The worst unauthorized biography of a musician or band you've ever read

What's the worst unauthorized biography of a musician or band that you've ever read?

My pick is the Kurt Cobain "biography" "Never Fade Away". It was rush-released two months after he died as a quickie cash-in.

http://www.amazon.com/Never-Fade-Away-Cobain-Story-ebook/dp/B006JRHG32/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1418226181&sr=8-1&keywords=never fade away cobain&pebp=1418226182676

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58554.Never_Fade_Away

I put "biography" in quotes because the author simply made up a decent chunk of the so-called facts in the book.

Yes, I bought it sometime in the summer of '94 because.. well, I didn't know any better.

 

Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs by Derek and the Dominos by Jan Reid. Just horrible. Remarkably factually inaccurate. And poorly written.

http://www.amazon.com/Layla-Other-A...&ie=UTF8&qid=1418226592&sr=1-5&keywords=layla

 

Not that i bought it, but the Albert Goldman on LENNON was horrible i heard

 

Inside Creedence by John Hallowell is a real howler.

 

I haven't read it either but I've heard so many bad things about that book!

 

It was awful and I still have it.

 

I don't think I've ever read a bad one.

 

Tony Sanchez's book on the Stones was highly glamourised

 

That other biography on Cobain, Charles Cross' Heavy as Heaven, was just gawd-awful. Way too focused on drug usage and not enough on the music.

 

That Goldman book really was bad. Especially the part where he insinuates that John liked to pick up little boys for sex Thailand.

 

Well, to be fair it was a biography of Kurt and not Nirvana as a whole. There's a lot of talk about the music in "Come As You Are" by Michael Azerrad and other books.

 

I liked Azerrad's book.

 

Clinton Heylin's Dylan biography (in all its versions) is dreadful: bad information, opinionated commentary, useless writing.

 

That book is also too heavily Courtney Love slanted. She gave him access to the mother-lode of Cobain journals, tapes, etc., and in return she doesn't receive a bad word in the book. Now, I'm not a Cobain murder theorist, and I'm not saying that Love is pure hell and evil, but anyone who is a Cobain nut can tell you, she's guilty of a lot of things, including some of the reasons why he felt like he had to kill himself.

 

Everett True's book is pretty good, as long as you can deal with True telling you how important he is to the history of Nirvana himself.

 

The books I read in high school did a bit of brainwashing on me.
Doors No One Here Gets Out Alive filled me the the most cliche rockstar myth archetype.
I must have read it 1000 times during science class.

Led Zeppelin's Hammer Of The Gods made me not want to read any Zep bios ever again.
It occured to me that Zep are not a good story to read about.

Those 2 books may have some merit, but I never want to see them again. Burn them.

 

One of the strangest unauthorized music bios has to be the new Aretha Franklin book by David Ritz. He did her authorized bio 15 years ago, but it was so butchered and sanitized by Franklin that he felt compelled to do a second book to make use of the material and interviews she kiboshed the first time. In this case, I trust the author over the artist. By most accounts, Franklin lives by her own most peculiar version of reality.

 

This one was authorized, as far as I know.

The chapter that attempts to narrate his suicide is one of the most overwrought, self-satisfied pieces of literature I've ever come across.

I don't know if it's unauthorized, or if it would count as a "biography"...but the 33 1/3 book on the Replacements "Let It Be" written by the guy from the Decemberists was also terrible. Here was a chance to actually get some insight on a famous record, about which precious few details seem to be out there. And this guy just wrote a navel-gazing long-form essay about his awkward adolesence and how the Replacements fit into that.

 

Agreed! The interview(s) he did with Kurt were interesting. Well worth picking up if you're a fan.

 

The Albert Goldman book on Elvis was also pretty bad. I did not buy it, but chapters were serialized in Rolling Stone when it came out.

 

It was authorized
http://galacticramble.blogspot.ca/2011/12/inside-creedence-worst-rock-book-ever.html

 

It was probably something by Geoffrey Giuliano. Hard to pick just one.

 

Gotta say that I'm always amused how people feel free to opine about books they haven't read, music they haven't heard, movies they haven't seen, etc. But hey, that's just me!

I have read the Goldman book — probably back in the late 80s when it came out — and it was the first book that came to mind when I saw this thread.

Unlike some of the fanboys here, I don't need or expect my heroes to be perfect or even close. I had read Goldman's earlier, massive Lenny Bruce bio, so I had some idea of what I was in for with the Lennon book. And I have to believe that given the sheer volume of his research and interviews, that at least some of what Goldman reported was close to the truth.

But most people are something more than the sum of their failures & faults, and Goldman's relentless muckraking tone, the incessant piling of one negative factoid after another, gave me little sense of Lennon as a human being, much less as a great artist.

 

I quit reading "Up and Down with the Rolling Stones" after reading his account of Altamont, which I had skipped to pretty early on. It's been a while, but if I recall, Sanchez got facts wrong that anybody who's watched the film knows, like the song being played when Meredith Hunter was stabbed. If figured if he's going to lie about something as easily verified as that, how could I believe anything else he said in the book.

 

Right! I stand corrected.