I discovered this good site to illegally download books and have been on a rock’n’roll binge the past month or so. Trouble Boys is hands down the best rock bio I’ve read so far, and I would say that even if the Replacements hadn’t been my favorite band since 15. Bob Mehr interviews every girlfriend, high school buddy, roadie, and relative in their fucked up families to give an exhaustive but fascinating portrait - only the Beatles have had their biographies pored over so minutely. It’s a long read but well worth it; I just finished it tonight. An average listener, after hearing the Replacements, would shake their head in wonder and ask, “How in holy fuck did this band not become as huge as R.E.M.?” I knew the answer to that already, but for those who don’t: alcohol is a helluva drug. The nadir is them hanging around before a show with their girlfriends, being nice and pacing around nervously on edge, and as soon as their girls are safely gone, pouring Jack Daniels in dog bowls and lapping the entire bottle up.

Two things I hate about Paul, one of which I knew, one of which I didn’t:

1) Paul tells a 15 year old, 9th grade Tommy, when the possibility of a nationwide tour will interfere with his education, which the band have worked around so far by only playing local gigs: “Either you drop out of school or we find a new bass player.”

2) The infamous one. Bob Stinson, coming off court-mandated rehab. He’d beat his wife during one of his manic episodes and she did the right thing by immediately calling the cops. She dropped the charges so he didn’t need to go to jail, but on the condition that he get serious help. Bob gets clean for the first time since he was 13 - 3 weeks with no drugs or booze.

On stage, a drunk Paul pops a cork of champagne that hits Bob’s eye, and tells him, “Take a drink, motherfucker, or get off my stage.”

Also, Chris Mars found his first real girlfriend in 1988. The boys all got married within a one year span of each other, perhaps too hastily. They felt that they needed to stop being worthless drunks and find maturity in stable relationships. Tommy finally learning how to grow up and live like a normal human being for the first time in his life at 27, by being forced by child support payments to work at a call center (the only place that’ll hire a high school dropout with no job experience) was an interesting postscript, for all the handful of months it lasted. I had no idea that he became Axl’s right hand man during the recording of Chinese Democracy - and they both hated each other’s bands!

Next up is probably We Got the Neutron Bomb! an oral history of L.A. punk. Even though X and some of Black Flag are the only bands from that scene that I actually care much about. Decline & Fall is still a classic movie for Fear alone. If I enjoy that then I might pick up that Germs book you recommended, even though I really hate that band. But hell, I also downloaded The Dirt because it’s supposedly the most debauched, over the top, insane rock bio ever, and I hate Motley Crue far worse. I read the writer Neil Strauss’ The Game about PUAs in 3 days despite it being 500 pages, so I figure The Dirt will be a fast read, anyway.

I already read Please Kill Me on NYC Punk, This Band Could Be Your Life on American indie, and more than one book on London punk quite a few years ago. If you’ve never read it, The Boy Looked At Johnny is the funniest, most wrongheaded, vicious, and petty-spirited book of rock criticism ever written. Allegedly written by Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons in less than a week on speed in 1978 and rushing by at less than 100 pages, it’s as close as anyone got to the printed equivalent of the punk scene they ostensibly covered. After ruthlessly assassinating the four main punk pretenders to the Pistols’ throne - the Clash, Damned, Jam, Stranglers - and then every New York band in a fervently anti-American tirade (the Ramones are labeled ‘retard rock’, Television are a boring hippie jam band, the Heads are nerdsy preppies, Johnny’s gonna die, and Debbie Harry is - worst of all - 30!), they hold up....the Tom Robinson Band as the future of rock’n’roll. It’s probably the best book on that London punk scene, written while the scene was still active.