Nikki Sixx's Heroin Diaries - Forward to the Past

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

The Heroin Diaries - A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rockstar, Nikki Sixx with Ian Gihins, Pocket Books, 2008.

This is not actually a book, but more of a collection of entries from Nikki Sixx's 1987 diary with additional commentaries by various people who were mentioned in his entries. This is like an additional text book for the hard hitting New York Times bestseller The Dirt, the complete autobiography of his world famous hard rock band, Motley Crue, straight from the horse's mouth. I will be reviewing The Dirt later. Now, let us focus on The Heroin Diaries - A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rockstar by Nikki Sixx with Ian Gihins.

Nikki Sixx was and still is the bassist and principle songwriter of Motley Crue, one of the most influential and prominent hard rock bands in the history of American rock and roll, if the world would be an overstatement. Their insubordinate and wild attitude both in life and music, on and off the stage, was the elementary constituent that shaped the whole music industry in the 1980's. Cock Rock, Glam Metal, Hair Metal, call it what ever you want but it all undeniably started and revolved around bands like Crue when Steven Tyler and Joe Perry were too busy knocking each other off the stage.

Through this diary we can dive deep into Nikki Sixx's life of rock n roll, booze, drugs and sex. Most of the entries contained either about Sixx doing drugs, trying to be sober, preparing to go on stage and a bit about his fellow band members here and there. Each entries comes with additional commentaries from his band members, former managers, ex-girlfriends and Sixx himself, trying to put in little bits of details about what really happened on various events mentioned in each of the entries. That very much helped the readers to understand what in the name of hell is he talking about.

The lay out of this book is all over the place so you really need to focus on what you read. Ghoulish arts and drawings here and there and most of the contents were either black, white or red in color. It was a bit of a turn off for me because more than once that these horrendous lay outs distracted my eyes from reading the texts. Like I said, this book is just a supplemental read for The Dirt. For those who wanted to know more about Motley Crue, I would suggest that reading The Dirt would be more than enough. For collectors, this is a must.

I write about heavy metal music in an obscure land called Malaysia. Help me make my writing better. visit my blog: http://www.thebulletbelt.blogspot.com/

Book Review - Standing in the Shadows of Motown

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

What's Standing In The Shadows Of Motown About?

Standing In The Shadows of Motown is a book about legendary Motown bass player James Jamerson. The book is part biography (part 1), part analysis of his style (Part 2) and a collection of 50 or so transcriptions of Jamerson's bass parts (Part 3).

How Is It Presented?

Standing In The Shadows was originally published in my preferred format with spiral binding. My original copy is nearly 20 years old and is still in great condition, despite heavy use. However I bought a copy for a friend and was dismayed to find that Hal Leonard have reverted to a solid binding.

Each of the transcriptions in Part 3 of the book has been recorded by a 'name' player, along with a backing track. The recording has defined stereo separation so you can pan to one side and hear just the bass, or pan to the other side and play along with the now bass less backing. Contributors include Pino Palladino, Anthony Jackson, Will Lee, Paul McCartney, Gerald Veasley, Geddy Lee, John Entwistle, John Patitucci, David Hungate, Rocco Prestia and a whole lot more.

How Could This Book Be Better

There are a few ways this book - which is already outstanding - could be made slightly better.

Firstly the transcriptions are presented in a random order. It would make more sense in my opinion to order the transcriptions either chronologically - so the development of Jamerson's style becomes clearer to the reader/bass player - or the transcriptions could be presented in order of difficulty from easy to hard.

When I wrote my book Deliberate Practice I used this book as an example in the practical section, and I've done the work of ordering the transcriptions in a notional easy to hard order, so if you're interested you could check it out.

A second way the book could be better would be by updating it and including some examples of Jamerson's isolated bass parts from the original masters. There are several performances like this on the Deluxe CD that accompanies the film of the same name - and the author was heavily involved in that, so permission shouldn't be too much of a problem. It's an extremely informative exercise following along with transcriptions when we can hear Jamerson's bass line front and centre.

A third way the book could be better would be the completion of some of the transcriptions. For example there is a fragment of Cloud 9 - but from a personal point of view I'd like to see the complete transcription!

A fourth way the book could be better - and this is purely subjective! - is the inclusion of some transcriptions of more tunes! Personal favourites that I'd like to see included in an ideal world include Different World by The Four Tops, At Last by Stevie Wonder, Fever In The Funkhouse credited to Jamerson himself, Love's Gone Bad by Chris Clark, Living in Shame and Love Child by The Supremes. And a bunch of others.

Review Summary

Standing In The Shadows Of Motown is a great book. You could spend years studying it and devising exercises to incorporate elements of what Jamerson did into your own playing. For bass players serious about getting better - irrespective of their current ability level - Standing In the Shadows is a must. My spiral bound version gets a 5 star review. The hard bound version is still great - but once you get into studying with this book it will fall apart. My recommendation is that you carefully remove the binding and take it to a Printers and get them to spiral bind it.

One Caveat: this is one of the few bass books out there with no tab. So you need to learn to read music to use it.

If you want more bass related info, head over to my how to play bass website where you'll find video lessons, articles, reviews and much more. There's also a monthly ezine you can sign up for - in return for signing up you'll get a PDF file with 5 cool bass lines in - and each month's ezine features a bass line in music notation and bass tab.

http://www.how-to-play-bass.com/