instead of a mean, raunchy punk tock name like the Angry Samoans,” says Kurt.  “I wanted to have something different.”  These days Kurt isn’t so crazy about the name anymore.  “It’s too esoteric and serious,” he says.  And later on, he’d have to pay another band fifty thousand dollars for a name he didn’t even care for that much.  (loc. 1157)

 

    One night, Kurt and Kathleen Hanna from Bikini Kill had gone out drinking and then went on a graffiti spree, spray painting Olympia with “revolutionary” and feminist slogans (including the ever-popular “GOD IS GAY”).  When they got back to Kurt’s apartment, they continued talking about teen revolution and writing graffiti on Kurt’s walls.  Hanna wrote the words “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit.”  “I took that as a compliment,” says Kurt.  “I thought that was a reaction to the conversation we were having but it really meant that I smelled like the deodorant.  I didn’t know that the deodorant spray existed until months after the single came out.”  (loc. 3448)

 

Kindle Details…

    Come As you Are presently sells for $14.99 at Amazon.  Michael Azerrad has two other e-books for you, both in the “rock music” genre: Our Band Could Be Your Life for $2.99 (which is a fantastic price), and Rock Critic Law for $8.99.  There are various biographies of Kurt Cobain and/or Nirvana by other authors, most of which seem to be in the $2.99-$11.99 price range.

 

 

“All in all, we sound like the Knack and the Bay City Rollers being molested by Black Flag and Black Sabbath.”  (loc. 3007 )

    The tone of Come As you Are is at times gritty and events - both good and bad - are presented in a matter-of-fact fashion.  For me, this approach heightened the book’s believability.  As expected, there is a ton of, and an incredible variety of drug-&-alcohol use/abuse.  The mood turns somber when it details Kurt's assertion that his shooting up heroin was okay because it relieved his stomach pains, something that even Michael Azerrad is skeptical of.  Things get even sadder when Kurt and Courtney are both addicted to heroin and going in and out of rehab while trying to raise their child.

 

    There’s a fair amount of cussing, although not as much as I expected in a book filled with direct quotes from a grunge band's personnel.  I counted 17 instances in the first 20% of the book.

 

    The ending (the post-suicide chapter) recaps the events that transpired in the months after the book’s first publication up to Kurt’s suicide on the fifth of April, then jumps to the details of a public vigil (“memorial service”) held later that month.  But you’ll find very little about the suicide itself.  I suspect that the 25 hours of interviewing forged a close bond between the author and Kurt, and having to research and write about the suicide would’ve been just too painful.

 

    Full disclosure: I knew very little about Nirvana’s music (other than “Smells Like Teen Spirit”), and certainly nothing about the band’s history and any of its members other than Kurt.  I'm also leery of labeling any biography book I read (and even more so, any autobiography) “non-fiction” because usually it consists of some famous person, or his biographer, telling his version of events from a biased perspective of self-interest.  Here, Michael Azerrad also gives you the “other sides" of the story, and that impressed me.  Overall, I found Come As You Are to be both enlightening and believable.

 

    8½ Stars.  We’ll close with Nirvana trivia question:

    Q.: How many (full-length) studio albums did Nirvana put out over the course of their career?  (the answer is in the comments)

Anatomy of a Song - Marc Myers

   2016; 323 pages.  Full Title: Anatomy of a Song: The Oral History of 45 Iconic Hits that Changed Rock, R&B, and Pop.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Music History; Reference; Pop Culture; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

 

   The title says it all – 45 songs spanning 41 years and chronicling the development of the modern music era, focusing on Rock, Pop, and R&B, but also touching on associated genres such as folk, reggae, punk, country, alt-rock, and others.

 

    The first song – Lawdy Miss Clawdy - sung by Lloyd Price can arguably be viewed as the birth of music's modern era, as it introduced the “45” record, something receptive to teenage ears and wallets.  The last song – Losing My Religion – by R.E.M. provides the cut-off year for this book, as the author asserts that a song has to be around for 25 years or more to be able to be called “Iconic”.

 

    The book is actually a compilation of entries from a monthly Wall Street Journal column that author Marc Myers has been writing since June 2010.  There's a goodly proportion of black groups and music , and I liked that.  The 45 chapters are all short, averaging about 7 pages each, one of which is always a picture of the artist(s).  The structure each chapter is the same:

 

    a.) An overview, telling the song’s backstory, how it fared on the Billboard charts and how it impacted the music scene,

    b.) a list of people, including their professions, whom the author sought out and interviewed to research the song, and

    c.) excerpts from those interviews, explaining how each song evolved.

    Want to learn how to make a hit tune?  Here are 45 examples.

 

What’s To Like...

    Anatomy of a Song hammered home a couple points about making hit songs.  The first thing to know is that it requires the input of a lot of people: songwriters, producers, lead singers, back-up singers, bandmates, arrangers, engineers/mixers, and session musicians.  I was surprised to learn that the “radio versions” of a majority of the 45 songs were done by session musicians, who were available courtesy of whichever studio a band or singer was contractually associated with.  You want the best musicians playing the version that the radio will play; hopefully the actual band members can then learn it by the time they go on tour.

 

    The producer, mixer, and arranger, and sometimes even the singer and/or band members, then take the raw song and add things such as horns-or-strings, overdubs, upbeats, a light reggae bass line, power chords, distortion, and layering.  Isolation booths can be used, particularly for the lead singer’s part, and in order to keep each track separate and pure.  Then comes the mixing, which is a work of art.  Finally, demo tapes are made and distributed to all associated for added input and tweaking.

 

    The book is a music trivia buff’s delight.  John Kay of Steppenwolf is completely color-blind.  Bette Midler used to work as a coat-check girl.  The Marvelettes originally called themselves “The Cansinyets” a slightly garbled version of “Can’t Sing Yet”.  Early on, Aerosmith was “heavily into funk and soul”.  Dion was supposed to be on the plane that crashed and killed Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper.  He gave up his seat because he didn’t want to pay the $36 that Buddy Holly was charging for a seat.

 

    The mention of the Led Zeppelin tour in late 1969  brought back personal memories.  I was at their Phoenix concert, having snuck in via some way that I’ve long since forgotten.  Alas, Led Zeppelin quit after 30 minutes or so, announcing that lead singer Robert Plant was sick as a dog, with the evidence being that he was singing everything an octave below his normal voice range.

 

    Two additional other things stood out to me.  One was the professionalism of all the bands and singers showcased.  These are not a bunch of wide-eyed, zonked-out amateurs doing whatever they please; they are musicians/artists constantly studying their trade and trying out new things.  The second was that the constant pressure to compose new material, then rehearsing, recording, promoting, touring, making TV appearances, and trying to maintain some sort of private life, while also somehow putting out one or two albums every year is a surefire way to get totally burnt out.  The daily life of a successful rock-n-roll band lost a lot of its glamour in this book.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Achromatopsia (n.) : a condition characterized by a partial or total absence of color vision.  People with it see only black, white, and shades of gray.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 217 ratings.

    Goodreads: 3.74/5 based on 1,078 ratings and 205 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    When MTV began broadcasting in August 1981, hip-hop was virtually ignored, with the cable channel focusing instead on major rock and pop acts whose labels provided MTV with music videos.  Many of those acts also happened to be white.  As MTV’s popularity and influence grew with the increasing number of cable subscribers, a rift widened between hip-hop and rock over rap’s exclusion.  Rappers viewed rockers as little more than video actors, and rockers viewed rappers as glorified disc jockeys and music thieves, not bona fide artists or musicians.  (pg. 237)

 

    “The song’s success was a complete fluke.  None of us thought that ‘Losing My Religion’ had much potential.  There’s no traditional chorus, and the lead instrument was a mandolin.  The video was unusual and groundbreaking – super-pop, super-homoerotic, and hypercharged.  In the video, I lip-synched for the first time.  But it all connected, and fans responded to the song’s realness and emotional urgency.”  (Michael Stipe, pg. 323)

 

“’White Rabbit’ is a very good song.  I’m not a genius but I don’t suck.  My only complaint is that the lyrics could have been stronger.  More people should have been annoyed.”  (Grace Slick, pg. 99)

    There are some things to quibble about, the major one, unsurprisingly, being the song-selection.  The are zero entries for the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, the Beach Boys, Elton John, and Bruce Springsteen.  Elvis gets one, but it’s from 1969 in the twilight of his career, not the 1950s when he dominated the music scene.  But I don't think these glaring omissions are due to any poor judgment on the part of Marc Myers; most likely he simply didn't have any interviews involving these artists.

 

     Also, the final decade in the book’s 40-year timespan, 1982-1991, is a bit sparsely represented – only three songs.  And while I enjoyed the many references to bands beyond these 45 – such as Lindisfarne, The Incredible String Band, and Stephen Stills – it would have been nice have an index of every act that gets mentioned.

 

    There’s a small amount of cussing, but it was always from direct quotes by the people Marc Myers was interviewing.  Hey, if they say it, and he quotes it, the cusswords have to be included.

 

    But let's be clear – I found Anatomy of a Song to be a fantastic book, bringing back a flood of old music memories, as well as enlightening me about just how much drudgery there is to being a music idol.  No wonder so many of them, regardless of genre, sought relief via booze and/or drugs.

 

    8½ Stars.  For the record, I was familiar with 40 of the 45 artists spotlighted here, and 35 of the songs.  Most of the unfamiliar artists were from the 1950s, which is before my time.  Your "hits" will probably be different f rom mine.

27 - Howard Sounes

   2013; 307 pages.  Full Title : 27 – A History of the 27 Club through the Lives of Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse.  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Non-Fiction; Biography, Music History.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

    It’s music trivia time!  Here’s a couple of tidbits that you might not know about the lives of some of the biggest names in rock-&-roll.

Brian Jones.  One of the founders of the Rolling Stones, he was both asthmatic and bipolar.  He was one of the first British musicians to use LSD heavily.  He had his girlfriend stolen from him by bandmate Keith Richards.

Jimi Hendrix.  His birth name was Johnny Allen Hendrix, and he was part Cherokee.  He played guitar left-handed.  At one time he was an “item” with Janis Joplin.  He served in the army, but got discharged by telling them he was gay.

Janis Joplin.  For a while she golfed at a country club.  She was an “item” with Jimi Hendrix, but had a fight with Jim Morrison, and was once slapped by Jerry Lee Lewis. She was bi.

Jim Morrison.  He wanted to be a poet, not a singer.  His father was a US Navy admiral.  He was an avowed “Dionysian”, and once had a fight with Janis Joplin after he'd acted like a jerk.

Kurt Cobain.  He played guitar left-handed.  At one point early in his career, he was a “sofa-surfer”.

Amy Winehouse.  She was bulimic.  Her favorite book was Catch 22 by Joseph Heller.

    Oh yeah.  They all died when they were 27 years old, which is the central theme of Howard Sounes’ book, “27”.

What’s To Like...

    I liked the book’s structure.  Howard Sounes divides it into two roughly-equal sections: Life (Prologue and chapters 1-7) and Death (chapters 8-13 and Epilogue).  Basically, you get to watch each star’s meteoric rise, and then watch them crash-&-burn.  Sometimes a chapter is devoted to a single person, other times a chapter features several stars.

    It is not a spoiler to say that statistically there is a “spike” for rock stars dying at the age of 27, but it’s not an anomaly, no matter how you manipulate the data.  Still, six mega-stars dying at the same young age is noteworthy, and  Howard Sounes searches for common factors in their all-too-brief lives to explain this.  Here are a couple of the commonalities:

    Heroin use (5/6)

    Little contact with their families growing up (5/6)

    Brushes with the law  (4/6)

    Early success in life (6/6, and yes, that’s a tautological concept since the book is about famous people who died at 27).

    Also, most of them died at night, and all of them were heavily into booze, meds, and other drugs.

    There are 30 pages of “Source Notes" in the back, plus a five-page Bibliography, which gives you some idea of the extent of Howard Sounes’ research for this book.  What’s unique, though,  is that he seems to have done extensive interviewing of friends, family, music business associates, and bandmates to supplement the previous documentation.  I liked this, although admittedly it leaves the door open for unsubstantiated gossip and slanted recollections.

    I enjoyed learning what the “Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy" and the “Yoko Ono Syndrome” are, as well as why we’re still seeing “new releases” by Jimi Hendrix more than 40 years after his death.  There are 16 pages of photographs of these rock stars, some of them less than flattering.  You’ll learn the origin of the band names “The Doors” and “The Rolling Stones”, neither of which was what I had thought.

    Howard Sounes is a Londoner, thus the book is written in English, not American.  Besides spelling differences, here are some of the “English” phrases used that I encountered:  Indian takeaway, sloping off, bunk off, Jack the Lad, tipped up, Readers Wife, bodged, full of beans, tetchy, and rowed.  That last one means “argued”, and the first one is what we Yanks call "takeout food".  I can only guess at the rest.

    The Epilogue does a nice job of bringing closure to these six mini-biographies.  Howard Sounes discusses the size of each star’s estate and how it was handled, since a lot of them didn’t leave a will.  Death brings out the worst in some people, especially when the deceased is famous.  Death is also great for just about any artist’s career, and Sounes updates you on how each of these artists is doing commercially nowadays.  In all cases, it’s better than you’d think.

Excerpts...

    “Just how do you get down after the show so you can sleep? (…) [A] few stiff drinks and a sleeper sped you on your way.  But plane time would come long before the sleeper wore off, hence the leapers.  But the flights are terribly boring when you’re up, so a creeper rounds off the edges and a lot of drink takes a bit of the cotton wool out of your mouth.  But booze (…) makes life a bit grim, so “just a bit” of acid makes you feel all tingly and good.  But it’s hard to concentrate on acid, so a quick sniff of coke (…) brings the brain briefly to attention while you smoke some grass or hash to take the nerviness out of the coke.”  (pg. 119)

    Visitors to Jim Morrison’s grave are a mixed bunch, of all ages from all over the world, not necessarily fans of the Doors.  Rather, the grave has become one of the sights to see in Paris.  “It’s an iconic life – live hard, die young,” observes Kyle Fisher, a middle-aged man from Ohio, visiting with his daughter in 2012.  “I think he was in the 27 Club.”  Peter Niedner from Germany believes that the number 27 is important.  “The two and the seven is a nine, and nine is a special number,” he says enigmatically, at the graveside.  “What I think is amazing is that he is more than forty years dead and you can come whenever you want and you see fresh flowers.”

    “Plastic.”

    “Yeah, but someone put them there.”  (pg. 293)

Tragedy is so romantic when people write about it, but it is horrible to see.  There’s nothing pretty about a person destroying themselves.  (pg. 123 )

    About ¼ of the Amazon reviews for “27” are negative – 3 stars or less.  A lot of the criticisms seemed to fall into three categories: too much cussing, not enough attention to conspiracy theories, and “too much Amy Winehouse”.

    There is cussing, but most of it is when the author is giving a direct quote from one of his interviewees.  Sounes does take the time to debunk some of the wacko conspiracy theories, which frankly ignore Occam’s Razor.  Personally, I rather like conspiracy stories, but here, the evidence of a.) excessive drug-use and alcoholism, b.) mental issues, c.) suicidal thoughts, d.) the soul-destroying grind of near-constant touring, and e.) the jaded despair when finding out that fame early in life doesn’t bring happiness all are far more believable causes for the demise of these six than murderous intent.

    Finally, it is true that the book  devotes more attention to Amy Winehouse than the others, but I suspect that’s because her death is a lot more recent and there are a lot more people worth interviewing around for her than for the earlier subjects.

    In closing, I found “27” to be an enlightening book.  The “warts” that are revealed about the dead six rock stars may not be flattering, but they do show that they were real, albeit flawed, human beings.  There are lessons to be learned here about fame, partying, friends, family, and substance abuse that just might save someone’s life.

    9½ Stars.  If six deaths seems a bit scant to you, Howard Sounes gives a “Long List” of fifty music-industry people who died at age 27 in the back of the book.  If fifty deaths seems a bit scant to you, Wikipedia has its own list of seventy-plus stars who died at 27 as well.  The link to Wiki's list is here.