![]() In March, Alicia Keys’ memoir, “More Myself,” also recounts a couple of meetings with Prince, whom she recalls as effortlessly intimidating and bluntly critical, sniffily noting that her audience was getting whiter and the sound at her shows sucked. Prince, who became a Jehovah’s Witness, insisted that Day join him knocking on doors, evangelizing. Day owes his career to Prince and says so in the first sentence, but he also doesn’t shy from describing a friendship derailed. They bicker over the star’s punishing, unpredictable behavior, but never who deserves credit. Read “The Beautiful One,” then quickly turn to “On Time.”ĭay gives his memoir an audacious, oddly effective premise: It’s a conversation between Day and a late Prince. Even better is the rollickingly fun “On Time: A Princely Life in Funk” by Morris Day, Prince friend, protege and leader of the Prince-constructed band The Time. Favorite anecdote: Prince held up the announcement of the book until the publisher would agree that the artist could pull the book from circulation, at any point in the future, if he decided the Prince portrayed in its pages no longer jibed philosophically with who Prince had grown into. Dan Piepenbring, the Paris Review editor hired to ghostwrite “The Beautiful Ones,” provides a lengthy, fascinating account of what it was like to work with Prince. His death allowed a degree of candor that gives a clearer picture of Prince the Human Being. Of the many archives used to flesh out those pages is a remarkable scrapbook Prince created in the middle of night, just after signing to Warner Bros., that shows him both more playful than we’re familiar with and more direct: He wrote “bad dad” next a photo of his father. He died soon after the book was announced, having finished only about 30 pages - all included (both handwritten and typed) - never quite advancing beyond high school. We’ll never know for sure just how much “The Beautiful Ones” by Prince might have revealed about him. Had he been able to continue, he would have placed stringent restrictions on its contents. ![]() At the time of his death, in April 2016, he had finished only about 30 pages of his memoir. Monk, former manager of Van Halen, who paints an image of entitlement so ugly, you yearn for levity. “Running With the Devil” from 2017 isn’t quite a musician memoir it’s by Noel E. Downing’s “Heavy Nights”) or being married to Phil Spector (Ronnie Spector’s harrowing 1990 memoir “Be My Baby”). So I waste a lot of time wading through muck before I strike gold, yet without my addiction to these books, I wouldn’t understand life inside the Rolling Stones’ bubble (Keith Richard’s smart 2010 book “Life”) how it feels to be the most-disliked member of the Wu-Tang Clan (U-God’s touching “Raw” from 2018) the value of keeping your mouth shut as a member of Judas Priest (K.K. The trouble is the long slog that often mirrors the career, when the book (and the artist) yearns for relevance. I’m all in for the ascent and relatable parts by the time success curdles into decadence, I’m hooked. My brain operates differently while reading them. See, I would never use “mainline” unless I was under the influence of autobiographies often full of drugs and “written” by pop stars. Which, in a way, you are when you mainline music memoirs. Whenever I tell people this, they look at me as if I were committing myself to sensory deprivation. Their currency is no longer their music but themselves, their reputations, their failures, their schedules, their lifestyles, their personal tragedies, their self-doubt - their stories. Which is why artists tour all the time now, their vacations are splashed across social media accounts, and selling out to corporations no longer carries a stigma. We don’t all recognize the same musicians. The best thing I can say for the Grammys - arguably the televised awards show that’s least representative of the quality of the art it purports to celebrate - is that watching it has become an annual reminder of how little music we share. He regards his crazy world for what it is. ![]() One reason his excellent “Me” - the best of the latest wave of music memoirs - flows so effortlessly: He’s deliciously upfront about addiction, and even better on the difficulty of recovering when you’ve spent decades surrounded by a culture of enablers. Elton John during his "Farewell Yellow Brick Road" tour: Nov.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |