Rock memoirs can be hit or miss. Many are ghostwritten, and some lack the musicians’ voices. Others can be glib recountings of oft-told tales of life on the road, drug and alcohol abuse, rehab and recovery, or the price of fame. Thankfully, three recent books offer different approaches to the standard rock memoir and make for great summer reading.
Robyn Hitchcock is a one-of-a-kind musician. Born in England, he grew up during the key hippie years there, but made his name as a founding member of the seminal pop-punk band the Soft Boys. He has since gone on to have a long and successful solo career that has, over the years, come to rely more on his formative teen ‘60s years, with a quirky and decidedly English eccentricity.
Rather than provide a life-long memoir, he recounts his days from being a small child to being away at school, culminating in a vivid chronicle of his life during that magical year of 1967. This affectionate and witty tale has a winsome naivety that places 1967 not so much in a haze of psychedelia, but rather within a warm remembrance of simpler times that suggested possibilities rather than limitations, unlike the world in which we live today.
Making this slim volume even more revelatory is the companion album, 1967 – Vacations in the Past (Glowing Green Frog), on limited-edition blue vinyl, which includes Hitchcock covering a wide variety of songs from that year. Some obvious groups—The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and The Kinks—are covered, as well as classics from that year from Procol Harum, the Small Faces, and Scott McKenzie.
Hitchcock doesn’t try to replicate the originals or re-arrange them in such a way that they lose their charm, but instead makes some of them all his own, often in fairly stripped-down musical settings and some with the assistance of his old Soft Boy mate Kimberley Rew.
Dave Mason has had one of the most legendary careers in rock history. The unassuming guitar god was a founding member of Traffic, had blockbuster, decade-defining albums in the ’70s, and wrote such evergreen rock classics as “Feelin’ Alright” and “Only You Know And I Know.”
Along the way, he played on countless sessions, including being part of the all-star supporting cast for George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass and with Wings. Despite the peerless achievements, Mason couldn’t be more understated or brutally honest when recounting his remarkable career that, for all its highs, hit the occasional low point.
Mason’s founding, leaving, and rejoining Traffic is typical of how groups in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s were constantly in a state of flux. His contribution to the group alone was enough to put him in the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall of Fame. He stands apart not just because of his lofty guitar skills, evidenced by his ability to play with so many different artists on so many different albums, including collaborating with Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and the Rolling Stones, as well as his making an album with Mama Cass Elliot, three as a member of Fleetwood Mac, but also because he was the kind of easy-going soul who music people just loved to be around in those heady salad days of rock.
Mason also has an album out, A Shade of Blues (Barham Records), but unlike the Hitchcock release, it’s not an official companion album to his book. It is, however, yet another excellent release, with Mason this time delving into his blues roots. Two of the guests are Michael McDonald and Joe Bonamassa.
Along with covers of such blues chestnuts as “Come On In My Kitchen,” “Cocaine Blues,” “Born Under A Bad Sign,” and “Dust My Blues,” Mason does imaginative bluesy reworkings of the Traffic songs “Dear Mr. Fantasy” and “The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys.” The latter is an interesting choice in that Mason had left the band for good by the time Traffic recorded the song in 1971. The vinyl album package is a gatefold with the record pressed on blue vinyl.
One of the best rock books in recent years, Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses, by Peter Wolf, is a one-of-a-kind memoir from an electrifying frontman that is really more than a music story. While the J. Geils Band has often been overshadowed in American rock music history by their Boston brethren Aerosmith, the fact is that the Geils band blows Aerosmith out of the water.
The group has never been given its proper due. The members were always about the music and not the lifestyle, fame, or being poser wannabees. Their live albums document live rock at its best, and few live albums other than such classics by the Rolling Stones, The Who, Humble Pie, and the Allman Brothers Band, to name four, can stand alongside the group’s releases.
While the band achieved its greatest fame during the early ’80s with the Freeze Frame album, that music in many respects was not indicative of the blazing, bluesy rock that made its members true rock princes. This intelligent, honest, often erudite, without being pretentious, tome chronicles a seemingly unlikely musical journey from Wolf’s being a mischievous teen, to his seeing, meeting, and spending time with blues legends and eventually carving out a place on the Boston rock scene as a struggling musician, DJ, and all-around raconteur. Wolf could hang with the best of them and eventually become the coolest guy in the room, but he would never announce it or think it himself.
The book goes into his troubled marriage with actress Faye Dunaway and his relationships with a panoply of fascinating and creative trailblazers and hell raisers who often were not part of the rock world. It’s surprising that Wolf spends so little time on the history of the Geils band and not much on his acclaimed solo career. His split from the band was acrimonious, and any reunions eventually bore little creative satisfaction or soul healing. The group’s namesake, J. Geils, died in 2017, rendering the idea of any further reunions moot.
This book is a deep dive into a one-of-a-kind figure. Wolf is a true man of the street, but also an autodidactic man of culture and taste, who never forgot that he grew up on the mean streets of the Bronx. The J. Geils Band members are not in the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall of Fame. Wolf makes no reference to this gross oversight. They are easily one of the greatest live rock groups in musical history. Maybe this memoir will revive some added memories in Cleveland and ultimately put the real bad boys from Boston into an institution of which their music is a pillar and a reminder of when real rock gods walked the Earth.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left by Robyn Hitchcock
A
Only You Know & I Know by Dave Mason with Chris Epting
B+
Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses by Peter Wolf
A+
