John Butlerconfesses to being addicted to rock biographies
If Benjamin Franklin's definition of insanity is true - the one about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results - then I'm in deep trouble. In the past six months alone I have read Peter Guralnick's books on Elvis, One Train Later by Andy Summers, A Drink with Shane MacGowan, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs by John Lydon and Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis of Red Hot Chili Peppers. I know how the story ends, but I can't stop reading biographies of rock musicians.
As a hobby it has a contemporary feel, like collecting obsolete mobile phones or eating pesto. I'm not sure how old the music-biography publishing industry is - I find it hard to imagine our forebears riding the Harcourt Line tram with a George Formby biography tucked under an arm of a morning - but I know where it all began for me. Bob Geldof's autobiography was called Is That It?, and it was an eye-opener. It picked apart a turbulent childhood in Dublin before ending with the natural full stop of Live Aid, in 1985. As a kid I devoured Is That It?, then read it again, and it's easy to see why. I was growing up in Dublin, I dug The Boomtown Rats and the book was peppered with pleasingly graphic sexual references.
I don't think I'm particularly interested in the lives of celebrities, but when you love a musician or a band you cherish any insight into who they are and what informs their music. Shakey, a biography of Neil Young, portrays a man whose fragile, sensitive vocal style belies a granite-hard attitude to life and self-expression. It's an interesting contradiction, and if great musicians happen to write such illuminating books about themselves, so much the better - like Chronicles by Bob Dylan.
But if it were solely about discovering the story behind the music I love, then surely I wouldn't have enjoyed The Dirt half as much as I did. Or would I? I can barely sing Girls, Girls, Girls yet I loved Mötley Crüe's eye-watering retelling of life at the vanguard of the LA glam-metal movement - if such a movement has a vanguard. No, it's definitely not just about the music. I hate Red Hot Chili Peppers' nursery-rhyme jock-rock with the white heat of a thousand suns, but I couldn't put down Kiedis's memoir, even if most of it describes him pinballing depressingly between rehab and recovery.
So if it's not about the music, the people behind the music or even the quality of the writing, what is it about rock biographies that I find so beguiling? Maybe what I enjoy about them is that each story has the same pleasing trajectory. In the opening chapters of rock biographies, the touchpaper is lit with a detailed description of musical grandparents. When these give way to sketches of our hero as a child, emulating skiffle bands on the gramophone in his livingroom, you know you're on the right path. When he moves to the city and suffers the lean years you gladly suffer with him, wading through these chapters because you know that they too are crucial, like the set-up to a good joke. They inflate the story with the required dramatic tension, then he gets his record deal and, bang, you're shot into orbit, touring the world with the superstar, heaving television sets from penthouse to swimming pool and, in the case of Mötley Crüe, back up again.
The other great thing about these books is that you never stop identifying with the musicians, even after the madness begins. You too grow dizzy as chapters pass and the names of albums, cities and ex-wives begin to pile up.
Then, just as the thrill of being on the road begins to wear off for them, the thrill of reading about it also wanes. You long to change gears and linger over sedate passages about a home in the sun or a farm bought with some of the hard-earned money. Just in time, rehab, religion or bankruptcy intervenes, and the book ends with the promise of a new solo album that you're fairly sure isn't going to be up to much.
All the best rock stories have an irresistible magnetic force, like modern fairy tales, a force that helps you disappear completely into them. That's why I love them. Reading a book on The Eagles recently, I never once stopped to think whether the music they made was good, or as important as the writer thought, or even whether he was the most objective judge, given that he played with the band. I was busy touring Japan with Don Henley, oblivious to the fact that somewhere in the world James Brown was making music at the same time. And Lou Reed. And that there were far more important things in the world than music in the first place.
All things must pass. In the future world of music these stories might achieve mythic status. Because of the way music is bought and sold and listened to these days, no musician will again experience global hysteria on the scale of the Beatles and the Stones, or maybe even U2. And if global stardom on the scale of Led Zeppelin becomes less likely, there may never be another Hammer of the Gods. The stories will continue to reduce in scale, and although I love these bands I don't know if I ever want to read about Sparklehorse, LCD Soundsystem or Air. In the future it will be all about the music. Maybe that isn't such a bad thing after all.
John Butler blogs at http://lozenge.wordpress.com