Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Perhaps when he finally hangs it up, he will dig more deeply into his unique career.Ī high-spirited yet surface-level glimpse into the life of one of the planet’s last rock stars.Ī former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.ĭiscovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. Rather than exploring that, he’s largely content to celebrate his good fortune.
Grohl survived a massive band’s collapse and leads another hugely successful act in a genre that’s no longer dominant. Grohl is good company, but the gee-whiz tone as well as the clichés (hanging out with the members of metal band Pantera is “not for the faint of heart”) make the book feel like a missed opportunity. Still, the author is upbeat even when talking about lean or tense moments, like when his body finally pushed back against his five-pot-a-day coffee habit. Though Scream was only moderately popular, Grohl thought he'd reached the mountaintop, so Nirvana’s massive fame, followed by Cobain’s suicide, was seriously disorienting. An accident-prone kid and unschooled drummer raised in a middle-class suburb of Washington, D.C., he caught the punk bug at a Naked Raygun show in Chicago, later dropping out of high school to join Scream.
As the book’s entertaining early pages reveal, Grohl was an unlikely candidate for global stardom. (Fans likely won’t learn anything about Kurt Cobain they didn’t already know, except perhaps his choice for cheap sustenance in the band’s pre-fame days, a canned-tuna-on-toast concoction dubbed “shit on a shingle.”) Rather, Grohl’s name-drops are of the “can you believe I get to do this for a living” variety: backing Tom Petty and Iggy Pop, meeting musical heroes from Little Richard to Joan Jett, singing “Blackbird” at the Oscars, performing at the White House, and filling arenas all over the world. Grohl’s memoir is thick with name-drops, but not for the sake of gossip or even revelatory detail. The Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters frontman shares anecdotes from his (mostly) charmed life in rock ’n’ roll.
0 kommentar(er)
