Review by New York Times Review
some readers sniff that only those with especially eventful lives should have the temerity to publish memoirs. Even such readers will be fine with the record executive Seymour Stein having written SIREN SONG: My Life in Music (St. Martin's, $28.99). After all, Stein was in the hospital awaiting possible heart surgery when a then-unknown Madonna visited his bedside seeking a record deal and playfully said, "Take me, I'm yours!" That event and its aftermath, which might warrant a full memoir from someone else, is but a passing episode for the ever-hustling Stein, who has to leave space for his time working with the Ramones, Talking Heads, the Pretenders, the Smiths, the Cure, Ice-T and many others. Stein has led the kind of life that makes this sentence sound utterly routine: "On Thanksgiving 1974, we had Elton John and his band over for turkey and pumpkin pie." (John Lennon showed up for dessert.) "My ears grew up faster than the rest of me," Stein writes of his childhood enthusiasm for records by James Brown, Sam Cooke and others, but it seems that his entire spirit was plenty precocious. Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn in 1942, he flew to Cincinnati when he was 15 for a summer internship at King Records under the tutelage of Syd Nathan, a seasoned executive who showed him the ropes and insisted the teenager change his last name from Steinbigle. Stein founded Sire Productions (soon renamed Sire Records) with the musician, songwriter and producer Richard Gottehrer in 1966. The company's most paradigmshifting successes grew from the downtown petri dish CBGB, where Stein found and signed the Ramones and Talking Heads. "I have no easily definable skills or talents," Stein writes. "What I really am is an extremist." Reading about Depeche Mode in a British music magazine late one night while home in New York, Stein made a phone call to a London friend inquiring about the availability of the band's American rights. When his friend said the band was playing that night in Essex, Stein booked a flight on the next Concorde. What he found was "four teenagers poking synths in a dump in the English suburbs." He loved it. From the sound of it, Stein has spent long stretches ignoring his personal life, but he pays attention to it in "Siren Song," candidly (and not always flatteringly) recalling his doomed marriage to Linda Stein (the victim of a brutal murder in 2007) and his role as a father to their two children. Stein was a "tragically clumsy" kid who realized he was gay when he saw Ricky Nelson performing Fats Domino's "I'm Walking" on television. "I truly believed that if I ignored it long enough," he writes of his sexual orientation, "it might go away, like the hiccups or a door-to-door salesman." Though a co-author, Gareth Murphy, helped write "Siren Song," Stein's pithy, brash voice is believably his own throughout. On his relationship with Linda: "Most divorcees fight over children; we shared custody of the Ramones." On the business: "The thing about pop music is that no matter how hard you work the land, you'll always be at the mercy of the weather." Now 76, Stein still works the land, though the bands he lists as his highlights from this century are more of a "who's that" than a who's who. It hardly diminishes the scope and impact of his career to say it had long since peaked by the time the Scottish band Belle and Sebastian released a song named after him in 1998, with lyrics that conclude: "Seymour Stein, sorry I missed you / Have a nice flight home / It's a good day for flying." Stein says songwriters have told him that it takes crafting about 40 songs before you get your first great one. In PAUL SIMON: The Life (Simon & Schuster, $30), the longtime music critic and journalist Robert Hilburn writes that Simon "wasn't a born songwriter" and "spent six years writing one mediocre song after another" ("Get Up & Do the Wobble," to take one example, managed to not spark a dance craze of the same name) until he hit upon "The Sound of Silence." Like Stein, Simon was a Jewish New Yorker (born in New Jersey in 1941, he grew up in Queens) who fell in love with doo-wop. As a teenager, Simon needed someone with whom to harmonize. Art Garfunkel lived two blocks away. When Simon and Garfunkel were 16 (recording under the name Tom and Jerry, after the cartoon), they had a modest hit with "Hey, Schoolgirl," which garnered them comparisons to the Everly Brothers. Hilburn itemizes the reasons the pair eventually split - Garfunkel's acting ambitions among them - but smartly concludes that the break came down to the scope of Simon's talent and ambition, which would only ever really leave room for one. Hilburn's book arrives less than two years after Peter Ames Carlin's "Homeward Bound," another soup-to-nuts biography of Simon. Unlike Carlin, Hilburn had Simon's cooperation, for better or worse. His book is sturdy and hardly hagiographical, but it's also muted when it criticizes and is short on titillating material. Then again, as you might guess from his gentle and introspective oeuvre, Simon is not exactly an avatar for rock's more Dionysian pleasures. Bobby Susser, a childhood friend, describes him this way: "He'd go, 'Our record is Number 1, so I should be happy, but what if it wasn't Number 1? Should I be unhappy? What does it mean? It's the same record. I'm the same guy.'" Hilburn handles Simon's personal life, including his marriages to Carrie Fisher and Edie Brickell, with discretion. On the subject of "Graceland," the heavily Africaninfluenced apartheid-era masterpiece that created a loud debate about cultural appropriation before Twitter was even around to amplify it, Hilburn can be tough (he calls Simon naive for thinking the controversy had passed at one point), but he lands on uplift: "The general perception," he writes in conclusion, was that Simon "came away from 'Graceland' a warmer, more generous person." Like many long careers in popular music, Simon's has waned over time. But Hilburn, in this chronological account, stubbornly treats every phase as equally worthy of sustained attention. He offers a substantial (and familiar) analysis of the failings of Simon's 1998 Broadway-musical flop, "The Capeman." He gives the same kind of space to the lyrics of "Darling Lorraine," from the 2000 album "You're the One," as he does to those of "The Boxer." Another native New Yorker from the boroughs outside Manhattan, Lamont Jody Hawkins couldn't have grown up more differently than Stein or Simon. Now known as UGod from the hip-hop collective the Wu-Tang Clan, he relates In his memoir, RAW: My Journey Into the Wu-Tang (Picador, $27), how he somewhat miraculously survived the streets of Staten Island, along with the group's other founding members, to achieve stardom. ("People think Staten Island is a joke," he writes. "Staten Island is no joke." U-God, I believe you.) The first half of the memoir is a visceral retelling of the rapper's childhood, with nary a paragraph that would escape a parental advisory sticker. He writes about being the product of rape ("The way I see it, you've got to be a compassionate individual to love a child conceived the way I was"), and about having a knife put to his neck by the father of his half brother. There's a fascinating and almost dizzying alternation at times between U-God's gentler side, which he credits to his mother, and an almost reflexive, blustering belief in the edification of violence. ("Not enough people living in New York today have been punched in the face.") He describes the ravages of the crack epidemic on his neighborhood, but also writes with pride about his work ethic in capitalizing on that epidemic. "Drug dealers are not lazy," he writes, with convincing detail to back it up. "Let me tell you straight up - it's not easy." Unlikely as it is with so much competition, the book does have a most horrific moment: U-God's son Dontae was nearly killed when he was 2 years old, used as a "human shield" during a neighborhood shootout. He lived, but required multiple surgeries over many years as part of his recovery effort. In the aftermath of that shooting, U-God writes, "I didn't get any support from these dudes who I thought were my brothers," meaning the Wu-Tang Clan (with the exception of Method Man). U-God is frank about the conflicts that can arise in such a large group ("Nine MCs going at each other, battling for who gets on the song can lead to some hard feelings"), but the book actually slows down when the Wu-Tang Clan's fame speeds up. The quick impressions of tour stops and recounted episodes of bad behavior lack the immersive and granular feel of the portrait of his youth. "I wanna give you the epic journey," U-God says of his lyrics. "Make you feel what I went through." "Raw" certainly does that. Patsy Cline's journey is the bass note running through John Lingan's homeplace: a Southern Town, a Country Legend, and the Last Days of a Mountaintop Honky-Tonk (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27, to be published in July), a book about the singer but even more about the history and current day of her hometown, Winchester, Va. "This little town of 25,000 is in fact a brutal microcosm for the entire country," Lingan writes, "a place where the deepest history and most pressing contemporary concerns are in constant collision." Don't let that thesis statement of sorts scare you off. Lingan's book is not a polemic and it's not a gimmick. He often conjures the place and its people with novelistic detail, saying a lot with a lyrical little. Residents of the town fill prescriptions at "a pharmacy whose perfume shelves were misted over with ancient dust." A man performing karaoke sings a "tuneless and heaving" version of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire," sitting "motionless on the chair, staring deadpan into the monitor, delivering his lines like a police chief naming casualties at a press conference." Lingan writes sensitively about Cline, "the patron saint of people who feel kicked to the curb." Her association with Winchester was long uncomfortable for the town's more patrician residents, who viewed her "simply as a loudmouth and unregenerate flirt." Lingan also writes engaging portraits of several other figures (politicians and preservationists among them) to put the puzzle of the town together. Primarily, there is Jim McCoy, in his mid-80s, whose Troubadour is the honky-tonk of the book's subtitle. McCoy met Cline in 1948. He was 19, moonlighting as a radio D. J., when the 16-year-old Cline visited the station and sang "San Antonio Rose" for him in a hallway. He quickly put her on the radio to perform it live. This moment became part of Cline's "creation myth," and her friendship with McCoy lasted until she died in a plane crash at 30. You end "Homeplace" thinking that every American town could use a book like this one written about it; every town could afford to be this lovingly but critically seen. Like many of the best country songs, the book is sentimental in a way that makes you wonder why sentiment is such a dirty word. Where "Homeplace" is serious-minded but essentially affectionate, the most blisteringly impassioned music book of the season is Saul Austerlitz's just A shot away: Peace, Love, and Tragedy With the Rolling Stones at Altamont (Thomas Dunne, $26.99, to be published in July), a vivid retelling of that claustrophobic disaster of a music festival. The 1969 event, at which a young black man named Meredith Hunter was killed by Hells Angels ostensibly there to keep fans safe, has long served as a clichéd time-of-death for the free-loving '60s as a whole, but Austerlitz's autopsy manages to feel revelatory. The primary reason is his dogged focus on Hunter. The book begins with Austerlitz in the Oakland home of Hunter's sister Dixie Ward, who confesses that she rarely can bring herself to visit her brother's grave just a few miles away. Hunter's identity is well known, but his story, Austerlitz believes, has never been properly told, and his life never properly mourned. The murdered teenager went unnamed in the documentary "Gimme Shelter," the most familiar account of the day. Austerlitz fixes our gaze on Hunter and situates him (if sometimes too neatly) as one chapter in a story that has recently grown to include Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin and others. "A black man had gone somewhere white men did not want him to be, and had never come home." If Austerlitz is here to honor the memory of Hunter, he has also come to bury the Grateful Dead. The band was a major reason the festival happened, and their association with the Hells Angels, a group whose "most fundamental belief was in the righteousness of violence as an act of manhood," helped ensure the bikers would vastly outnumber the police in the security department. After watching the day's mayhem (which included the Jefferson Airplane singer Marty Balin being knocked out cold by an Angel), Jerry Garcia and his bandmates chose not to take the stage as scheduled, claiming that it would be better to skip straight to the headlining Stones. Austerlitz paints that decision as understandable but cowardly, and writes that it began a "process of erasure," in which the Dead's "footprints were being deliberately scrubbed, leaving the Rolling Stones as the sole owner-operators of the debacle called Altamont." Austerlitz also recounts how the documentary makers made something lasting out of footage that was chaotic and non-narrative. The day was druggy, hazy, surreal, ultraviolent; "Yellow Submarine" as a Quentin Tarantino movie. This book relentlessly places you in its scrum. Even days after finishing "Just a Shot Away," you may feel as if you're still in that crowd, trying to find an inch in which to back up and escape what's coming. The same year as Altamont, Larry Norman released his first solo album, "Upon This Rock." The Gospel Music Hall of Fame describes Norman, inducted in 2001, as the person "who first combined rock 'n' roll with Christian lyrics." Whether you celebrate or blame Norman for this breakthrough, his career is worth remembering for the way it illuminated the intersection of commerce, popular art and religion. At his most famous in the 1970s, Norman toured the world and performed at the White House for Jimmy Carter. Gregory Alan Thornbury is out to resurrect Norman with WHY SHOULD THE DEVIL HAVE ALL THE GOOD MUSIC? Larry Norman and the Perils of Christian Rock (Convergent, $26). The "perils," in brief, are what you might imagine: Christians find you too edgy; rockers find you too, well, Christian. Norman wasn't threatening to churchgoers just because they were afraid of electric guitars. "His Moby Dick was institutional Christianity itself," Thornbury writes. He wanted apologies for "the church's racism, ready acceptance of aggression, violence and war, and for an unwillingness to listen to the concerns of a generation." Like a good rock 'n' roller, Norman wanted to make trouble, even if that trouble was part of an effort to promote good behavior. He claimed that any straightforward promotion of Christianity was propaganda, not art. (Perhaps not propaganda, the lyrics he sang nonetheless often fell short of his aspirations to complexity: "Take a look at yourself / And you can look at others differently / Put your hand in the hand of the man / From Galilee.") Thornbury, chancellor at The King's College in New York City (and formerly president there), is attuned to Christian culture and history. Whether he's a rock critic is a very open question. In his view, "Larry Norman Presents : Appalachian Melody" is "one of the great albums of the late 1970s." He finds it "hard to think of a better guitar album from the era" than "Something New Under the Son." Some of the book's minutiae, about record company disputes and other matters, are less than enthralling. But Norman's role - and struggles - in the cultural landscape of the time is worth remembering. "God gave me a gift," Norman once said, in a line that any rocker might adopt, "not to be popular, but to be invasive." JOHN williams is the daily books editor and a staff writer at The Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 3, 2018]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"I don't consider myself an ex-drug dealer or an ex-criminal," rapper Hawkins writes in this sage, fast-paced memoir. "I consider myself to be an experienced fucking person who went through a lot of hell to come out right and get where I am today." Hawkins, a member of the Wu-Tang Clan, describes New York during the less glamorous (and more dangerous) 1970s through the early 1990s, when lived with his single mother in a crack-ravaged Staten Island neighborhood; he dealt drugs as a teenager, eventually running a mini-empire. During this time, Hawkins and his friend Method Man honed their rap skills. They joined other determined, songwriters to form the Wu-Tang Clan. Along the way, Hawkins spent a year in prison for drug possession and, sometime after, was admitted to a mental institution after he was found wandering around his neighborhood in a bathrobe ("Maybe one of my girlfriends poisoned me"); he became a father and later dated Janet Jackson, on whom he had had a crush as a kid. Hawkins is a wonderful storyteller who spares no detail (he writes of using plastic wrap as a prophylactic), and his willingness to share his wisdom in nonsaccharine terms yields an inspirational coming-of-age story. Agent: Marc Gerald, United Talent Agency. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The Wu-Tang Clan (the name was taken from the 1983 film Shaolin and Wu Tang) remain one of hip-hop's most recognizable and influential groups. This year is the 25th anniversary of their seminal first album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). When you think of the band, Hawkins aka "U-God" (short for Universal God), might not be the first name to spring to mind. He was the eighth member of the group to record a solo album but was there from the beginning and has quite a tale to tell. This is an engaging journey, and it's not all fame and fortune, but U-God's voice is real. He's generous with advice and caution, relating the inside story. His 2013 CD, The Keynote Speaker, was well reviewed, and the book ends with the hope that the remaining members of the group will reunite. VERDICT This firsthand account of the innovative hip-hop collective is recommended. Fans will be thrilled to hear U-God's voice again. [See Prepub Alert, 10/4/17.]-Bill Baars, Lake Oswego P.L., OR © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Gritty memoir from a meditative drug dealer-turned-rapper, a key member of ferocious Staten Island hip-hop group the Wu-Tang Clan.The Wu-Tang Clan made their mark through being unusual in their myth-inflected back story, a posse of distinct street-focused perspectives. Before that, "U-God" Hawkins absorbed the realities of urban poverty firsthand in a Park Hill housing project. "Only the pure of heart make it out of the ghetto," writes the author. As a teenager, he ran a lucrative crack enterprise, learning about violence and survival and eventually serving prison time. "I was content with my small operation," he writes, "making enough to get by and taking care of my peoples." At the same time, he was developing rhymes with what evolved into the Wu-Tang core. Their genesis isn't discussed until halfway through the book, and other members are sketched broadly beyond amusing anecdotes of hardscrabble early years. Hawkins suggests their success was marred by infighting and unequal emphasis on contributions by prominent members RZA, Method Man, and Ol' Dirty Bastard, about whom the author notes, "If Dirty hadn't died, I think the Wu would be in better standing." Regarding his own solo project, he claims, "we couldn't get the same support from the entire Clan the way [other members'] records had been supported." By the end, Hawkins' narrative becomes rancorous; regarding his lawsuit against RZA, he writes, "he got rich, but I still don't know what I'm due." By 2010, "the supergroup was splintering apart." Hawkins notes even the notorious Wu-Tang "one copy" LP purchased by Martin Shkreli wasn't really a legitimate project. The author writes in a casual style that will entertain fans of the group and its era, but the narrative becomes muddled and disingenuous. Hawkins brags about his own redemption and embrace of an underground values system termed "Supreme Mathematics," yet he writes dismissively of barely provoked violent acts by Wu-Tang associates and himself.A rambling and heartfelt account, vivid in its recollections of 1990s East Coast hip-hop. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
