I’m into music that is passionate and honest.  Always have been.  I love and admire classical music – played the viola for 10 yeas in school and I still listen to it regularly – but metal/punk/new wave are also part of my passion.  When I was in college (no this is not some sort of tell-all confession) I had some number of friends who were in every band available.  One of these friends, Mark, traveled with some regularity to ground zero of the (then fledgling) metal movement – the Sunset Strip on LA.  Upon his return from one of his trips he had a hand-labled tape (it was written in sharpie) of a band that none of us had heard of – something called “Guns N’ Roses”.  It would be at least a year before Guns enjoyed any sort of mainstream appeal.

There’s no denying that, for a kid from (what was then) rural Manassas, Guns took quite a bit of warming up to but it resonated with me.  It was unflinchingly honest.  Regardless of the genre, I am always open to stuff that’s honest and, lets’ face it, —  Mozart and Beethoven were the Van Halen and Guns N’ Roses of their era.  Beethoven didn’t spend much time on lyrics but the music makes me think the same way Metallica or Guns does…

So – on to the root of it – , it was with some interest that I saw that Steven Adler, the drummer for G n’ R, had written a book about his life (some  might call that an autobiography) that seemed kind of interesting: Guns burned sooo hot, flamed out so fast and it was such a big part of the scene then that I was kind of interested in seeing what somebody who was behind the curtain had to say….

The short synopsis of the book is that Adler’s story is no different than those that earlier titans of rock (Clapton, Page, Jagger, etc) had to tell.  Incredible talent, luck and drive combine to generate a meteoric rise to fame that is fueled and sustained by rampant substance abuse and what might be generously described as an overall lowering of societal expectations…:)

Overall, the book spends about 25% of it’s time covering stuff that is pretty interesting to Guns fans that were involved in the scene then and 75% of it’s time covering his 15 year misadventure with substance abuse (which is titanic).  So, if you are into the metal scene in the late 80’s and early 90’s, buy this book, rip it in half and read what’s left.  Otherwise, forget it.