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A Not-Book-Review*: “Recycling Reality,” by Nicky Almasy – an expat’s coming of age story, from NYC, Mexico, and London, to Shanghai, Thailand, HK, and Kuala Lumpur

July 2, 2026
bradspurgeon

Nicky Almasy

Nicky Almasy

Until early March of this year, when I shook his hand and exchanged words with him for about two minutes, I had only ever met or communicated with Nicky Almasy once. It is easier for me to know the exact date of our first meeting – which was 19 October 2008 – than it is for me to remember the second one, earlier this year. That is because the first was the Sunday night after the Chinese Grand Prix of 2008, and in Shanghai, a first step that fall of an experience that would change my life.   Having now made contact with Nicky again after nearly two decades, I have learned thanks to reading his memoir, “Recycling Reality“, (Earnshaw Books, Hong Kong, 2022), that not only was he also at that time shifting to a new reality in his life, but that we share far more experiences than I could ever have imagined for such a casual acquaintance whose path I had crossed only once until he handed me his book under the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur last March.

That last meeting was reduced to just a handshake as I had just spent more than an hour or two beyond our rendezvous time caught up in the offices of the Emirates airline trying to deal with a cancelled flight back to Paris – a gift of the man who trumped the world by starting a war in the Middle East. By the time I got to Nicky, he had to leave for another appointment.  But it was long enough for us to say hello, and for Nicky to surprise me by handing me this published memoir that I ignored the existence of.   I have now finished reading the book, and I wanted to talk about it here since without my earlier meeting with Nicky, this blog would not have been created 16 years ago.

In late 2008 I had been carrying around my guitar picks, capo, and songbook to all the Formula One races that I was attending as a reporter for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times, as I had recently turned my life full-throttle into playing music when not writing articles about the world’s premier auto racing series. In my late teens and early twenties I had played in open mics as I sought to test the waters to see if I could possibly become the next Bob Dylan. Learning very quickly that I didn’t have a chance in hell, I decided eventually to focus on writing alone. But in 2008, after a tragic personal loss – the death of my wife, Nathalie – I felt the need to return to playing music. At the instigation of some musician friends, I then began to look around for open mics to perform at and see if I fared any better as a potential Bob Dylan than three decades earlier.

Recycling Reality by Nicky Almasy

Recycling Reality by Nicky Almasy

So it was that after several races, finally, in Shanghai of all places, one night returning to my hotel from a meal in a restaurant, I saw a nearby bar-restaurant called the Blues Room. On the glass of the door or other front window, an image in a poster jumped out at me: An old-fashioned, 1950s microphone and the words: Open Mic! I took a closer looked to find that it said, in English, that every Sunday night you could bring your instruments and go on stage and play some songs. Exactly what I had been looking for in the last races in Europe without success – although I had not really applied myself all that much, being somewhat skeptical of my abilities or needs to perform in public.

After the race – won by Lewis Hamilton in a McLaren, ahead of Felipe Massa in a Ferrari, setting up what would be an historic final race duel in Brazil shortly thereafter – I got on the media shuttle bus as quickly as possible to get from the circuit in Jiading, far outside the city – and arrived in town with time to spare before the beginning of the open mic. I had brought my pick, capo and songbook with me to the circuit, so went directly to the Blues Room. It turned out to be a very, very quiet night, with only one other musician. But there was this Hungarian guy, Nicky Almasy, who ran the event, and I was very pleased to meet him, as the F1 race in Budapest was among my favorites, and I always enjoyed the company of the Hungarians I knew. (My son had been training for years under a top Hungarian chess trainer, as well, and I always found the people gentle and interesting.)

The other musician was an American teenager who lived with his parents, expats working in Shanghai, and he was there with his sister, just slightly older than him. As an open mic experience, my first after 30 years absence, it was highly inconclusive, but probably also the best way for a middle-aged, aging rock star (in his own mind), to return to “the stage.” In fact, we played and jammed for hours, and at one point, Nicky immortalized the session by taking a photograph of me while standing at a table in some deep, purple-faced, Dylanesque chant.

Brad Spurgeon jamming at the Blues Room in Shanghai in 2008.

Brad Spurgeon jamming at the Blues Room in Shanghai in 2008. (Photo Credit: ©Nicky Almasi.)

I found no open mic in Sao Paulo, and anyway, with the championship being decided there and especially Hamilton taking his first title, I was far too busy writing and reporting to think about finding a place to play. It was only when I returned to Paris that I again began to think about finding an open mic. And it was only thanks to a small sense I had picked up at the Blues Room that I might find a deeply needed outlet that way, and then the persuasive words of my son, Paul, that I had to try again, that I ended up at Earle Holmes’s Monday night open mic at the Lizard Lounge, and my open mic, musical journey definitively began.  (From that moment onwards I brought my guitar to every Formula One race and performed at open mics or jam sessions at each Grand Prix from 2009 to the end of the 2016 season, starting this blog to write about the adventure from 2010 onwards.)

What all of these preliminaries are leading to is, believe it or not, back again to “Recycling Reality,” Nicky’s book. As we were not in touch after that night in the fall of 2008, and as the event was a much, much more important moment for me than for Nicky, I don’t think he had any strong recollection of who I was at all when I learned he was now living in Malaysia and that we would be visiting there for TAC Teatro, and could we meet? So for me, the first thing I wanted to read about in the memoir that he handed me, was everything he had to say about the Blues Room in Shanghai, and how that happened, and what the stories were. I was not let down.

Nicky had begun to run the open mic evening and other live music events at the Blues Room – which was located at the corner of Nanjing Road and Tongren Road – a year or so earlier, and it closed down not long after I played there, in early 2009. But during that time, surprise surprise, Nicky had not only been hiring bands to play there on the other music nights, but he had begun to exercise his other passion, which was photography. Yes, he had been photographing the bands that played there, and soon he had developed a business in Shanghai as a photographer of bands.

Before I continue about the contents of the memoir, another side note: As someone who likes to write, and even made a living out it, and who is currently writing a memoir myself, I am always interested in seeing what “works” and what doesn’t. The first thing I did when Nicky handed me this book, a 265-page paperback, was to check out who the publisher was. Had Nicky done what so many people do today, had he self-published his memoir? Because, otherwise, I wondered, who would want to publish, let alone read, Nicky-Almasy-of-the-Blues-Room’s memoir!?

I saw “Earnshaw Books” and immediately looked it up: “Earnshaw Books was founded in Hong Kong in 2006 and publishes a wide range of books across a growing number of fiction and non-fiction genres. A hub for stories, memoirs and history from China, Asia and beyond, and a nurturing platform for new authors, Earnshaw Books offers a unique and enticing glimpse into the world through words.”

I realized that not only was it not self-published, but that Nicky had found the perfect publisher for his memoir. As he has now lived in Southeast Asia since 2005, moving from one country to another, one expat experience to another, he has a story to tell that will interest readers of that publisher’s niche. It could not be more perfect. I soon learned something more: My own interest was held at a much higher level for all those areas of his life to which I could also relate most closely by my own parallel experiences, and it waned a little  – but not too much – on those I could not.

To summarize: I was absolutely hooked on his story of life in Shanghai, less so on his tales of traveling with malaria scientists in Thailand, and very much drawn in with his final chapters in Malaysia, especially his efforts to land a full-time job with Tony Fernandes’s AirAsia as a writer, photographer and videographer for its inflight magazine, Travel360. My interest there is not only due to Kuala Lumpur being one of my favorite places in the world as well, but because I too had crossed paths with AirAsia’s owner Tony Fernandes on several occasions when he was a Formula One team owner, and it was Fernandes who eventually gave the green light to hiring Almasy at the publication.

But to say that I could only identify with what I had myself experienced here would be doing a great disservice to this surprisingly well written life story that speaks for generations of people who seek something bigger, something greater, than the world they were brought up in.  I say “surprisingly” because English is Almasy’s second language, and you wouldn’t know it by reading this.  Almasy came from Debrecen, in Hungary, which is the country’s second largest city, but still only has around 330,000 total urban population. He grew up dreaming of the life he read about in imported music magazines like the New Musical Express – that “other” I mentioned above.

And if I say that it might require having shared the same experiences as a writer to get into their memoir, nothing could be further from that idea than the opening pages of Almasy’s story, when he writes about his wayward youth as an immigrant to New York City. There he set up a fabulously interesting life in a bar in Manhattan frequented by movie stars, before he returned to Hungary for a short visit and then found that he could not re-enter the US.  So he decided, at barely 20 years old, to go for the classic route of flying to Mexico and attempting an illegal border crossing!

The story of how he paid a people-smuggler to get him across, but he ended up robbed, beaten, and dumped over the fence into the arms of the American cops aiming their weapons at him, reads like pages out of the darkest of low-life Jim Thompson kind of noir fiction. Along the way, in what I think must come from his basic life view of some kind of hope or faith, he seems to carry luck on his side through almost every step of his career – despite endless seemingly insurmountable such trials. He gives up on America, but resettles in London, where he ends up writing album reviews for “Record Collector” magazine, and hanging out in Camden Town at the height of Brit Pop, rubbing shoulders with all the up-and-coming talent, including musicians from the band Suede, that he will return to later in the story when they again cross paths, but on a different plane of life all together.

To cut the story short, and to summarize again: He finally settles in Shanghai in 2005, spends a decade there, and that gig photographing bands transforms into a completely different photography career launched by his own passion for documenting the then world’s second tallest building during its construction: The Shanghai Tower. That leads to a friendship with the embattled architect of the building, Marshall Strabala. Almasy becomes, one way or another, basically the official photographer of the construction of that building.

In turn he ends up working for the That’s Shanghai city magazine, doing countless cover photos, and bit by bit, he becomes a highly respected, full-time, and international award winning photographer. A theme that runs throughout the book is what I would call his “meetings with remarkable men” through whom he seems to, in some ways, live vicariously as a journalist and photographer. (That, of course, might be called the essence of journalism, as we are all writing about someone else – a “story.”).

Another of these people is the Hungarian musician, Miklos Both, who he connects with and ends up writing about, photographing, and filming in several collaborations, as well as becoming a close friend. Tony Fernandes, in some sense, becomes a somewhat more distant such connection, but one who ends up providing him with his longest period of “stable” employment, as he lands the job at Travel360 that will only end with the advent of Covid that shook up not just AirAsia, but the entire Asian and, indeed, world, tourism experience and lifestyle for expats.

But by then, Nicky was reaching his limits on what had turned from the lowest level of border hopping illegal immigrant working in a bar in the US into living at the very highest of journalistic luxury travel while reporting for the inflight magazine and traveling uninterrupted for weeks on end year in year out around Asia:

Once you reach your limit, you begin to lose yourself altogether: When you’re on the road, your temporary homes, the hotels, meaninglessly click and switch like projected images one after the other behind the shadow that is you. Marriott, Crown Metropol, Park Hyatt, QT, Novotel, Hilton, Wyndham, you name it, are all just repetitious, ever changing but never-changing artificial backdrops, mere empty stages to dress up your solitude as a traveller. I often find that the more luxurious the hotel, fine art hanging on the walls, their one-of-a-kind décor, the more it enhances a sense of loneliness. There is a lack of human connection. Besides, they isolate you from the essence of your chosen destination with their ostentatious comfort-bubble and cut you off from reality altogether…..

….But when these momentary shelters become your everyday reality, if this is in fact all you have to fall back on each evening, when you live in them for weeks on end, these very same magically self-cleaning units are nothing more than bitter, blank reminders of just what an ungrounded life you’re living.

Any hardcore business traveller would reassure you that beyond the dazzling luxury decor, the exaggerated reception smiles that only last strictly until checkout time, nothing awaits but a dark reflection of your inner emptiness. It hangs over you like a sinister pendulum, and it intensifies at night as you sigh into the empty room before falling asleep. A traveller’s loneliness knows no distance, sneaks under your door, finds you in your fancy bathtub, stares back at you from the bathroom mirror, and it’s already there under the nicely creased bedsheets with the carefully folded towel swan on top before you even climb under the clean, crisp blankets. Endless business travel is like jumping through different dimensions as city skylines revolve outside your window; Nagoya, Osaka, New Delhi, Seoul, Guangzhou, Beijing. As exciting as they are to be in, from the hotels, these cities are all shimmering mirages of a seemingly projected reality.

This is where Nicky Almasy’s memoir touches home the most for me: His ability to cut through the gloss, the surface view, the sludge, and to express what we all, inevitably, face in life no matter how much success or lack of it we may meet with in our lives and careers. I could also deeply relate to his sentiment and career decisions to seek change, as I myself did after covering Formula One for more than 20 years and finally choosing to step off the weekly travel conveyor belt. Ultimately, I found this memoir to be a wonderful vicarious rollercoaster ride through another contemporary’s challenges as he tries to find his way to a self-sustaining and meaningful life and career, and one with which I could compare my own life choices. I would never, ever have suspected such a story that night I entered the Blues Room in Shanghai and took that first step in my own subsequent life’s journey.

(*A note on the “Not Review:” Years ago I decided to create a new feature concept for this blog. Because I believe in Ernest Hemingway’s dictum about writers not criticizing other writers in print as reviewers – “You cannot run with the hare and hunt with the hounds,” he said – but because I love to read good books and talk about them, I decided to start this approach. The idea is that I do not place myself on a critical pedestal and dictate what is righteous or not about a book I read. I do not pretend to recommend it as a piece of literature or a consumer product. I do not play the role of the book reviewer. This blog is simply my space, Brad’s world. So what I do when I feel compelled, is to write about books I am reading or have read or feel a need to write about for any other reason. This “Not-Book-Review,” as I call the column, is only a reflection of how I felt about the book.)

Looking Back at Writing “Formula 1: The Impossible Collection” For Assouline During Lockdown

September 17, 2021
bradspurgeon

Formula 1: The Impossible Collection

Formula 1: The Impossible Collection http://www.assouline.com

PARIS – The point of this blog for me is usually to write about things happening right now in my life. For more than a year now, I have kept quiet here about one of the biggest things that happened in my life during most of the Covid period we are still living through. I was so busy first doing it – and keeping my mouth closed and fingers crossed about it – and then once finished, talking about it everywhere except for here, with one published interview or review after another – I will run a list of links of those at the end of this post – that I simply did not find the moment to talk about it here! In short, I am referring to the book that I had the opportunity to write about the 100 great, extraordinary, “impossible” moments in Formula One history, since the series began in 1950 and up to the end of last season. The first 70 years of the world’s most popular auto racing series summed up in words and extraordinary images and published by Assouline, one of the world’s top luxury book publishers. So, I am coming late to it here, but since I also see this blog as a personal record of important moments in my life, I have decided that it is better late than never to talk about it!

This book project was offered to me in August 2020, when I was in Sicily and like everyone, found myself in that momentary lull between waves of the biggest pandemic to hit humankind in a century. And, as many readers of this blog will know and be able to relate to themselves, I had one part of my life absolutely wiped out by the pandemic: Performing music and doing my other theatre-related activities in public. The performing arts, as everyone knows, were amongst the worst hit – well, of course, not to mention the restaurant industry, the travel industry, airlines and airports, etc. – since to perform in public was one of the easiest and most natural things to ban. And rightly so.

But that left me, like so many musicians and actors and performers, feeling as if we might not be able to breathe if we came down with Covid, but we were not able to breathe without our moments on stage, either! Fortunately for me, I had spent decades of my life devoted exclusively to my other passion of being closed up in my room – or a media center or newspaper office – and writing. Living through words. Living in the mind and not in the outside world or on a stage.

Formula 1: The Impossible Collection promo video by Assouline (turn up the volume!)

So when in August 2020 I was offered this opportunity of writing a book about Formula One for Assouline’s most prestigious collection – the Ultimate – in the series known as “The Impossible Collection,” I didn’t just jump at it, I instantly stopped feeling any regret, pain or other horror for losing that other aspect of my life, consisting in performing on stage. Here was a fabulous project offered to me by Assouline that thrived off the lockdown isolation as it required intense concentration, research and writing at just the very moment that the second wave of the pandemic came to hit us.

First Hungarian Grand Prix 1986. Photo Credit: Bernard Asset

First Hungarian Grand Prix 1986. Photo Credit: Bernard Asset

Suddenly, I came entirely back to life thanks to this project. I also felt a huge sense of responsibility: The task was much bigger than I expected when I said yes. I had to come up with the 100 greatest, iconic, most important, “impossible” moments of Formula One over 70 years. I had been hired for my experience of more than 20 years covering the series for the International Herald Tribune, and The New York Times, and I realized that I had a responsibility for a big book that would sell for 920 euros, and/or $995, not just for an article on a piece of paper that would be used to wrap up fish the next day! My choices of moments have to be as close to perfect as possible.

Responsibility of Choosing the Impossible Moments for Formula 1: The Impossible Collection

It’s not that I doubted my ability to choose those moments. But I knew that Formula One is a series that has millions of fans who are not only passionate, but are often just as knowledgable as many of the journalists who cover it their whole lives. I also knew that any choice for a great moment that I made would also leave out several other possibilities that some other journalist or fan might feel very passionate about and cry foul!

“HOW could you not put in THIS moment!” they might say.

But that is also when I decided that, in any case, any list of 100 moments over 71 seasons that anyone made would have to have an element of personal preference or style to it, and I would have to assume that. Still, it took months to make the final choice of 100 great moments. I narrowed an initial selection down to 150, and then began eliminating, or at the suggestion of my editors at Assouline, in some cases, joining moments together – such as when I did only one moment for the two times that Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost crashed into each other at the Japanese Grand Prix in Suzuka in 1989 and 1990, thus drawing their championship duel to a close.

McLaren Technology Centre team factory. Photo Credit: McLaren F1 Team

McLaren Technology Centre team factory. Photo Credit: McLaren F1 Team

I also said to myself that it would be absolutely necessary in a series like Formula One to include in the great moments not just sporting moments, but technical ones – the introduction of the Ford DFV engine in the 60s that would dominate for so many years, or the first rear-engine victory, etc. – as well as business advances or reversals, new venues, etc. Formula One has so many different aspects to it, that it would be impossible to do it justice while focusing on just one part of it.

While it was easy to make my first list – I started by working off the top of my head, then I went through several histories, timelines, collections of statistics, etc., to make sure I missed nothing that I might have overlooked – the most difficult thing was really what to cut out of the list. So many things had to go at some point. It was with great regret, for instance, that I did not include Jean Alesi’s sole victory in the series when he drove his Ferrari to win the Canadian Grand Prix in 1995 after Michael Schumacher, who led all but the last 11 laps of the 68-lap race, had to make a pit stop to change his steering wheel, and could not engage the gear, and so handed the lead to Alesi, who kept it until the checkered flag. It was a hugely dramatic moment during a season dominated by Schumacher, and involving the two teams that would exchange those same two drivers for the following year. (Schumacher went to Ferrari the following year, while Alesi and his Ferrari teammate, Gerhard Berger, both went to Benetton.)

Michael Schumacher's first win for Ferrari in the wet in Spain in 1996. Photo credit: © Agence de Presse ARC/Mario Luini

Michael Schumacher’s first win for Ferrari in the wet in Spain in 1996. Photo credit: Agence de Presse ARC/Mario Luini

There were countless moments like this that I loved, that were big, important, but it was impossible to use them all. One of the ways that I chose moments, in fact, was to try to choose them for their larger effect on the series. That applied especially, for instance, with the moments that involved fatalities. The early years were so full of fatalities, and each was as tragic as the other. As time went on and safety improved, there were fewer and fewer. But still, while I did not mention the death of Elio De Angelis in 1986 after a testing accident, I could not, clearly, avoid talking about the moment involving the death of Ayrton Senna (with Roland Ratzenberger having died the previous day) at Imola in 1994. Nor could I avoid talking about the death of Wolfgang von Trips and the 15 spectators at Monza in September 1961.

I could not, either, avoid moments that included the great records, Schumacher’s equalling Juan Manuel Fangio’s 5 world titles in 2002, and then beating that record. And how satisfying and beautiful it was for the book to end on the note of Lewis Hamilton equalling Schumacher’s record of seven titles – and beating his number of victories – in the final season that the book covered, 2020, which was unfolding as I wrote it.

Catharsis in Writing the Introduction to Formula 1: The Impossible Collection

It was the work on the moments, both selecting them and writing them – in all their minute detail – that would make up the biggest part of the job. When I took on the project, I had thought it would be the writing of what became a 65-page introduction – with lots of photos – that would be the hardest part. In fact, the introduction was probably the most fun part to do, as I saw it as an opportunity to sum up and focus all of my knowledge about Formula One accumulated over a lifetime of being a fan – the first race I attended was the first Canadian Grand Prix, at Mosport in 1967 – and nearly a quarter century of writing about it professionally. So in a way, the introduction – that even went into the previous era of Grand Prix racing, starting with the precursor auto races sponsored by the founder of my former IHT newspaper, James Gordon Bennett Jr. – was even cathartic, in a way.

It was an incredible bit of unexpected icing on the cake when after I submitted the completed book to the editors, I learned that both Jean Todt, the president of the International Automobile Federation, and Stefano Domenicali, the CEO of Formula One, had written forewords to the book. What an honor. (But just as great an honor was my having been the writer that Jean Todt recommended to do the book when Assouline asked for his advice on who to call.)

When Formula 1: The Impossible Collection Finally Arrives

Me at home with my advance copy of the Formula 1: The Impossible Collection book. Photo Credit: Ornella Bonventre

Me at home with my advance copy of the Formula 1: The Impossible Collection book. Photo Credit: Ornella Bonventre

But the day my advance copy of the book arrived – all nearly 10 kilograms of it – that was when I saw the reality that I could never truly have imagined for a book that is an absolute “bijou” as the French say for a jewel, and I could see immediately not only why it was being sold for 920 euros, but that it seemed worth much more than that in the paper and hand craftsmanship alone. Printed at a luxury quality printer in Milan (called Grafiche Milani, a favourite of Jimmy Page) and many of the photographs – the photographic research job, as well as many of the photos themselves, was done by Bernard Asset, a top F1 photographer, while the final choices of photos and images was done by Martine Assouline, of the husband and wife team that own the company – were separately glued to the pages. The cover had a soft feel to it, and a wafting sent of the printer’s workshop came emanating from the box when I opened the book package. Astounding!

Jimmy Page video of his experience with Grafiche Milani printer of Formula 1: The Impossible Collection

By the time the book was completed, and published in May, I had begun to think about playing music again, and I was, in fact, able to do so at a few places, as the pandemic died out a little where I live, and the vaccination process began – I got my second one at the end of May – and then I returned to Sicily, where I was able to perform a couple of times, as I have done back home in France since then.

On the other hand, I have also been working all out on another book project in recent months, which I will also only announce when the time is appropriate! (I’m entering a virtuous cycle here!) And again, I can thank this new project for taking me through the third wave!!!

The book “Formula 1: The Impossible Collection,” is available around the world in both Assouline’s own stores, as well as some select shops. It is also available to buy online at Assouline’s site.

Great Press Coverage of Formula 1: The Impossible Collection

Actually, I said the cherry on the cake were the two forewords, but there was another aspect to doing the book that I had not expected to this degree, and that was great coverage by some of the world’s top magazines, some of which involved several interviews with me…that once again showed me how difficult it can be to be on the other side of the journalistic table, as the subject of the interview rather than the interviewer!

Here is a list of links to a few of the major interviews and reviews of the book, so you can click on any one of them to read the review or interview:

  • Robb Report: Assouline’s New $995 Formula 1 Book Was 70 Years in the Making
  • MAXIM: A LOOK BACK AT FORMULA 1’S MOST MEMORABLE MOMENTS
  • MAXIM: RACE THROUGH F1 HISTORY WITH THIS HIGH-OCTANE COFFEE TABLE BOOK
  • BOSS HUNTING: ‘Formula 1: The Impossible Collection’ Is The Ultimate Coffee Table Book For Racing Fans
  • F1Total.ca : INTERVIEW l Brad Spurgeon and Assouline release ‘Formula 1: The Impossible Collection’, a one-of-a-kind $995 book
  • Motorsportweek: Feature: Writing the Impossible Formula One book
  • GQ Australia: 11 coffee table books you actually won’t be able to put back down
  • L’Automobile Magazine: F1: un livre collection sur les plus grands
  • L’Equipe: Un livre pour célébrer les 70 ans de la F1
  • Quattroruote (Italy)
  • Bunte (Germany)
    • Le Figaro Magazine (France)

    Le Figaro Magazine (France)

    L'Automobile (France)

    L’Automobile (France)

    FIA AUTO MAGAZINE ISSUE #34

    FIA AUTO MAGAZINE ISSUE #34

    The book was reviewed or promoted in many, many other parts of the internet, on many different kinds of sites, making me realize there is a landscape out there for talking about books and products of a size and kind that I had never even suspected existed (the landscape I mean, not the size of the books!). And so it was a fun, learning experience all over to have been blessed with this not impossible dream of writing a book about Formula One’s impossible moments for Assouline.

    “Just a Story From America:” Discovering Elliott Murphy – 48 years late – in His Unputdownable Memoir!

    September 8, 2021
    bradspurgeon

    Elliott Murphy

    Elliott Murphy

    PARIS – I have a confession to make. I thought I knew just about everything there is to know about all the rock, folk, or just any musicians who count that I needed to know about. What arrogance! The last thing I expected to discover now, at my age – don’t ask what that is – was a musician who got his start in 1973 and had albums published by Polydor, RCA and Columbia Records, who was produced by people as astounding and legendary as Paul Rothchild, and who has lived in my backyard – in Paris – for the last 30 years. Of course, I HAD heard of Elliott Murphy for many years. But because I had heard of him as the American musician the French were in love with and who they thought of as an “American” star but I didn’t because I had not heard of him while growing up in Canada, I had brushed him off entirely…having never listened to his music. More arrogance. But that all changed over the last week after I stumbled upon his memoir: “Just A Story From America.”

    Not only have I come to his music 48 years late – and keep in mind that even in March 1973, a month before this was released, I was keenly aware and waiting for the latest sounds, coming home one day that month with that month’s release of Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy” and Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” – but I have also come to the memoir late. Fortunately, not 48 years late! This brilliant memoir was published in English in May 2019, and in French last November. So I am only a little behind on that! And the way I have started this blog post will make me look quite ignorant to the millions who have known and loved Elliott Murphy’s music for nearly 50 years!

    As far as I can see, Elliott Murphy’s memoir, “Just A Story From America” is a self-published – or I should say, independently published – book in English, but with a bona fide French publisher in the translated version. And it also came out in a Spanish translation at a publisher in Spain under the title, “The Last Rock Star.” So maybe the promotion and marketing of the English edition was a little lacking. (Unless I am being arrogant again!) In any case, I have now read this memoir as quickly as I read that memoir of Steve Forbert a few years ago, or Terence Rigby’s memoir (by Juliet Ace) a couple of months ago. Forbert, like Murphy, was another of the many “new Bob Dylans” and Rigby was another “supporting role” kind of artist, which you could almost say in some small way Murphy was too. Someone who was never a household name, but played as well as the big guys, and often WITH the big guys. On the other hand, in fact, no. You can only say that the comparison between the great actor of usually secondary roles, and the great musician who was eclipsed in the fame sweepstakes by friends such as Bruce Springsteen, Lou Reed, Billy Joel, and many more, is a great and real act of his own. End of story. So I am writing this blog post today to say to any of the few readers of this blog who do NOT know Elliott Murphy’s music AND Elliott Murphy’s writing, to please, waste no more of your life’s time and get to know him.

    While reading the memoir, I went to YouTube and started my searches for his albums, in order of appearance. There are now some 40 of them, so to listen to all of the Elliott Murphy albums will take me some days. But I was immediately astounded upon hearing his first: Aquashow, released in 1973, by Polydor. Here I was listening to a cross between David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, and wait for this, Graham Parker and Elvis Costello, all wrapped up into one.

    Elliott Murphy performing “Last of the Rock Stars”

    But there’s more, much more: At the same time that I discovered the musician I also suddenly discovered Elliott Murphy the writer and journalist, and there will be many more discoveries yet to come: Elliot Murphy has published in Rolling Stone, Spin, Vanity Fair, among other magazines, and written books in addition to the memoir – novels, short story collections and poetry. As a writer, he has as great a voice as he does as a singer. That voice and the story it tells so beautifully makes this memoir a touching work from beginning to end. Extremely touching. It is the highly personal story of a man who confronted the death of his father when he was 16, when his father was 48, and actually witnessed his father’s fatal heart attack, running off to find a doctor to help – too late – and then having his fairly wealthy, Long Island idyllic life disintegrate around him.

    Elliott Murphy’s album Acqushow

    His father was a show business impresario, having created an amusement attraction called Aquashow, with dancing girls and water shows, that was hugely successful; followed by a successful restaurant that hosted stars and the political elite. His mother dined with Eisenhower, met with Elizabeth Taylor, the world of Elliott Murphy Sr., revolved around high style and success. Until the heart attack showed how flimsy the world really is.

    For the boy, Elliott, known at the time by his middle name, James – or rather, “Jimmy” – it was, naturally, his whole world that fell apart. As it did for his mother, who at first tried to keep the restaurant going, but it failed eventually. Eventually, she ended up as a salesperson at Tiffany & Co. and stayed there for 20 years.

    No wonder Elliott Murphy was angry at life. But it was an anger that he channeled into his touching first album with his new name, his real name: Elliott Murphy. The album being called…Aquashow. Yes, Elliott Murphy’s Aquashow lived on.

    Without the backstory, I think that no one could have known where this album came from. Except in the authenticity of the cry of pain.

    Watching his life unfold as an artist in this memoir is a lesson in life and career: So much of his life was made by his audacity – and a little arrogance? – as he always went directly to the source of what he hoped would be a launching platform for his career. During a trip through Europe when he was 21, he stopped off at Cinecitta in Rome hoping to finagle his way into acting as an extra in films, arriving decked out in such a way that he thought they would believe his story that he was an actor in cowboy films in the U.S. Fellini took one look at him and offered him a role as an extra – actually something a lot more than that – in his film Roma!

    Elliott Murphy today

    Elliott Murphy today


    Returning to the U.S., he made a demo with his brother of some of the songs he wrote in Europe, and he headed off to Polydor, knocked on the door, said he wanted his demo listened to, and they were invited up immediately into the office of one of the A&R people who listened to it, liked it, and arranged an audition later in the week with the head of A&R. He liked it and they got a deal! Off the street in a company they knew nothing about, except that James Brown was with Polydor, as was guitarist Roy Buchanan.

    This kind of thing is repeated again and again throughout his life and career as he found himself scoring deal after deal, moving from Polydor to RCA – where Paul Rothchild produced the album, “Lost Generation,” in 1975, and where he then recorded his “Night Lights” album – then to Columbia, where he recorded his last album for a major label, “Just a Story From America,” the same title as the memoir.

    During this period, he lived a life that he turns into a dream read with fabulous anecdotes about meetings with a seemingly endless string of household names in show business, that includes such a diverse cast as Frank Zappa and Liza Minnelli. Zappa invited him into a studio while he was recording an album, Zappa’s guitar amp was in the studio, but Zappa was seated in the engineering booth with the engineer, and playing his guitar from there that was attached to the amp in the studio! Minnelli he met at a party, and the two were encouraged to sing together…but he knew none of her broadway music show tunes, and she knew no pop, rock, folk, Dylan or otherwise! He met Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was just as arrogant about him as I was (until now), who looked away from him while they shared a stretch limousine, and said: “I hear you’re a has-been.” (He regrets now that he was so pissed off at that that he did not buy any of the drawings Basquiat was selling for only a hundred bucks each. Imagine the value today – that would be a very much “living well” kind of revenge.)

    Here we see the life of a rock star up close and personal throughout the 1970s, and then the fairly sudden change for the singer songwriters when punk suddenly took over and made them all irrelevant. (How did Forbert come out and thrive at that moment?!!?)

    That period coincides in his life with the moment he goes entirely and almost fatally off the rails. Like so many others – not Zappa – he was taking drugs – mostly cocaine – and alcohol as a daily diet. He was in so deep that he did not even know it. In short, he managed to discover his own problem with the help of a freak moment meeting an attractive woman who had herself been an alcoholic, and who took him to a meeting where he discovered he DID have a problem, and he had an epiphany. He never touched a drop of alcohol or drugs again, some 30 years ago now.

    Elliott Murphy's father's Aquashow on a billboard in NYC

    Elliott Murphy’s father’s Aquashow on a billboard in NYC


    In fact, he had fallen so low that after all these successes in the 1970s, he had ended up moving back to his mother’s place, sleeping on a cot, and then working as a secretary in a law firm just to survive! But he had learned a lesson about life that he would never forget, and soon begin to apply: “Looking back, it’s hard to deny that my daily drinking and regular cocaine use had something to do with my bad decisions; what happens when your lifestyle instead of your work becomes your priority.”

    That was it. From then on, his work took precedence over his lifestyle. But his lifestyle also improved. He ended up moving to France in around 1989 – a country where he had had quite a big success that he was not even aware of for years thanks to the record company’s keeping it secret from him – and then he met his future wife – Françoise – and then had a son, Gaspard, in 1990. He has lived here ever since, worked on something similar to Bob Dylan’s “never ending tour,” – not to mention getting invited to play with Bruce Springsteen during his Paris visits on several occasions – and he has expanded that writing career too. With this memoir as the latest result. Go out and get it! I have told only a fraction of the fabulous tales this book contains. It’s a real discovery…of course, as I indicated earlier, I’m probably preaching to the converted and I’m the only idiot out here who didn’t know much about Elliott Murphy until now!

    A Not-Book-Review cum Memoir Cum autobiography etc. of Terence Rigby and his Memoir by Juliet Ace: Rigby Shlept Here

    August 11, 2021
    bradspurgeon

    Rigby Shlept Here

    Rigby Shlept Here

    CASTELLAMMARE DEL GOLFO, Sicily – He was one of the greatest British character actors of the end of the 20th century, early 21st century, one of Harold Pinter’s fetish actors and friend, just as adept starring in television, on stage or in cinema – a late career period with along with Julia Roberts and in Color Me Kubrick…the list of achievements go on and on for Terence Rigby. And I am proud to be able to say that for a few months in 1977 to 1978 we were briefly friends, while I was a bartender at The National Theatre in London, and he was acting in various roles as part of the company. In fact, he helped me audition for RADA, where he had started out 20 years earlier. But if my life completely changed after that, I always carried questions about who exactly was this man Terence Rigby. Many others who knew him asked the same questions. How delighted was I last week to discover a Memoir of Rigby’s life was published in 2014 and written by his good friend, the scriptwriter, Juliet Ace. Called, “Rigby Shlept Here,” it is a magnificent tale of an unusual man and a great actor. I have now written a long review-cum-memoir of my own of this book, and about this man. Follow the link here to my page in my Writers on Writers and Writing section about Terence Rigby and Juliet Ace’s memoir “Rigby Shlept Here.“

    Writing on Writers and Writing: a New “Salon” Space on this Blog

    December 29, 2020
    bradspurgeon

    Writing on Writers and Writing Photo: ©Brad Spurgeon

    Writing on Writers and Writing.
    Photo: ©Brad Spurgeon

    PARIS – The other day when I put up that article I did about Marc Villard, the French crime writer, I mentioned that I thought it was about time for me to create a separate space on this blog to hold together all my articles about the French crime writing scene. Sleeping on the idea, I came up with an idea I like even more, which is to create a space on the blog that will group together ALL of the writing on this blog about writers and writing. So it seemed natural to create a menubar, that you see above this post at the top of the browser, called “Writing on Writers and Writing.”

    Under that menubar you will find a collection of all sorts of bits and pieces of writing from this blog of stuff about writers and writing, books, bookstores, Not Book Reviews, etc. It is not an exhaustive collection of such writing that I have done over the years, by any means. It is just like the rest of this blog, stuff that I chose at any given time to devote a page to. As a result, I took away some of the articles previously held in certain other parts of the blog – like from “Blog Articles as Opposed to Posts,” and I gave them this their own home.

    I am hoping that it will inspire me to contribute regularly to them with many of the pieces of writing on writing and writers that I have done in the past, and perhaps, eventually, I will create subheadings for each area that may grow too big, such as the writings specifically about the French crime writing scene.

    Also, I decided that it was a good place to carry the definition of what should be linked there just a little further, by adding links in the menu to such things as my interview book with Colin Wilson, linking to its place on Amazon: Colin Wilson: Philosopher of Optimism. Or the video interview that I did with Colin Wilson when a new edition of the book came out.

    Finally, I also decided to add to the Fiction menu the some of the translations that I have done of other people’s fiction, notably the three stories by Marc Villard, and a story by Jean-Hugues Oppel, that appeared in an anthology in the United States, and then later made its way to a BBC radio play, which is where the link goes.

    And so it is that under semi-lockdown I have finally found the time to do some long-required housekeeping on this blog! (You will have seen the huge lack of blog items in recent months about playing music in public! And you will not, coronavirus oblige, wonder why!)

    The True Believer: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Today’s Bizarre Social, Political and Crazy World – and it was published in 1951

    January 14, 2019
    bradspurgeon

    My copy of The True Believer

    My copy of The True Believer

    PARIS – If you want to know what is happening in the world today, read this book first published in 1951. If you are shocked, confused, disgusted or even enamoured by Trump, Brexit, Bolsonaro, Orban, Gilets Jaunes, Salvini, Putin, Xi, and all this talk about making every country great again until there is no more world, then read this book published in 1951. If you haven’t got a clue about what I just wrote above, then read this book published in 1951. I have never been a person to seek to find all the answers in one place, but having just finished reading “The True Believer,” by Eric Hoffer, I have found just about all the answers to what is happening in our world – politically and socially – today. And I feel both a little better, and a little worse for it. But mostly better.

    That the book was published in 1951 puts our world into perspective, of course. But at the same time, when putting human nature and its political systems into perspective, there should be no surprise for what is happening today. In a nutshell, “The True Believer,” puts it all into a nutshell: The psychology behind mass movements – looking at just about all of history up until 1951 – and sums up without favour to one side or the other exactly why mass movements find their adherents and their leaders. Here we see the common thread throughout human history between such things as communism, fascism, Nazism, as well as world religions like Catholicism and Protestantism and Judaism, and, yes, terrorism, and yes, populism.

    Before the pro-Trumps or the anti-Trumps try to put a label on whose side Eric Hoffer is on, please, again, understand that he is not on any side: Hoffer was a longshoreman throughout his life and spent his free time reading, studying and examining both historical and contemporary movements. A longshoreman is a guy who works on the docks in shipyards, loading goods on ships, etc. A longshoreman is a worker. Hoffer was not part of any educational, social or political elite. He published “The True Believer” at nearly 50 years old – he was born in 1898 in The Bronx – and spent his life living his writing and his studies, and not seeking any particular status in society, beyond that of being a longshoreman – until his writing success gave him the possibility to leave the docks in 1964, and then become an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley until 1970, when he retired from public life.

    The book, it turns out, became a bestseller, and was republished many times. “The True Believer” is still available if you go to Amazon, where you can even buy a Kindle edition. I came to this book last month as I was looking at my bookshelves and saw it once again (my 1966 Harper & Row, Perennial Library edition); I had picked it up decades ago from who knows where – I think in a pile of books that my fellow employees put in a pile at the office for sharing – and I had put it on my shelf and been attracted to read it many, many times, but never sat down to read more than the first page.

    The book begins: “It is a truism that many who join a rising revolutionary movement are attracted by the prospect of sudden and spectacular change in their conditions of life. A revolutionary movement is a conspicuous instrument of change.”

    That was it. This time, thanks to our crazy contemporary world, I was hooked from those words onward. I immediately began to think about the social movements the world is facing today, and the common thread that ties them all together: Desire for sudden and immediate change.

    As I read the book, I found answers to most of the questions I have had about all the world’s biggest, most obvious social movements of today, but also and most importantly, answers to why people have elected liars, bigots, racists, dictator-leaning leaders, and how they can let such often ignorant, lying, leaders run their countries into the ground.

    I cannot go through the whole book here, and prefer to give just enough of a taste that anyone who reads this will get the book and read it. It reads, by the way, like a treatise, or even a manifesto. But it is written in very simple English, and laid out in chapters, subheadings, and other bits and pieces that make it easy to pick up and read in short spurts – as I did – on the metro (were it not for the lack of good lighting these days in public transport built for backlit screens) or in down moments anytime during the day.

    Among the fabulous, burning questions it answered for me were such things as why the “true believers” do accept a leader who is a patent liar who denies the truth on subjects that are clearly able to have their facts checked: The reason is because the believers are far more interested in having a person to believe “in” than having a person whose facts are true. The truth, in fact, means nothing to the true believer, only the fact of having a leader they believe will lead them to the change they desire. Ergo Trump, of course, and the fact that he creates his own “facts.” His followers do not care about his lying, only the change they believe he can bring.*

    But there is much in the book to give me hope, as well. One of the things that Hoffer says a great leader must have to succeed in a social movement is the ability to develop a core group of close advisers and schemers and lieutenants around him (or her). This group not only sees the mission the way the leader does, but remains loyal – and he to them – and together they work to break down the system and create their new movement. Of course, while we know lots of stories about Trump looking for loyalty above all from government leaders around him, the bigger story of the Trump administration is his complete inability to keep for any length of time any loyal group of advisers around him. Mostly he is himself incapable of being loyal to any other individual, from what I have read in the news.

    Of course, some things in history have changed. While Hoffer speaks about the leader’s need to control the media, and in the past this meant state control of the media, today, the new fascist dictators of the world no longer have to control newspapers and television stations when they simply discredit them through their own use of the social media – see Trump and Salvini as among the best examples of this. (Of course, Putin’s apparent setting up of a group of people to manipulate foreign social media could be seen as another kind of example.)

    The True Believer in its own words

    I have done far more talking here than I planned, and I have given far too few examples of the kind of writing this book presents us on every page. So I will here open the book randomly three times in three different places – I took no notes while reading it – and write down below the paragraphs that jump out at me on the random pages in order to give examples:

    1) “It is rare for a mass movement to be wholly of one character. Usually it displays some facets of other types of movement, and sometimes it is two or three movements in one. The exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt was a slave revolt, a religious movement and a nationalist movement. The militant nationalism of the Japanese is essentially religious. The French Revolution was a new religion. It had “its dogma, the sacred principles of the Revolution – Liberté at sainte égalité. It had its form of worship, an adaptation of Catholic ceremonial, which was elaborated in connection with civic fêtes.”

    2) Imitation is an essential unifying agent. The development of a close-knit group is inconceivable without a diffusion of uniformity. The one-mindedness and Gleichschaltung prized by every mass movement are achieved as much by imitation as by obedience. Obedience itself consists as much in the imitation of an example as in the following of a precept.
    Though the imitative capacity is present in all people, it can be stronger in some than in others. The question is whether the frustrated, who, as suggested in Section 43, not only have a propensity for united action but are also equipped with a mechanism for its realization, are particularly imitative. Is there a connection between frustration and the readiness to imitate? Is imitation in some manner a means of escape from the ills that beset the frustrated?

    3) The man of action saves the movement from the suicidal dissensions and the recklessness of the fanatics. But his appearance usually marks the end of the dynamic phase of the movement. The war with the present is over. The genuine man of action is intent not on renovating the world but on possessing it. Whereas the life breath of the dynamic phase was protest and a desire for drastic change, the final phase is chiefly preoccupied with administering and perpetuating the power won.

    The book is almost cover-to-cover such pithy analysis. Unfortunately, it happens to be so apolitical that it ends by actually saying that mass movements are a good thing for the world, despite the usual death and destruction that accompany them. They are bringing necessary change to a system that has become ineffectual, that has calcified.

    But here, again, Hoffer does not make judgments. I know that in today’s climate Hoffer will likely be considered by many to be “on the side” of the establishment. Hillary Clinton has read this book and mentioned it in association with Trump. This will lead some anti-Clinton people to say the book must therefore be a plot by Hillary. But they would overlooked the fact that Ronald Reagan bestowed upon Hoffer the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983, a few months before the longshoreman died at the age of 84.

    So, again, I say, read this book first published in 1951, even, in fact, if you have already read it. It will resound with more meaning today in our world gone mad.

    * Note: One of the fundamental theses of the book is that the believer is a frustrated person who longs for a movement to actually remove them from the constraints that a free society condemns them with. What constraints? The need to make decisions, to make choices, to face their own responsibility for their frustrated state within a free system. In other words, a mass movement, a dictatorship, a religion, tells the believer what to believe, how to act, no decisions need to be made. Life is “simpler.” So the believers are actually getting the repressive system they want.

    The Inspiring Steve Forbert Memoir, or Another Great Gift From Romeo: Big City Cat

    September 11, 2018
    bradspurgeon

    Big City Cat Cover

    Big City Cat Cover

    PARIS – I am so relieved to have just finished reading Steve Forbert’s memoir, “Big City Cat: My Life in Folk-Rock.” I am a very slow reader, and I had been glued to it during every off-moment of the past three or four days since I downloaded it into my Kindle – wreaking havoc on the rest of my life. I had been waiting patiently for the book’s release date and the moment that came, I downloaded it and dug in. Were it not for other commitments I would have finished it in a single reading, if possible. As it was, I was forced to put down the Elvis Costello autobiography to read Forbert’s, but I couldn’t kill all of my commitments – work, family and social. So it took a few days. Why all the excitement?

    Let me use the Costello book, “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink,” as a point of departure. Forbert and Costello were born only four months apart in 1954, with Costello being the older of the two. I was born almost exactly three years after Forbert. They were born on different sides of the Atlantic ocean, and both became famous at almost the same time – Costello’s first album, “My Aim is True” was released in July ’77, while Forbert’s first album, “Alive on Arrival” came out in June ’78. I was living off my busking in London’s Marble Arch subways at the time Costello’s album appeared, and I was renting a bed in a crappy hotel in Notting Hill Gate. I remember seeing the posters all over the place for Costello’s album, with the photos of the nerd with the horn-rimmed glasses, and I remember thinking, “Who is this clown?” In time (years, really), Costello would become one of my favorite singer songwriters, and remains so today.

    Forbert, for me, was a completely different story. He was one of my early musical influences. But not from his album, it was from having attended open mic nights at Folk City in New York City in 1976 when he was starting out, and I met him there, and talked to him about himself a little as we stood in line outside in the cold, waiting to sign our names to the list for the night’s open mic. He uses the older term “hootenanny,” and writes extensively about this period in his life. It fills in a background for me not only of his life, but of the life I took part in at the time but only briefly, and only barely, and especially of all that I missed by not staying in NYC long enough before returning to Toronto.

    Alive on Arrival

    Alive on Arrival


    At the time, I was very interested in talking to him because, for me at 18, seeing this 21-year-old take to the stage and spread some kind of magic around the room, filling the place with a presence and a sound that I could not identify, I wondered what the hell was going on here? What was happening that the room changed when “Little Stevie Orbit” took to the stage? What orbit did he come in from? I was confused, particularly since I knew that my own efforts on stage as a musician at the time were so poor, and so many of the other musicians taking part in the “hoot” sounded simply human – not from another galaxy or time warp.

    So his influence on me was something in his performance that I continued to search for a long while and eventually started to grasp one evening while busking in London in the fall of ’77, the following year, and feeling something about how to use the whole body and express through the body and voice the fire of the emotion burning inside the gut. (It would take me many, many more years, even so, to get to any point where I could be in any way satisfied with a feeling of how to reproduce that thing at will.) So it is that I know exactly what Forbert’s eventual manager, Danny Fields, was referring to when he describes in the book what got him interested in the young Forbert:

    “I … loved the intensity of performance — I would say that most of all,” Fields is quoted saying. “I don’t remember words, just remembered he played, he sang and he played and he stomped with his boots, so he was like a one-man band and I liked that.”

    That’s a bit of a crude and simple description of the thing Forbert gave off – in addition to the rich, unique rasp of his young voice – but it does indicate it was this “thing” that was being communicated and reaching everyone that listened and saw him perform. There was a genuineness that came through it all, too. And in reading this autobiography, I realize where the genuineness came from: Forbert, who reached international fame in the pop charts in 1979 with “Romeo’s Tune,” is about as genuine as they come. This book is genuine. Unlike so many efforts at propaganda that show business personalities release as memoirs or autobiography, “Big City Cat,” gives several sides of the story.

    There is the beautifully told, laid back, easy voice of Forbert – his Mississippi voice comes through – telling the main narrative (in which he frequently talks about his own failings as well as his strong points and successes). But the book also gives space for several of the other people involved in his career, including the aforementioned Fields, who are given what appears to be freedom to talk about the bad side of Forbert as well as the good. (At one point Forbert just fired his whole entourage, without much explanation, including Fields – and it was for good. Oh, and he goes on doing the same with his managers for decades.)

    Forbert as “the new Bob Dylan”?

    And so, yes, it turns out, the “bad side” is mostly, possibly, bad for Forbert himself, who does not hide that he probably made some mistakes in his career choices that led to his career peaking in the late-70s, early ’80s before he completely disappeared from the pop firmament and never had another hit like Romeo’s Tune. He was one of a long line of singer songwriters who were cursed with the epithet, “the new Bob Dylan.”

    “I say to this day that, deep down, Steve Forbert wanted to be the new Bob Dylan and/or the new Elvis Presley,” writes Fields. “And, the cataclysm, you know, was when he woke up and he was not either the new Bob Dylan or the new Elvis Presley. It became apparent after the third album—he was not the new Bob Dylan—and he lashed out.”

    But here’s the beauty of the book, in Forbert’s immediate response in the main narrative:

    “Any career disappointments I had didn’t center around the cliché of being the “new Bob Dylan.” I never put any credence in that,” Forbert writes. “I knew enough to know that that tag put me in some pretty good company, John Prine, Bruce Springsteen, and Loudon Wainwright being three. I’m sure they would agree that what it basically conjured was a talent for poetic storytelling. As far as whatever literal expectations it might set up, it was nothing to be taken seriously. No one new was ever going to be able to bring about the radical changes the real Bob Dylan had brought to songwriting.”

    “In my case, my illusions were shattered when I didn’t manage to follow the success of “Romeo’s Tune.” I had been under the impression that I could accomplish pretty much anything I wanted to do. For a while I could. And then, lo and behold, I couldn’t.”

    This reminds me exactly – paradoxically – of the quote in Bob Dylan’s memoir, “Chronicles,” where after the producer Daniel Lanois beseeches Dylan to write some new songs like the epic greats he wrote in the 1960s, Dylan responds that he would love to, but that he can no longer do that – that that was another time, place and Dylan. (I am paraphrasing without returning to read the original quote.)

    But true to his genuineness, Steve Forbert has continued writing songs, playing music, loving music, being obsessed by music, to this day. And making albums. And touring endlessly, including around Europe and elsewhere. (I saw Forbert solo in a small town in England in 2013.) Here is, finally, a man who – after semi-serious alcohol problems in addition to the career problems – appears to be ultimately at peace with himself and his career.

    “By the time “Romeo’s Tune” was a hit I had already surpassed my personal level of comfort with, oddly enough, the very goals I’d set out to achieve,” he writes near the end of the book. “If it’s clear that I am not the type of personality that would ever be at ease with a household name–level of fame, then I should be pretty comfortable these days.”

    Beyond Romeo’s Tune: Or the Forbert behind it all

    For me, Forbert’s voice, his talent, his “thing” from Folk City suddenly made sense to me in the middle of October 1978 when I had just returned from one of the most painful episodes of my life, living in Iran during the Revolution, and I was taking a black London taxi from the airport back to the apartment where I had been living while in London for most of the previous year. All of a sudden, over the cab radio I heard a song, I think it was “Goin’ Down to Laurel,” and I instantly recognized the voice and the feeling. It was that guy from Folk City from two years earlier.

    All of my questions and confusion suddenly got answered and straightened out. He had simply been so fabulous and gifted that he was destined to be heard on the radio. It hit me with all the greater power because I was returning from the hell of the revolution in Teheran to the comfort of the West, and felt life opening up with endless possibilities. Forbert’s voice and performance seemed to fit right in with that sense of an optimistic future.

    And as life’s strange synchronicities would have it, the apartment where I was heading was that of Paul Gambaccini, the American BBC radio DJ and pop music writer, which was where I had lived before heading for Iran. Paul was unaware that I was returning – but I still had my key – and so he came home that afternoon to find me sleeping on the couch in the living room. It was a slightly awkward situation for a moment, as he had come home with a couple of people he was going to interview; a guy named Bob Geldof and his girlfriend Paula Yates.

    I had no idea who Geldof was – other than Paul telling me he was a singer in a band called the Boomtown Rats -, but when Geldof discovered I had just returned from the revolution in Iran, he was more interested in talking about that than doing the interview with Paul. His probing questions about the life of the people of Iran I would look at in future years as highly significant of his character: The man who eventually became famous and knighted for his charity concerts and philanthropy nearly a decade later to help people in need, was already interested in the needy people of Iran in 1978.

    All of that might appear like going off topic, but I don’t think it is: Whatever you do in life, it will be influenced by the character guiding the whole enterprise. The true “you,” that you are, the one that makes the decisions every waking moment. And reading Forbert’s book, I feel I have finally understood what made up this massively talented “one-hit wonder,” who has, in fact, had a lot more to contribute to the musical world than just “Romeo’s Tune.”

    And this draws us back around to the Costello book, which as reflected in its title, “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink,” is a completely different read from a completely different character. Where Forbert’s could be read in a single rollercoaster read (or ride) the Costello book, like his music, is a vast tapestry of stories, memories and impressions in a language that is much more involved than in the Forbert book. I saw an interview with Costello recently on YouTube where he says that the book is meant to be read very slowly (which made me feel immediately better about myself and my slow – but relishing – reading of his book). So I felt no problem dropping it for the Forbert rollercoaster, and I will now pick it up again. Suffice it to say, there could not be a bigger difference in philosophy between the two books – as I think there is in the two lives, and the two musicians’ music….

    By the way, in another strange twist of fate, in 1980 when I was back in Toronto and preparing to go to see Forbert in concert after the release of his third album, “Little Stevie Orbit,” I glanced into the window of the record store on the way to the concert and saw suddenly jumping out at me the name of the man who had written the liner notes to the album: Paul Gambaccini! How the hell did that happen?!?! Come to think of it, Paul might well have been the DJ who put the Forbert tune on the radio in London as I was in the cab on the way back.

    I highly recommend anyone who does not know Forbert’s music to get listening immediately, and go out and get this book. It’s a great read about the whole pop music world of the last 50 years. Forbert was one of the rare musicians who appeared to be equally at home at Folk City – and other Greenwich Village folk clubs – AND at the rock mecca of CBGB’s, where he opened for the budding band known as Talking Heads and others, including John Cale. (And don’t miss him as the boyfriend in Cyndi Lauper’s video of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun!”)

    What a life!

    A New Not-Book-Review: Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, “Joueur d’échecs”

    October 18, 2017
    bradspurgeon

    Maxime Vachier-Lagrave

    Maxime Vachier-Lagrave

    PARIS – Until I began playing chess as an adult nearly 20 years ago, there was no activity either sporting, musical or intellectual in my life that I would do unless I felt at least a tiny level of competence. Chess became almost an addiction – the part about playing on the Internet – but I could never fool myself into thinking I was anything other than a horrible, horrible chess player.

    As it happens, my son, Paul, was a very, very good chess player from the age of 7 to 15, playing at the national level in France, both amongst children and adults. He suddenly quit chess completely not long after he turned 15, telling me that it would require more work than it was worth to stay at the top levels as he grew older. That made sense. In any case, he quit, while I continued to play as a hack. But I also continued to watch the players of his age group whom he had known or played against as they rose up the categories. One who I had first become aware of when he was about 8 years old, and who was only 6 months older than Paul, was Maxime Vachier-Lagrave. He was already one of the top young players at that time in France, and he continued to rise steadily up the ratings list and through the hierarchy of national, European and world championships.

    Lately, this player has reached as high as No. 2 in the world, and currently sits third in the international ratings list. A couple of weeks ago, in France and in French, he published a book about his life in chess (Joueur d’echecs, Fayard) – at age 27 – and I now learn that while I never doubted that this young player would rise up to challenge for the world title, apparently there were a few times in his career when he had his doubts. His rise up the international standings was not quite as fast as some of his contemporaries – like the current world no. 1, Magnus Carlsen of Norway, or even Sergey Karjakin, of Russia – but if you watched his career as closely as I have, or even just look at his career ratings chart on the site of the FIDE, you see a trajectory that goes up, up, up, steadily.

    But despite having seen Vachier-Lagrave play in many tournaments, having exchanged a few words with him and his parents, and having observed him at the chess club that he and my son were both members of a little more than a decade ago, I never felt I had any understanding at all about who this kid was, this boy who was so clearly made for chess in a way that my son Paul, despite his natural talent, was not. So when I learned that this new book about his life had come out, I immediately downloaded it into my Kindle. And I was NOT disappointed.

    Part of the reason I am so bad at chess is my simple lack of attention span when it comes to reading any book about how to play chess. But Vachier-Lagrave’s book has NO writing about how to move the pieces or what an opening, middle game or endgame is. This book is all about what it means to be a professional chess player today, and how he got there. One of his main stated goals is to show that while the game of chess may be extremely complicated in the eyes of most people, and the top level players may be associated with the kind of madness we find in books like “The Defense,” by Vladimir Nabokov, or Stefan Zweig’s “Chess Story,” or in famous players like Bobby Fischer, who went slightly off the rails mentally, Vachier-Lagrave sets out to show just how normal a young man he is.

    “At the risk of deceiving some people, chess players are not robots, not computers with legs, and not mad scientists,” he writes (here in my translation from the French). “Worse, or rather, better: We are just normal people! With our qualities and our faults, our certainties and our quandaries, some strong points and many weak points. Normal people who are in possession of an abnormal talent – in the first sense of the word, that is, outside the norm – in a specific area, which is the practice of chess.”

    He puts chess into a completely different perspective than that of the popular imagination, and for that this is a book that can be of interest to the general reader, although I feel it will mostly be read by an audience of chess players and fans who know who he is. As it turns out, he describes himself almost perfectly whenever he talks about how he may appear from the outside, to others; somewhat diffident appearing, not overly emotional on the outside, but enjoying to let himself go occasionally, including with friends at a bar.

    What I realize most through the reading of this book is that like it or not, fair or not, there IS a difference between the extremely talented and those who are not so talented. While Vachier-Lagrave talks about all the hard work he has had to do in his life to achieve the success he has at the moment, he especially emphasises how impossible it is for him to sit eight hours a day, every day, to just study chess. When he does play, he is like a child having fun kicking a soccer ball. It is not work, it is passion. But he never takes it too far, because it is ultimately, also, his profession. In fact, he can go a few days without playing at all, between tournaments. To empty his mind and return with passion again.

    But here, no doubt, lies the key to it all – and in contrast to my son’s relationship with chess: First, Vachier-Lagrave says he could never do without chess, that it keeps returning to hims; second, his natural talent is clearly of a massively high level, and his pleasure is rewarded with satisfaction if he works at it so he does not have to work more than he might want to.

    But I also found, as I read this book – which, by the way, is extremely intelligently written, and shows a decent cultivation, which is not surprising for a chess player who also took a university degree in math – that the similarities between success in a chess career and success in, say, a racing car driver’s career, are many. I thought often of the memoir, “Aussie Grit,” of Mark Webber, the Formula One driver, as I read this book, because Webber emphasises over and over again the need to go to the absolute limit in order to reach the highest level. Many drivers have talent, but only those who make all the right moves and never give up, arrive at the pinnacle.

    There are many talented chess players in the world, but despite Vachier-Lagrave trying to look “normal,” what sets him apart is his exceptional ability to roll with the punches, believe in himself, and to continue that steady rise up the ladder in pursuit of the dream of his childhood to be world champion. This is no doubt due to his exceptional lucidity about how to deal with life’s potential obstacles.

    “The pages of the history books are full of these great young hopes who remained great young hopes and never managed to “make it,”” he writes. “Everything is a question of talent, work and desire, but not even those things are enough sometimes. Bad luck and the unpredictable circumstances of life can destroy progress forever, and put to an end a career that looked brilliant before it even started.”

    A New Not-Book-Review: Mike Nesmith’s Autobiographical Riff, “Infinite Tuesday”

    July 24, 2017
    bradspurgeon

    Infinite Tuesday

    Infinite Tuesday

    PARIS – You can’t run with the hares and hunt with the hounds, said Ernest Hemingway, referring to what he thought of book reviewers who were also fiction writers. That is why on this blog a few years ago I came up with my concept of the Not Review, which I have done periodically in the form of Not Reviews of music in my “Morning Exercise Music” listenings, in Not Reviews of films, and Not Reviews of books. The idea is I’m not criticizing, or placing myself in a high position of cultural authority, but simply reflecting on books, music or films that I have seen recently, and what they made me think, what they say, how I feel, and what you might want to know about them to see if you want to listen, read or see them. Today, I have put up my latest Not Book Review, this time of the autobiography of Mike Nesmith, the former Monkee, which is called, “Infinite Tuesday.” He also refers to it as an “autobiographical riff.” Check it out on the link above! His is a fascinating story that goes way beyond The Monkees – like, how about to creating one of the first music videos, helping to create MTV, and then there is his mother the inventor of Liquid Paper….

    A Not-Book-Review: Wayne Standley’s Novella, “The Man Who Looked Like Me”

    April 29, 2014
    bradspurgeon

    Wayne Standley

    Wayne Standley

    For my second “Not-Book-Review” I did not premeditate that I would write about the book that a friend gave me a few months ago and that I only got around to reading now. I did not imagine that it would be so much fun, so light, so captivating and so genuine. But when I discovered all that, I decided that I HAD to write about it on this blog – especially because I’ve mentioned its author so often here in the past as a musician: Wayne Standley. The book he wrote is called “The Man Who Looked Like Me.” So check out my “Not-Book-Review” of Wayne’s book. Then see if you can find a copy for yourself to read!!!!

    As a reminder: This “Not-Book-Review” is a type of article specific to this blog that the first one of which was my talk about the book of another musician, Neil Young – and his “Waging Heavy Peace”. The idea behind the column is that because it is a blog, and because I believe in Ernest Hemingway’s dictum about writers not criticizing other writers in print as reviewers – “You cannot run with the hare and hunt with the hounds,” he said – but because I love to read good books and talk about them, the idea is that I am not going to place myself on a critical pedestal and dictate what is righteous or not about a book I read. I am not going to recommend it as a piece of literature or a consumer product. I am not going to fulfill the role of the book reviewer whatsoever. This blog is my space, Brad’s world. So what I will do when I feel compelled, will be to write about books I am reading or have read or feel compelled to write about for any other reason – my “Not-Book-Review.” Something people can read, and should read, only as a reflection of how I felt about the book – not a recommendation that they should or should not read it.

    So, again, here is my Not-Book-Review of “The Man Who Looked Like Me” by Wayne Standley.

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