Rock Memoirs That Are Actually Worth Reading
The rock memoir is a crowded shelf, and plenty of them are ghostwritten, score-settling or both. These six are the real thing: honest, funny and full of the details only the people who were there could know.
Life – Keith Richards (2010)
Exactly as entertaining as you'd hope. The stories are wild, but the best bits are about the music itself: open tunings, Chuck Berry and the craft of the riff.
Just Kids – Patti Smith (2010)
A beautiful book about friendship, art and being young and broke in late-sixties New York. It won the National Book Award, and it deserved to.
Chronicles: Volume One – Bob Dylan (2004)
Dylan being Dylan, it skips around and leaves out whatever he likes. But his writing about arriving in Greenwich Village is magical.
Born to Run – Bruce Springsteen (2016)
Warm, candid and surprisingly open about depression. Read it and then listen to Darkness on the Edge of Town again.
Bedsit Disco Queen – Tracey Thorn (2013)
The Everything but the Girl singer's account of a pop career is dry, witty and wonderfully unglamorous. A brilliant antidote to rock-god mythology.
Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. – Viv Albertine (2014)
The Slits' guitarist on punk, and on everything that came after. Fearless, funny and impossible to put down.
Put one on your Christmas list, or better still, get it from your local independent bookshop.
