Worst rock memoir ever?

As for people asking me about my classic old threads - well, I prefer to live in the present. I know a lot of people liked them, and others who had strong feelings about them that wwere maybe not so positive, but I would much prefer to tell you what is on my mind now because that's my where my happiness is these days. To those who wish to analyze the old threads, the so-called 'classics', there's always tthe archive.

One of the worst has to be Dave Davies' "Kink." He obviously did not have a ghost writer as the book is filled with awful puns and dumb jokes. And most of it is bitching about Ray. Then, halfway through, it becomes exclusively about how he believes in UFOs. Funny in a car crash kind of way.

I had high hopes for Gene Simmons' "Kiss & Make-Up," but it came across as rather clinical, considering what it *might* have been. Surely, Simmons' lurid predeliction for all things libidinous could have inspired more colorful text, but alas nay....

Not that it's a rock memoir, but the first time I paged through Jon Savage's "England's Dreaming," I found it a bit too textbooky...lacking the ramshackle, reckless charm of, say, Gillian McCain & Legs McNeil's "Please Kill Me." I suppose that's an unfair comparison, however, as "Please Kill Me" is an oral history versus Savage's journalistic accounting of facts.

The Dennis Wilson bio "The Real Beach Boy" comes to mind. I gotta go puke. And Leigh's Velvet Underground. It wasn't about the band! I was ripped off. ;-)

that trashy Gina Arnold book I suffered through about 8 years ago... just awful.

Hey, 'Kink' is great, especially the UFO stuff. His radio interviews to promote it at the time were unbelievable. If you think that's tiresome you should try his brother's tome, 'X-Ray'. Now that's a bad pun. Other true stinkers include 'The Big Wheel' by Bruce Thomas, where Elvis Costello's bass player moans about how hard it is touring the world, staying in nice hotels, being treated well and being Elvis Costello's bass player, Ian Hunter's excruciating 'Diary Of A Rock'n'Roll Star' ('checked out the guitar stores in Tucson, saw a nice Epiphone, but you can't get a decent cup of tea in this town, no way' for 180 pages) and best of all, (I forget the title) a sort of autobiography by Alan Jackson, the only hack to wear a shirt and tie at the NME during Punk's first gloaming. This book is so exquisitely dull that he gets ten pages out of Stevie Nicks arse (so to speak) as he describes following the now faded star up a spiral staircase to her turret garret. (You can tell I used to review this stuff). Honourable mentions for dullness- Mick Wall's impressively tedious biog of Iron Maiden (published by Sanctuary- i.e. their management company) which happily admits in the foreward that it includes no stories of excessive behaviour. D'oh! A friend of mine was employed transcribing the original tapes, the lucky soul. For some reason the pages gave off a curious purple luminescence which kept me entranced. Oh, and Steven Rosen's astonishingly shitty bio of Sabbath, just reissued. Includes chapter titles like 'Once, Twice, Three Times A Crazy', references to 'the good ship Sabbath helmed by Captain Ronnie Dio' (actually that sounds too good for Rosen) and, get this, a poem by Bill Ward. Fuckin' A.

The worst rock book of any sort has to be Danny 'I Knew Jim Morrison And I Took Lots of Drugs and Screwed Lots of Groupies and I Know Who Baudelaire Is, Too!' Sugerman's 'bio' of Guns N'Roses. There's maybe fifty pages that even mention the band; the rest is like some kind of sixth-rate Joseph Campbell/Greil Marcus drivel drawing comparisons between Axl and pretty much every 'tormented genius artist' who ever lived. I just can't do justice to how awful this book is. Go read it now and laugh your ass off.

erm alan jackson wasn't *at* the nme during "punk's first gloaming" (unless "first gloaming" means "eight or nine years later")

For what it's worth, I didn't think the Flur book was THAT bad...was interesting enough from the point of view of one of the "inessential" Kraftwerk members. Certainly there could have been more, but there's precious little enough about Kraftwerk out there as it is, so this was at least SOMETHING. Of course, if anyone can recommend a good book on Kraftwerk, that'd also be appreciated.

Oh, while it's not technically a rock memoir, I thought I'd take this opportunity to recommend that everyone steer clear of Jeff Gomez' novel Our Noise, quite possibly the WORST BOOK EVER. Basically a few hundred pages of lame and pointless neurotic agonizing with an oh-so-hip namedrop every couple of lines, telling you what band-shirt such and such a character is wearing, what band poster is on the wall, etc etc. Ugh. Franklin Bruno did a dead-on parody of the book in a review of same book, which is far more entertaining, and over far more quickly.

Anyone ever caught any B. Eno writing? What a waste of space...

I quite enjoyed Our Noise, for what it's worth. I think if one is able to take all the name-dropping with a grain of salt, rather than getting offended (like Mr. Bruno and Ms. Toomey quite obviously did), the book was a decent, fluffy read.

The follow-up with the Tsunami-derived title was, however, quite painful.

Fluffy is the key word there...there was so little of substance in the book that it irritated the fuck out of me. One of the few books I've ever flung across the room in disgust. (Another was Atlas Shrugged, but that's another story altogether.)

I like fluffy every now and then. It can be good, particularly when what I read before it was so damn unrelaxing for the ol' brane

I thought this thread was about shitty memoirs, not the staffing history of a minor part of a major corporation, mr s, and though I presume you're correct I still bet Jackson was the only suit and tie guy at NME in the eighties. His descriptions of his first day there ar quaintly charming, a real life Derek Kent. Thanks all for the tips on Sugerman on GnR- it sounds spectacularly crappy.

Sean: Of course, if anyone can recommend a good book on Kraftwerk, that'd also be appreciated.

I seem to recall that Kraftwerk: Man, Machine and Music by Pascal Bussy was decent, given what I've seen of the competition.