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

(forgive this monster of a post...I love reading about the musicians I like as much as I do listening to them!)

Thing is, all of Heylin's books are that way...the dude is a very opinionated writer (His Sgt Pepper book, The Act You've Known For All These Years, is probably the worst offender in that regard). IMO I didn't think Behind The Shades was that bad (I've read worse Dylan bios, the Howard Sounes' Down The Highway for one)...if anything it was worth it for the interview quotes from people who knew Dylan. Heylin's Bootleg! book is still a classic, though

To say the least...for what it's worth though Keith Richards has admitted that it's actually pretty accurate. What gets me with books like Up And Down... are how these guys supposedly fried their brains on all kinds of drugs yet can still recall fifteen year old conversations 100% verbatim. As I recall Spanish Tony "co-wrote" Up And Down... with a guy named John Blake (?) who wrote a really dreadful solo-Beatles bio called All You Needed Was Love, which featured the same kind of verbatim conversation passages...

I know Danny Sugarman worked for The Doors, etc, but the whole vibe of the book was presented as "Jim Morrison was God". I hate those kinds of biographies. It also bugged me how Sugarman portrayed Morrison's vices/addictions as an additional work of genius, instead of the tragedy they were. I knew a lot of kids in high school who, between that damned book and the horrible Oliver Stone Doors movie, felt that Jim Morrison was actually somebody to aspire to living like, like some kind of positive role model...and found out the hard way that it wasn't the case, just like Morrison did

Fortunately Hammer Of The Gods has since been just about completely disregarded, not only by Zeppelin themselves, but by the legions of Zep fans out there. Unfortunately, Mick Wall's recent bio isn't much better...when I read it I could swear Wall took entire passages from HOTG and used them verbatim in When Giants Walked The Earth. Either way, Led Zeppelin has not been served well in the biography department...the Barney Hoskyns "in their own words" book is by far the best.

Stephen Davis' Doors/Jim Morrison bio was just as bad as Hammer Of The Gods. Funny thing is, his Stones bio, Old Gods Almost Dead, is probably the best one not written by an member of the band...

I've read Giuliano's Harrison, McCartney and Townshend bios. Absolute trash, the lot of them...there ought to be a law against letting such a sleazeball like Geoffrey Giuliano near a word processor. In regard to Blackbird, the McCartney bio, I'm surprised Jimmy McCulloch's family didn't sue Guiliano...and not just over that tasteless death photo he included, either.

...Which leads me to good old Albert Goldman, and The Lives Of John Lennon:

As sleazy, critical and opinionated as TLOJL is (I haven't read the thing in twenty years or more) when you consider the amount of actual research Goldman put into it -the notes and interview sources in the back of the book are immense, as I recall- there has to be at least some truth to his claims in the book. Thing is, in a lot of ways Goldman smashed the Lennon 'myth' in ways that only Lennon himself could have dreamed of or appreciated. Sure, Goldman pi--ed off a lot of Lennon fanboys/girls with his tome, but I don't recall any of his sources -or Paul or Yoko, for that matter- suing him for libel or misrepresentation, either.

Quite frankly, I remember liking the Goldman book a lot more than Ray Coleman's "John was God and could do no wrong" Lennon bio. That friggin' book was so fawning and sycophantic I thought I was gonna puke...

 

Don't waste your money on it.

 

...AND about the author!

 

Any hate for George Tremlett?

 

I skipped this one due to bad reviews, but one I did read was "Being Frank: My Time With Frank Zappa" by Nigey Lennon. Actually some parts were entertaining, but I can't imagine much of it being true.

 

I read some of that a while back. My guess is it contains some, possibly true, stories about what it was like to hang around with Zappa in that era (early 70's) along with some of her fantasies.

 

Some truth, yes, but it's the way he used the interviews/research. A lot has been written about Goldman's methods AFAIK. He basically interviewed 5 or 6 people about every incident in Lennon's life, which sounds thorough. But rather than going for a balanced view between their accounts, he used the most sensational of them in every case. Which is why the whole book reads like a life lived on the verge of hysteria.

 

After I posted I got a bit worried that somebody would post it here. Thankfully Google came up empty.

 

It's for this reason that I find this thread's focus on unauthorized biographies a little strange.

Because most of us don't want our dirty laundry aired, I generally assume that authorized biographies have been sanitized to some degree. So while unauthorized bios may suffer from the lack of input from the person being written about, authorized bios may be seriously flawed in a different way.

I don't read many musician biographies, and I can't think of any that I'd condemn, so if you'll pardon the threadcrap I'll mention a couple of my favorites instead: Sylvie Simmons' excellent Leonard Cohen bio, and Jimmy McDonough's Shakey (Neil Young). And though I, too, found the Zevon book disturbing, I loved it anyway.

 

Not to mention those music reviews 20 to 30 years after the initial release. Reviews of the day would have worked much better instead of a 1999 review of a record from 1972.

 

There's also the issue of emphasis. I haven't read Goldman's Lennon book (aside from a few excerpts). But in the case of his Elvis book, he spends very little time discussing Elvis's music or his process of performing and creating it. In a serious biography of a musician, it seems reasonable to expect the focus would be on music, rather than on the artist's personal life. One might come away from Goldman's book thinking Elvis worked as a porn star, given the amount of space devoted to discussing his sex life relative to the space discussing his work as a musician. It's sort of like writing a book about Hitler in which WWII is only mentioned in passing.

 

Several years ago I received as a present Lennon in America: 1971-1980, Based in Part on the Lost Lennon Diaries by Geoffery Giuliano

it is the goddamn weirdest book I have ever resd....You would not believe how badly this guy writes....and the 'facts' he comes up with....

 

Could you clarify what you mean by 'Bad Information'? Inaccurate? As far as his opinionated commentary, I kind of think that's helpful when it comes to Dylan: He has more than enough syncophants. But when he lives up to his talent, Heylin gives him his due. My sense is that Clinton does his research, especially when it comes to Dylan's long messy trail of recordings.

 

Bad Information: '[At the Town Hall in 1963, Dylan's] perversity was such that he did not include 'Blowin' In the Wind', at this point his best-known song'.

Set list for Town Hall 1963 (note the tenth song performed by Dylan):

1.Ramblin' Down Thru The World

2.Bob Dylan's Dream

3.Talkin' New York

4.Ballad Of Hollis Brown

5.Walls Of Red Wing

6.All Over You

7.Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues

8.Boots Of Spanish Leather

9.Hero Blues

10.Blowin' In The Wind

11.John Brown

12.Tomorrow Is A Long Time

13.A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall


14.Dusty Old Fairgrounds

15.Who Killed Davey Moore?

16.Seven Curses

17.Highway 51 (Curtis Jones)

18.Pretty Peggy-O (trad., arranged by Bob Dylan)

19.Bob Dylan's New Orleans Rag

20.Don't Think Twice, It's All Right

21.Hiding Too Long

22.With God On Our Side

23.Masters Of War

24.Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie


Not only is the information bad, Heylin compounds the error by interpreting the bad information as an example of an apparent 'perversity' on the part of the artist for which part of the evidence is this bad information.

 

There's a lot of discussion of Albert Goldman here. I've read both his books on Lennon and Presley. Pretty awful biographies. But Goldman was an adjunct associate professor of English at Columbia; among his course offerings was the University's first class on popular culture. So here's a college professor writing hateful diatribes. Weird? Or a reflection of modern educational institutions?

 

Money
Argent
Soldi
Geld
Dinero

 

The biography by ex Cream song writer Pete Brown was 'not' good.

 

Oh, no question about it, Goldman manipulated his research to his own ends...but for people like Yoko to basically say the whole book was nothing but a pack of lies isn't wholly accurate, either. All that is really neither here nor there, though- the Goldman book is what it is, and it's reputation precedes it. Needless to say the recent Tim Riley and Philip Norman Lennon bios wipe the floor with The Lives Of John Lennon.

Oh god, I forgot all about that one...at best, consider Lennon In America to be a work of fiction, no matter what it's supposed to be presented as.

Okay, yeah, that is a fair cop. For somebody who has done as much research, etc on Dylan's music as Clinton Heylin has you'd think he would have known better than that. I'd be about 99% certain Heylin would have researched the setlist for that gig somehow. Sort of makes you wonder what his motives were with the whole "Dylan's perversity was such..." line in the first place...

 

thanks you saved me from reading this book. i already tried to read most of keith richards boring and incoherent book

 

The Lennon book by Albert Goldman was just horrible. The guy researched hard, but mainly to assasinate his subjects, who he quite often didn't understand.

Most biogs I've read by Alan Clayson are very poor.

Jeremy Reed's Another Tear Falls - A biog of Scott Walker, is full of pompous ****. It might be the most unintentionally funny book I've ever read.

Virtually every book about Brian Jones - including ones by Jeremy Reed and Alan Clayson, tend to be poorly researched, confused and unable to get to grips with his complex personality (Though I've not read the most recent one by Paul Trynka).

No One Gets Out Here Alive is also awful.

Paulo Hewitt's biographies (some authorised, i believe) are notoriously lightweight and too in thrall of his subjects and the "Mod myth" to be truly objective.

 

Garbage. Both of these books are sensationalised nonsense full of fantasy and zero fact. As for the molestation claims, perhaps you'd do better to take court documents, which show the prosecution's 'evidence' for the pitiful joke that it was, as seriously as you do tabloid trash articles and wannabe bandwagon-jumping hacks...

 

Christopher Sandford is another rock musician biographer who can't write his way out of a wet paper bag. His Keith Richards (Satisfaction) and Paul McCartney (can't remember the title, that's how bad it was) bios are just bleedin' awful. Avoid at all costs...full of factual errors, blatant cut and pastes from other books and just all round terrible, cliched writing.

 

Did you read what I said? 1) I stated that neither book was all that great 2) both authors came to the conclusion that Jackson wasn't a pedophile.

 

I read (started to read) a Beatles unauthorized in the early 80's. I got about 2 chapters in and had to quit. Not only did it stink, but it put me off on reading rock biographies in general. It also made me very selective on any biography I have read since then.

I assume the book is sensationalized unless proven otherwise. Actually bad overly reverent bios are almost as bad as trash fests.

 

Yes, I did. You concluded your post by saying that you hoped these writers were correct, as if the allegations had any worth to them. For those that have read the case, it is obvious that even a kangaroo court would have had trouble convicting. So no great shakes there.

But what do about all the bitter folks out there with a vendetta against Jackson? Create another fantasy to comfort them, of course! This time saying he was either gay or asexual. Zero evidence on this one too, needless to say.