Ripple Library - Willie Nelson - Roll Me Up & Smoke Me When I Die

The title says it all. Willie was born on April 30, 1933 (too bad it wasn't 10 days earlier) and with his 80th birthday approaching he's not taking any chances with his final wishes. If you want to know the history of Willie and his music there are better books out there. Willie: An Autobiography (2000) and Willie Nelson: An Epic Life by Joe Nick Patoski (2009) will tell you just about everything you want to know about his music and incredible life.

Roll Me Up… is more of a companion piece to those books. You won't get too many insights but there are some good laughs and words of wisdom. If you're looking for secrets on how to become a good songwriter here's what he has to say - "I will never say anything to discourage a songwriter but if you're a real songwriter, nothing I could say would discourage you, anyway. If my opinion could change your mind about being a songwriter, then you weren't really a songwriter to begin with and I would have done you a favor by making you look for a different career. If a real songwriter happened to hear that I didn't like his work, he'd say 'What the hell does Willie Nelson know?'" You can apply that lesson to just about anything in life. The book is full of lessons like that plus some interesting stories from sister Bobbie. There are some lyrics and some old jokes that probably sound a lot funnier if you're burning one with Willie on his bus but it would be impolite not to chuckle at them while reading at home. Hopefully an audiobook version is coming out, it would be a great listen on a road trip.

Keep it next to your nightstand for a quick, easy read before bed or in the bathroom if you need inspiration.

--Woody

Buy from Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/Roll-Me-Smoke-When-Die/dp/0062193643/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1354038169&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=willie+nelson+roll+me+up+and+smoke+me+when+i+die

 

Ripple Library: Dee Snider - Shut Up and Give Me the Mic

Since record sales have been in the toilet for years now, more and more rock musicians are publishing memoirs. It makes sense. Their audience doesn't want to hear any new material from them and the musicians don't have to share any royalties with their bandmates. A lot of them are obviously ghost written and are often full of questionable details. In his forward to his autobiography Shut Up and Give Me the Mic, Dee Snider goes out of his way to let everyone know he wrote this book himself and that he was sober enough to remember it all. As he points out, junkie rock stars don't keep journals - "Have you ever known a junkie? They can't remember what they did thirty minutes ago, let alone thirty years ago." And "Real heroin addicts can't hold their own dicks; forget about a pen or pencil." One of the things I've always liked about Dee is that he's not afraid to say what he's thinking.

I wasn't sure what to expect from Dee's book. Most people know about Twisted Sister's huge popularity from their huge Stay Hungry album, but I'm a hardcore old-time SMF lover of the Under The Blade era. I figured that part of the story would get glossed over to get to the glory years. I was totally wrong. The first half of this 400 page book is a headbanger's delight. You get to learn all about Dee's childhood of dealing with being the oldest of six kids fighting for attention and battling with his angry father. It's no wonder that he was attracted to the original heavy bands. Dee refers to himself as an "original headbanger" and he certainly is. He bought the debut albums from Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Grand Funk Railroad as new releases. One of his high school bands only played Sabbath songs. The guy knows and loves his heavy metal. Something I never knew was that Dee was in a few bands with Don Mannello, who would later change his name to Don Fury and become a producer/engineer of Agnostic Front and many other hardcore bands.

There are so many great stories of the early days of Twisted Sister when they were a New York Dolls influenced glam rock band covering David Bowie, Mott The Hoople and Lou Reed in the bars of New Jersey, upstate New York and outer boroughs of New York City. A cover band like Twisted Sister never played cool clubs like CBGB or Max's Kansas City, but to underage drinkers in the suburbs. Eventually Dee starts to move the band in a heavier direction influenced by AC/DC, Judas Priest and Motorhead. This is when the band's real identity started to come together. Dee's wife Suzette started to dress the band in her homemade costumes. By the late 1970's Twisted Sister were a huge band on the local club scene but desperate for a record deal and international rock stardom. Rejected multiple times by every record label, the band continue to slog it out 4 or 5 nights a week in the clubs blasting out 3 sets a night. One of my favorite things in the book is when Dee talks about a club in Portchester, NY called Detroit. I always heard it referred to as "Detroits" and Dee gives an important NYC grammar lesson - "Hey, youse goin' tuh Detroits tuh see Twisted?"

Easily my favorite part of the book are the chapters on the years 1980 to 83, the peak era for metal freaks like me. Going to the UK to blow minds playing huge festivals with Motorhead, Iron Maiden and Michael Schenker Group will make you want to build a time machine. During this time Dee was writing all the rowdy headbanger anthems on the classic Under The Blade and You Can't Stop Rock N Roll albums. This was such a great time for metal. Things were getting heavier and faster all the time creating a new audience. Twisted Sister live was just as heavy as anything else out there but they also helped do cultivate a look that would become known as "hair metal." None of those other bands ever had the pedigree that Twisted Sister had. While all this is going on, Dee's completely sober, married and having kids. Not much in common with Vince Neil, here.

When the band finally does achieve massive success in 1984 with Stay Hungry, Dee goes into extreme detail about how they blew it in the following years. Over-exposure, musical mis-steps and massive financial mistakes. When it all ends with the abomination of the Love Is For Suckers album everyone in the band hates each other. Dee's attempts at a solo career are also failures and he digs himself so deep into debt that he's reduced to working for his brother at $5 an hour. The stories of his lean years should be required reading for any musician or actor who never thinks the bottom is going to drop out. Through it all, he manages to keep his family together and eventually switched gears into radio, acting and voiceover. I cringe a little whenever I see Dee on television but his great sense of humor usually wins me over. I cringed a lot when I heard he was putting out an album of show tunes, but luckily I have not had to hear any of it and don't plan on doing so. All I know is that this is a great rock book. You don't have to be a Twisted Sister fan to enjoy it. It's well written and very entertaining. Read it loud, mutha!

--Woody

Buy from Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/Shut-Up-Give-Me-Mic/dp/145163739X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1347475909&sr=8-1&keywords=dee+snider+shut+up+and+give+me+the+mic

Ripple LIbrary - Commando: The Autobiography of Johnny Ramone vs. I Slept with Joey Ramone: A Family Memoir

A few months ago I was flipping through a copy of New York magazine and was surprised to see they printed a chapter from the upcoming Autobiography Of Johnny Ramone. He died in 2004 and I had no idea he had ever written his life story. I've been a huge Ramones fan for over 30 years and was lucky enough to catch the band live close to 20 times throughout the 1980's. I'd read a lot about them and figured I'd heard most of the stories already so I skipped the book written by Joey Ramone's brother Mickey Leigh called I Slept with Joey Ramone: A Family Memoir that was published in 2009. But when I found out about Johnny's book I took a trip to the library and took out Mickey's book before reading Johnny's. I figured it would be good to read them back to back and see how their stories compared.

Mickey's book goes into great detail about their upbringing and how Joey was a total outcast due to his strange looks and even stranger behavior that was later diagnosed as OCD. Joey really couldn't have done anything other than be a Ramone. Something I never knew was that Mickey had played music with Johnny at some point before the Ramones started. I also had no idea that Mickey wound up marrying an ex-girlfriend of Johnny's. It's well known that Johnny's wife Linda was with Joey originally and the split caused huge problems for the band. Obviously, Johnny and Mickey's accounts of these events differ greatly. Mickey goes into way more detail on this topic than Johnny. Maybe too much, but he probably needed to get some things off his chest. The best parts of Mickey's book is when he talks about working for the band in the early days. He was a roadie for the band during the early years and gives interesting accounts of things that are well known in Ramones lore - opening for Johnny Winter in 1975, the first shows in the UK a year later and all the craziness of their early tours. I also had no idea that he sang backing vocals on the first Ramones album, notably on "Blitzkrieg Bop." Years later when the song was used for a Budweiser commercial he tried getting some money out of the band, causing a huge fall out with his brother. I Slept with Joey Ramone is a good read, but Mickey comes across a little bitter that his own music career never went anywhere and he's been stuck living in his brother's shadow.

Johnny Ramone was determined to live in no one's shadow. His book is short and to the point. Not surprising given his guitar playing and no bullshit attitude. Johnny was a total hard ass but if it wasn't for him the band would have never survived more than a year or two. Most Ramones insiders give Johnny a lot of respect but have gone on record that he was absolutely no fun at all. His book doesn't really dispute those claims at all. He talks about how much he enjoyed being angry and pissing people off. He also made sure the band worked hard and made money so they could all retire comfortably. His story of the Ramones is consistent with most of the others that have been published over the years but a few really cool stories stood out for me. I was very excited to learn that Johnny said the loudest band he ever saw was Grand Funk Railroad in the early 70's and one of the only people that ever intimidated him was James Williamson of the Stooges. Johnny's book comes in a very cool hardcover package with glossy pages and lots of excellent photos. The appendix at the end of the book contains lists of all of his favorite musicians, baseball players, movies, etc. I had no idea Leslie West was his third favorite guitarist of all time.

Both books end with chapters dealing with the cancer that took Joey and Johnny's life. Having lost a loved one recently to cancer, I wound up skipping over quite a bit of them. Having spent many months in and out of hospitals and doctor's offices I had absolutely no desire to relive any of that nightmare. Johnny and Joey never got along in life but managed to work together to create one of the greatest and most influential rock & roll bands of all time. It's so tragic that they both lost their lives to illness way too early in life. If you're a Ramones fan, you owe it to yourself to check out both these books.

--Woody

Ripple Library - Glenn Hughes - The Autobiography

Glenn Hughes HATES cocaine, but he LOOOOOVES the smell of it. Poor guy is playing bass and singing his ass off in a band called Trapeze during the early 1970's when he gets recruited to join Deep fuckin Purple in 1973 and help revitalize the band with vocalist David Coverdale. They create a monster album called Burn and go on to have major success space truckin around the globe. They play an insane show at the California Jam festival that literally set the stage on fire. But behind the scenes, young Glenn develops a taste for the high life. Mainly A LOT of coke. LOTS and LOTS of coke. How he's still alive to tell his story in this new autobiography is completely amazing, let alone be able to function as a human being and go to the toilet all by himself.

You don't have to be a fan of Deep Purple or any of Glenn's music to enjoy this book. If you want to know what it was really like back in heavy rock's golden age you need to read it pronto. There are so many sleazy, sordid tales that your mind will reel. Canoodling with Bowie, out-snorting Ron Wood, and being accused of loving chocolate bars more than his bass by Gary Moore is just the start. There are coked out trysts with Angie Bowie, Cherie Currie and maybe even Sharon Arden (later Ozzy's old lady). Then there's the usual 70's girlfriend swapping and switcheroo. His story telling isn't pornographic but gives you enough innuendo to get the drift. Later on when the drug use gets really out of control he has no problem admitting to soiling his kimono and puking up a hot dog into his hands on a commercial flight. Pretty glamorous, eh? Read Cheetah Chrome's autobiography if you want to hear how gross it is to be a low budget drug addict. At least Glenn had some big money a few times in his life.

There's music, too. After all, the Mk.III and IV line ups of Deep Purple were pretty incredible. You get the inside stories behind how a lot of the songs were written and recorded. For an out of control coke fiend Glenn has kept himself pretty busy over the years playing with everyone from Tony Iommi to the KLF. Personally, I would have loved a bit more technical data. What the hell were those ungodly large speaker cabinets he used to use to deafen people with back then? How massive was the PA system they would rattle stadiums with? How the hell did they move it from one place to another? What's he playing through these days? Maybe that will be revealed in his next book. The other thing he doesn't really mention is having the same name as the leather dude in the Village People.

Glenn's been clean for awhile now and his career is on a definite upswing. His new band with guitarist Joe Bonamossa is a success and he's playing and singing great. He's skinny as a rail but very healthy looking and determined to kick ass for a long time. As the Cove would say "God bless yer!"

--Woody

Ripple Library - Spray Paint The Walls: The Story Of Black Flag by Stevie Chick

Leave it to an English writer to tell the tale of one of America’s greatest bands. Given the long standing bad vibes that continue to exist between most of the key players it’s a good thing that someone with an outside perspective decided to deseed Black Flag’s dark history.

Guitarist Greg Ginn formed the band Panic in Hermosa Beach, California 1978 but later changed the name to Black Flag. He was lucky enough to cross paths with strong willed individuals like singer Keith Morris and bassist Chuck Dukowski, who shared Ginn’s enthusiasm for kick ass rock like Ted Nugent and Black Oak Arkansas as well as the new punk bands. Ginn was able to bankroll the band with funds created by his business that sold components for ham radios called Solid State Tuners. Later when he had difficulty getting a record label to release Black Flag’s music he created SST Records as an offshoot of that business. In the early days, band members would work a soldering iron by day and then shake the walls with the loud, pissed off music they were writing.

The story of Black Flag has been told many times and often it boils down to what other band members say and Greg Ginn refuting it. Spray Paint The Walls contains no new interviews with neither Ginn nor later period singer Henry Rollins, who has documented his time and opinions with Black Flag pretty extensively. There are, however, new interviews with Dukowski and Morris as well as singers Ron Reyes and Dez Cadena, bassist Kira Roessler and key SST label members Joe Carducci and Steve “Mugger” Corbin. Everyone agrees that Black Flag was much more than a band but a way of doing things. That hard work towards a goal is the most important thing even if no one else cares. That work ethic has inspired countless bands over the past 30 years.

Black Flag, along with Dead Kennedys and Canada’s D.O.A. were the first bands to be labeled “hardcore punk” and to bring their music across the country. The Ramones pioneered headlining smaller venues and bars but these guys brought punk rock to any dump that would have them and every basement show owes them a debt to this day. Not many bands could endure that lifestyle for very long but Black Flag managed to do it for about 8 years and towards the end were even bringing their own PA system along so that they would be heard properly. This massive effort is still something most bands are sane enough to not attempt.

If you’re a fan of Black Flag then you probably won’t learn too much new, but the new interviews are great to read, especially what Chuck Dukowski has to say. Chuck left the band under much stress in 1983 and often he’s forgotten about. Ginn provided the killer riffs and a lot of the lyrics but Dukowski was the one brought the intense attitude and ideas, not to mention his insanely driving bass playing. It’s often said that he sort of helped create the Rollins persona that eventually caused Ginn to quit his own band. This book is definitely worth reading even if you’re not a fan because bands just don’t operate like this anymore. Black Flag literally did everything themselves – released their own records, booked their own tours, ran a record label that gave us the Meat Puppets, Husker Du, Minutemen, etc. Read and be inspired to perspire.

--Woody

Ripple Library - Raisin' Cain - The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter by Mary Lou Sullivan

In my previous book report on Cheetah Chrome’s autobiography I mentioned it’s amazing that he’s still alive to tell his story. Well, that goes double for Johnny Winter. Cheetah is an insane rock & roll wildman but I bet he could’ve picked up a few useful pointers from Johnny on partying, guitar playing and day to day mayhem.

Johnny Winter was born in 1944 and caught the rock & roll bug when the music was still in its infancy. By the age of 15 he was leading his own bands in Beaumont, TX and became an eager student and apprentice of the blues. Armed with fiendish talent and a huge set of balls, he got to sit in with B.B. King and managed not to embarrass himself. After spending years on the road and cutting singles for shady local record he got a big break and was signed to Columbia Records. Playing Woodstock in 1969 helped catapult Johnny into superstardom.

Author Mary Lou Sullivan met Johnny Winter in 1984 and was fascinated by the crazy life he’d led and decided to write his autobiography, against the wishes of Johnny’s manager at the time. Eventually she spent a years worth of Saturday nights interviewing Johnny at his home and on the phone. Once she got his version of the story, she started talking to dozens of people in his life including his mother, brother Edgar and his wife. Key collaborators like Rick Derringer, Tommy Shannon and Uncle John Turner told their tales alongside numerous other friends, record producers and industry people. You get a well rounded view of the man’s life. Johnny is brutally honest and never tries to make himself the hero when he wasn’t. And when his memory differs from others, both sides are presented.

The tales from the glory years of the 1960’s and 70’s are just as wild as you would expect. There’s plenty of sex (Johnny loved to get naked and show everyone his white pubic hair if anyone doubted he was truly albino), drugs (you won’t believe the amount he’s done) and, of course, rock and roll. Working with his hero Muddy Waters led to some of the greatest music both men ever produced and Johnny loves talking about the albums they made together. If you’re a blues fan, these chapters will make you very happy.

Towards the end of the 1980’s Johnny began to have some management issues that caused huge problems for him that lasted many years. The portrait painted of ex-manager Teddy Slatus is not a pretty one and a great lesson out there for anyone who wants to know what really happens in the entertainment business. His actions negatively impacted Johnny’s mental and physical health, finances and, ultimately, his music. Johnny’s affairs are now handled the right way and word has it his playing is regaining its fiery brilliance.

Raisin’ Cain is one of the better rock biographies I’ve read (and I’ve read A LOT of them). The research, dedication and excellent writing make this a must for anyone with a pair of eyes that has a good pair of ears.

--Woody

Buy an autographed copy from the author
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Buy from Amazon: Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Book)

Ripple Library - Cheetah Chrome: A Dead Boy's Tale: From the Front Lines of Punk Roc

The fact that this book even exists should motivate you to buy a copy. If you know who Cheetah Chrome is, then you know that he’s a true rock & roll wildman who’s lived a lot harder than you ever will. He’s survived drugs, alcohol, Stiv Bators, Cleveland, New York City and then some. The dude deserves the happy life and family he’s created for himself in Nashville.

Cheetah was born Eugene O’Connor in Cleveland, 1955 and became a rock & roll fan, guitarist and pot smoker at an early age. His musical course was forever changed when his mother bought him the first Stooges album by accident. Young Cheetah’s mind was blown and it put him on a path that eventually led to meeting up with other weirdos in the mythical proto-punk band Rocket From The Tombs. Once that band splintered into Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys, Cheetah and his blood brother Stiv Bators went on to create one of the most full-on high energy punk rock bands of all time.

Cheetah pulls no punches in his autobiography. He’s very forthcoming about all the horrible things he’s done to himself and to others. The chapters on his years as a junkie are harrowing and an excellent deterrent for anyone considering dabbling in that area. So many of his friends and collaborators are dead and gone – Stiv, Johnny Thunders, Jerry Nolan, Dee Dee Ramone, John Belushi, Nico, etc and there’s no real reason why Cheetah’s still around other than being a tough mother fucker.

But the best parts of the book are the hilarious situations he’s gotten into over the years. Even as a kid in the audience he managed to make an impact. For instance, he once gave his hero Iggy Pop a bunch of free downers before a Stooges show only for Iggy to turn into an incoherent mess onstage. There are plenty of sex, drugs and rock & roll stories from the 1977 ground zero days at CBGB and tours with fellow mental patients The Damned. As debauched as some of the tales are, you definitely get the feeling that a lot of the gory details have been left out.

Even if you’re not a fan of the Dead Boys or punk rock in general, this book is a must read for any music fanatic. I was lucky enough to witness most of the Dead Boys reunion shows at the Ritz in NYC and his band the Ghetto Dogs a few times. Cheetah was always a completely inspiring lunatic on the stage. On a more personal note, as a young dipshit coming into NYC on the weekends to see shows and buy records I used to see the street walking Cheetah all the time in the early to mid-80’s. He was usually nice enough to stop and talk to me and answer all my moronic questions about the Dead Boys or which MC5 albums I should track down (“all of them” he told me). Some days Cheetah didn’t look so good and I knew to stay the fuck away. Long live Cheetah!

 --Woody

Buy here: Cheetah Chrome: A Dead Boy's Tale: From the Front Lines of Punk Rock