Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Man, this is yet another haphazard music bio. Publishers of rock bios must think fans are less than intelligent. Many stories (Bob Dylan stuff, the song "The House of the Rising Sun", the tour with Carl Perkin & Jerry Lee Lewis, etc., etc.) come right out of that great video documentary, "Finally, Burdon and the Animals". Some of these tales are actually word for word, which makes you wonder how much effort went into the book itself. Other stories come right out of Burdon's first autobiography, which was little more than a drug & sex induced flashback - though I admit it was very well written, and was a better book than this new one. This new book is just a completely unfocused mix of everything. Hard to believe Burdon & Craig had an editor who knew anything about rock music. The index doesn't include many of the people and places in the book, which they apparently didn't notice. My guess is that a computer made it for them. Many famous people will find their names spelled wrong in the book (a great blind living bluesman, the keyboard "Rabbitt", a soul legend, half of a great country rock outfit, and the best sax man in the history of rock music are among the many in this unlucky group). The writing is not uniform, switching from slang to British terms to literary references to profanity - all in a matter of pages. Although I am no prude, a 60+ year old man using the F-word used more than 25 times seems a bit much. He claims, more than once, that he is not bitter, but when referring to other people, f-ing along page after page is one of the things bitter people do, isn't it? Even basic factual matters aren't handled well. Midway through the book it is stated that he gave MGM their first number 1 single with the song Spill the Wine, yet the appendix lists this song as #3, and it can't max out at both 1 and 3 - and there are dozens of things like this throughout the book. The book also confuses time frames. Going from Hendrix already being dead, back to when he was alive, til when he is dead, again, without ever accounting for what is going on. The book is over 325 pages long, but this is due to the outrageous layout and spacing used; I think in terms of words this book is shorter than the first autobiography. The text is practically double-spaced. What really adds to the length is the insane number of paragraph breaks. Many, many chapters have dozens of one-sentence paragraphs for no literary or grammatical reason (did a computer do this too?). Big fat books cost more than not so fat ones, so maybe there is a reason for this? Even the text itself is weirdly chosen. For instance, he is over 60 years old and has done more than most people ever dream of, yet he devotes one full chapter of this short book to what is just 5 days of his life in the Israeli desert doing nothing much worth remembering? Why bother telling this story? I think the biggest problem could be summarized like this: the 2nd to last line in the book is perfect, and it should have been the first line ("My first true love: singing"). If this is true, tell us about that instead of goofy theories about masturbation, Hendrix, explosives, the Animals manager, Eggmen, Yakuza, Morrison, and this other stuff. Thunder's Mouth needs a decent editor, someone to make sure Burdon & Craig started here, instead of avoided this for 300+ pages! After all, this is not what got in him the rock hall of fame, and that is why people read a book by him.
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