ROCK AND ROLL BOOK OF THE DEAD

BLOG 1: Why this book is like no other

When The Rock and Roll Book of the Dead was first sent to publishers two years ago, they asked: With all the titles about these legendary seven stars, why write another? Are you bringing something new to the table? Something intriguing? Thought-provoking? Challenging? Outside the box?

The answer was and is a resounding yes on all accounts. Else I wouldn’t have undertaken the decade-long task of researching and writing it.

Readers look for many different things in a book. But all seek one thing above all else: a work that is truly new.

New comes in two forms: new facts or new interpretation. Hundreds of biographies have been written about Mozart and Beethoven, for example. Original biographers exhausted the facts of their lives many years ago, but enlightening biographies continue to be written. How? They connect and contextualize the existing facts in a different way – telling a deeper and entirely unique story about a legendary personality.

Recent portraits of the stars –Norman’s on Lennon, Cross’s on Hendrix come to mind– have been factual retreads of their predecessors. A few negligible new factoids are spliced into their enormous bulk, but a fresh perspective is sadly lacking. If a biography is a forest of trees, these works give us one shrub at best, while doing nothing to change or sharpen our view of the larger picture: the complex forest that was John Lennon, or Jimi Hendrix. Or Presley, Joplin, Morrison, Garcia, or Cobain.

         The Rock and Roll Book of the Dead is dedicated not to minutae but to changing the face of the forest itself and revealing these legendary personalities individually and by comparison in a way that has never before been seen.

         “Rock and roll books,” Frank Zappa, of the Mothers of Invention, famously observed, “are written by writers who can’t write, for readers who can’t read.”

         Well, not exactly. But the genre has yet to boast any Pulitzers. Though this book has no such lofty ambition, it has been written for readers who not only can read, but who like to be challenged and explore deeper themes. In this sense, it is a thinking man’s rock title. It also invents its own genre: neither a simple biography, or collection of biographies, it is the dramatic study of seven very different lives unified in their struggles and their common tragic ends.

         The book is unique in its outsider perspective. Most of the biographers of these seven stars are family members, friends, lovers, employees. Indisputably these insiders have the facts, but many also have an agenda: to support and reaffirm the almost godlike mythology of these stars. All Seven were geniuses, pioneers, and titans – but deities they were not, and never tried to be. In portraying them as such, insiders become air brush artists, eulogists. They do a disservice to the reader in search of unbiased truth, no less than to the Seven, all of whom were smothered by such deification.

         As Bruce Springsteen once said: “The biggest gift your fans can give you is just treatin’ you like a human being, because anything else dehumanizes you. And that’s one of the things that has shortened the life spans, both physically and creatively, of some of the greatest rock and roll musicians.”

         This book is dedicated to Springsteen’s proposition. Its unique purpose is to resurrect the stars by revealing them as who they really were --human beings, not gods. Mortals with all the fears, frailties, insecurities, and conflicting emotions as the rest of us – but struggling to survive the crucible of fame, too. This is the central new theme: the hell inside the heaven of superstardom. How being a “living legend” can be a gilded cage, an Everest without oxygen. The theme is especially timely in light of today’s American Idol you’re-nobody-if-you’re not-a-star culture.

         As John Lennon sang, Fame, puts you there where things are hollow; Fame, what you like is in the limo; Fame, what you get is no tomorrow.

         But in fact, Lennon and the others, spiritual pilgrims all, got more than tomorrow. They got immortality. But Why? How? And at what price? The Rock and Roll Book of the Dead is the first title to answer these deeper questions.

         It is also the first to explore the fatal similarities of these seven stars underlying their differences. All endured lonely, traumatic childhoods. All were volatile, hypersensitive, compulsive, bi-polar. All suffered disastrous affairs and/or marriages. All were consumed by a love-hate for their celebrity. All became drug addicts. All battled creative and spiritual emptiness. And, from early on, all lived in the shadow of death, and most felt predestined to an early end.

         As I explore these themes and others in future blogs, I welcome any and all other voices in the discussion – questions, observations, clarifications, corrections, polemics, harangues.

         RIP (Rock In Peace).