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).

Despite their authors’ contrasting personalities and different musical styles, these autobiographies have much in common. Each focuses on descriptions of the pains and pleasures of devouring vast quantities of cocaine, heroin, alcohol, and various other ingestibles of questionable character. And they are studded with accounts of their authors’ persistent failures to abstain from the innumerable sexual adventures that are the right-de-seignior of rock stars.

Mainly missing in action, or at least given short shrift, is the creation and performance of music. Sometimes, and this is one of them, two out of three is bad. Because all three artists did their best work while deeply addicted, they raise unanswered questions about the relationship between creativity and drugs. But their creativity was also at its peak during their youth, so it might not just be the drugs that were the doors of perception, romantic myths notwithstanding. Perhaps their need for drugs and alcohol is related to their obsessions with music – each in its way has charms to soothe the savage breast. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll – are they attempts to plug holes in our souls?

Also absent is how the hell they managed to perform night after night in such an out-of-their-head condition, let alone to remember enough details to write these books. I recall seeing Slash hanging out at Metro prior to a performance of a pal of his in 1989. He was so sloshed he was nodding off and was only vertical because he was held in place by buddies on either side of him. About a half hour later, the headliner called him up on stage. Two people aided him in navigating the stairs, strapped on his guitar and plugged it in for him – he couldn’t have done it himself. And then he started playing – brilliantly, never missing a note.

For all the similarities, these cleaned-up guitarists have created wildly different books, especially in their narrative voices. In contrast to Sixx’s over-the-top, exclamation-pointed, large-font hysteria, Clapton’s tone is almost emotionless. And Slash doesn’t seem to have any personal voice – the words appear far more to be co-author Anthony Bozzo’s. Clapton wrote his book after his dissatisfaction with a co-writer’s version. Sixx’s work is a pastiche of a diary he kept during the year when Motley Crue’s fame coincided with his peak drug use. The entries are annotated by the current version of Sixx and by various and sundry members of his professional and personal entourage, some of whom pointedly contradict his accounts.

Each musician comes from fractured, unconventional, “Oprah”-worthy families. Clapton was raised by his small-town grandparents in straightened financial circumstances. He was told his mother was his older sister – a lie his extended family maintained and he blames for souring his life. He grouses: “The feelings of insecurity I had about my home life made me hate school.” Yet he describes his grandparents – who raised him as their son – as warm and kindly, saying they spoiled him. One wonders how well any of these men understand their lives; Clapton, constantly in the spotlight as lead guitarist and the object of the “Clapton is God” graffiti, writes “I hated anything that would single me out and get me unwanted attention.” Sixx’s childhood found him shuttled from one household to another, feeling unwanted in each. One doesn’t need to know much psychiatry to relate his anger at his mother, full of bile and blame toward her – even now he feels she doesn’t love him – to his indefatigable misogyny. In a weird way, Slash’s youth seems almost charmed. His hippie parents, a British father and African-American mother, moved to California and soon divorced. His mother’s successful costume-design career introduced him to movers and shakers in rock. At age 13 he was sleeping with his girlfriend of the same age at her house, with her mother’s permission and her gifts of pot.

All these rehabbed rockers chronicle gripping early life-stories and celebrity sensationalism. But it is Clapton’s that is ready for the major biopic with a life that is bursting with melodrama, romance, and hit songs. Besotted with his guitar pal George Harrison’s wife Patty, the relationship blossomed into marriage and nine years later wilted in divorce. She reports in her own recent autobiography that Clapton wasn’t fun to be around, though she is rather proud of the songs he wrote for her, especially “Wonderful Tonight.” Years later, his toddler son Connor died, accidentally falling out the window of a New York high-rise. Such is the stuff of Clapton’s life and loves that I’d be astonished if a movie isn’t already underway. His current popularity even provides a sappy-happy Hollywood ending.

– Deena Dasein

Cars remained a fixture of rock songs and Grushkin seems to include them all, like Commander Cody And His Lost Planet Airmen’s cover of “Hot Rod Lincoln,” Jonathan Richman’s “Roadrunner,” and Bob Seger’s “Making Thunderbirds.” Hundreds of luscious color shots of rockers and their rides, records and album covers, and concert posters are displayed spanning genres from rockabilly to rap. One of the book’s few black-and-white photos is of Sam Phillips presenting a Cadillac to Carl Perkins (but you can’t tell if his suede shoes were blue). Grushkin offers photos of surfer guys with their woodies (the wood-sided station wagons used to lug their boards to the surf), ZZ Top’s iconic custom car, and several images of a lean-and-hungry Bruce Springsteen, who mined the ride as a metaphor of freedom.

But not all born-in-the-U.S.A. rock obsesses over cars. One style of rock has another ornament so prominent it lends itself to the name of the genre: hair metal. Steven Blush’s American Hair Metal (Feral House) features dozens of musicians sporting the colorful, highly-coifed, curled-and-teased tresses loved by MTV and millions of fans in the 1980s. The book’s frontispiece, a can of hairspray, readily gives the idea that for Blush, and perhaps for the stars and fans, the music is not the message. He gives but a brief nod to the genre’s sound: “every Hair Metal band had varying degrees of Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, AC/DC, KISS, and Van Halen in them.” This is basically a picture book, as it should be, and big hair is front and center, every shot showing where blame for the hole in the ozone layer should be placed. Lipstick, mascara, and eyeliner are as central to the image as the gravity-defying dos. But so many of the quotes from the (in)famous performers seem to indicate their focus, unlike the camera’s, is neither their looks nor their music. Their obsession is, surprise, surprise, sex. “That’s the reason you get into a rock band, right? To get laid and to get free booze,” Mötley Crüe singer Vince Neil avers. Erik Turner from Warrant has the same obsession: “I got into rock ‘n’ roll to get girls. I kept seeing all these ugly guys in rock ‘n’ roll with all these women, and figured I was no uglier.” Rikki Rocket of Poison adds: “If by a groupie you mean a girl that fucks any guy just because he’s in a band – if that’s what it is – then I love it! Otherwise, I’d never get any!!”

Blush reports these “bands put considerable effort into getting chicks” but they probably put in more time telling the press about their sexual exploits. Ratt made sure everyone knew their tour bus had a condom vending machine; Poison broadcast that they traveled with their “groupie computer.” Is that the reason for their public focus on sex? “After a while, it wasn’t about sex anymore for the guys because they had so much of it. It became about who could do the wildest stuff,” says a member of the less-than-well-known Sweet Pain.

Hair metal’s embrace of decadence stands in sharp contrast to musicians who use the music as a minor accessory to embellish the real thing – Christianity. In Body Piercing Saved My Life (DaCapo) Andrew Beaujon takes a year-long odyssey through the “parallel universe” known as Christian music. Selling more records than classical, jazz, and new age combined, it “is the only music that’s categorized by the lyrical content as opposed to the musical side.” It includes artists who also appeal to non-religious audiences, like Chevelle, P.O.D., Pedro The Lion, Switchfoot, The Rez Band, and Amy Grant. The book’s title, taken from a popular T-shirt seen at the major Cornerstone festival, references not the stylish facial studs but the nails gorily glorified by Mel Gibson in his Passion Of The Christ. Beaujon, who claims to have had no prior experience with religion, visited Christian festivals, award ceremonies, and churches with great sound systems, and interviewed the industry’s various movers and shakers. His most interesting profile-interview is Pedro The Lion’s David Bazan, a rare think-for-himself person, influenced as much by Fugazi as by his close reading of the Gospels. Least appealing is Brandon Ebel, the very successful owner of the Tooth & Nail label, which he modeled after Sub Pop. Lacking any trace of humility, despite the overtly Christian music he releases, many of his quoted statements end with “Don’t put that in your book.”

Beaujon is an unreliable author. At the end of the book, he sheepishly admits he lied when he said he had no experience with religion – his father was an Episcopalian priest disgraced by a sexual affair. Also, he indicates, unlike most popular music, sexual controversy in Christian music has a negative effect on sales; “sex does not sell.” But he also stresses the strong sexual overtones at the musical church services he observed. O.K., maybe sex is the major accessory.

– Deena Dasein

Some follow Bangs’ advice, but the improbably/improperly named Lonn Friend, editor of Los Angeles glam metal’s main magazine, R.I.P., certainly didn’t. Friend was never as sleazy as the scene he covered, but he loved being associated with it, especially with the stars whom he constantly refers to as his friends. “I had always attributed my success in this business to the fact that artists trusted me. I earned the respect of bands and developed relationships because I never violated confidences or exploited scandal for the short-term reward of selling a few more magazines. Damn, we probably would have sold an extra hundred thousand mags a month if I had published one-tenth the dirt I knew about [Guns N' Roses] alone.” Although he mentions many of the major players in the scene, the only dirt he dishes in Life On Planet Rock (Doubleday Morgan Road Books) is on himself. The collection of his celebrity encounters bids to be the most cringe-worthy memoir ever.

Friend was thrilled to accept KISS‘ invitation to fly home with them. “I dug breathing this kind of rarefied air, and Gene [Simmons] figured if we bonded like real bros, I’d be inspired to carry the KISS torch high and proud – in other words, I’d support him and his band on all media fronts. More press meant more exposure; more exposure meant more bucks in the KISS coffers. I was being played like a Stradivarius, but it didn’t matter because my ass was flying ultra first class on the dime of superstars.”

After the demise of his magazine (when hair metal was replaced with grunge) and his abortive TV career, he worked A&R for legendary record label honcho Clive Davis. Reprising this stage of his career, Friend provides rarely seen facts and figures and gives a brief but telling glimpse of how labels work, or rather why they don’t really work at all.

Jancee Dunn’s But Enough About Me (Harper Collins) also combines celebrity anecdotes with a journalist’s memoir. But unlike Friend, Dunn keeps the rich ‘n’ famous at arm’s length; she’s under no illusion that they are her friends. A Jersey girl raised in a very white-bred J.C. Penny-loving family to whom she has always been far beyond close, Dunn writes in an amusing, self-deprecating style. She understood what her job required. At Rolling Stone, the editors knew that “cover images that sold the most briskly were of half-naked starlets, and we were encouraged to inject as much sex, drugs, and rock and roll into the text as we could reasonably get away with.” She describes her encounters with a constellation of stars from Madonna and Dolly Parton, to Stone Temple Pilots‘ Scott Weiland who tried very hard to get her to take some heroin.

Dunn constantly relies on meds to calm herself, but she is also a drinker who finds that encouraging others to drink makes for better interviews. She usefully scatters tips, a grand post-Bangsian primer, on celebrity interviews. “Keep in mind,” she advises, “those first few moments are key for celebrity-nobody relations. Famous people are like taffy: They are only pliant for a short period of time before they harden, and you’re left with canned answers.” Dunn muses “the process of engaging your celebrity is not unlike being a photographer at the Sears portrait studio. You just need a different version of a squeaky toy so that their eyes follow you and they smile occasionally.” She recommends the interviewer must “swiftly capture the attention of someone who is inured to both flattery and sincerity – surprise them with a fun fact about themselves. If you blow in with a newsy little item about them, there is instant festivity.”

Magazine interviewers like Dunn and Friend are useful, and indeed crucial, to creating and enhancing celebrity, but to advance to the highest level, death is the great career move – especially if it is what Steve Jones calls “‘death by fame.’ Its variations are many, ranging from overindulgence in drugs to murder, from suicide to car, helicopter, and plane crashes.” In Afterlife As Afterimage: Understanding Posthumous Fame (Peter Lang), Jones and Joli Jensen edited a series of essays assessing the posthumous careers of Robert Johnson, John Lennon, Karen Carpenter, Tupac, Patsy Cline, Elvis, Kurt Cobain, and Louis Prima.

No one benefited so much from his own mortality than Johnson. He is well known today, as his current record sales attest. “This is strikingly at odds with the short and obscure life of the man,” writes Eric W. Rothenbuhler in his chapter “The Strange Career Of Robert Johnson’s Records.” Like Jesus, Johnson died young, had various stories written long after his death, some with elements of magic and had acolytes who made his name. “Eric Clapton in particular was mystic in discussing Johnson, including frequent references to Johnson’s soul, the devil, bad dreams, and ghosts,” Rothenbuhler writes, “and was aided and abetted in his hagiography of Johnson in books by Greil Marcus and Robert Palmer. Only some of Johnson’s repertoire has become canonized, not his blues dance music but the ‘haunted suffering songs.’”

In their essay on Carpenter, Peggy J. Bowers and Stephanie Houston Grey write: “a celebrity is a fiction – a collection of myths designed to market the texts with which they are associated. They are, in essence, walking, breathing commercials for music, books and films.” And they walk and breathe so much better beyond the grave.

– Deena Dasein

He was into jazz and then – living in its ground zero, Greenwich Village – he became part of the folk revival (a.k.a. “the great folk scare”). Van Ronk understood that movement was not really part of the folk tradition, which, he maintains, is embedded in an oral culture that “produces different versions of the same song, and eventually leads to entirely new songs.” “[T]his folk process has been short-circuited,” he says, “first by widespread literacy and later by the phonograph, radio, and TV. As a result, with the exception of a few holdouts – some rap and street poetry, kid’s game rhymes, bawdy songs, and so forth – there is very little folk music in modern-day America.”

Van Ronk was a well-respected musician who never made it big, yet he certainly rubbed shoulders with those who did, like that kid from Minnesota who crashed on his couch for months, Bobby Somethingorother. He also worked and hung out with a variety of others crucial to the folk scene, like venue owners and magazine publishers. In describing his life, he is recounting music history. Van Ronk’s mordant sense of humor and worldly wisdom make this insightful book a delightful read.

Changes through time – usually presented in some narrative form, is what we call history. George Gimarc forgoes the story in his Punk Diary: The Ultimate Trainspotter’s Guide To Underground Rock 1970-1982 (Backbeat). Instead, he has created a verbal time-lapse photography of punk. In chronological order, Gimarc lists a variety of punk events: when key albums and singles were released; when bands debuted, signed record deals, had lineup changes; notable concerts and festivals; and when punk poobahs were incarcerated or met their demise. The two-inch thick tome is studded with black-and-white shots, including album covers, festival and concert flyers, and punk magazines. He takes a generous definition of the genre, including XTC, Squeeze, Bob Marley, and Kraftwerk, along with the better known (Clash, Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks), the obscure (TV21, Blurt, Pork Dukes, Fad Gadget), and my faves (Anti-Nowhere League, The Business, Celibate Rifles, Bad Religion). Each entry contains a snippet of interesting information, including how the band took its name, a fragment from a review or interview, or a list of album tracks. Other entries remark about some future significance, making the term “diary” a bit misleading, since the remarks were written decades after their time.

Obviously much of rock itself writes about time. How many song lyrics, like “time is on our side” and “our time will come,” harp on passage? Indeed, time is the focus of one record that vies for the title of the first rock song: Bill Haley & His Comets‘ “Rock Around The Clock.” And time is the theme of #Jim Dawson#’s excellent history of that song, Rock Around The Clock: The Record That Started The Rock Revolution! (Backbeat). Cut in record time on April 12th, 1954, the label honcho made the group spend most of the session doing his pick for the single’s A-side, “13 Women.” With only 30 minutes left, they recorded the B-side. It was a fine take with one problem: Haley’s vocals couldn’t be heard. The group went through the song again with minutes left on the clock, but this time the mics on the instruments were turned off. The master tape was created by recording machines simultaneously playing both tapes. “RAC” wasn’t a hit when it was released, but it did get more play than the A-side. Coincidentally, the recording was made on the same day MGM announced its acquisition of the film rights to Evan Hunter’s new novel, Blackboard Jungle. When “RAC” was used for the movie – a sensation in mid-1955 – over its opening and closing credits, it rocketed to number one in Billboard’s July chart.

Beyond detailing the song’s commercial life, Dawson delves into a rich variety of histories, including those of radio DJs, recording technology, record labels, live music scenes, and guitar solos. He also chronicles the term rock. One of the earliest songs to use the term was “My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)” from 1922, with the pregnant line: “I looked at the clock and the clock struck one . . . ” Haley’s hit song was credited to Max C. Freedman, but he had basically stolen it – providing a different accent and the addition of the word “tonight” – from Sam Theard’s 1950 song of the same name.

Of course, Dawson also recaps Haley’s biography. When his main claim to fame arrived, he was a 29-year-old yodeling champ with a receding hairline and a bad eye; his iconic spit-curl was created to draw attention away from those problems. Like the other examples of cultural and social miscegenation that rocked the mid ’50s, Haley, from Pennsylvania, combined R&B rhythms with country & western (Gene Autry without the Okie accent) vocals. But by 1958 Haley was a man out of time. His career and his personal life went sadly, and very badly, downward until he died in 1981.

– Deena Dasein

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.

Yet despite the different approaches, each of the books tells the same story, with the same plot-points. We’re informed how the band got together. The mechanism of how their signature sound emerged is uniformly murky, but each author details their other significant initial creative work — their name. VU’s was nabbed from the title of a lurid S&M paperback that was laying about. Deep Purple’s came from guitarist Ritchie Blackmore’s grandmother’s favorite song, which was also what a popular strain of acid was called. Bassist Paul Simonon suggested the name when he noticed the word “clash” turned up frequently in the newspaper and thought it nicely captured his bandmates’ divergent personalities. (In storytelling this would be called foreshadowing).

Personality conflict was something each band had in spades, especially between each of their creative two-somes. The contrasting sensibilities, musical and otherwise, between VU’s John Cale and Lou Reed — one a classically trained avant-garde cellist, the other a rock’n'roller with poetic interests — came together to create their music and their image. Deep Purple’s main muso, Blackmore, carved the band’s sound with art school- trained and classic music buff, Jon Lord. Blackmore’s guitar-god chops and over-the-top dramatics were honed by prior years of work with Screaming Lord Such and producer Joe Meeks. Guitarist Mick Jones and frontman Joe Strummer came from different social classes and had different interests and ambitions. It was the combination of these yin-yangs that created what was great in these bands.

But each band also had a key, albeit musically secondary member, who was the glue and more. Beyond Mo Tucker’s unusual Bo Diddleyish beat, her sweet character tempered the more volatile guys in the VU. Roger Glover was far more than Purple’s bassist, serving as the mediator between explosive personalities, in both the personal and musical dimensions. Simonon couldn’t exactly play an instrument when he first joined The Clash (yes, he became the bassist); it was his unflappability and more significantly his work creating the band’s visual material — including himself as its centerpiece — that was crucial.

Further, the authors depict outsiders whose influence helped make the band known to the world: from VU’s Andy Warhol to The Clash’s embeddedness with the press. Management may have helped their commercial success, but was useless for band cohesion (although it did pay Blackmore a wad of cash if he would agree to allow singer Ian Gillan to rejoin the band). Mercurial Clash manager Bernie Rhodes‘ “politburo-esque machinations” and divide-and-control and keep-everyone-guessing management style did nothing to promote harmony among the musicians.

Regardless of differences in source material and approach, and despite the differences in the bands’ styles, all three books make the same key point: What made these bands great, and each were in their own way, was also what killed them. Each of these bands had dual foci of opposing sensibilities, the main muso and the frontman: Cale and Reed, Jones and Strummer, and Blackmore and a rotating set of others. (Thompson provides enough evidence to demonstrate that for Blackmore the opposition was more than musical. The sulking, dictatorial, and just plain nasty albeit brilliant guitarist was the very definition of a prick.) Having lived, indeed thrived, by the sword — these two opposites — the bands also died by that sword. Karma?

In a familiar story that runs across the entire human landscape, joyously innovative tension seems to inexorably decline into acrimony and worse as the slings and arrows of perceived slights and focused limelight cause egos to swell and tempers to flare.

– Deena Dasein