Aging rockers tell their stories

Published 1:48 pm Friday, December 14, 2007

NEW YORK — For those rock ‘n’ roll fans on your gift list this holiday season, there are plenty of new offerings to keep their heads bopping along happily into the new year.

There is fresh work from Eric Clapton, Sting, Genesis, Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones, Velvet Revolver guitarist Slash and Motley Crue bassist Nikki Sixx.

There’s just one twist: None is on CD racks.

All are on bookshelves — part of an unusual flurry of autobiographies out this winter by aging rockers with some hair-raising stories.

Clapton’s self-titled autobiography is already a hit, having sold 525,000 copies. Joining him on best-seller lists is “Slash,” “Ronnie” and Sixx’s “The Heroin Diaries.”

Why would rockers — those near-mythical idols of sex, drugs and general excess — turn to that most stodgy of storytelling modes, the written word?

“I think there are a couple of motivations: One, they’ve lived their lives and it’s time to look back on them,” said Broadway Books executive editor Charlie Conrad, who worked on Clapton’s book.

“And also, from the standpoint of the public, rock figures are out there on the cutting edge — the knife edge. They live life to its extreme. And if they survived, they have a good story to tell.”

Those stories include tales of love, loss and friendship, but also nasty bouts with venereal diseases, scary strippers and mountains of controlled substances.

Clapton, who pushed aside a ghost writer in favor of penning his own book, discusses the death of his son Conor, his various addictions, and his love triangle with Pattie Boyd and George Harrison, a topic already broached in Boyd’s recent tell-all, “Wonderful Tonight.”

Wood, who offers his own night bedding Boyd, also delves into his years freebasing cocaine and the time he had an armed face-off with Keith Richards, with both pointing guns at each other.

The original lineup of Genesis — including Peter Gabriel — collaborated for the first time in more than 20 years for “Genesis: Chapter and Verse,” which offers polite first-person accounts and photos.

Sixx’s diary is a tad darker — an unvarnished look at his life on the road in 1987, when he struggled with addictions and depression. There’s the time he woke up during an earthquake and ran outside, naked and clutching a crack pipe. In another entry, he writes: “This morning I woke up with my shotgun in bed with me.”

Not to be outdone, Slash, a founding member of Guns N’ Roses who makes several wicked cameos in Sixx’s book, has his own accounts of debauchery, delivered in a straightforward, often amusing way.

He tells of one night being kicked out of a Canadian hotel, drunk and soaked in his own urine. But to his surprise, he’s not as frozen as he feared: “That’s a wonderful side effect of leather pants: when you pee yourself in them, they’re more forgiving than jeans,” he writes.

Publishers say the warts-and-all profiles that emerge from these books are crucial for their success.

“I’m sure they’re not telling every single crevice of their darkest soul, but they are giving you some real stuff. I think that’s a real difference,” said Elizabeth Beier, executive editor of St. Martin’s Press, which published the Wood and Genesis books.

For the less squeamish reader, there’s always “Mosaic: Pieces of My Life So Far” by Amy Grant, which includes the singer’s lyrics, poetry and vignettes — all of a decidedly uplifting variety.

And Sting has published a book of his lyrics, complete with his more highbrow observations. Of the song “Synchronicity II,” he writes: “I was trying to dramatize Jung’s theory of meaningful coincidence.”

Publishers say the current crop of rock tell-alls owes much to the success of Bob Dylan’s 2004 autobiography “Chronicles: Volume One,” which sold 425,000 hardcover copies.

“The Dylan book coming out and being so well received kind of showed people, ‘Your regular recording and performing career doesn’t have to be over for you to do your memoir. You don’t have to wait until the whole story is utterly completed and you’re in your dotage,’” Beier said.

Books mining the seamier side of rock are nothing new, of course. Recent notable titles include Anthony Kiedis’ “Scar Tissue”; “Hammer of the Gods,” about Led Zeppelin; “No One Here Gets Out Alive,” about The Doors, and Motley Crue’s “The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band.”