Rock and Roll Tourist – Graham Forbes (Northumbria University Press).
Former Incredible String Band bassist Forbes has come up with a great idea. Go and watch gigs, write a book and get paid for it! Seems simple, doesn’t it? What I have missed out is the fact that Graham Forbes has a talent for explaining his surroundings in such a way that you can almost feel that you are there. His accounts of going to see such diverse bands as The Bootleg Beatles, Anthrax and Hayseed Dixie as well as music heavyweights Kiss, U2, Elvis Presley and BB King don’t glamorise life on the road but will still make you want to be a rock n roll star. Sometimes things don’t turn out such as the time that Graeme went to see Chuck Berry in Glasgow and the “cantankerous old sod” didn’t turn up. Eminem did the same in Hamburg. But these aren’t the tales of the road that you want to hear. You want to hear about what it’s like to travel with a band, don’t you? Take Anthrax, for instance. They’ll really be rock n roll, won’t they? Forbes’ main problem was how he was going to get from Galway (where he had just seen Amos Garrett) to Oxford, where Anthrax was playing. The resulting paragraphs sum up public travel in the UK and are hilarious. Anyway, back to Anthrax. After seeing them in Oxford, Graham travels across the Channel with them to Calais and then on to Brussels. Graham describes the toilet on the tour bus as smelling like a tent for geriatric elephants – I don’t think that any other descriptors are required. However, days of hard drinking and wrecking hotel rooms are all in the past and now Scott Ian and Charlie Benante are Anthrax’s answer to Aerosmith’s Toxic Twins – they are the Blackberry Brothers! Rock and Roll, eh?
If you only read one music book this year then make it Rock And Roll Tourist.
Former Incredible String Band bassist Forbes has come up with a great idea. Go and watch gigs, write a book and get paid for it! Seems simple, doesn’t it? What I have missed out is the fact that Graham Forbes has a talent for explaining his surroundings in such a way that you can almost feel that you are there. His accounts of going to see such diverse bands as The Bootleg Beatles, Anthrax and Hayseed Dixie as well as music heavyweights Kiss, U2, Elvis Presley and BB King don’t glamorise life on the road but will still make you want to be a rock n roll star. Sometimes things don’t turn out such as the time that Graeme went to see Chuck Berry in Glasgow and the “cantankerous old sod” didn’t turn up. Eminem did the same in Hamburg. But these aren’t the tales of the road that you want to hear. You want to hear about what it’s like to travel with a band, don’t you? Take Anthrax, for instance. They’ll really be rock n roll, won’t they? Forbes’ main problem was how he was going to get from Galway (where he had just seen Amos Garrett) to Oxford, where Anthrax was playing. The resulting paragraphs sum up public travel in the UK and are hilarious. Anyway, back to Anthrax. After seeing them in Oxford, Graham travels across the Channel with them to Calais and then on to Brussels. Graham describes the toilet on the tour bus as smelling like a tent for geriatric elephants – I don’t think that any other descriptors are required. However, days of hard drinking and wrecking hotel rooms are all in the past and now Scott Ian and Charlie Benante are Anthrax’s answer to Aerosmith’s Toxic Twins – they are the Blackberry Brothers! Rock and Roll, eh?
If you only read one music book this year then make it Rock And Roll Tourist.
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