When the house lights go down and the crowd jumps to its feet and the spotlight operators squint through the dry ice, seeking musicians on the stage, the bass player is often the last rocker they highlight. Singers and guitarists generally get most of the attention. So perhaps it’s fitting that Duff McKagan released It’s So Easy (and Other Lies) after a veritable library had been published about his bands. In doing so, he allowed other people to cover the gossip, conflict, and controversy, turning It’s So Easy into a surprisingly sincere and heartfelt memoir.

McKagan is, of course, most well-known for being the bassist for Guns N’ Roses during their reign of the rock world in the eighties and early nineties. More recently, he has manned the bottom end for Velvet Revolver and even did a fill-in stint in Jane’s Addiction while also fronting his own band Loaded. He has also developed an impressive writing resume, penning articles for Playboy, ESPN.com, SeattleWeekly.com, and others.

The first indicator that It’s So Easy is different than so many by-the-numbers hard rock memoirs is the prologue. The default in situations like this is to begin on a grimy bathroom floor with a bloody needle dangling from a skinny forearm and a .12 gauge propped nearby. The narrator usually croacks, “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. But after achieving my dreams, there wasn’t anything left to do. I had everything in the world, but no reason to live.” With that dramatic scene set, the book cuts away, and goes back to the beginning with a bushy haired child strumming a tennis racket in a seventies suburban ranch home to the chronological start of the story.

In contrast, McKagan begins his tale with worries about teenage shenanigans at his daughter’s party. The birthday girl is thirteen and she, like most kids, is embarrassed of her parents, in spite of their rockstar and fashion model backgrounds. The girl begs the old folks to get in the house before her friends arrive. It’s a touching scene of domesticity. Scattered throughout the parental reflections, McKagan manages to weave in enough references to his own edgy past of drugs and larceny to indicate that his is not a “normal” life. But after many decades of addiction, wealth, and wealth lost, It’s So Easy illustrates that McKagan has achieved as close to a normal life as possible for someone in his situation.

Another unique aspect of the book is how McKagan simply avoids huge chunks of Guns N’ Roses history. Generally, a celebrity would be criticized for omitting certain time periods. But in this instance, it’s a blessing to the most hardcore GN’R fans. Sitting on my shelf right now are seven books about the Sunset Strip rockers and we still have the on-again, off-again book from a GN’R mother to look forward to. This band has been exhaustively researched and written about so when McKagan devotes slightly more than a single page to the recording of the seminal Appetite for Destruction record, I for one, cheered. By leaving well-worn topics to the other books, McKagan can focus on more personal recollections and experiences, such as documenting his brother Bruce’s excitement as the record climbed the Billboard charts.

To be sure, It’s So Easy is not the tale of a choir boy. There are plenty of narcotics and liquor scattered throughout these pages. Those vices just aren’t the focus of the book. They’re a bit of spice, not the main dish. And when the musician does turn to those foggy, staggering times, he does so in a poignant manner, as opposed to a chest-pounding, “Look at me! I did sooo many drugs” manner. For example, during a new, shaky attempt at sobriety, McKagan struggles to complete a simple everyday transaction.

One of the first things I did was go to the grocery store to buy food. It was a novel idea at the time — it had been years since I really shopped for food. Now here I was, thirty years old, an adult with a credit card, a checkbook, and an ATM card. I could buy whatever I wanted in the store, but I had no idea where to start. I thought everyone was staring at me — I was sure my shaking was freakishly visible…

I looked at the girl at the cash register.

“I give you this money, right”

My shirt was drenched in sweat and I was having a full-blown panic attack.

She nodded nervously, barely able to disguise her disgust. She gingerly took the money from my hand, trying to avoid actually touching me.

While examining the influence of drugs and decadence, McKagan makes a statement about some fellow Los Angeles rockers that can be equally applied to the hard rock memoir genre as a whole.

Back in the halcyon days of GN’R, when everyone in L.A. thought we were the most badass hard-drinking and hard-drugging motherfuckers around (and maybe we thought so, too), we quickly found out we were in the minor league compared to Motley Crue. After their shows, we often ended up partying together, learning their code names for different drugs, even flying on their private jet a few times. Our peek into their world was a look into an abyss. They’d found a way of skating around the edge of that abyss while perfecting the dark art of drinking and drugging for a while back there in the 1980s.

Later, McKagan reiterates, “But for the second time in my life I realized that nobody — not even me at the time — could hang with the dudes in Motley Crue: within two months of buying the house at Lake Arrowhead, I was throwing up blood at Tommy Lee’s cabin.”

The point here is that the amplifier hum of the Crue’s The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band looms so large over the hard rock memoir genre that most musicians feel they have to live up to those almost unimaginably sleaze-dripped pages. Other rockers strive to surpass the decadence. Ratt vocalist Stephen Pearcy said in a recent television interview that his book-in-progress will make “The Dirt look like a sandbox.” This attitude towards the Motley text is one of the main reasons why so many hard rock memoirs have been so similar and so disappointing. None of these guys would say, “My goal is to ‘out Zeppelin’ Led Zeppelin” in reference to their music. They would discuss creating their own sound, doing something different, something unique. But when it comes to books, they all seem incapable of escaping that singularly Dirt-y influence.

McKagan goes the opposite route, telling the story he wants to tell as opposed to setting his sights on a previously published book. He also doesn’t go out of his way to “set the record straight” by pointing out errors in other GN’R books, a common trend amongst bands with several literary efforts. This attitude allows him to explore his attempts at sobriety, the shakes, the shady drug dealers, and all that. But it also allows him to discuss investing in Starbucks and Microsoft. It allows him to write emotionally about his beloved pets. It makes it possible to devote as much passion and determination to his attempts at higher education as his attempts to master music. It enables him to begin — and finish — It’s So Easy with scenes of domestic bliss.

Early in the book, Duff McKagan explains how he was an outsider to the Los Angeles glam metal scene. He came from a punk background and rocked short spiky hair and a Sid Vicious-wannabe padlock necklace while most people were teasing their hair and wearing spandex.* All these decades later, McKagan is still taking a slightly different tact. It’s So Easy belongs on any hard rock fan’s bookshelf, amongst all the other required books. But it also stands apart in many very positive ways.

[*Not to perpetuate the flawed concept that punk was somehow more organic, more real, more honest than hard rock and glam metal. Here, I'm simply making the point that McKagan had a different -- not necessarily better -- perspective at that point in his life.]

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Carl Rollyson examines Larry Brown: A Writer’s Life by Jean W. Cash. The late, great Southern literary icon’s strengths and weaknesses as a writer and a man are described in this book. I’ll have my own comments on Larry Brown: A Writer’s Life shortly. But in the meantime, it’s simply nice to see major publications giving some focus to this biography and, by extension, Brown’s body of work.

One of the many reasons that major media markets are losing ground with their book coverage because they waste space and words providing criticisms that astound no one, surprise no one, and are in no way shocking, educational, or illuminating. In short, they waste our fucking time. They squander the precious little coverage on books they don’t like. A more effective strategy might be to focus on some hidden gem that is being overlooked. Maybe introduce new writers to the culture at large. But my advice to at least a certain segment of critics is “Stop your petty bullshit crusades against writers that, in the whole scheme of things, don’t make much of a dent in our pop culture.”

Case in point, the recent New York Times coverage of Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel Imperial Bedrooms. Now, in the interest of full disclosure: I am an unabashed Ellis fan. I did not like the new book quite as much as I had hoped, but as a whole, I am a huge fan of his body of work. I’ve stood in line at those sketchy booksignings he describes in Lunar Park, you know, the ones where the author sucked on throat lozanges and was sick with a “head cold” the whole time. I am an Ellis admirer and I honestly do think he gets a raw deal in my ways. With that out of the way, let’s look at the matter at hand.

The esteemed Gray Lady saw fit to publish not one, but two negative reviews of Imperial Bedrooms. First, Erica Wagner wrote on Thursday, June 17 that “I can well believe the haunted fascination that sparked off Imperial Bedrooms.” But the resulting novel falls flat.”

Okay, fine. Critics don’t have to enjoy every thing they read.

Then Janet Maslin wrote on Wednesday, June 23 that the book “is without shock value. It’s a work of limited imagination that all too deftly simulates the effects of having no imagination at all.” She even goes so far as to state that the sense of dread in the novel is because the “options have narrowed” for the author himself.

Which brings me to my point… well two points actually:

Did Anyone Expect Any Different?
Is there anyone in the book world who is surprised that The New York Times did not like Bret Easton Ellis’s new book? I mean, there’s a better shot at Fox News endorsing Nancy Pelosi for President or PETA suddenly throwing a dinner party featuring foie gras. Just take a look at their history of Ellis examination.

–In August 2005, A.O. Scott reviewed Lunar Park and wrote, “The problem with this novel is not that it is a fast, lurching ride to nowhere. Of course it is; it’s a Bret Easton Ellis novel. The problem is that it does not have the honesty to admit that it wants to be more, the faith that readers will accept more or the courage to try to be more. It is the portrait of a narcissist who is, in the end, terminally bored with himself; that it may also be a self-portrait doesn’t make it any more true.”

–In January 1999, Daniel Mendelsohn reviewed Glamorama by writing, “It’s a mystery to me why some people are complaining that Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel is nothing more than a recycling of his controversially graphic ”American Psycho” (1991). ”American Psycho,” after all, was a bloated, stultifyingly repetitive, overhyped novel about a fabulously good-looking and expensively dressed Wall Street sociopath who tortures and dismembers beautiful young women, whereas ”Glamorama,” as anyone can see, is a bloated, stultifyingly repetitive, overhyped book about an entire gang of fabulously good-looking and expensively dressed sociopaths who torture and dismember both women and men — and lots of them. Clearly, Ellis’s authorial vision has grown broader and more inclusive over the past decade.”

–That same month, Michiko Kakutani also reviewed the same novel by writing that “Bret Easton Ellis doesn’t need the National Lampoon to turn him into a parody — with Glamorama, he’s done it himself. This glutinous hodgepodge of a book takes all the most glaring flaws of Mr. Ellis’s recent work — compulsive name-dropping, an obsession with designer clothing, a fascination with gratuitous, gruesome violence and a cast of interchangeable fatuous people — and tries to pass them off as a novel.

–In September 1987, Scott Spencer reviewed The Rules of Attraction and stated, “Yet these moments of humor are infrequent. Mr. Ellis has it within his grasp to become a satirist, but for now his method of aping the attitudes of the burnt-out works against him. He seems as passive in his regard of social rot as, say, the editors of Interview. Nothing seems to surprise, disturb or even affect him, and though this deadpan effect is surely deliberate and is in large part the reason for Mr. Ellis’s popularity and warm critical reception, one closes the book feeling that this time out the author has stumbled over the line separating cool from cold. Where we ought to be saying, ‘Oh my God, no,’ we are, instead, saying, ‘Who cares?’”

–In 1985, Mary Jo Salter reviewed Less Than Zero, and remarkably, had words that slightly, kinda, somewhat bordered on praise. “I hated reading the book for more than 20 minutes at a stretch, but that was partly because Mr. Ellis succeeded in making its world hellish,” Salter wrote. “The novelist is only 21 years old and has precociously fashioned, despite an obvious stylistic indebtedness to writers from Hemingway to Joan Didion, a tone so distant that he almost seems to write by remote control. That is control of a kind, and augurs well.”

Does the Times Have to Stand Strong to Stop the Ellis Juggernaut Sweeping the Nation?

As I stated earlier, I am a fan of Ellis’s work. And I do think he deserves are more respected place in our literary landscape. But I’m also not blind to the fact that Bret Easton Ellis is not exactly a cultural phenomenon. Imperial Bedrooms might flirt with the bestseller list, but it ain’t Harry Potter. Nor are kids choosing sides between “Team Clay” and “Team Rip.”

I can understand if a critic or group of critics feel like they need to strike a blow against a tidal wave of popular opinion. If someone at the Times wants to tilt at the Twilight-Potter-Gossip Girl-Skinny Bitch windmill, then be my guest.

I can also understand if a critic feels they need to be the lone dissenter against a prevailing attitude of critical acclaim. Bill Clegg’s Potrait of an Addict as a Young Man just wasn’t that impressive to me, yet, every other literary reader seems prepared to elevate it to pantheon-ic status. That’s a circumstance where I might feel like having my solitary voice of dissent heard.

But the National Book Award and the Pulitzer are safe, Bad Boy Bret won’t be hoisting those trophies any time soon.

So why should The New York Times bother wasting so much space on a book they don’t like? Ellis will sell however many copies of Imperial Bedrooms that he’s going to sell, with or without the critical negatives. Hardcore fans aren’t going to be dissuaded by Maslin and Wagner’s recent opinions, they’ll still slap down their twenty bucks. And how many middle-of-the-road Bret Easton Ellis fans are there? I don’t imagine there are too many people out there saying, “Whew, I was going to purchase that new book but the Times saved my bacon! I’ll know to avoid Imperial Bedrooms now.”

I don’t have an answer to that question. And while I want to be very clear that I’m not advocating book reviews to be wholly positive, cheerleading affairs, I have to wonder if the more than 2,000 words dedicated to completely predictable negative reviews could have been better allocated to other books.

In bestselling author Anthony Bozza’s new book, Why AC/DC Matters we get the kind of impassioned art criticism that is normally relegated to websites, fanzines, and independent publishers.

Now, in the sake of full disclosure, Bozza is a friend and business colleague of mine. So take these comments with a grain of salt if you are so inclined. And if you’re the FTC goons, then yeah, I got a free book in the process.

But in Why AC/DC Matters, Bozza makes the argument that the Aussie band has been unfairly ignored and misunderstood by the critics for decades. This isn’t a straight biography of the band, although Bozza provides enough background into the musicians to catch you up if you’re not that familiar with the lives of the Young brothers and gang. And the book isn’t a straight critical interpretation either, full of labyrthine discussions worthy of a college hallway full of grad students. Instead, it’s simply a fun look at what makes this band important, ranging from their place in cultural history to their musical techniques to their steadfast refusal to chase trends.

The wonderful 33 1/3 series has been producing this kind of book for some time now. But it’s nice to see that Bozza managed to get a major publisher to release a similar examination… and of a hard rock band no less! I have more horror stories of publishers claiming, “Metal fans don’t read” than I can stomach.

So kudos to Bozza for managing to get a fun, quirky, entertaining passion project out on the bookstore shelves. Here’s hoping that his success will open the doors for other similar projects from other writers.

And the last line of the piece is a pretty cool encapsulation of the book and it’s achievement:

“in the death of this beautiful woman, he has found the novel of his life.”

I might just have to add A Happy Marriage to the to-be-read pile.

I spent a good deal of time wrapped up in Tony Bacon’s Million Dollar Les Paul: In Search of the Most Valuable Guitar in the World this past weekend. It’s an engaging read that is an exhaustive look into the roots of a collecting craze involving 1958 to 1960 Gibson Les Paul guitars.

Bacon points out that originally, the guitars were not a major initiative for Gibson. During the years in question, only about 1,500 of the instruments were ever produced. But, starting in the mid sixties, famous musicians such as Eric Clapton, Mike Bloomfield, and Jimmy Page started playing the sunburst finished instruments. Their status as tastemakers, along with the peculiar strengths of the small run of instruments, fueled a strong collectors market. Now, as baby boomers with cash strive to recapture their youth, it’s not unusual to see these instruments sell for $300,000 or $400,000. Bacon does take the recent economic conditions into account in his book and the market has softened somewhat.

Obviously, this book is aimed towards guitar fans. The details of PAF pickups are exhaustively researched and the casual audience may not care about the “flame” qualities of a certain batch of wood. But, Million Dollar Les Paul also features enough famous musicians and enough examination of the nature of collecting and obsession to make it interesting to non-players as well.

The novel, based on Bondurant’s grandfather, deals with crime, corruption, and moonshine in the hills of rural Virginia. “Bondurant’s bootleggers are eminently touchable and, even in their worst moments, touching,” Bayard writes. “This is a lyrical and riveting book about ‘the dreams of wadded sums of cash, of heavy lumps of change in your pocket, the small stacks that speak of little dreams.’”

Amazon lists Tuesday, October 14th as the release date for this book so make plans to visit your local bookseller early and often. And be sure to check back here as I’ll have a lot more about Bondurant and his new novel in the next few days.

Click here to check out Bondurant’s website and click here to read my interview with him regarding his first novel, The Third Translation.

Manjoo’s text is intriguing. He points out how, as people, we have always had a tendency to believe what we want to believe. However, recent technological advances make it easier for us to select increasingly specialized and personalized realities. In today’s day and age, just how can you ever truly agree upon what is “fact” when all data can be altered.

The main thing I found lacking about True Enough was some prescription for sifting through all the information overload. The subtitle is “learning to live in a post fact socieity” which I interpreted to mean that Manjoo would make some suggestions as part of the “learning to live” aspect of the book.

However, he explains the issue and leaves it at that. Farhad Manjoo is trained as a journalist so it’s certainly second nature for him to report the facts and let the reader decide. However, in a book length work of nonfiction, where he devotes 250 pages to explaining the problem, I would have like to have seen some solutions offered. Or, at least some simple ways enhancing our own movement through the endless information.

Still, True Enough is an engaging read and it’s sure to generate conversation and debate. Be sure to check it out.

I read the book the day it was first released and didn’t find it to be that bad. It wasn’t as good as I was hoping, but I didn’t think it was awful. My main criticism of it was that I didn’t really learn much new in it. There wasn’t a great deal of depth (particularly if you already know quite a bit of VH history) or new material in it.

DeRogatis’s review raises an interesting question, however. How does a reviewer of a book put aside his opinions of the book’s subject? There’s no doubt that Christie goes a bit far in his praise of Van Halen. So DeRogatis definitely has a point with some of his criticisms. But with lines in the review such as “the overdressed, over-amplified, prone-to-overplaying heavy-metal cartoons who gave us Jump, Dance the Night Away and Poundcake” it makes me wonder how DeRogatis feels about the band. Christie could have done a better job, sure. But if DeRogatis goes into it with a dislike of Van Halen, then how does the book stand a chance?

It’s a difficult stance to maintain. I’ve reviewed books about music genres that I didn’t like. And although I like to think I put aside my distate for X genre or Y musician and focused solely on the book’s merits, it is definitely a struggle.

I’ve been pretty hard on writing/publishing books. Far too many of them are just garbage. And I’ve been pretty vocal about the titles that comprise my Mount Rushmore of writing texts. An interesting new addition to the discussion is Walter Mosley’s This Year You Write Your Novel.

 Clearly Mosley knows what he’s talking about. So I was curious to see what he had to say about writing a novel in this slender volume of advice. In the book, Mosley makes some interesting points. One of the suggestions that really jumped out at me (because I’m terribly guilty of this myself) is to refrain from researching a novel.

There will be moments when you will want to dally over details. Do Georgia geese fly south in April or June? Is it physically possible for Bob Millar to hear the cult leader yelling from a mile away–even in a desert. Would the police arrest Trip if the women were allowed into the bar and were served by the owner? All of these questions are valid. Before the book gets into  print, you should have the answers. But many writers allow questions like these to help them procrastinate. They tell themselves that they can’t go on until these questions are answered. Nonsense. Put a red question mark next to the place where you have questions and get back to it later.

Working at a computer with high-speed Internet access is incredibly tempting for a chronic researcher (like me). It’s so easy to say, “I’m just going to look up what size engine a ’55 Chevy had,” and next thing you know, it’s two hours later and you’re looking at photos of hand-stitched quilts. So Mosley’s advice about researching is something to keep in mind.

I also like the fact that Mosley recognizes two types of writers: intuitive and structured. The intuitive writer meanders through their story, usually unaware of how it will end or how to get there. The structured writer uses outlines and blocking-techniques to plot their novel. Most writing books prescribe one strategy or the other. But Mosley provides useful tips for both types of writers. Which is a great deal more accomodating than many of the writing texts out there.

Ultimately, the biggest positive of the book is also the biggest negative. This Year You Write Your Novel is short. Very short. Ramones-short. Mike Tyson-in-his-prime-putting- people-on-their-ass-in-38-seconds-short. This book covers writing a novel, revising, and trying to get it published in 111 pages. That includes the Introduction and the index. Blink and you might miss something.

For example, Mosley dedicates fourteen-and-a-half pages to a challenging subject. “I’m very happy to be on the other side of having to write about story and plot, the most abstract and complex interconnected components of fiction writing,” he writes.

Mosley’s advice on getting an agent is even more concise.

How does one get a literary agent?

The best way is through someone who knows and works with that agent. A personal connection is always best. Failing that, you might, in your perusal of bookstores and libraries, have found certain contemporary novels that have a resonance with your own work. Call the publisher of said work and ask who represents that writer. Get the agent’s address and send her or him a query letter explaining who you are (a vitae), what you have written, and how that writing echoes work that the agent has represented. In the best of all possible worlds, that agent will ask you for a sample of your book. After that, keep your fingers crossed.

Well, geez, that sounds easy, doesn’t it?

I will give Mosely a heap of credit for rounding out his brief discussion of agents with the admonition to never work with an agent who charges for their services. Kudos for this warning because far too many beginning writers fall prey to scam artists.

Ultimately, This Year You Write Your Novel is a useful book, probably better suited to the most beginning of writers. Most likely a brand-spanking-new beginner would get bogged down in the detailed discussion some of John Gardner’s writing texts. So Mosley’s book should be well-calibrated for the person who is just starting this life we have chosen. It should be a handy reference for them as they learn and become ready for more detailed explorations of the craft.

And Walter Kirn reviewed William Vollman’s newest book, Poor People. Kirn makes an interesting point that Vollman’s own motives in all of his adventurous project would be worth discussing. “For decades, and at great personal risk, Vollmann has made a calling and a career of mixing with people whom most of us avoid and of listening, at length, to the unheard, whom he typically, and appropriately, pays to speak to him,” Kirn writes. “It’s an endeavor that seems to stem from deeply held but rather obscure convictions that, in this case, could use some explication. If Vollmann is going to question Agee’s motives in writing about the dispossessed, shouldn’t he open up about his own?”

My review of The Garbageman and the Prostitute by Zack Wentz appeared on PopMatters last Friday. If you didn’t see it, be sure to check out the entire piece here.

And we’ll let Zack keep on keeping on here at Slushpile.net since he was kind enough to interview Kevin Sampsell for me. Check out the next post.