Ebury £18.99 pp482
A renowned rock biographer (he wrote the notorious Led Zeppelin book, Hammer of the Gods), Davis knows where most of the bodies are buried. In Morrison’s case, it’s Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where the singer’s remains were interred in 1971. There isn’t much new here, but Davis offers a clear and confident overview of post-war America and the artistic and political turmoil of the 1960s that nurtured Morrison and The Doors. Morrison’s early death (reconstructed here in pitiful, ghastly detail) has guaranteed that his legend will linger, but Davis is convincing on the compelling quality of his subject’s best work, too. Morrison believed that rock music was a thrilling artistic medium, capable of embracing poetry, politics, sex and philosophy, and in songs such as The End or Riders on the Storm he supplied the proof.
GENE VINCENT: There’s One In Every Town
by Mick Farren
The Do-Not Press £9.99 pp189
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Although not a household name like Elvis or Chuck Berry, Vincent continues to mesmerise his disciples with his beyond-the-grave mystique. In fact, Vincent resembled a member of the living dead for much of his life, as he struggled to overcome the distinctly un-rock’n’roll handicap of a leg hideously crushed in a 1955 motorbike accident. The injury caused him to pop painkillers and swill them down with hard liquor, lending an aura of madness and despair to his crippled-angel stage performances. Author Farren has been a counter-culture legend since the 1960s, but his high-speed survey (small pages, big print) of Vincent’s life, death and legacy isn’t so much definitive as deficient. It feels scrappy and second-hand, with gaps in the narrative padded out by dollops of pop sociology. Tear out the discography and dump the rest.
KEITH RICHARDS: Before They Make Me Run
by Kris Needs
Plexus £12.99 pp350
Earth’s resources may be running dry, but nobody need fear a shortage of biographies of Richards. Needs’s effort is well researched and written in chatty geezer-ese, while the author’s own junkie experiences give him a point of contact with Keef, who has put his skeletal- zombie years behind him and found unexpected equilibrium with wife Patti Hansen. As the former editor of Zig Zag and Flexipop! magazines, Needs interviewed Richards several times, enabling him to impart some sense of his subject’s indestructible constitution and unquenchable thirst for bourbon and vodka. Don’t expect any criticism of St Keith, however, since Needs’s portrait unhesitatingly identifies our hero as Rock’s Top Bloke.