Stairway to Heaven: Led Zeppelin Uncensored by Richard Cole
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

"[...] they never allowed their offstage antics to overshadow their craftsmanship onstage and in the studio. They never lost sight of their fans and the debt they owed them. In nearly three decades in the music business, I have never seen anyone else like Led Zeppelin. They were indisputably the greatest rock and roll band in the world."

Indisputably the greatest? Well, maybe... Led Zeppelin was certainly one the most famous and influential bands in the history of rock music and their Stairway To Heaven always places high on various lists of "best songs of all time". I am not a particular fan of the group although I like their music more than most of the heavy-metal bands of which genre they may be considered precursors. My favorite piece is Whole Lotta Love, with its pseudo-free-jazz fragments and generally non-traditional, innovative structure, which - to me - sticks out positively from their mainstream repertoire.

Richard Cole, author of Stairway To Heaven. Led Zeppelin Uncensored (1992; the book is co-authored by a professional writer, Richard Trubo) is an ultimate insider in the band's affairs as he worked as a tour manager for Led Zeppelin throughout their entire existence (1968 - 1980). Unfortunately, being a tour manager means being privy to the social behavior of band members rather than to their creative process. Thus, instead of a serious biography of the band we have its "excessography."

The entire book is basically a meticulously detailed report of the never-ending stream of alcohol- and drug-fueled excesses of the band. I know there exist readers - I hope they constitute a small minority - who thrive on learning dirt about celebrities; this book is precisely for them. For instance, the author seems to be proud of finally telling the truth about the notorious "Shark Episode" that happened in The Edgewater Inn in Seattle. What's more, he seems to be proud of his role in the event.

The parade of gross behaviors, which range from juvenile pranks to acts that today would likely be considered criminal, obscures all the valuable contents of the book: I would love to read more about the music, about personalities of the band members, and more seriously, about the dynamic of relationships between them. What's worse, the events described in the book seem to happen outside of any particular cultural, social, and political background. Indeed the 1970s were not as turbulent as the 1960s but there was a lot of processes happening in the world, which are not in any way reflected in the band biography.

Since I sort of matured in my mid-sixties I have developed serious doubts about the nobleness of the human species. One passage in Stairway seems to confirm my doubts: the account of the evening when the author and John Paul Jones (the "quietest" member of Led Zeppelin) met with Elvis Presley and the meeting ended up in an "orgy of gift-giving that Elvis seemed to find exciting." Yuck!

I would estimate that almost one hundred pages in this 380-page book are devoted to detailing the "we got drunk and did stupid things, we got stoned and did even more stupid things" activities. Why do we need this repetitiveness? This is not a good book! A perfect example of how not to write books about popular musicians.

One-and-a-half stars.


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Burglars Can't Be Choosers by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"The only place I had to break into these days was the place where I was living."

No sophomore slump for Mr. Lawrence Block in his Bernie Rhodenbarr series. Two weeks ago I reviewed the second novel in the series, The Burglar in the Closet, and liked it about half a star more than the first installment, Burglars Can't Be Choosers (1977). But the first novel is also a good read and I recommend it for the prose and particularly for the plot.

We meet Bernie Rhodenbarr as he burglarizes an apartment in Manhattan and feels a "little surge of excitement" which always happens when he opens a lock. This burglary has been commissioned by someone who paid Bernie a thousand dollars up front and promised much more if he manages to steal a box covered in blue leather. Unfortunately for Bernie, but fortunately for the reader, the box is nowhere to be found. Instead, two policemen interrupt Bernie's escapade and there is another - rather grim - surprise.

Bernie manages to escape and hides in a friends apartment. He meets a young woman, Ruth, whom he fancies a lot:

"I watched her little bottom as she walked, and when she bent over to deposit the chicken bones in the garbage I got a lump in my throat, among other things.

The prose is fun to read until about middle of the book. Bernie's conversations with Ruth are really well written and the light sexual banter between them is full of first-class dialogue. Particularly the comparisons between burglary thrills and sexual ones. There is even a nice, subtly written sex scene.

Bernie is irresistible to women; since I have a life-long experience of being utterly resistible, I am envious of him. On the other hand, similarly to him I have some knowledge of Victorian erotic literature: when he explains the meaning of the word 'gamahouche' to another character I remembered how I inquired about that word some time around 1965, when I read such literature for the first time (and when it made so much sense). Getting an answer was not easy, 30 years before Google.

Unfortunately for me, the quality of the prose deteriorates about mid-book, and the author focuses on the story. Readers who enjoy mystery books for their plot will be happy here: the plot is well structured and has variously-sized nice twists. In some way the denouement reminds me of classical mysteries. Some humor makes appearance again at the end.

Good read!

Three-and-a-quarter stars.

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The Newton Letter by John Banville
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Then comes that cold, that brave, that almost carven signature: Newton. What did he mean, what was it those commonplace things said to him, what secret did they impart? And so I sat in the shadow of lilacs, nursing an unrequitable love and reading a dead man's testament, trying to understand it.

One might say that the passage above summarizes John Banville's The Newton Letter (1982), a slim and beautifully constructed novella. Written in dazzling prose, it tells a story of a writer who has worked seven years on a book about Isaac Newton and seems to be unable to finish the work. He struggles to understand what happened to Newton who apparently suffered some kind of nervous breakdown in 1693 and wrote a strange letter to the philosopher John Locke in which he threatens to quit his scholarly pursuits:

"My dear Doctor, expect no more philosophy from my pen. The language in which I might be able not only to write but to think is neither Latin nor English, but a language none of whose words is known to me; a language in which commonplace things speak to me; and wherein I may one day dare have to justify myself before an unknown judge.

In the letter Newton also accuses Locke of endeavoring "to embroil [him] with woemen."

Yet in the epigraph, the narrator-writer also mentions his "nursing an unrequitable love," which introduces the other thread of the novella (to me, the more important one). The writer has rented a lodge to work on his book and there he meets two women with whom he himself becomes "embroiled." The two threads are entwined together, almost as if they were revolving about each other. The parallels between the two threads are both superficial - inability to continue the work or embroilment with women - but also much deeper, reaching to the core of the human behavior: why do we do what we do. Why had Newton written that letter? Why does the writer sleep with one woman while he loves the other? He does not know this any more than he knows the reasons for Newton's temporary "madness." This is a similar motif as the one in The Book of Evidence, where Freddie does not know why he committed murder.

While I admire the duality and entwinement of the motifs it is the unrequited love theme that resonates with me most strongly. Maybe because of the beautiful prose:

"Love. That word. I seem to hear quotation marks around it, as if it were a title of something, a stilted sonnet, say, by a silver poet. Is it possible to love someone of whom one has so little?

(I quote another breathtaking passage after the rating.) Sex scenes are notoriously difficult to write: even greatest authors sometimes stumble and produce passages that sound ridiculous, technical, disgusting, or just plain vulgar. Mr. Banville offers a beautifully written, delicate, almost metaphorical scene of physical love between the narrator and Ottilie. I am not able to quote because the entire longish paragraph would be needed to fully convey the beauty.

I also love the author's sense of humor: amidst all these serious events the author suddenly inserts a pseudo-literary-essayistic footnote, a reference to a fictitious paper. The effect is hilarious because it is so utterly unexpected. A wonderful novella that can be read in 90 minutes yet remembered forever.

Four stars.

"I used to picture my deathbed [...] I, a wizened infant, remembering with magical clarity as the breath fails this moment in this bedroom at twilight, the breeze from the window, the sycamores, her heart beating under mine, and that bird calling in the distance from a lost, Oh utterly lost land."

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Mc Nally's Puzzle by Lawrence Sanders
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"We all have our wonts, do we not, and one of mine is to dither when faced with a difficult decision. I was tempted to delay a confrontation with Peter Gottschalk to another day. [...] But that I realized was an ignoble snivel and so, as the Reverend Spooner might say, I lirded my groins and phoned the Gottschalk residence."

I love reading this kind of prose, ornate, flowery, full of circumlocutions, puns, and even clever spoonerisms. But boohoo! McNally's Puzzle (1996) is the last Archy McNally novel written by the original author, signed as Mr. Lawrence Sanders. (One cannot be sure about the authorship: the seven McNally novels are so much better than most other works by the author who used Lawrence Sanders' name that it is hard to imagine they were all written by the same person.) Mr. Vincent Lardo continued the series after Mr. Sanders' death, and one day I will find courage to try one of the "posthumous" novels.

In this installment we meet the intrepid and suave Archy as he retrieves - 'steals back' would be a more proper term - a valuable baseball card from an ex-wife of McNally law firm's client. I need to add that - true to Archy's common modus operandi - the retrieval is achieved after seducing the thief and consummating a short affair with her. Yet this is only a teaser and Archy's distinguished father, the head of the firm, gives Archy - who's in charge of 'discreet inquiries' - a new job. Another client of the firm, Mr. Gottschalk, requests precisely such a discreet inquiry as he fears someone has been trying to kill him.

The beginning pages are wonderful to read:

"I occasionally suffer an attack of the guilts and have found the best cure is a good night's sleep, when a mambo with Morpheus dilutes crass behavior to impish mischief."

Alas, quite early in the story "the King of Duncedom", Binky Watrous, makes his entrance into the plot, which made me groan 'Ugh.' To me, Binky's presence in a story significantly reduces its readability. Oh well... The cliché persona of Binky is almost balanced by the presence of parrots and by the author's attention to all "matters psittacine," (check it out in a dictionary!)

Ornate prose rules until the end of the story - who cares about the plot and denouement when one can read:

"I donned a new pongee robe embroidered with Chinese characters. I had been told by the merchant the calligraphy could be translated as: 'May you have a happy life.' But I suspected it meant, 'Suffer, you miserable schlub,' or some other invidious imprecation."

Marginal recommendation, only for the prose.

Two-and-a-half stars.

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Pearl: The Obsessions and Passions of Janis Joplin by Ellis Amburn
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"'Premier white blues singer of the '60s,' Rolling Stone
'One of the brightest stars rock has ever produced,' The Who's Who in Rock
'Janis Joplin expressed one side of 1968 fairly well: ecstatic and self-destructive simultaneously, wailing to the edges of the universe.' Time"

Ellis Amburn's Pearl. The Obsessions and Passions of Janis Joplin (1993) has been an exasperating read for me. What begins as a captivating biography of a great artist eventually morphs into a litany of lurid, tabloid-worthy descriptions of excesses in sex and drug use. I will whine about that some more later; let's begin with the good stuff.

The author sets up Janis Joplin's story in an interesting way: it begins with the singer's "crushing disappointment" when she attends the 10th reunion of her high school class of 1960. In 1970 Janis Joplin is at the peak of world fame but the people of Port Arthur, TX, the town where she was born, still do not accept her. The Texas Bible Belt town has never forgiven Janis for her lifestyle, the author is saying. The entire biography seems to be based upon the theme of a "star in quest of the self-esteem denied her in adolescence", which eventually proves "unrecoverable." Mr. Amburn sees the clear path from the Port Arthur rejection of the star to her death in a Hollywood motel of a drug overdose just seven weeks later. The motif of the reunion provides a narrative clasp that ties the story together.

The early portion of the biography follows the singer's childhood and youth, and her increasingly rebellious behavior. She searches for her idols, the beatniks, in Venice, California, in 1961, but comes back home disappointed. She performs one song at a club in Beaumont, TX, but only manages to scare the audience with her intensity. Her first real public performance comes in 1963 in a club in San Francisco. Then she hits "a spectacular bottom":

"All she wanted to do was to wallow in dope - any kind she could get - 'smoke dope, take dope, lick dope, suck dope, fuck dope.'"

Again she goes back home to Texas where she spends about a year. And it is only in 1966 when she gets her big break: an audition for the band Big Brother and the Holding Company, which set her on the road to stardom.

The passages about the epochal years 1966 - 1968 in San Francisco, the Haight-Ashbury times of "the massive counterculture convocations" such as the Human Be-In read great. Alas, soon the gossip begins dominating the biography and the reader is treated to mentions of Janis Joplin's orgasms or Jimi Hendrix' penis size. The singer falls deeper and deeper into drugs: extremely heavy heroin and alcohol use - to the extent that she sometimes performs on complete alcoholic blackouts.

It is clear that Janis Joplin's life trajectory arced from seeking recognition to seeking instant gratification at every moment of her life when she became a world famous singer, but I dispute the author's need of repetitiously providing salacious and grim details of Joplin's drug-fueled escapades. One cannot escape the suspicion that the author's goal is to titillate the reader with the gossip-level trivia.

While explicit sex scenes and references work well in great literature, let's just mention the unforgettable The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B , peddling information about who ejaculated into whom and how many times an orgasm has been achieved does not really belong in a biography of an artist, even if it is a rock artist. Artists have a right to privacy, like all of us (maybe except politicians). Also, in my view, the connection between the artist's behavior and the greatness of her art is tenuous at best, although many people would probably disagree.

The author ends the biography with a wonderful sentence:

"That she achieved as much as she did, considering the burden of suffering she carried, makes her a shining example of the human spirit."

I agree, but the sensationalist biography in no way supports that statement and is, in a way, offensive to the great artist.

Two and a half stars.

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The Burglar in the Closet by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"My name is Bernie Rhodenbarr and I'm a thief and I love to steal. I just plain love it.

Rearranging books in the back row on a high shelf I happened on Lawrence Block's The Burglar in the Closet (1978) and remembered how much I liked the book when I first read it, almost 30 years ago. Do I like the book as much now, when I am wise and mature... I mean decrepit and senile? Yes, I still do.

This is the second installment in the Rhodenbarr series. We meet Bernie as he prepares to burglarize an apartment in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan. Let me explain that Bernie loves his job not only because the substantial financial rewards it brings. He also - or maybe mainly - loves the thrill of not getting caught. And this time around he indeed does get a generous helping of thrills. As hinted by the title he gets stuck in a closet and he sees things that he would prefer not to see. Anyway, the intelligent and quite plausible plot moves fast and captures the reader's attention. Two murders, massive amounts of money, what's not to like? Of course, the denouement disappoints a little but not as much as usually in mysteries.

Obviously, this novel should be read not for the plot but for breezy, whimsical prose, full of often sophisticated humor. Bernie's phone conversation with Denise Raphaelson is a gem: full of sweet tease and flirt. I was giggling for two minutes, which itself is worth the price of the book (used, "Officially withdrawn from New Haven Free Public Library"; by the way how could a public library not be free?) While the dentist office humor is not as lofty it is also funny and "Mr. Thirsty" (a dental saliva ejector, wow, that's a mouthful - a pun, a pun!) is also worth a giggle or two.

Mr. Block does romance well too. I like the passage when Jillian (no, not Denise, Bernie is quite popular with ladies) reacts to Bernie's offer of sleeping in the chair in her apartment:

"'Bernie?' She gazed up at me from beneath those long eyelashes. 'Bernie, don't be ridiculous.'
'Oh,' I said, and looked deeply into her eyes, and smelled her hair. 'Oh'"

A trifle, but a very entertaining one! I am now searching for the first installment in the series, Burglars Can't Be Choosers.

Three and a half stars.


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