Rock bio's you like

[Panamark]

"Hungry for the Cock" the Duran Duran story.

Or Andy Taylor's self descriptive biography of the band
"Girls on Film"

[Douglas T.]

Aerosmith's WALK THIS WAY!

Gene Simmons SEX MONEY KISS! (Not entirely an autobiography!)

[Seshmeister]

"All She Wants is to listen to tapes - A history of Duran Duran tours"

[chefcraig]

Aerosmith's WALK THIS WAY!

I dunno. I enjoyed Walk This Way, yet at this point I'm starting to question the author's (Stephen Davis) credibility. I just finished Watch You Bleed - The Saga Of Guns N' Roses, and I'm beginning to wonder if he simply saw a paycheck and decided to phone this one in. The amount of just plain stupid errors about other bands the fellow commits makes me wonder how accurate anything else the guy is saying. For instance, he mentions Jimi Hendrix lighting his Les Paul on fire - an instrument not even remotely associated with the man, states matter-of-factly that Paul Stanley is the bassist in KISS, and goes on to say that Slippery When Wet was Bon Jovi's debut album.

The factual errors truly are unforgivable, particularly the bone-headed mistakes he makes about Led Zeppelin, such as calling In Through The Outdoor a masterpiece when everyone (including the band) has acknowledged how dreadfully unfocused it is. The Aerosmith mistakes are just as odd. Davis claims Whitford and Perry did not play on Get Your Wings (two well known session players supposedly did), yet he completely failed to mention this "fact" when he wrote that band's biography. Considering he wrote books about both bands makes the errors even more unfathomable. And how hard is it to get dates correct? He flubs the Draw The Line release by two years, and it's pretty much theorized that virtually everyone on the planet knows when John Lennon was assassinated.

When the guy can't even get the obvious details correct, I truly wonder about some of the other "facts" he mentions (which for the most part come from well known interviews and VH-1's "Behind The Music" special), not to mention the conclusions drawn from them. Yeah, it's a semi-compelling read to an extent (particularly if you are a fan of mindless hedonism), yet appears to be served from a distance. All of the characters more or less come across as two dimensional cartoons, as opposed to real living and breathing people. There is also an underlying theme of dismissal toward the band, as if the author is writing more from a sense of contempt than any sense of urgency or basic interest. The fact that the book came out before the release of Chi-Dem only compounds the feeling the work was a hastily researched cash in, ill conceived and most certainly (and obviously) poorly timed.