Grade: B
I really expected more from Elvis Costello's 2015 memoir Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink. I'm a huge fan of the artist, and after reading the exhaustive liner notes accompanying each of his reissue CDs that that thoroughly pick apart the albums song by song, well, I didn't really think this book would be so dull. I guess Costello's just getting old, or it's a British thing to ramble on and on about your family tree, but the only part of the beginning I really found interesting was how his father, a jazz singer, received acetates of the latest Beatles songs before they were hits so he could learn them for performances. The chapter about composing with Paul McCartney is almost worth the book's price, but too much of Unfaithful reads like a list of all the famous musicians he's met. "Look how hip I was then, I hung out with Joe Strummer!" "I'm cool now too, I sat next to Destiny's Child at the Grammies!" "I had a Polaroid taken with Aretha Franklin!" And speaking of African-American icons, he's not giving us any details about the infamous 1979 Ray Charles incident. Too bad, that story would've been a lot more interesting than the ones that made the cut, many of which should've been printed on disappearing ink. Totally on the other end of the spectrum is John Fogerty, a California country boy who channeled the Louisiana bayou into a string of hit records with Creedence Clearwater Revival. Why, he's so backwoods that he even describes an onslaught of creative inspiration as "the closer the horses got to the barn, the more they could smell the oats." Unlike Costello, Fogerty dishes the dirt, manure and anything else you could possibly heap on anyone in his 2015 autobiography Fortunate Son. Not only do you get the details on all his legal struggles with record exec Saul "Zanz Kant Danz" Zaentz, you learn that the rest of CCR, with the exception of his brother Tom, were so incompetent that he had to overdub backing vocals and drum parts onto the band's records to make them passable. While fascinating, this makes for a book clearly calling out for a counterpoint, but the only other voice we read is that of his wife Julie, who joins John at the end of the book to add her side of the affairs. You might find it mildly interesting to hear two sides of a "how we met" story, but eventually it just becomes a repetitive exchange of Fogerty discussing his depression countered with Julie's cheerleading "but I KNEW he could write another song, I just KNEW it!!!!" Both books:
Grade: B
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Walburgh's BlogMostly retro, mainly music, but generally whatever's on my mind. Archives
June 2017
Categories
All
|