Dancing with myself

I picked up Billy Idol's 2014 memoir Dancing with Myself at Horizontal Books, a discount bookstore in Cleveland.  I was curious to read what he had to say, figuring I would just skip around and look at the pictures before giving it away.  The book turned out to be more engaging than I expected and I ended up reading the whole thing.  I have always been aware of Billy Idol; his songs were a constant on the radio when I was a child and I discovered his band Generation X when I was getting into punk rock.  It is safe to say that I knew the broad contours of his career from his early days through the bad press of his Cyberpunk album, but did not know much about the solo portion of his career specifically.
Billy structures his memoir around a motorcycle accident that occurred in 1990.  He opens the book with a description of his crash, and then sees this as a turning point in his solo career while he was making his Charmed Life album, and then he circles back to the accident in the epilogue to reinforce its pivotal role in his life.  If this was a 12-step talk, the accident would have been his bottom, the thing that finally helped him to get over his addictions.  But he doesn't quite phrase it that way.  It more that this was a culmination point for many of the events in his life.
I mention this structuring because of the way that it sets this book apart from other rock 'n' roll memoirs that I have read.  Mick Wall's book about Lemmy tends to mythologize the man by nearly erasing narrative plotting.  So much of Lemmy's life seems just a continuation/repetition of his early days that the stories within the book run together.  Elvis Costello's book reads more like a picaresque: a string of events that create a sense of forward momentum but which don't necessarily add to an overarching plot.  Both of those books are more meandering and seem more personal.
It was interesting to read about Billy's early days in the Bromley contingent and on the London punk rock scene, but there was not a lot that I didn't already know.  He writes lovingly about a broad group of people in his book, but they are all held at a certain distance.  Even his long-time lover Perri comes and goes throughout the book but the reader is left knowing little about her aside from her connection to Billy.  In a certain way, this makes sense.  It is his book, after all.  But it seems to reveal more about the author in its way.  Billy often seems contrite about the way that he treated people near him during his drug-using days.  He writes about the way that addicts will use people close to them.  But these people still seem kept at arm's length in the book.  It is not until the very end of the book that Billy writes about his father's failing health that some of the personal emotion breaks through.
Billy and his father share a moment when they discuss his choice to pursue music and some of the difficulties that their relationship faced.  The scene is well-written and seems like a genuinely touching moment that is much less guarded than much of the memoir.
I did enjoy the sections about his time in Chelsea and Generation X more than the rest of the book.  Like the scene with his father, these sections seemed less guarded.  He seemed less defensive of those bands than he does about his solo career.

Mighty Like a Rose

I really enjoyed reading Elvis Costello's musical memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink.  The book was given to me over a year ago by a friend who is a much better gift-giver than I am.  I was a little skeptical about reading a musician's memoir because I don't particularly like reading memoirs in the first place (though I seem to read an awful lot of them for all that) and because of the way that I tend to think about music, but I'll come back to that.
One of the things that stood out to me is that this reads more like a full autobiography than just a memoir of Costello's musical career.  He weaves personal and family history along with discussions of his lyrics and the music that inspired him into the overarching narrative of his life in music.  But this makes it sound more organized than it is.  At times, the book reads more like an oral history because Costello will veer off from one story to another based on his own associative logic.  The book is more-or-less chronological, but it takes minor detours from time to time.
I spent a lot of time while in college searching out Elvis Costello's music and searching specifically for vinyl albums, so a lot of this felt very familiar.  This makes me realize that there are whole swaths of his music that I still don't know.  While I know that this is all out there, I still think of Elvis in his knock-kneed rocker stance on the cover of My Aim is True.  This memoir felt like my own personal history in a way as I read about his recording Delivery Man, and I hoped that he would mention something from the concert he played in support of that album in Columbus, OH in 2005 that I attended.  This also made me realize that I still think of When I was Cruel and Delivery Man (released in 2002 and 2005, respectively) as his "new" albums.
I have a way of thinking about music as abstraction.  I want to think about music apart from the musician in the sense that any art is separable from the artist.  When music, or any art, is abstracted from its source it is easier to enjoy and also to criticize.  When I think and write about music, I am moved by the personal experience and the connections that it forges with others.  I want others to experience and enjoy the music in the same way that I do.  The shared experience of music is a less distorted medium of communication than most for being abstracted.  Songs are encapsulations of energy, thought, and emotion.  They convey a lot about the artist, of course, but also about what we latch on to and this is why so many subcultures generate around music.  The things that we like define us as much or more than the things we do.  When I was young I connected so much of my thought, fashion, and aesthetics with the music that I listened to.
This post is perilously close to going off the rails as I just deleted a paragraph about Dick Hebdige's Subculture: the Meaning of Style.  It is an excellent book but would have lead down a path I don't want to go right now.
Bringing this all back around, Costello does not do what I feared he would do.  He wrote sensitively and honestly about his life and work.  He didn't disillusion me and I do appreciate that.