By Rev. John of PCLIVE!

The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rockstar
By Nikki Sixx
Pocket Books (9/18/07)
ISBN 0-743486-28-5
432 pages

One of the most memorable moments from VH1’s Behind the Music was Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx telling the story of his out-of-body experience. He had just overdosed, was presumed dead, yet revived at the last minute… and he saw all this from above. What BTM doesn’t tell you was that Slash from Guns N’ Roses was with him at the time. It doesn’t tell you of the chaos amongst his bandmates wondering if he was alive or not. It also doesn’t tell you the depression and drug addiction that haunted Sixx in the year preceding this most recent overdose. These are all some of the things Nikki shares with gruesome detail in The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rockstar.

The Heroin Diaries is a journal Nikki started on Christmas Day 1986 to, among other reasons, remember what he had done the day before. This was a fascinating entry point for me personally because it was right before the writing and recording of the Girls, Girls, Girls! album and was my introduction to Mötley Crüe. Twelve-year-old me looked at the band as the coolest on the planet, and even planned to use “Wild Side” when I made my debut as a pro wrestler (don’t laugh, I was twelve). Thirty-two-year-old me was surprised to read just how depressed and suicidal Nikki was at the time.

I was even more surprised to read that “Wild Side” was actually a bastardization of The Lord’s Prayer, and inspired by his friend’s daughter, a seventeen-year-old Catholic school girl who used to stop by between classes for reasons that had nothing to do with prayer (though, she may have still been on her knees).

The twenty-year difference between discovering the band and reading The Heroin Diaries now is the most interesting aspect of the book. As a kid growing up in the ’80s, Shout at the Devil back patch in all, The Crüe were gods. They rocked. They partied. They had all the girls. This was the life you wanted to live. This was what it was all about.

Who knew that, while we were idolizing the man, Nikki Sixx was sitting on the floor in the closet in his bedroom, alone, shooting up as much heroin as he could get his hands on and wanting to die? The lifestyle we all grew up wanting as teenagers suddenly stopped looking so glamorous. It actually looks pretty sad.

That was 1987 for Nikki Sixx. Throughout the recording and touring of Girls, Girls, Girls!, that was his life. Save for fifteen days in May when he was clean and sober (except for the alcohol and the cocaine), it was doing as much drugs as he needed to just to make it through the day. There was still the debauchery you would expect; he was a rockstar after all. But at the end of the day there was just a junkie all alone, both physically and emotionally.

The Diaries aren’t all about the drugs. Nikki also went into his feelings about the recording industry, all the other bands that were biting off of The Crüe’s style, his management, and even his bandmates. I also had no idea that Slash was a friend of his from before Appetite for Destruction was released. There was a day in August when Axl Rose had actually called Nikki to tell him that Slash was all “strung out” and wanted to know if Nikki could help him or say something to him. Think about that one.

If it sounds like I’m down on him, I’m not. I’m still a Mötley Crüe fan, and even more so of Nikki personally. Even when you strip away all the bells and whistles that go along with being one of the biggest bands in the world, there’s a guy who remains passionate about what he does, and more importantly, remains passionate about music.

But he didn’t publish these diaries to say “look at me and look how cool it was to be in Mötley Crüe”—he published them for the future rockers and/or junkies as a guide book of what not to do. He’s been there and done that. He knows all the excuses and he knows all the tricks. He’s also lucky to be alive. The Heroin Diaries is his way of telling people not to make the same mistakes.

Rating:

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon
By Crystal Zevon
Ecco/HarperCollins (5/1/07)
ISBN 0-060763-45-9
480 pages
Available at Amazon.com

This review came about for a rather peculiar reason. I was essentially dared into it. Let me explain…

One Friday evening, I was headed home from the day job with barely enough time to shower, change and head to the night job when I stopped into Barnes and Noble. While perusing the stacks, my phone rings. It’s Flea. Just to clarify things, this is the Flea from Pulse Wrestling, not the bassist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers (I do have to remember what section I’m writing in, so that clarification is necessary). I’m not that well-connected, folks. So, our conversation eventually turns to the fact that I’m shopping in Barnes and Noble, and he’s asking me whether there’s anything good out literature-wise. Well, I’m in the biography section, and I notice I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon. I pick it up, quickly page through it, and tell Flea, “Well, there’s a new oral-history biography of Warren Zevon done by his ex-wife. Looks interesting.”

I didn’t really expect Flea’s reaction. “Oh, not f*ckin’ Warren Zevon. Goddamn, I hate him. Fuckin’ ‘Werewolves of London’…” It took me back a little. If anyone would be a Zevon fan, I thought, it’d be Flea. He likes iconoclastic artists like Zevon. Besides, Zevon was a drunk, Flea’s a drunk, and you can connect the dots. Then I thought about it for a second. I could see where Fleabag was coming from regarding “Werewolves of London”. It’s one of those truly great songs that you end up hating because it’s played at saturation level on rock radio; I’ve heard it three times this week alone on two different stations. It’s in good company though, sitting right next to “Freebird”, “Roundabout”, “Light My Fire”, “Comfortably Numb” and pretty much everything from the Led Zeppelin catalog (seriously, when a Zep song comes on the radio, I switch the station unless the song in question is “Kashmir” or “Immigrant Song”). So, I knew I needed to counter this a bit, and I decided to… well, draw blood, as the man said in that song. “Dude, ‘Lawyers, Guns and Money’.” “Well, I’ll give you that one,” was Flea’s response. At this point, I knew I needed to purchase this book, and I needed to review it.

This book came about in a way almost as unusual as this review. When Warren was diagnosed with the mesothelioma that would kill him at 56, he wanted his story told. The only person he trusted to do this was, of all people, his ex-wife Crystal. His rationale was very Zevon-like: Crystal had seen the absolute worst of him, and he knew that she wouldn’t sugar-coat him and turn him into some sort of plaster saint. She took on the obligation to do so, with full credit to her. Reliving those days must have been painful for her.

However, she decided on the perfect format to ensure that personal bias wouldn’t creep in on her part. She chose to do the book in the oral-history fashion that was given legitimacy in rock writing by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain in their magnificent history of New York Punk, Please Kill Me. Crystal used quotes from published interviews, personal interviews, magazine articles, and various and sundry reminiscences to assemble her ex-husband’s history in a highly readable, understandable format, never dwelling too much on any one segment of his life, even the end of it.

The format helps here, because a prose telling of Zevon’s life would bring one to the conclusion that even the oral-history version makes hard to avoid: he was, to put it nicely, a complete and utter asshole. An extremely talented asshole, but an asshole nonetheless. He was miserable to deal with, drunk or sober, and extremely demanding on everyone who entered his life. Yet, somehow, everyone ended up loving him, even the people he used, treating his personality as just something to deal with in order to get to the talent that burst from him.

Zevon was born in Chicago to a Jewish mid-level gangster and a Mormon waitress twenty years younger than him. The family eventually made it to California, and through those trips, Warren’s talent for music appeared at an early age. It was so evident that his youth was disregarded; when he met Stravinsky at the age of 13, the great composer treated him with fully adult respect and encouraged his talent. He got out of Fresno at an early age and wandered to San Francisco just before the hippie boom hit, forming a proto-psychedelic folk duo and calling himself stephen lyme (lower-case spelling courtesy of e e cummings). He had a full understanding of the importance of image at that age, making sure that “lyme” had an affection for anything colored green. He started to make friends on the West Coast rock scene, becoming close to Howard Kaylan of The Turtles, among others. Kaylan convinced The Turtles to put a Zevon composition on the flip-side of “Happy Together”, and Warren had his first success in the business.

But his career didn’t progress rapidly. He had a failed solo album come out in 1970, which was enough to get him the attention of the Everly Brothers, who hired him as keyboardist and musical director. Zevon ended up hiring Waddy Wachtel long before he became one of the leading guitarists-for-hire in rock for the Everlys, starting a fruitful creative relationship. While working for the Everlys, whether together or solo, he got to meet and make friends with Jackson Browne and Lindsey Buckingham (pre-Fleetwood Mac), and through them, the cream of the West Coast scene. It was Browne that would end up pressuring David Geffen for years to sign Zevon to Asylum Records. After all, Asylum artists like Linda Rondstadt were recording Zevon songs, so it was a natural. Geffen resisted, but finally gave in. His first solo release for Asylum wasn’t a real financial success, but critics fell over each other giving it praise. It would be his second Asylum album, Excitable Boy, that would prove to be the breakthrough.

Fortunately for Flea and people like him, the reminiscences regarding “Werewolves of London” are not too plentiful, only appropriate for a song that everyone agrees took fifteen minutes to write. Unfortunately, the format doesn’t apply itself well to reminiscences of any song in particular. One does wish for a little more detail, but Zevon was such a phenomenal lyricist that one can imagine that everything came so easy to him that he or anyone else didn’t really dwell on where the inspiration came from. As a lyricist, though, he was definitely ahead of his time, and Excitable Boy proves it. “Werewolves of London” is post-modern kitsch long before that concept became cool. “Laywers, Guns and Money”, in one line, perfectly anticipates the ’80s: “Bring lawyers, guns and money; the shit has hit the fan”. It took his friend Jackson Browne five more years to come up with something nearly as good and incisive with “Lawyers in Love”, and even then, people missed the point of that song. With Zevon, you always knew.

It was during this period, though, that Zevon’s worst tendencies were starting to come out. He had broken up with the mother of his son Jordan to marry Crystal, and they ended up having a daughter, Ariel. Zevon, though, plowed himself into two separate directions that took him away from his family: into his work, and into the bottle. SoCal Rock was front-loaded with Cocaine Cowboys at the time, and Zevon was regarded as the rowdiest of the breed, behavior that later commended him to Hunter Thompson as part of the musical contingent of Gonzo (Zevon’s gun fetish alone will give you chills reading about it). The alcohol abuse broke up his marriage, and then Zevon established his track record as a serial monogamist, getting together and then breaking up with women when they started to bore him. He became alienated from his children. The booze also took a toll on his musical career. Geffen ended up dropping him from Asylum, then signed him when he created Geffen Records, then ended up dropping him again. Zevon became more and more dependent on help from friends and fans, like the members of R.E.M., in order to sustain a career that was only kept going through a repetitive tour sequence that guaranteed him an audience. It took him until the mid-’80s to start drying up, and the process took repeated trips to rehab and a nearly-unhealthy dependence on Alcoholics Anonymous. He ended up stopping his AA meetings when he discovered his sponsor was addicted to heroin, but he stayed off the booze, a testament to his willpower.

But the talent didn’t dry up. His lyrics were always of high caliber, and he kept attracting famous fans who’d help him, like David Letterman, who relied on Zevon when Paul Shaffer needed a vacation. When he was diagnosed with the disease that would kill him, his fans came out in droves, and he did have a habit of making fans and friends in unusual ways. For instance, he developed symptoms of OCD. Instead of it being a drawback, it became a way to bond with a neighbor of his who also had OCD. The neighbor in question was a then-unknown Billy Bob Thornton, who stayed friends with Zevon until the end of his life. Reading this book, you get the impression that Warren Zevon was the luckiest man in showbiz. Every time he’d fall, and he’d keep falling and falling, someone would be there to pick him up, allowing his ability and talent to be shown to anyone who’d listen. That tendency was kept alive until the end. He’d fallen back into alcoholism when he received his death sentence, but the news that he’d try to get in one more album before the end brought his coterie out to help him, including Bruce Springsteen. The Wind might have been Zevon’s greatest statement, an album that told everyone, “You might not have listened when I was alive, but listen now, and you’re gonna miss me after this.”

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead is a fast-paced trip through the life of an enigmatic rock star, one who was truly upset that most of his peer group achieved greater success than he did but rarely showed it. As Crystal promised, there’s no sugar-coating here. Zevon is shown in his most despicable light. In fact, he may be portrayed as too despicable at times. That sense is aggravated a bit by a lack of explanation for any of his activities. Zevon went through life in a No Apologies mode, and his friends and the contributors to this book understand that and accept it, and don’t try to attempt to explain him.

That may be this book’s greatest failing. When you’re confronted with a protagonist such as this, some explanations would be welcome. There’s no real justification for anything he did that’s apparaent on the surface. Joe Strummer, for instance, ended up rejecting life because he felt that life had rejected him, a conclusion he developed at the age of nine that stayed with him for the remaining forty-one years of his life. Zevon came from a broken home with parents that didn’t really give him the attention he deserved, and ended up growing up in a soul-crushing place like Fresno, but that doesn’t explain everything. He was someone who used and abused people until they gave up on him, but he’d end up attracting those people back. He definitely had the knack of making friends and keeping them for extended periods of time. And he knew how to use those connections. It was his relationship with Lindsey Buckingham, combined with his reputation, that explains the fact that the rhythm section on “Werewolves of London” is Mick Fleetwood and John McVie. He was even able to use people after he was dead, like he did with Crystal and this book.

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, though, encapsulates the experience of what it was like to know Warren Zevon. It shows why people were attracted to him, some of them knowing going into the relationship that it would turn out to be a disaster. People were willing to put up with all of the nonsense because they knew that there was a talent in there that needed to be expressed, and they were willing to do anything to help it come out. No, he definitely isn’t displayed here as a plaster saint. But to those of us who follow in his behavioral footsteps, Warren Zevon is certainly a patron saint. If you can’t bring lawyers, guns, and money to this show, just give yourself a little sentimental hygeine and cry out an “aah-ooh” as you read this. It’s definitely worth your time. You can sleep when you’re dead.

Rating:

Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer
By Chris Salewicz
Faber & Faber (5/15/07)
ISBN 0-571211-78-X
640 pages
Available At Amazon.com

The question still rings out like a challenge and accusation across three decades: “Where were you in ‘77?” If you worked for one of the three major British weekly music papers, the answer to that is simple: you were in bed with The Clash. The championing of punk by the papers when it was still an underground movement the previous year refined itself after the Grundy Incident and national exposure down to the championing of the one group that was considered acceptable by everyone, including record companies. After all, no other punk group got a one-hundred-thousand-pound advance to sign to a major. It was safe to promote The Clash as the vanguard of New Music, and the reporters covering punk pitched in with an enthusiasm that can be seen given the time separation as downright embarrassing.

(As usual, one of those reporters, Caroline Coon, took it one step further and decided to turn metaphor into reality. The woman who came up with the Do It Yourself ethos decided to follow it, using Paul Simonon as a walking sex toy in an attempt to relive her radical youth. She’d even end up managing The Clash for a brief period.)

One of the worst offenders of the journalistic credo of separating yourself from what you cover was Chris Salewicz. His articles in the New Musical Express on The Clash were always the most enthusiastic. As such, he developed a deep and lasting friendship with the members of the group, one that still exists to this day. This is not to say that Salewicz was deficient as a journalist. He did his job, and he did it well given the particular necessities of the time. But I was taught that it wasn’t a journalist’s job to be a cheerleader. It’s something that’s informed my writing to this day, and, yes, I do get uncomfortable with some of the writers on this site who don’t follow that principle. Objectivity is a virtue, after all.

However, Salewicz has been able to use his deficiencies to his advantage, writing a number of books on subjects that he has been personally enthused about, and doing so in an engaging way. His latest work takes him back to The Clash, and an attempt to get a hold on one of the most enigmatic of punk performers, Joe Strummer. Salewicz apparently considers it a badge of honor that people have told him that he was the only journalist that Strummer “trusted”. Those admissions at the beginning of Redemption Song: The Ballad Of Joe Strummer left me a bit queasy. Biography-as-encomium is a genre that leaves me cold. I detest books that set up their subject as some sort of plaster saint. Salewicz doesn’t do that here, but it’s not for lack of trying.

The attempt starts on the cover. The subtitle of the book is “The Definitive Biography”. At that point, Salewicz paints himself into a corner. The definitive book on British punk has long been written—Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming. The definitive book on The Clash has also long been written—Marcus Grey’s Last Gang in Town. Of course, Savage’s story ends in 1991, and Grey’s in 1995. It’s no coincidence that the strongest portions of Redemption Song are those that focus on Strummer after Grey’s book ends, dealing with his time with the Mescaleros, as he tried to revive a career in the doldrums.

The story of the man that became Joe Strummer is a rather simple one. Born as the younger of two sons of a member of the Foreign Office, John Mellor’s early life was one of adventure and disconnection as he moved from place to place, wherever Ron Mellor was needed by the British government. In order to stop the constant moves, the Mellors placed their sons in a boarding school when John turned nine. The Mellor boys reacted badly to being placed in an alien environment in, what was to them, another foreign land (John was born in Turkey, while his father was born in India, and neither had really lived full-time in England). David, the elder, withdrew into himself, leading to his suicide at a young age. John became a rebel and bully, something he would remain for the remainder of his life.

Salewicz sets up no type of judgments on Strummer’s behavior, either as a child or as an adult. The story of Strummer’s youth is well-trod ground by now, and Salewicz provides nothing really new or noteworthy. We all know that Strummer essentially dropped out of society as his schooling ended, becoming a hippie, renaming himself “Woody” (and coming up with the connection to Woody Guthrie post-hoc, something that provided him with a connection to other Guthrie acolytes like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen), entering the squatter’s movement in London, forming the 101ers and renaming himself Joe Strummer after his guitar-playing style… it’s a well-known story, and every angle was covered during the orgy of Clash press coverage thirty years ago. Grey’s book provides many more details than Salewicz provides. However, if you’ve never read Grey’s book, Redemption Song is a good primer on the forces that created Joe Strummer.

But the strength of Salewicz’s book, as said, comes in areas that Grey didn’t cover. During the last half-dozen years of his life, Strummer attempted to reconnect with his mother’s family in Scotland, and Salewicz uses them as sources in an attempt to display another side of Strummer, one that wasn’t publicly known. Unfortunately, it ends up being the same side we’ve already seen. All of his mother’s relatives loved Joe, as apparently did everyone else Salewicz talked to. No one hated Joe Strummer, not even the people he treated badly. Mick Jones and Topper Headon forgave him quickly for Strummer turfing them out of The Clash. The Clash substitutes he assembled for that last, disastrous Clash album give him a free pass. The members of the Latino Rockabilly War and the Mescaleros, whom Joe treated like hired hands or worse, all love, love, love him, and not even the four and a half years after his death have changed their minds. Even Gaby Salter, who spent fourteen years with Joe and bore him two daughters, then was dumped to the curb when he met Lucinda, won’t say a bad word about him. It’s only in between the lines that you can find stuff to dislike about Strummer.

In between the sweet portraits of the man are the moments and the subtext that redeems this book somewhat. You just have to find them. Yes, it’s wonderful to hear about Salewicz and Simonon going on a trek to find Joe’s ancestral home in the Hebridies. But it’s thrillingly disconcerting to piece together the portrait of the post-Clash Strummer, a man totally lost. Salewicz won’t say it straight out, but in the decade-and-a-half between the final dissolution of The Clash and the point where he started to receive critical acclaim for his work with the Mescaleros, Strummer was a disagreeable alcoholic who had a constant nimbus of pot haze surrounding him. Virtually every anecdote of Salewicz’s personal encounters with Strummer begins with them lighting up a joint. Strummer couldn’t work in the studio without setting up a “spliff bunker”, a contraption of cases where he could isolate himself, toke up, and write lyrics. Pot and booze is a combination that does not lead to a favorable mindset when it comes to dealing with other people. Or maybe those are just my experiences, and Strummer was completely different.

How lost was Strummer? His best efforts during his “wilderness years” were things he ended up doing with Mick Jones, the only man who could provide the music to set off Joe’s lyrics. But his relationship with The Clash became ambivalent. He’d hate to be reminded of the band, and he chafed at the CBS contract that Bernie Rhodes signed that essentially put his work with the group into a lifelong arrangement, but it was The Clash reissues that provided him with the money to live his lifestyle and attempt to find his own way. There’s a telling anecdote in here from Strummer’s final year of life. He sent a bunch of lyrics to Mick Jones, about a half-dozen songs’ worth, and Mick wrote the music. Mick thought that these would be for the Mescaleros’ next album. When they didn’t turn up on Global A-Go-Go, Mick asked Joe what was up. Joe told him, “No, these aren’t for the Mescaleros. They’re for The Clash’s next album.” It took the Mescaleros to get Strummer comfortable with the thought of The Clash. When Mick Jones walked out on stage to play with Strummer in 2002, at what would end up being Strummer’s final concert (a situation that Salewicz paints as a spur-of-the-moment decision by Jones), the ball was rolling. Despite Simonon’s protests, The Clash would reunite in 2003 when they were inducted in to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It was a certainty. It was stopped only by Strummer’s death.

I remember the excitement that I felt when I read about Jones joining Strummer on stage that night. To me, and a lot of people my age, the Clash may not have been The Only Band That Mattered, but they were damn close. I felt that the post-September 11th Era needed a group to blow away the miasma of bullshit and show the world exactly what was going on with the Bush/Blair Axis of Obfuscation. No one did it better than The Clash when they went up against the varsity team of Reagan and Thatcher; the JVs wouldn’t even be a challenge. Simonon could be talked into it, I felt; he could put down the paintbrushes and create sonic works of art again. Strummer’s death five weeks later from a congenital heart defect destroyed that image. For someone whose personal feelings about The Clash and its members permeate this book, Salewicz doesn’t relate his own feelings about that moment and what it could have meant. Of course, he knew exactly how intransigent Simonon was on the issue, and that tempered his own feelings. In general, Salewicz doesn’t service Clash fans very well in this book, and that was his intention. He wrote this book for Strummer, and parroted Strummer’s own prejudices and feelings. The writing was an act of exorcism, not intending to inform as much as confront the world with what his friend felt, something that Strummer never did in prose form. This book is substitution, with Salewicz putting himself into his buddy’s shoes and attempting to write what Strummer might have done if he’d confronted himself enough to write his autobiography.

Joe Strummer had a half-century of life, much of which was wasted potential. When he set out to work, he did so with a clarity of conviction. He spent his last decade confronting the decisions he’d made during those moments of clarity, attempting to reestablish bridges that he’d burnt. He did it with the 101ers that he’d abandoned to join The Clash. He did it with the audience in his tours with the Pogues, the Latino Rockabilly War, and the Mescaleros, not to mention his BBC World Service show. He did it with the former members of The Clash, and got close to bringing them back together, knowing that it was the best moment of their lives and they could have those moments again as they approached an age where they were satisfied with their lives and their demons were dismissed. He did it with his mother’s family that he’d ignored and dismissed for three decades. It’s those attempts that Salewicz emphasizes. But is it a fair portrait of the man? I think that Strummer himself would say that it isn’t. It’s the type of book that someone would love to have written about them after they die. But Strummer was always honest, and he’d be the first to say that this book should have contained more of his worse moments. He was always one to believe in fairness, after all.

Rating:

The Grand Illusion: Love, Lies, and My Life With Styx
By Chuck Panozzo with Michelle Skettino
AMACOM Books (5/15/07)
ISBN 0-814409-16-4
225 pages
Available At Amazon.com

This is a very difficult review to handle from my perspective. After all, Chuck Panozzo is essentially me with a couple of decades of separation in time. But those couple of decades are really irrelevant when you’re talking about Chicago, a city where growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s was pretty much the same as growing up in the mid-to-late 1970s. In fact, there’s only one eensty-weentsy little difference between us.

Well, there are a couple of eentsy-weentsy little differences between us. Chuck founded a band with his fraternal twin brother John at the age of 13. One day, a young accordion player (the most popular instrument in the neighborhood) a couple years older than the Panozzos heard the two playing (Chuck on guitar, John on drums) and wanted to join in. They let Dennis DeYoung do so, and found he could sing a little too. That was the beginning of what eventually would become Styx. So, one of those eentsy-weentsy differences between Chuck and myself is that he’s a world-famous rock star who’s known incredible success over the last three decades and lived in an expensive condo on the Gold Coast for decades. Meanwhile, I’m working two jobs, live in an apartment in the suburbs, and despite the evidence displayed on this Web site and numerous others over the past seven years of being able to write a best-seller that would be controversial yet audience-appealing, no one’s offered me so much as a book contract yet.

The other eentsy-weentsy little difference between us is the subject of this book. From the age of five, Chuck Panozzo felt different from other kids, especially his rambuctious twin. At the age of nine, he discovered what that difference was: he was attracted to other boys. The Grand Illusion: Love, Lies, and My Life With Styx is the story of a man haunted by his differences, yet unable to express them thanks to a combination of social brainwashing and an environment of fear. His curse was that he kept exchanging one environment of fear for another as he progressed in his life, going from Roseland on the South Side of Chicago to rock stardom, and kept getting caught in the undertow of expectations.

Let me tell you from experience: if you think that your typical small town in, say, Kansas (just to cite an example from recent personal experience), with its Jesus Freaks and bible bashers and “Choose Life” billboards that seem to be almost a command rather than just a polite suggestion, can be a repressive environment for a young man growing up with the knowledge that he’s gay, it’s nothing compared to your typical Catholic neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. I didn’t even need the sexual component to know about this. Intellectuals were treated as freaks too, and that was my particular sin. And that’s where the comparisons between Chuck Panozzo and myself begin.

We both grew up in Catholic families on the South Side; him in Roseland, me in Archer Heights. We both had similar experiences in lifestyle despite the nearly-two-decade age difference between us. As I said, things didn’t change much between the ’50s and the ’70s in Chicago. When Chuck and I both reached our double-digit years, Richard J. Daley was mayor (The Greatest Mayor There’s Ever Been died just after my twelfth birthday). We both gravitated at a young age to pursuits that were considered “unmanly” in our blue-collar neighborhoods; Chuck to art and me to science. We both attended Catholic high schools (one of the early highlights of this book is Chuck relating his experiences during his year in a seminary preparatory school). We both graduated from colleges on the South Side; Chuck at what is now Chicago State University, me from the University of Chicago. After graduation, we both drifted into teaching at a public school here in town; Chuck taught art while I taught geometry. Our fathers both died of cancer after working themselves to death. We’ve both had relatives die of alcoholism that defied treatment; Chuck his brother and me my uncle. The only difference between us was about eight miles in geography.

Even our particular psychologies were similar. We both dealt with our differences by withdrawing socially. With Chuck, though, it wasn’t the onset of bipolar disorder, as it was with me. He was ashamed and terrified of what he was, a situation abetted by intense sessions of Catholic brainwashing and family desires to conform. I at least had the option to relish in my differences as a coping mechanism. Being a brainiac was a license to be different, and was in a way accepted. In the early ’60s, you couldn’t be gay on the South Side, not even after Illinois became the first state to eliminate sodomy laws. And we both discovered performing as a coping mechanism. My family accepted me becoming an actor, especially since I was really good at it. Chuck’s uncle was a professional drummer, acceptable employment in the community as long as he had a day job to back it up, and was the inspiration for both Panozzos to take up music.

Therefore, I received a very eerie sense of déjà vu as Chuck talked about his first two-plus decades. In a lot of ways, it was my biography, right down to the overprotective mother who didn’t encourage boys being boys. One of the most important rules in reviewing a work of biography or autobiography is to attempt to remain dispassionate about your subject. That’s very difficult to do when the protagonist of the work you’re reviewing is, for all intents and purposes, the gay Italian version of you. That disconnection is further made impossible by a simple little fact of life: if you’re of a certain age and you grew up in Chicago, you are a Styx fan for life. Therefore, to me, this book’s a bit of a come-down. You want your heroes to have enough critical differences from you to provide something for you to work toward. Chuck’s just another guy from the South Side who can play bass really well and let his sexual proclivities become a dysfunction that took over his life.

That’s also the weakness of this book. Obviously, another desire of anyone’s when they hero-worship is the perverse need to see those heroes struck down, the greater the calamity, the better. This isn’t the book for you if you want someone to dish out the dirt on Styx, or even dish out the details with a healthy amount of dirt like Bob Spitz did in his magnificent book on The Beatles. There’s more attention given to the band’s career pre-name-change as the Trade Winds and TW-4 than to Styx’s progression to superstardom, which is handled with the rapidity of a John Panozzo fill. That book, the full retrospective, has yet to be written. It would require the cooperation of John Curulewski, who’s been painted as the Pete Best of Styx, leaving just before mega-stardom. It would also require the cooperation of Dennis DeYoung, who has no problem performing concerts of Styx music with orchestras but has a great many problems admitting that Styx carried on without him after he became the cause of many of their fights (Chuck admits in the book that he hasn’t talked to Dennis since Dennis sued the rest of the group in 2001). That book won’t be written for a long time. But, in the meantime, this book provides many tantalizing details, just not enough of them to create a mythology behind the group. For a group that named themselves after a piece of mythology, that seems rather odd.

Among those details, who would have ever thought that the path to Styx as rock stars would have begun with a chance remark by a nun? Yes, a nun. She heard the boys perform the Cole Porter Songbook to a bunch of bored high school kids and told them to start playing rock music. And this was before the Singing Nun hit the charts, so who knows where her divine inspiration came from? But cute, fun details are somewhat lacking due to the breakneck pace of this book. A lot of the pre-stardom stories will come across as expressions of every single cliche about up-and-coming bands, only made less cliché by the fact that they actually lived it. The story of them finally breaking through, after four poorly-promoted albums, by getting airplay for a two-year-old song on then-radio powerhouse WLS is also the origin of Styx’s local fanbase, and therefore my entry into his story. It’s then that I started to wish for a little more detail.

(Something that Chuck didn’t mention is that it ended up working both ways. During the early 80s, WLS was still playing rock music, blasting fifty thousand AM watts over a dozen states at night. When Styx came to town to play—it must have been the Paradise Theater tour—every time a Styx song was played, and they were very frequently, the deejay would brag that it was WLS who broke Styx across the country, and WLS was welcoming them home. The obvious egotism on display was countered by a great sense of civic pride. Unlike Cheap Trick, they actually were from Chicago, and unlike Chicago (the group), they were still living in town.)

But this isn’t Styx’s story on display. It’s Chuck Panozzo’s. During the life of the band, he was always the quiet one, a great deal like his fellow bassists John Entwhistle and John Paul Jones. It’s only now that he’s come to terms with himself and his life that he explains why this was so. The main feeling that you get from this book is one of fear. It drips off the pages. Every one of Chuck’s attempted forays into the expanding gay life of Chicago during the 1970s is prefaced by his attempts to explain to the audience the precautions he would take not to be recognized. He truly felt his career was dead if his sexuality was discovered, and it would drag the band that he co-founded down with him. Given the press reaction in 1976 to Elton John’s admission of bisexuality, he had good reason to be afraid. It’s something that’s very difficult to explain these days, with rock stars coming out of the closet by the day, and Chuck takes great care to attempt to explain. Sometimes he doesn’t cross that bridge all too effectively, but it’s a difficult task, and credit has to be given to him for the attempt.

But closets can be deep, and even years after his public admission of his sexuality and a decade and a half of dealing with being HIV positive (and a decade after being diagnosed as having full-blown AIDS) hasn’t fully opened the door. There’s a great reticence from Chuck when he talks about his attempts in the 1970s to experience life as a gay man. He never mentions the names of the venues he would attend in search of finding people like him. For instance, he was a virgin well into his twenties when he made his first venture to a gay porn movie house. He mentions that it was in Old Town, but that’s it. Given the time period and the way he found out about it, it was almost certainly the Bijou, which is still around (and became a pioneer in the release of gay videos). But he never mentions the name. Same goes for the gay bars he used to frequent. Same goes for the gay men who he befriended and/or slept with, invariably mentioned by first name only, even if they’re no longer with us. In a way, he’s still hiding. It does have the effect of properly projecting the sort of anonymity that he sought at the time, though, so to most of the audience, the details won’t be missed. But to a Chicagoan who knows his city, the admissions are strange. He takes great pains to show everyone that he wasn’t in denial about his sexuality, but his desire to not be that way is palpable. It’s also understandable to someone like me, but may not be so to a younger audience.

Denial is the theme of the second half of the book. It’s not denial about being gay, though. Chuck was diagnosed as HIV positive in 1991, something he attributes to the casual sex that he actually did end up having in the ’70s in between bouts of subterfuge. He didn’t seek treatment until it became full-blown AIDS in 1997. The denial of his HIV status came at a time when Styx was fallow, between their 1990 reunion album Edge of the Century and their mid-’90s reunion tours. He found things to occupy himself. However, unlike with Styx’s last fallow period between their initial break-up in 1984 and the reunion, they weren’t positive ones. John Panozzo didn’t have Chuck’s ability to channel things in a positive fashion, and his heavy drinking turned into full-blown alcoholism. At the same time, Chuck’s and John’s mother started to decline from cancer. Chuck put off getting treatment for his own problems to take care of them. John’s death in 1996, after many attempts to save him and his position in the band, was a great blow. It allowed Chuck to further delay things until it almost was too late. He uses his experience to attempt to teach his audience an object lesson in getting treatment as soon as possible. Unfortunately, both he and his twin teach the audience another lesson, one that Chuck leaves unsaid: treatment won’t work if you’re not receptive to it.

Nowadays, Chuck’s living in Miami with his long-term partner, his viral level is down to undetectable levels, he performs with Styx as often as possible given his health (and reveals that he had a cancer scare, diagnosed with prostate cancer at the same age cancer killed his father), and he is a frequent public speaker on gay and lesbian issues. It’s a great story, featuring an unexpected protagonist (to anyone who was a fan of Styx back in the day), a fight that only his belated desire to seek help won him, a happy ending for a man who’d been looking for love all of his life under impossible conditions, and an inspiration for people to keep fighting when the fight seems to be impossible, whether it be against incompetent record executives, dead-end constant touring, or a battle against a retrovirus. The Grand Illusion is a story of heartbreak at its center, and the story of reassembling that heart, showing to everyone not only the triumph, but the damage done and the lives lost in the process. It may not be the story you’re looking for if you want to learn everything about Styx, but the story you get is one that needs to be told and needs to be read.

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