Books I Read on Tour

Much of the time spent on tour is in the van. I've tried many different things to help pass the time. NPR, iPod, movies on laptops, PSP, sudoku, scribbling in a journal, etc. Luckily I'm not one of those people that gets sick while reading in a car. I do tend to get tired and doze off though, sometimes mid sentence I'm reading. Here are some books I've read over the past few tours. I tend to lean towards rock biographies while on tour. There have been some good ones lately.

Shakey: Neil Young's Biography
This book is epic. It's a thick paperback that stayed in my backpack while we were touring around with Kings of Leon. The story of Young's journey from a small Canadian town to California to super stardom is the stuff of legends. The amount of detail is exhaustive and you really get a feel for who this guy is. Neil Young gave full approval to the author to write the book and he spoke to all the key people involved in Young's life. As they would all tell their recollection of how events transpired, Neil Young would interject his point of view on whatever topic was being discussed throughout the book. This really helped to get an overall picture of his life.

Excerpt:

I asked Young’s guitar tech Larry Cragg what the hardest tour had been. “All of ’em,” he said. “They’ve all been rough–every one of ’em made workin’ for anybody else real easy. The tours are out of the ordinary, the music, the movies–everything’s out of the ordinary. We do things differently around here. That’s just the way it is.”

Cragg was tinkering with Young’s guitar rig, which sat in a little area to the rear of the stage. A gaggle of amps–a Magnatone, a huge transistorized Baldwin Exterminator, a Fender Reverb unit and the heart of it all: a small, weather-beaten box covered in worn-out tweed, 1959 vintage. “The Deluxe,” muttered amp tech Sal Trentino with awe.

“Neil’s got four hundred and fifty-six identical Deluxes. They sound nothing like this one.” Young runs the amp with oversized tubes, and Cragg has to keep portable fans trained on the back so it doesn’t melt down. “It really is ready to just go up in smoke, and it sounds that way–flat-out, overdriven, ready to self-destruct.”

Young has a personal relationship with electricity. In Europe, where the electrical current is sixty cycles, not fifty, he can pinpoint the fluctuation–by degrees. It dumbfounded Cragg. “He’ll say, ‘Larry, there’s a hundred and seventeen volts coming out of the wall, isn’t there?’ I’ll go measure it, and yeah, sure–he can hear the difference.”

Shakey’s innovations are everywhere. Intent on controlling amp volume from his guitar instead of the amp, Young had a remote device designed called the Whizzer. Guitarists marvel at the stomp box that lies onstage at Young’s feet: a byzantine gang of effects that can be utilized without any degradation to the original signal. Just constructing the box’s angular red wooden housing to Young’s extreme specifications had craftsmen pulling their hair out.


Scar Tissue
I was a Red Hot Chili Peppers fan back around the Mother's Milk era. Personally, I still think that is their best album. I liked Blood Sugar Sex Magik too, but I feel like that is when they began their downward decline musically and artistically. In his autobiography Anthony Kiedis even admits that they have yet to create anything as compelling since. For the most part though, this is the tale of a heroin junkie in Hollywood finally coming clean. Kiedis spills the beans about all his depraved behavior and his childhood growing up in Los Angeles with a father who dealt drugs to actors and other Hollywood movers and shakers. Sonny and Cher were his god parents. Just imagine all the stuff this guy has seen. He pretty much talks about it all in this book.

Excerpt:

I don't want to give the impression that we were monks the whole time we recorded. We'd often invite friends up to the house and have these elaborate dinner parties. One of the people who was around then was the actor River Phoenix. I met River through Ione (Skye), who'd done a film with him. John (Frusciante) and River had jammed at a party that we all attended, and they got close. I don't want to go off on River's trip, because his family is excruciatingly sensitive about it, but since I'd known him, he had drunk heavily and used cocaine heavily, and it was no secret to me or anybody who knew him that he was quite out of control with this stuff and it would be just a matter of time before bad things started to add up. River was around a lot during the writing and recording of our album (Blood Sugar Sex Magik). He was a big supporter of our band, and I even wrote a whole verse about him in 'Give It Away': "There's a river, born to be a giver, keep you warm, won't let you shiver/His heart is never going to wither, come one everybody, time to deliver."


Our Band Could Change Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991
This is a great book profiling many of the seminal bands of the era. The chapters are all broken up into stories about the specific bands and their rise to prominence. Bands featured include Black Flag, Minor Threat, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. and Fugazi, among others. Michael Azerrad has written for SPIN, Rolling Stone, etc. and profiles the subjects fairly well. There isn't the kind of detail like in the Neil Young biography, but you still get a decent overview of all the bands. The Sonic Youth and Butthole Surfers chapters were my two favorite. After reading this book I would love to see a more thorough account of those two. In other words, I'm patiently awaiting Thurston and Gibby's autobiographies.

Excerpt:

They (Butthole Surfers) were eventually reduced to scavenging for cans and bottles so they could turn them in for the nickel deposit. It was quite a come down for (Gibby) Haynes, who was all set to be a successful accountant just a couple years before. One day some prankster ran up and kicked all the bottles out of Hayne's bag. "Gibby and the rest of us were on our knees, scurrying to collect the bottles again," says (Jeffrey) Coffey. "And I looked in Gibby's eyes, and he was about to cry. It was just so pitiful - this big, strong guy like Gibby being reduced to tears because here he was on the streets of New York, groveling for bottles. But good god, we needed those bottles."
----------------------------
They were all tripping one day when someone jokingly suggested moving to R.E.M.'s home base of Athens, Georgia (which also happened to have been a notorious drug mecca). "We thought it would be a trip to, for no apparent reason other than it seemed funny, move to Athens," says Coffey. "And stalk R.E.M." They wound up a few miles outside of Athens, in tiny Winterville, where they stayed about seven months, working up new material and playing gigs. And stalking R.E.M.


The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band
The first live concert that I ever attended was Motley Crue at the old Omni arena here in Atlanta. Guns N' Roses was the opening band. At the time I had no idea I was witnessing glam rock history in the making. I was just a little kid with a bunch of my friends, and my mom chaperoning us all. She loves telling this story. We were literally third row center. At the time I was completely naive to the amount of debauchery involved with these bands. In this autobiography of Motley Crue it's basically all exposed. It's story after story of just complete reckless abandon, as well as the consequences. It goes from band member to band member and back again as they each pen chapters, giving perspectives from all angles.

Excerpt:

I (Nikki Sixx) needed to go out on the scene to escape from my own decay and loneliness. I flipped through my phone book in search of old friends. I called Robbin Crosby, then Slash, because Guns N' Roses were going to open for us in America after the European tour. I picked up Robbin at his house in a silver limo I liked to rent and gave him some blow. On the way to the Franklin Plaza Hotel, where Guns N' Roses were staying because they were all homeless, I threw up all over the limo. I wiped the chunks off on an antique beaver-hair-covered top hat I had bought for Slash and gave it to him at his door along with a bottle of whiskey. Some of the guys in Megadeath were also staying at the hotel, so we all piled into the limo. Robbin scored some junk from his dealer, who wasn't too happy about the conspicuous limo in front of his house, and we did drugs until our minds went blank.
----------------------------
Something not as gentle as the hand on my head, something rough and impatient, grabbed my foot. And in an instant I shot down through the air, through the roof of the ambulance, and landed with a painful jerk back into my body. I struggled to open my eyes and I saw adrenaline needles - not one, like in Pulp Fiction, but two. One was sticking out of the left flank of my chest, the other was in the right. "No one's gonna die in my fucking ambulance," I heard a man's voice say. Then I passed out.