Illinois Entertainer

Death is described as the great rock career move, but surviving serious drug addiction might be a better choice. Especially when, decades later and clean ‘n’ sober, you get to regale the public with tales of your sordid past in best-selling books. Among a raft of such having-one’s-cake-and-eating-it-too tomes by rockers touting their tales of dopester depravities are Eric Clapton’s Clapton: The Autobiography (Broadway), Motley Crue bassist Nikki Sixx’s Heroin Diaries (Pocket) and Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash’s Slash (Harper).

• Read more: Clean ‘N’ Sober

I’d always thought that rock’s major accessory was sex. But a recently published book, Paul Grushkin’s lavishly illustrated coffee table tome Rockin’ Down The Highway (Voyageur), has given me second thoughts. Grushkin makes a convincing case that rock’s main accoutrement is the automobile.

• Read more: Rock Accessories

“You cannot make friends with the rock stars,” Lester Bangs insists, talking to the budding rock crit in Almost Famous. “They’ll buy you drinks, you’ll meet girls, they’ll try to fly you places for free, offer you drugs. But they are not your friends.”

• Read more: Celebrity Helper

Timing is everything. Well maybe not everything, but it’s damned important – especially in music. Time seems to be the backbone of writing about music, too. Musician bios, for example, are presented in chronological order. One of the most fascinating of such lives is Dave Van Ronk’s in The Mayor Of MacDougal Street (DaCapo). Van Ronk’s Zelig-like life, detailed in this posthumously published autobiography (ably edited by Elijah Wald), gave him a front-row seat in a variety of musical scenes.

• Read more: ‘Til The Broad Daylight

Getting a handle on any major rock band is at least as easy as herding cats. But that hasn’t stopped the production of books purporting to provide the “real story.” Three recent publications illustrate three very different ways of nabbing their elusive quarry. In Smoke On The Water: The Deep Purple Story (E.C.W.), Dave Thompson assembles publicly available material and appears to make a story by arranging the basic factoids about the group in chronological order. Although Pat Gilbert also uses some previously published interviews in Passion Is A Fashion: The Real Story Of The Clash (DaCapo), his grasp of that band goes far beyond stale stuff. Gilbert richly provides his own interviews with members of The Clash and many of their key collaborators and co-conspirators. His book is a model for all band bios, full of his own and others’ insights, and refreshingly re-plete with contrasting perspectives. Clinton Heylin takes a radically different ap-proach, presenting re-views and interviews published during the life of the band in All Yesterday’s Parties: The Velvet Under-ground In Print 1966-1971 (DaCapo). VU began at the same moment as rock criticism, and the authors here, all of whom genuflect, are a who’s who of early rock crits, including Richard Goldstein, Lenny Kaye, Lester Bangs, Ben Edmonds, and Danny Goldberg.

• Read more: Three Sides To Every Story