With Winter greeting us earlier than normal, a good time to stay inside, sip your favorite sip and grab a book. Some recent reads by the large melon:
Shakey: Neil Young's Biography While the the book is labeled a 'biography', the author does a nice job of mixing Young's interviews into a semi-autobiography. Neil, being Neil, didn't want the book out and fought for it's release. The book title, 'Shakey', I thought was reference to Neil's epilepsy but understand it's more about never knowing what he would do from one day to the next (reminds me of someone...). It's a long read but good content throughout, starting in Neil's Canadian upbringing with his crazy mom, 'Rassy'. Rassy has left us but if she were still here, don't fuc* with Rassy. A road trip to California (in Neil's hearse that he used for gigs) brought about Neil getting involved with Buffalo Springfield ('Buffalo Springfield' is a brand of steamroller I learned). Stephen Stills had quite the ego but what front man doesn't have one? We go through Neil's marriages (he had a little mix of everything with the wives he had) and the love he had for his kids, a couple of which had illnesses that required constant attention. Neil may have been an odd ball overall but he did not back away from being a dad. I did enjoy the way he screwed with the record labels when he could. They wanted commercial/pop songs and he would do the opposite.
Party of One: A Fuzzy Memoir Comedian Dave Landau's autobiography. He doesn’t fit the stereotype of what I perceive someone who went to a Grosse Pointe high school to have. But what a period of adolescence he had. We were screwballs growing up but at least we had the benefit of dirt roads and police officers telling us to more or less "shoo" when they saw us doing something stupid; Landau, while he did push the limits to an extreme, didn't have that courtesy.
A good, short read, with thankfully a happy ending with all the times you'll say "no way" reading it.
Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses J. Geils Band (or 'Geils Band' as he refers to them in the book) front man Peter Wolf's autobiography. The "woofa goofa" throughout his life had interactions with Marilyn Monroe, Muddy Waters, Faye Dunaway (married her), David Lynch the filmmaker, Eleanor Roosevelt, Tennessee Williams, Merle Haggard, Rolling Stones, Sly Stone, Alfred Hitchcock, Andy Warhol and Van Morrison to name a few. The stories are incredible, however, Wolf either has an incredible memory or a creative one as he has dialogue noted back and forth with all his interactions. Not necessarily a bad thing but reminds me of Bruce Springsteen's autobiography where he had just a bit too much detail of what happened 40 years ago.
