Le Freak, by Nile Rodgers

The prolific American hit maker tells his story.

Legendary musician, songwriter and producer Nile Rodgers - famous in equal measure for all three skills - tells about his unusual upbringing, drug use and various famous names he has produced. Rodgers' hardscrabble upbringing wouldn't have marked him out for success. When his career did take off, beginning with a string of hits with his band Chic, followed by writing and producing mega hit albums for Diana Ross and Sister Sledge, his addiction issues threatened to derail his career at any minute. Near death experiences didn't get him off addictive substances, but rather the humiliating experience of having a fellow musician tape a performance when Rodgers was totally stoned. When he saw the footage, he knew it was time to get off the drugs. 

Fans of Rodgers' biggest hits will find much to enjoy in this candid autobiography. A lot of time is spent on Madonna's Like a Virgin album, and David Bowie's Let's Dance, with guest appearances from a host of other big names. As a B52s fan, I would have liked to have read something about Cosmic Thing and Good Stuff, two albums he produced in the late 80s and early 90s. But you can't have it all.

Face It: A Memoir, by Debbie Harry

Self-created pop and rock icon Debbie Harry tells her story in this punchy memoir.

Debbie Harry was at the centre of New York's 1970s punk scene. It was a time of frenetic creative energy, when musicians and artists maintained a vibrant street life and everyone seemed to know everyone, one way or another.

During the 70s Debbie Harry was trying to form an identity and artistic persona, immersing herself in art, fashion and music, hurtling herself forward, as she writes it, and trying to survive. When she met musician Chris Stein they became immediate friends and artistic collaborators. Together they created Blondie, recruited other band mates, and wrote a string of hits. Blondie sold millions of records, but due to dodgy management they were deeply in debt by the time the band broke up. Debbie would eventually resurface as a solo artist, survive drug dependency and agree to re-forming Blondie in the 1990s.

Face It has been pieced together from a series of interviews with music journalist Sylvie Simmons. As a consequence it has a punchy, direct quality. There isn't much in the way of deep introspection or reflection, although Harry is often candid and revealing. She openly discusses sex, drug use and risky living. Her philosophy of life is to keep surviving and creating and pushing forward. Mistakes are often made, it's a part of living, but not worth dwelling on.

For Blondie fans, there's lots of fascinating information about how the band's classic albums were made and the meaning behind some of the songs. One lovely aspect of the book is Harry's continued closeness to Chris Stein. As she maintains, they started out as friends and it is that close bond that has held them together over the decades, even once they parted as lovers.
​
Part scrap book (Face It is jam packed with photos and fan art) and part memoir, Debbie Harry gives her own unique twist on music, sex, drugs and 70s New York. It's a survivor's tale, told by an adopted child who never met her parents, someone who has come to accept life's highs and lows with equanimity. 

Face It: A Memoir, by Debbie Harry. HarperCollins $45. 

First published October 2019 at northmelbournebooks.com.au

So What: The Life of Miles Davis, by John Szwed

I’m getting the impression that these jazz biographies written by academic jazz professors are less biography and more just a collection of authoritative musings. The last book of this type I read was a biography of Ella Fitzgerald, which was dry and a bit of a disappointment. This book comes close. You wonder if these writers on jazz experience any kind of ecstasy when listening to the music, because it doesn’t come out in their prose.

John Szwed, who is a professor at Yale University, writes well enough. And he is thorough in all the information he gives you about the recordings of Miles Davis, peppering the text with lots of fascinating bits and pieces of information. Yet the way it is all presented is rather lacklustre. Why not allow yourself some enthusiasm for what you write about?

Interspersed between the academic mini-biographies of Davis's albums, there are biographical details of Davis’s actual life: the women, drugs, health problems etc. Indeed, half way through the book there’s an unnumbered chapter (between chapters five and six) simply called Interlude where the author writes about Miles Davis’s personality, with no musical references whatsoever.

This is the odd thing about So What, and why I guess you walk away feeling that the book is lacking some human essence. So What for the greater part examines the discography of Miles Davis, but does it in a kind of quarantine from Miles Davis the man. To me it had always seemed that the biographer has the job of trying to explain the music by the life, and vice versa. Usually both intermingle in a pleasant way that provides meaning for the reader.

It’s not all bad though. Running to 400 pages, there has to be quite a bit of biographical detail, and for Davis nuts, you’re going to find lots of details that you probably didn’t know of. There are also some fascinating quotes from friends and colleagues of Davis, who do their bit to psychoanalyse him.

Needless to say, Miles Davis was an extraordinarily complex man. Someone who was very, very enigmatic and mysterious, even, I would dare venture, to himself. He was full of paradoxes and contradictions. Painfully shy, yet extroverted. Someone who abused women, but needed them to mother him. You get to the end of this biography and realise that you have to be satisfied with not knowing what really drove Miles Davis to make the music he did. Perhaps the only answer is to listen to the music to try and find the answer there.

This book was not so bad, it’s just that I would expect a book on Miles Davis, a major twentieth century artist, to be a page turner. Could you imagine Picasso or Hitchcock getting such a prim and rigid biography of their life and achievements?

Kate Bush: The Biography, by Rob Jovanovic

Ms. Bush did not agree to be interviewed for this short 200 page biography, not that I can imagine she would have had anything more to say than she has in media interviews over the past 30 years (well, you could probably minus a decade or so for her silent patches inbetween albums.)

I’m quite partial to these pop music biographies where the author stands back and prefers to let the extensive quotes speak for themselves.

Bush has of course led a very private life, the opposite ambition of most young up and coming ‘artists’. Indeed, the opening track of her long awaited 2005 album Aerial was about the vanity of fame. I loved that line, ‘why does someone fill up their house with priceless junk’.

The reality is her day-to-day life is probably quite uneventful, like most people. She was in a long relationship with bassist Del Palmer, which ended amicbly. She had a son, Bertie, with whom she is especially smitten, and now enjoys her time as a mother. What other biographical details could we possibly find out about Kate Bush?

Hence most of this book is really a biography of Bush’s albums. To this reader, it's very interesting for that alone.

This is not a knockout biography, but for its modest aims it does very well. It’s nicely written and doesn’t fawn over Bush’s oeuvre.

If you’ve recently taken an interest in Kate Bush’s music, or have dabbled in her discography over the years, then I’m sure you’ll find this a fascinating read of a fascinating artist. If you’re a hard core Bush fan, who know the artist’s career back to front, you may find only a few of your gaps filled in.

Ella Fitzgerald, by Stuart Nicholson

This bio of the most swinging of all jazz singers is dullsville. The subject being Ella, I presumed even the most half hearted book on her would have to be a fun read.

Author Stuart Nicholson is more of a jazz scholar, and that’s probably what bogged down this book. Ella the woman is barely touched upon. Perhaps fair enough, considering how private she was. What you get with this book is more of a biography of Ella’s recorded works, from her early years with Chick Webb, through her Decca recordings, then onto Norman Granz and the Verve years.

Having said that the book is an uninspiring read, I agreed with a lot of what the author had to say about Ella’s singing. Ella’s recordings can often be quite anodyne; they can almost put you to sleep. She’s such a perfect singer, with that famous crystal clear diction and breathtaking technique, that style often triumphs over content.

As some critics have noted, Ella never really internalised the lyrics of the songs she sang. Hence there is a bit of a ‘disconnect’ between her singing and the lyrical content of a song. No wonder she seemed happy to sing just about any song.

For example, the recording of the famous Verve American songbook series was produced like a line of sausages out of a factory. Often Ella would learn the songs just the night before recording them. Hence the quote by Sylvia Syms at the beginning of chapter eleven, ‘I don’t think anyone would accuse Ella of having an intellectual relationship with the lyrics of her songs.’

On the other hand, when Ella hit her stride boy could she swing. It’s on those records that you marvel at Ella’s extraordinary art. In essence, she was a happy singer, a singer of life’s joys.

One positive I did get out the book was Stuart Nicholson’s defence of Ella’s early output for the Decca label. This period is often derided as being full of dross. Ella recorded lots of novelty songs at Decca, with a keen commercial eye on making as many hits as possible. (She sold some 22 million records for the company). Interestingly, it’s during her time at Decca that she also wrote a lot of her own hits.

The later part of her career went the way of most has-been singers: she started recording lots of inappropriate material, just to stay ‘hip’ and with the times. Would you believe that Ella even wanted to record the theme song to the Australian soap Neighbours? She told London’s Evening Standard that she had heard the song on British television. (Ella was a soapie junkie.)

My feeling is that you’d have to be a pretty hardcore fan to read this biography. Shoot me, but I like to read biographies because I find that they’re lively and gossipy and so human. Or that they offer compelling insights.

This biography is dry and dutiful and serious, so unlike Ella at her best. Forget the book and get yourself a copy of Ella Swings Gently with Nelson Riddle.

Lush Life, a biography of Billy Strayhorn by David Hajdu

A short, elegant biography of composer and musician Billy Strayhorn.

I first learnt about Strayhorn as a teenager, after buying Donna Summer’s 1981 self titled album. This was after she quit working with Giorgio Moroder. A double album made with him, called I’m a Rainbow, was shelved in favour of her doing an album with Quincy Jones.

The last track on that Quincy Jones album is Donna’s version of the Strayhorn classic Lush Life.

Amazingly, Strayhorn says he wrote most of the song while still in his teens. Apparently, he never wrote the song down on paper, and it was only discovered when he was performing it for friends. Norman Granz, founder of Verve, was amongst that audience who heard Strayhorn perform Lush Life. The lyrics of the song have an extraordinary world weariness, written by someone far too experienced in the disappointments of love and romance. It’s hard to believe that Strayhorn was so young when he wrote this song. The lyrics are worth quoting in full:

I used to visit all the very gay places,
Those come what may places
Where one relaxes on the axis
Of the wheel of life
To get the feel of life
From jazz and cocktails.

The girls I knew had sad and sullen faces
With distingue traces
That used to be there, you could see where
They’d been washed away
By too many through the day
Twelve o’clock tales.

Then you came along with your siren song
To tempt me to madness
I thought for a while that your poignant smile
Was tinged with the sadness of a great love for me.
Ah yes, I was wrong,
Again, I was wrong.

Life is lonely again
And only last year
Everything seemed so sure.
Now life is awful again,
A trough full of heart
Could only be a bore.

A week in Paris will ease the bite of it.
All I care is to smile in spite of it.
I’ll forget you, I will
While yet you are still
Burning inside my brain.

Romance is mush
Stifling those who strive.
I’ll live a lush life in some small dive
And there I’ll be while I rot with the rest
Of those whose lives are lonely, too.

Billy Strayhorn was a gay black artist at an unpropitious time. This is one of the reasons Strayhorn was so content (or appeared content, most of the time), to work either uncredited or under credited with Duke Ellington for some 25 years. Too much attention focused on Strayhorn as a band leader and artist would have begged questions about his personal life.

However, there are glimpses in this biography where Strayhorn does seem a bit miffed at the lack of credit he got for his quiet contributions to the Duke Ellington oeuvre. When Strayhorn’s name was used on a record as band leader, while Ellington actually did the musical side, Strayhorn quipped, ‘So now I lead the band and Ellington writes the music.’

Strayhorn, astonishingly, only made one record, The Peaceful Side. It was recorded in six hours and only sold a few thousand copies.

This is a terrific biography of someone who should have a much bigger profile in the world of music, or perhaps you should more often see in print not only Duke Ellington’s name, but rather Ellington / Strayhorn.

Strayhorn died of cancer at the age of 51. Besides being an artist and musician, he was also an aesthete (an expert on Shakespeare), a cook and an activist in the civil rights movement. He was great friends with Lena Horne.