Rock & roll out the memoirs

Enlarge Image

Peter Criss

Enlarge Image

Ann and Nancy Wilson

Enlarge Image

Cyndi Lauper

Enlarge Image

Pete Townshend

Enlarge Image

This book cover image released by Crown Archetype shows "Rod: The Autobiography." The autobiography of rocker Rod Stewart goes on sale on Oct. 23, 2012. (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Tunes, tickets and T-shirts aren't the only staples clogging the rock 'n' roll assembly line. Autobiographies, on the rise

since Keith Richards' hot-selling Life, have become an essential for fans seeking a back-page pass to the private lives of their musical heroes. Here are details from five of this fall's many rock tell-alls.

Who I Am: A Memoir

By Pete Townshend

Harper, 544 pp.

The Who guitarist and chief composer of such classics as My Generation and Won't Get Fooled Again chronicles the triumphs and stumbles of his creative and spiritual journey.

START ME UP: His parents sent him to live with a cruel grandmother, who often left him alone and victim to the drunken whims of her lovers. "Her favourite punishment was denying me food. She granted me affection only when I was silent, perfectly behaved, utterly compliant and freshly washed, which is to say, never. She was a perfect wicked witch."

STAYIN' ALIVE: A sex abuse victim himself, Townshend was stunned and even suicidal when police investigated him in 2003 for visiting a child porn site. All 11 computers taken from him were clean, save the photos of his toddler daughters running naked on a beach. "The grease pencil circles over their bodies made me weep." He accepted a "caution" rather than endure a trial and further tabloid harassment.

IT'S ONLY ROCK 'N' ROLL: Townshend and Keith Moon got drunk while staying at a Holiday Inn and, while strolling down a second-floor balcony, the drummer leapt over the railing into the pool. "I followed but miscalculated managing to just scrape into the pool, badly grazing my back and one arm. I might have broken my neck or my back. I should have known better than to emulate Keith's antics." The band was banned from Holiday Inns for life after Moon drove a car into a pool.

THE NAME GAME: Townshend found Mick Jagger irresistible, admitting the "clearly very well-endowed" singer was the only man he ever wanted to bed. After seeing the Rolling Stones perform for the first time in 1963, Townshend became "an instant and lifelong fan. Mick was mysteriously attractive and sexually provocative, possibly the first such talisman since Elvis."

ROCKIN' MY LIFE AWAY: Writing Pinball Wizard for rock opera Tommy, "I made a huge leap into the absurd when I decided that the hero would play pinball while still deaf, dumb and blind. It was daft, flawed and muddled, but also insolent, liberated and adventurous. If I had failed to deliver The Who an operatic masterpiece that would change people's lives, I was giving them something almost as good: a hit."

Kicking & Dreaming:

A Story of Heart, Soul

and Rock & Roll

By Ann and Nancy Wilson with Charles R. Cross

!t, 279 pp.

Sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson -- better known as the faces and voices of Heart -- look back on the personal and professional struggles and triumphs that define their legacy as one of rock's pioneering female-fronted, creatively autonomous acts.

START ME UP: Ann reveals that "the first nude man" she ever saw was guitarist Roger Fisher -- a colleague in one of her earlier bands, Hocus Pocus, and later in Heart -- walking unabashedly around a motel room. (Roger later became Nancy's boyfriend, while Ann had a long relationship with his older brother, Michael, Heart's sound man, who inspired the hits Magic Man and Crazy On You.)

STAYIN' ALIVE: Both sisters describe their challenges in trying to have children. Ann wound up adopting two babies as a single mom, while Nancy grappled with infertility for years before she and then-husband Cameron Crowe had twin sons through a surrogate in 2000. Nancy recalls in one entry that "most of 1997 was consumed, as was every year that decade, by trying to get pregnant," and that she "spent more than a hundred thousand dollars" on doctors and fertility treatments.

IT'S ONLY ROCK 'N' ROLL: Nancy remembers attending Elton John's swank 33rd birthday party in West Hollywood, where John's songwriting partner, Bernie Taupin, "repeatedly pulled me into the bathroom" and offered her cocaine. "Bernie was convinced that getting me high was the key to seducing me."

THE NAME GAME: Nancy recalls meeting Eddie and Alex Van Halen at a hotel, where the brothers had a "Kamikaze-drinking contest, followed by a cocaine-snorting fest." They also expressed interest in sleeping with both Wilsons, and "wanted us in one bed. It wasn't the first time we had that offer, and as with every other request, we turned it down."

ROCKIN' MY LIFE AWAY: Ann initially "hated" the Mutt Lange-penned All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You, a No. 2 hit for Heart in 1990. "She did sing it, and we begrudgingly turned it into a Heart song," Nancy writes. "It ended up being one of our most controversial songs, even getting banned in Ireland and a few other countries."

Rod: The Autobiography

By Rod Stewart

Crown, 365 pp.

Rod the Mod lays out his journey from son of a north London plumber and would-be pro soccer player to one of rock's most distinctive singers, renowned for his bevy of blond wives.

START ME UP: Even early in his career, success meant one thing -- buying a nice car. In the early '70s, flush with solo success cash, he spent nearly $10,000 on a Lamborghini Miura, more than his new house. "I kept it covered in plastic and even went so far as to put little red cones around it." If it rained, the car wouldn't get taken out. "It was far too expensive for that."

STAYIN' ALIVE: In the late '80s, Stewart's signature rasp was giving out on him. He was soon addicted to steroids, graduating to "a cocktail of drugs in a syringe" consisting of antibiotics, steroids and vitamin B. Soon, Stewart grew "aggressive and impatient" and gained weight. The turnaround? "It's no exaggeration to say that I owe my career (longevity) to the invention of the in-ear monitor."

IT'S ONLY ROCK 'N' ROLL: "The night when I opened the door to my hotel suite and found a bass player stark naked and gaffer-taped to the bed was well, it was pretty typical," writes Stewart in a chapter about the Sex Police, a "loose affiliation of band members and tour crew whose intention was to stamp out sex on the road." There was "a lot of sex on tour," so the playful game became trying to disrupt this rock pastime.

THE NAME GAME: Stewart and guitarist Jeff Beck have an enduring if fraught relationship, dating to the late '60s Jeff Beck Group. Fans are still waiting for a reunion. The men swapped demos last year, but Stewart wasn't keen on them and "Jeff felt he'd wasted his time. We haven't spoke since," Stewart writes, adding that a Christmas greeting e-mail went unanswered. "A shame, because there's nothing like it -- Beck's guitar and my voice."

ROCKIN' MY LIFE AWAY: Stewart's signature song from his early years is Maggie May, a retelling of his "blink and you'll miss it" loss-of-virginity encounter with a woman at a jazz festival. But "actually, I even wondered for a while about leaving it off the album. It didn't have a chorus. It just had those rambling verses. (But) maybe I should have known from listening to Bob Dylan that a song didn't have to have a catchy phrase in the middle to be popular."

Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir

By Cyndi Lauper with Jancee Dunn

Atria, 352 pp., $26

The eccentric singer/songwriter famed for Girls Just Want to Have Fun and True Colors wittily expounds on her hardscrabble climb to become a global pop star, outspoken feminist and champion of gay rights.

START ME UP: Lauper left home and her sexually abusive stepfather at 17, flunked out of arts high school and supported herself as an IHOP waitress, topless dancer, nanny, shoe store clerk and racetrack hot walker before getting her break. Label executives initially wanted to shape her as the next Barbra Streisand. Her response: "I can't take enough medication to stand still that long, OK?"

STAYIN' ALIVE: Deeply depressed after a breakup and career setback, she considered killing herself and spent hours drinking vodka alone in her hotel. She recalls, "The only thing that always prevented me from suicide is that I never wanted a headline to read, 'Girl who wanted to have fun just didn't.'"

IT'S ONLY ROCK 'N' ROLL: The press and even Madonna's label tried to stir a rivalry between the singers. Lauper refused the bait. "You don't (expletive) knock another sister, ever," she writes. "Our music wasn't even similar." However, she adds, "if you ask me, her voice was sped up in Like A Virgin to make it sound high like mine."

THE NAME GAME: Lauper describes Jeff Goldblum, her co-star in 1988's Vibes, as "awful," "upsetting" and "a strange fellow." "We did a love scene and suddenly he put his big fat hands all over my face. So I pulled them down and he got all upset." His habit of distracting the cast with faux nervous breakdowns before scenes prompted Lauper to snap, "If you keep doing this, this movie won't be a murder mystery anymore, because I'll kill you right here in front of everybody."

ROCKIN' MY LIFE AWAY: Signature hit Girls Just Want to Have Fun, with its pronounced hiccup and Queens accent, was crafted as "a combination of a Bob Marley blues approach to reggae, some Elvis Costello, a little Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Frankie Lymon, some Ronnie Spector. John Lennon's picture was in the studio, too. And like all good pictures, eventually the eyes move, so he was kind of there in spirit."

Makeup to Breakup:

My Life In and Out of Kiss

By Peter Criss with Larry "Ratso" Sloman

Scribner, 384 pp.

Kiss' Catman drummer charts his course from gritty New York upbringing to the heights of global fame -- and back down to a suicidal moment after Los Angeles' Northridge earthquake.

START ME UP: Inspired by the kabuki-style androgyny of David Bowie, Kiss chose alter egos. Criss' character was his wife's black cat, Mateus, because "we were both wild, independent." Gene Simmons (who "loved horror films") chose the Demon, Paul Stanley was Starchild, while Ace Frehley, Spaceman, was actually convinced that extraterrestrials had colonized this planet ("He was working on a radio to communicate with them").

STAYIN' ALIVE: In 1994, battered by drug abuse and two broken marriages, Criss surveyed the wreckage of his life after L.A.'s big earthquake ("The whole room stank from death and the debris of my former exalted life") and quietly slipped a .357 Magnum in his mouth. "Then I thought of my (late) mother. We had a very strange, deep relationship." He pulled the barrel out: "I woke up the next morning and got on with my life."

IT'S ONLY ROCK 'N' ROLL: "We found out from day one that sex was a part of rock 'n' roll," Criss writes in the book's biggest understatement. Criss says Frehley and Stanley were intrigued by both sexes, while Simmons kept a running tally of his female conquests in Polaroid pictures, "carefully pasted into bound volumes, each dated." Criss once tried to make love to a groupie who had dressed in his cat costume, but, weirded out, claimed he "had a headache."

THE NAME GAME: After Alive! put the band on the cultural map, Criss' newfound celebrity found him befriending John Belushi. "He wanted to be a rock star," Criss writes. And party like one. "He would scoop (cocaine) up in his palm."

ROCKIN' MY LIFE AWAY: Criss' ballad Beth was the big hit off Destroyer (1976). Manager Bill Aucoin came by Criss' New York brownstone to toast the drummer and offer a prediction. "You saved the album, Peter," he told him. 'But (the band) is going to hate you for it." The high of that hit came with the crushing lows of cocaine abuse that led to primal scream therapy. "I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown."

-- USA Today

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 21, 2012 A14