I've read a bunch of rock autobiographies lately. I mentioned Ozzy's about a year ago. These autobiographies are like reading history for me; people who have contributed to the music background of my life and hearing their perspective in kind of their own voice. Aside from Ozzy, I've read Keith Richards' "Life", Sting's "Broken Music" and I'm currently reading Steven Tyler's "Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?".

Keith's book renewed interest in the Rolling Stones for me. I was fine with the Rolling Stones until the Tattoo You album, after which I think I felt the Stones lost their relevance and I thereafter didn't pay attention to them even when critics were reporting a "return to form" after the 80s ended. Growing up, I liked all the Stones repertoire played on radio and I bought a bunch of LPs from the 70s and wasn't blown away. A lot of filler on the albums, I thought. Looking back I probably just bought the wrong albums.

If you buy a band's great albums, you can then accept their lesser output. But if you buy their so-so albums first, you don't get the momentum to discover their best albums. So I bought Goats Head Soup, It's Only Rock and Roll, Some Girls, Love You Live and of course Tattoo you and Emotional Rescue which were released when I was old enough to be buying albums. I didn't buy Exiles on Main Street, Beggar's Banquet, Let It Bleed or Sticky Fingers. Anyone familiar with the Rolling Stones catalog can probably look at that list and see I missed the great, classic albums and understand why I failed to appreciate them through the rot of their 80s output, a period characterized by public feuding between Mick and Keith. Privately, they rarely even recorded in the studio at the same time, if ever.

It's no literary masterpiece. Actually, it's a total mess with the timeline scattered and many stories and anecdotes placed haphazardly out of context, but that's not the point. What makes it a great read is that it's Keith Fucking Richards, and if real rock and roll or the Rolling Stones are anywhere in your background, it's kind of a must-read. The thing is over 600 pages and if I end up back in the States, I'll probably buy it and read it again with their musical catalog cued up for when relevant songs and albums come up.

I didn't expect much from Sting's autobiography and I wasn't disappointed. The Police are legendary, but I was never impressed by Sting's personality or arrogance. I gave it to him that he was a brilliant songwriter, one of the great pioneer rock bassists who deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Paul McCartney, and I credited him to be of above average intelligence.

I expected the book to be pretentious and full of himself. It was written after he was only 50 years old and no where near the end of his career nor when he was old enough to have the reflection or levity to be some definitive life statement. But the most surprising aspect of his book was how poorly written it was and the shocking use of high school-grade metaphor.

I think he even (pretentiously) admits that he was trying to be a writer, drawing on his own life as the source material for a literary work. And it's for most part, really, really boring. I figured out too late that most of the first half of the book should be mercilessly skimmed and ignored. Inconsequential anecdotes from some random person's early life (not unlike this blog, but I'm neither famous nor getting paid for this pure vanity project).

The only interesting part of the book for me is when he talks about the formation and early days of the Police and that back story, and that takes up a good part of the book, and then the story suddenly ends with the U.S. tour of Outlandos d'Amour, their first album. The bulk of the Police years are not mentioned, which indicates he had nothing to add to what had already been plumbed through the media through the years.

That book is the worst of the bunch for me, but I'm not a Sting fan. Just as he once emphasized, after an interviewer referred to "Police songs", that they weren't Police songs but his songs played by the Police, I'm a Police fan, not a Sting fan.

The only thing that made an impression on me was the idea that he is not a happy person. Fame and fortune hasn't brought him happiness and he admits that at the center of his being is an unhappy person that was probably formed in his early life. It doesn't change just by superficial success. If the inconsequential anecdotes of his early life are of any worth, I'd glean that his lifelong unhappiness was caused, perhaps innocently, by his parents, as well as modern, post-war life and economies. As a person, I also appreciate that certain depth to him and can hardly fault him that.

Steven Tyler's autobiography is easily the best and most entertaining of the bunch. Unlike Keith's book, it sounds like Tyler's voice, whereas if you hear Keith talk, the book sounds like nothing what would come out of his mouth. He doesn't talk as coherently as the voice in the book, and the book isn't all that coherent. 

But befitting the primary driving creative force of Aerosmith, Tyler is also a great writer and communicator of his ideas. He's funny and candid, doesn't hide his pubescent boy sense of humor that only a rock star is allowed to carry on the rest of his life, and tells it like it was, the good, the bad and the horny.

I'm not a huge Aerosmith fan. I liked their hits, thought a lot of their albums were filler, and like the Stones I ignored them after the 80s rot settled in with guitarists Joe Perry and Brad Whitford leaving the band for a few years. Unlike the Stones, I did notice when they came back with distinctive and worthy hits, but like the Stones I also considered them irrelevant in my youthful perspective, compared to new music that was coming out (alt rock which led to 90s rock and indie rock).

I was moved by Richards's book and I am being moved by Tyler's. Although Richards' perhaps more so because of the span of the legend of the Rolling Stones. There's a joie de vivre in a rampant, decadent rock and roll life, one that I may have dreamed about as a teenager; one that in retrospect I would never have wanted nor been able to handle. But I recognized that spark of what drives you when that spark is music. I guess I didn't want it enough. I didn't work hard enough at it. And though music remains the last love of my life now, inexplicably in superficial, corporate manufactured K-pop, I'm glad I have the bedrock of appreciation of something real.

Steven Tyler, on the other hand, I'm appreciating him as a human being. Someone down-to-earth, passionate and honest with himself, even regarding all his faults in his rock and roll past and lifestyle. I don't know how to explain it. He is a spiritual person and is in contact with the unseen life energy that gives our world meaning. Not enlightened in the sense of transcending it in recognition of a completely different "reality", he is still very much in contact with the perceptual world, but he sees the channel, the bridge.

He comes across to me as an exceptional human being.