Popular Music Autobiography

The Revolution in Life-Writing by 1960s' Musicians and Their Descendants

Oliver Lovesey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501355844
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The 1960s saw the nexus of the revolution in popular music by a post-war generation amid demographic upheavals and seismic shifts in technology. Over the past two decades, musicians associated with this period have produced a large amount of important autobiographical writing. This book situates these works -- in the forms of formal autobiographies and memoirs, auto-fiction, songs, and self-fashioned museum exhibitions -- within the context of the recent expansion of interest in autobiography, disability, and celebrity studies. It argues that these writings express anxiety over musical originality and authenticity, and seeks to dispel their writers' celebrity status and particularly the association with a lack of seriousness. These works often constitute a meditation on the nature of postmodern fame within a celebrity-obsessed culture, and paradoxically they aim to regain the private self in a public forum.

1

Disenabling Fame: Rock ‘n’ Recovery Autobiographies and Disability Narrative

Recent rock ‘n’ recovery autobiographies of addiction reveal a meditation on the pathology of fame. The writers’ addictions inevitably belong to what has become a celebrity career trajectory of conspicuous excess leading to illness, rehab, and often relapse and then dramatic recovery that both valorizes artistic integrity and distracts from the muse. Increasingly, the autobiography of recovery is part of the celebrity cycle, though one of the most famous former addicts, Keith Richards—a former adman who turns on and off his wasted persona at will—has been notoriously contemptuous of recovery confessions, and his hyperbolic aphorisms about drugs and health have been collected in Mark Blake’s Stone Me: The Wit and Wisdom of Keith Richards, and his own autobiography has appeared. Recent autobiographies by Eric Clapton, Marianne Faithfull, Ronnie Wood, Anthony Kiedis, and Slash, as well as the autobiographical works of Nikki Sixx and Kurt Cobain among others, are predicated on a romantic myth of the artist conspicuous for extreme excess that morphs into a shadow dance with death. The ideal of the heroic rock star—exploited in energy drinks, video games, and even presidential campaigns—is fit, youthful, and supremely abled, perhaps most famously exemplified in Joel Brodsky’s “young lion” photograph of Jim Morrison. This stance of usually testosterone-driven virility is the equivalent of normalcy in illness narratives. To be a rock star is to live with blinding intensity as the object of universal envy, perhaps especially for those like John Lennon and Kurt Cobain with a fascinated dread of the physically disabled. The lust for life and passion for anarchy that celebrates the body electric, however, is an industry-driven and socially sanctioned pose, partly accepted, like ubiquitous celebrity culture itself, as a social cure for postmodern malaise.

These celebrity autobiographies of addiction, many appearing just as disability studies entered the mainstream, have an uncomfortable location within the “unstable” category of disability (Davis 23) and also a/b studies. In the context of a consideration of the cultural contexts of addiction, this chapter argues that the quantity and distinctive qualities of these rock ‘n’ recovery autobiographies suggest a distinct subgenre, given the complexity of altruistic and self-serving motives lying behind their creation, their hybrid genre, their construction of self, and perhaps most importantly, their highly ambivalent relationship to fame. These autobiographies attempt to reclaim their writers’ lives from addiction and from the illness of fame.

Addiction as disability

Addiction has an uneasy location within disability studies, itself perhaps defined by instability and indeterminacy (Bérubé 338) and a close connection to narrative (Garland-Thomson 77). Like illnesses such as HIV/AIDS stigmatized as being acquired through sexual behavior, addiction—perhaps particularly celebrity addiction—is widely dismissed as “a calamity one brings on oneself” through a perverse lifestyle (Sontag, Illness 114). Drug addiction itself, however, is a fairly recent category of illness. The “invention” of drug addiction—the first usage of “addiction” relating to drugs in the OED appeared in 1906—at the turn of the century was concurrent with the rise of widespread anxieties about various “others”: the deviant, the foreign, and the homosexual (Redfield and Brodie 3–6). Addiction has from the early twentieth century been associated with vice and criminality, and Nazi eugenicists grouped alcoholism with a vast range of “‘defective’ conditions” in their euthanasia campaigns (Muzak 256–7; Snyder and Mitchell 102, 122). The “pathologization and criminalization of habit” (Redfield and Brodie 4) grew out of the Victorian medicalization of private life, a process that Virginia Berridge has traced in Opium and the People, making habitual drug use into a disease. The psychiatric disease model of addiction as deviance, itself a liberation from earlier demonizations of addiction, gave way in the 1960s and 1970s in the face of “recreational” drug-using behavior and especially the reality of returning drug-dependent Vietnam vets in America. This disease model of addiction, however, rooting normative addictive behavior in the brain, liver, DNA, or personality type, has come at a cost. The creation of a stable addict identity demands the radical reconstruction of the individual’s life story in terms of the later addictive behavior. If addiction is perceived to be a chronic behavior that brings to the fore a defining component of personal identity, then the addict who has been placed in a toxic environment must for ever more reside in a state of suspended recovery and seek prophetic signs in all past life experience. As with breast cancer survivors like Marianne Faithfull, the addict’s having been once afflicted entails being forever liable to recurrence or relapse, and the necessity of perpetual self-surveillance.

Celebrity addiction carries its own myths and metaphors, as if genius or beauty is abnormally fragile and fame’s proximity to death explains the high-stakes danger pay. The rock star, even more than film stars like Marilyn Monroe, performs a spectacle of flirtation with death, from stage diving to risking electrocution or assassination, as the price of attempting to steal fire from the gods, a metaphor used in so much heavy metal mythology. The nearness of death is the sign of authenticity, rejection of conventional life in all its forms, and the drive of genius. There is the constant spectacle of groupies, contract riders demanding the finest wines and M&M’s, and drugs, but also unscrupulous promoters hiring unsafe helicopters, demanding overwork and the presence of guns, knives, and organized crime. Death is a well-respected career move in rock, in a culture in which even celebrity murder is a category of fame. However, rock’s famous dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Brian Jones, and even Keith Moon—that Kurt Cobain’s wise mother labeled the “stupid club” she begged him not to join (Cross 227)—were mostly far from being beautiful young lions when they died in distinctly unglamorous settings, at a time when addiction and rehabilitation were not well understood in clinical discourse. Morrison and Jones had donned fat suits to murder their rock star images,¹ aided by rampant alcoholism and drug abuse, and stars like Hendrix and Moon choked on their own vomit in bed, or, like Joplin, walking across a motel room, or like alcoholics Sandy Denny, walking down a flight of stairs, or Morrison and Humble Pie’s Steve Marriott, taking a bath. The glamorization of rock star fatalities and the sensational attention given copycat suicides as followed the death of Cobain, through tourist dead rock star tours and books like Stairway to Heaven: The Final Resting Places of Rock’s Legends, allow rights holders to profit from endless recirculation. Rock star deaths create an impossible standard for other rockers,² and Morrison widely announced his coming death in the wake of those of Hendrix and Joplin. Even young cult stars like Jeff Buckley—himself a dabbler in heroin to medicate his probable bipolar disorder (Browne 326–30)—was intensely aware of the heroin overdose death of his father, Tim Buckley, and his audience’s expectation of his own early death, and would perform celebrity death scenes as part of his stage act.

The rock ‘n’ recovery autobiographies considered here labor under this mythology of immortality and also under a related derring-do attitude to addiction itself. Two important cultural figures, William Burroughs and Keith Richards, are the virtual godfathers of these accounts and their attitudes to addictive practices have been widely influential. Richards is cited as an addict role model by Slash and Sixx (and indirectly by Wood), and Burroughs is similarly cited by Faithfull, and he had a quasi-mentoring relationship with Cobain with whom he later recorded. Similarly, in the perhaps classic version of copycat addiction, Miles Davis succumbs to the prevailing notion that “heroin might make you play as great as Bird” (96). Dickie Pride, discovered by Larry Parnes, however, may have been the first rock casualty who succumbed to copycat addiction, and he died, aged twenty-seven, in 1969.³ Early in his career, Richards adopted the drug-taking of musical mentors (156–7), and he recognized the value of a reckless, naughty public persona as a Rolling Stone, though this image was partly the creation of the band’s first manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, to distinguish his “boys” from the Beatles. Richards’ statements about addiction are full of rakish bravado, as if he styled himself a bohemian aristocrat gone to seed: “I don’t know if I’ve been extremely lucky … but I’ve never turned blue in someone else’s bathroom. I consider that the height of bad manners” (qtd. in Blake 98). His flippant witticisms about narcotics, quoted with affection by Ronnie Wood, include his adage about having no “problem with drugs, only policemen” (214). A more strident version appears in the memoir of MC5 founder, political activist, and former federal prisoner on “drug-related” charges Wayne Kramer: “[d]rug prohibition has killed more people than drugs ever could” (296).⁴ The self-satirizing pose of gone-to-seed rock god dispensing medical and lifestyle advice also has been taken up by Ozzy Osbourne and David Crosby.

Burroughs and his fellow Beat writers were iconic rebels to 60s rockers (his photograph appears on the cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band), and his credo that addiction is “a way of life” in the autobiographical “Prologue” to Junky gave addiction itself legitimacy and at the same time an automatic identification with an artistic tradition and the authenticity of street culture. Moreover, Burroughs, an erstwhile philosopher of addiction, framed addiction as an anthropological adventure. Like stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius who in his Meditations warns against the dangers of pleasure or anything that will “habituate you to dependency” (62),⁵ Burroughs maintains that addiction is an afflicting virus, though resistance to it fosters “cellular stoicism” (xli). The delights of the “kick” for Burroughs pale before the strenuous but presumably virtuous resolve needed to endure the horrors of drug withdrawal. When Junky was first published, a nervous publisher’s note was added drawing attention to the novel’s purpose as a deterrent to “discourage imitation by thrill-hungry teen-agers” (qtd. in Harris xxi), a caution not duplicated on the covers of the rock ‘n’ recovery autobiographies.

Richards’ Life is a very well-rehearsed “life” as Richards has covered many of the incidents in multiple interviews over six decades. He regards his music as belonging to the tradition of African American blues, but also country and reggae, each with its own traditions of borrowing, mentoring, and theft. Far from acknowledging that there is “a vampiric relationship between the white rock and rollers and the black people who inspired all their music” (Hagan “Question”), Richards self-identifies as black. As he says, “[t]o the Jamaicans, the ones that I know, I’m black but I’ve turned white to be their spy,” or at least he is in a process of “transition from white man to black” (346). He is abundantly aware of his partly self-created image and the myths surrounding him and his infamous drug use. A conflicted focus on heroin addiction—perhaps the key feature of Richards’ media persona—occupies Life’s middle portion. This subject goes along with his equally famous elegantly wasted insouciance and his self-designed haircut, imitated by everyone from Patti Smith to Izzy Stradlin. He acknowledges the ravages of dependence and his many failed withdrawal regimes (one on the advice of William Burroughs); but he can’t part from the swaggering bravado of his stance as a successful addict who chose addiction to keep himself grounded and resist the ego-perils of superstardom. Heroin was fame or rock stardom’s analgesic: “I never particularly liked being that famous. … I was doing it [heroin] not to be a ‘pop star’ … That was very difficult to handle, and I could handle it better on smack” (285). He mainly used pharmaceutical-grade heroin, injecting directly into muscle tissue and not veins. He also has had some legal good fortune as when the penalty for his 1977 Toronto bust was reduced to giving a concert for the blind (391–414), which some in Canada quipped should have been for the deaf (“Silence”). Richards suggests the weak paternal figures in his hard-bitten, lonely, working class upbringing as well as persistent bullying at school may have contributed to his vulnerability. He reveals unwittingly, however, that Brian Jones—teenage father, flamboyant dandy, possibly homoerotic sadist, who probably suffered from an undiagnosed bipolar condition exasperated by ingestion of near-suicidal quantities of narcotics—may well have originated the Rolling Stones’ dangerous image now so widely associated with Richards.

The confessional motive

The motives behind these rock ‘n’ recovery autobiographies are often deeply conflicted. It’s “not very rock ‘n’ roll” to write a confessional autobiography for the benefit of others as Sixx notes, though he claims rock’s very rebelliousness allows him to confront the stereotype (413). Celebrity disability autobiographies, such as Michael J. Fox’s Lucky Man and Christopher Reeve’s Still Me, often are designed to use celebrity visibility to draw attention to the realities of disability and offer hope. The literary celebrity memoir by Susan Cheever, Note Found in a Bottle: My Life As A Drinker, that takes its epigraph from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up and includes details of her famous father, John Cheever’s alcoholism—to which we shall return in Chapter 3—is motivated by a desire to help others understand the disease of alcoholism that she says is “still invisible” (188). The motives of rock ‘n’ recovery autobiographies, however, while ostensibly altruistic, are sometimes much more ambiguous. A rock ‘n’ recovery autobiography, as in the case of John Phillips’ Papa John, An Autobiography, while drawing attention to addiction, may be a staged performance of contrition designed to seek an advantage in coming legal battles, as his daughter Mackenzie Phillips later realized, as she writes in her own narrative of addiction and sexual abuse High on Arrival (145), or it may seek to justify a liver transplant, as in the case of David Crosby’s Long Time Gone. Eric Clapton and the more recent autobiographers examined here all claim to write for others’ benefit, even to fund rehab centers or children’s charities, but their accounts clearly glamorize their rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, with inflammatory dust-jacket promises of sex, drugs, and rockin’ writing in sometimes cartoonish formats replete with nude photographs (Sixx; Kiedis). While most acknowledge the absolute helplessness in the face of addiction demanded by some recovery programs, it was probably publishers’ advances and the subjects’ own pop cultural savvy about the public’s addiction to fame that dictated attending to debauchery at least as much as contrition.

These riff and tell books are also highly competitive in their desire to outdo or “out-Mötley” others (Sixx 330).⁶ The humor of Alice Cooper’s renunciation of alcoholism for “golf addiction” or Clapton’s confession that before heroin and alcohol he was addicted to chocolate is highly unusual. Sixx’s The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star and the Guns N’ Roses guitarist’s Slash emerged in the aftermath of Anthony Kiedis’s autobiography and seem partly designed to compete for the crown of most deranged, depraved rocker while ostensibly being billed as cautionary tales. Sixx writes somewhat formulaically: “If one person reads this book and doesn’t have to go down the same road as me, it was worth sharing my personal hell with them. I’m also donating profits from this book to help runaway kids” (8). Sometimes, there is even a conflict between competing addictive practices and disabilities. For example, the bipolar disorder that Adam Ant self-medicated via his sex addiction, as his 2006 autobiography explains, takes a side seat to his mania for pop stardom and workaholism,⁷ and Grace Slick’s 1999 alcoholism narrative details sexual exploits with various lizard kings, as both symptom and benefit of her illness.⁸ Canadian Celtic-rock fiddler Ashley MacIsaac’s crack addiction can’t bypass the internalized homophobia that fired his self-destructive exhibitionism as he writes in his 2003 autobiography Fiddling with Disaster. Rock ‘n’ recovery narratives designed to close a chapter on excess, or recover agency over the illness narrative itself (Couser, Recovering 191–2; Linton 162), inevitably re-launch the rockers’ often stalled careers, and attempt to raise the curtain on a second act to feed the public’s insatiable celebrity obsession.

The impetus behind many of these autobiographies extends from the 12-step programs of many rehab centers and in particular the emphasis on public confession or the so-called “drunkalogue.” They all unwittingly represent an unambiguous endorsement of residential recovery, group therapy, and the 12-step program. This approach to recovery provides not only a way to live but also a way to narrate, and some of the writers, such as Kiedis, unconsciously slip into somewhat clichéd, jargon-riddled recovery speak. A number of the autobiographers recount a litany of failed “cures” before they accept the 12-step approach: trips to the Caribbean or even the Sahara to recover; acupuncture; cocktails of fruit juice, vitamins, and Valium; or regularizing the supply of heroin in lockdown clinical settings to exhaust the drug’s appeal; or using unlimited supplies of alcohol to control the symptoms of withdrawal and thus trading heroin addiction for alcoholism. The recovering addict—and former addicts usually must accept that they are forever in a state of recovery—is forced to acknowledge a powerlessness to resist drugs, accept responsibility for past irresponsibility, and express a willingness to make amends. Recovery is directly related to reading or hearing others’ accounts of enslavement to drugs or alcohol, and to drafting and retelling one’s own narrative. Recovery is thus textual, an act of telling and retelling. As Robyn Warhol has demonstrated in a study of the “rhetoric of addiction” in a different context, there is a close similarity between recovery and Evangelical conversion narratives (106).

Generic hybridity

The very different rock ‘n’ recovery autobiographies considered here belong to a genre distinguished by its very hybridity. These texts are “postmodern morality tales” (Coyle 18) that present addiction and celebrity’s disabling effects as a “moral test” (Quayson 37). Their stoical laments for past hedonism sometimes employ the rhetoric of spiritual autobiography a...