Axl has been working on this bastard since 1996, hiring and firing like a schizoid plutocrat; by 1999 he claimed to have demo’d nearly 70 new songs, some of which were rather “advanced” in their approach. The year 2000 found him ordering a wood-and-wire chicken coop to be built in the studio for his post-Slash guitarist Buckethead, who wears a KFC bucket on his head and had told Axl that he would be “more comfortable working inside a chicken coop.” In 2002, a song called “Rhiad and the Bedouins” was premiered at the Belgian Pukkelpop festival, although no one could really hear it. By this time, Axl was saying that he had the follow-up to Chinese Democracy already written . . . Buckethead quit in 2004, and shortly thereafter GNR’s label, Interscope — in a fit of wishful thinking — announced that ChineseDemocracy would be in stores by the end of the year. Never happened.
Is there a way out of this Eco-esque labyrinth? Will the album ever be complete, or releasable? Not until the people of China have a democratically elected government. And perhaps not even then.
Whims of desire
Another contemporary figure crying out for the Goldman touch is soul man/lubricant R. Kelly, whose unauthorized biography Your Body’s Calling Me: The Life and Times of “Robert” R. Kelly — Music, Love, Sex & Money, by Jake Brown, was published in 2004. Brown has some interesting, unauthorized-style touches — one of Kelly’s non-sexual friendships is described as “plutonic” — but nothing can obscure the divine comedy at the heart of the book: the struggle in R.’s soul between God and sex, or at least the kind of sex that R. likes. He believes he can fly, he starts every day with a prayer, but in 2002 he was charged with 14 counts of child pornography. The trial is scheduled for May of this year.
“Despite how small his star may fade,” concludes Brown, on a note of consolation, “he does shine bright and divine on millions of lives that otherwise would have had no one to inspire or remind them that, at heart, we are all God’s children.” On second thought, the proper redactor of the R. Kelly story might not be Goldman but rather Nick Tosches, whose 1982 Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story reads like a bulletin from the brink of damnation: “The booze and the pills stirred the hell within him and made him to utter hideous peals. At times he withdrew into his own shadow, brooding upon all manner of things — abominable, unutterable, and worse. At times he stalked and ranted in foul omnipotence, commanding those about him as Belial his minions.” Remember: bring God into your unauthorized bio, and you’ll be bringing in His old buddy the Devil, too.
The witch in the ditch
But let’s stop going on about Albert Goldman. On the tangled field of unauthorized rock biography, have there been no triumphs outside his? There have, of course. Scott Robinson’s Yes Tales: An Unauthorized Biography of Rock’s Most Cosmic Band, in Limerick Form performs exactly as advertised. Thus a paragraph describing the entry into the band of guitarist Steve Howe, “a fierce performer with an almost feral energy,” is succinctly recapped as follows:
Late of Bodast, Tomorrow, In-Crowd,
Axe-man Howe arrived, entered, and bowed
He could solo for days
And avoid all clichés
And in spite of this, wasn’t as loud.
Craig Bromberg’s The Wicked Ways of Malcolm McLaren (1989) is a success of a different order — a forensic, undeceived account of a master bullshitter. McLaren — libertine, impresario, red-herring merchant, and one-man culture virus — masterminded the Sex Pistols, Bow Wow Wow, and the late-stage New York Dolls. He gave Adam Ant the Apache stripe across his nose. He’s a trickster, and would doubtless love his biography to be full of obnoxious fictions. But Bromberg brings down his quarry with the snares of truth, tapping nearly 200 sources to get things straight; he even does a bit of shoe-leather reporting, very rare for the genre, tracking down McLaren’s estranged mother in a London suburb and attempting to give her a bunch of flowers. “Go away,” she says. “Just go away. I have nothing to say about him.”
We’ll end, though, with an image from Fred Vermorel’s The Secret History of Kate Bush (And the Strange Art of Pop), from 1983: a work of mystical genealogy in which the spoor of Kate’s inspiration is hunted back through time, through the mist, into her witchy pre-Christian origins. (“Kate Bush is our goddess Frig,” he writes. “And like the Saxons we both revere and fear her. Shroud her in the mystery of her power and the power of her mystery.”) Vermorel, an art-school pal and occasional co-conspirator of McLaren, conducted no interviews at all for this book. Instead, he went clambering up the trunk of the Bush family tree, to wobble in speculation among its most etiolated boughs: Aluric Busch (11th century), Henry del Busk (13th century), Roland atte Bush (14th century), and John Bush, “Kate’s first certain ancestor,” born in 1769. John begat Henry, a boozy laborer in a bowler hat who staggered homeward on the night of December 2, 1872, missed his path, and drowned in a ditch. “I found that ditch,” declares Vermorel. “And one December evening in 1981 I recreated the incident.”
