What’s cooler than sex, drugs and pashing models? I found out from 3 rock memoirs
- Written by Liz Evans, Adjunct Researcher, English and Writing, University of Tasmania
At the height of his success, Evan Dando was notorious for his good looks, heavy drug use and flaky personality. As his memoir, Rumours of My Demise, effectively attests, the Lemonheads frontman was also a shameless rock’n’roll caricature whose addictions and puerile hedonism repeatedly sabotaged his friendships and relationships, along with his career.
In 1992, on the way to a recording studio in Los Angeles, he took acid at the airport and subsequently tried to open the emergency exit mid-flight. A year later, he missed his band’s first appearance at Glastonbury festival because he was holed up in a hotel with a couple of women and had to endure being bottled and booed throughout a rescheduled acoustic set.
Arising from Boston’s white, wealthy, college rock scene, The Lemonheads morphed from their punk origins into a melodic indie band who broke into the mainstream with their fifth album, It’s a Shame About Ray.
Review: Rumours of My Demise by Evan Dando (Faber); The Uncool by Cameron Crowe (Fourth Estate); Rebel Girl by Kathleen Hanna (HarperCollins)
Dando’s book, co-authored with ghost writer Jim Ruland, chronicles their chequered journey, capturing the last raw, pre-internet era of the music industry. It also charts the singer’s misadventures with heroin, and ridiculously indulgent lifestyle.
He misinterprets Kathleen Hanna’s fanzine, My Life With Evan Dando as a form of personal obsession, instead of a smart, acerbic, humorous critique of sexism, the male gaze, and the media. And while he makes these embarrassing brags, he omits all emotional context or meaningful detail for anyone other than his first wife, the English model Elizabeth Moses, and even this is minimal.
In 1993, The Lemonheads’ management team decided to turn Dando into an indie cover boy, much to his apparent annoyance. “I wasn’t an actor or a model. I was a musician. How I looked shouldn’t matter,” he writes. Yet although Dando says he felt humiliated and objectified, he fails to acknowledge that this experience was commonplace for female artists.
Despite his protestations at being embroiled in what he calls the “Dippy Dando” narrative, he was clearly happy to pose with seaweed on his head, pinching his nipples for Interview magazine, to make out with actors Angelina Jolie and Amy Smart for a video shoot, and to strip off and French kiss another actor, the late Adrienne Shelly, for the cover of Spin.
By the end of the book, it’s hard to know how Dando sees himself or how he wishes to be perceived. His attempts at self reflection resemble little peaks of self-interest, while his take on life sounds worryingly adolescent.
“I’m not that different to how I was as a teenager, but I’m not as impulsive as I used to be,” he writes, as if he were 23. “Wherever I go, you’ll find me playing guitar or cruising around on my skateboard, taking it easy.”
Ho hum.
According to a recent interview with The Guardian, at 58, Dando still takes mushrooms, weed and acid, which probably doesn’t help.
Forget Ray. If you ask me, it’s a shame about Evan.
Uncool misfit or privileged insider?
By complete contrast, although he was a teenage rock journalist in the 1970s, Cameron Crowe was behaving like a sensible grown-up. A fully fledged, self-confessed nerd, his sole vice was the occasional joint.
As the title of his funny, upbeat memoir, The Uncool, suggests, Crowe felt like an absolute misfit in the burgeoning rock scene of California, mainly because although he was writing lead features for Rolling Stone magazine, at 15 he was still, basically, a child.
Always the youngest person in the room, the underage Crowe was continually thrown out of music venues, issued warnings from bar staff and resented by his older colleagues. Understandably, this made him insecure about his age, but eventually he found inspiration from the confident musicians he was interviewing, including The Eagles’ Glenn Frey, who was an early role model.
Given the way rock stars opened up to him, Crowe’s age was arguably an advantage. A young, naive teenager would have been an entirely unthreatening prospect for a rock star with a fragile, possibly drug-damaged ego and a weirdly insulated lifestyle.
With his clear-eyed enthusiasm and willingness to listen, Crowe appeared like an impressionable little brother among a sea of cool heavyweights. No wonder these guys poured their hearts out to him.
And for all his uncertainty, within the heavily male-dominated environment of ‘70s rock, the privilege of inclusion was always within reach of Crowe, even as a teenager: because he was male.
To his credit, Crowe writes of losing his virginity at 17 “in a blizzard of scarves” to the infamous “Band-Aide”, Pennie Lane and two of her Flying Garter Girls, with a refreshing lack of braggadocio. “I was one step above sleep in terms of options,” he recalls. “I think I was only partially on their minds while they were watching television and showing affection to each other.”
Yet although the women he encountered in the industry, including writers, management, publicists and record label staff, appeared to take things in their stride, he doesn’t explore or examine their experiences, which leaves the question open.
Given some of my own encounters as a female rock journalist a full 15 years later, I can’t help but wonder about the reality of their situations.
Trading adolescence for a backstage pass
What is certain is that Crowe was on the frontline of an incredible era for music. His passion for acts like The Eagles, the Allman Brothers Band, Gram Parsons, Fleetwood Mac, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Todd Rundgren powered him into a glittering writing career at a time when money flowed freely within the music industry, and bands had far fewer boundaries with the press.
Often with renowned photographer Neal Preston, Crowe got up close and personal with all manner of rock icons at pivotal moments. “We were living in the moment,” he writes of their working partnership. “But we were also storing all these one-of-a-kind memories for later, when we’d bring them out and polish them like cat’s eye marbles.”
Crowe’s assignments were legendary.
He moved in with The Eagles for a profile piece; spent ten days on the road with Led Zeppelin trying to coax Jimmy Page into an interview; confronted a moody, grieving Gregg Allman in the wake of his brother’s death; captured the Rumours drama with Fleetwood Mac; and followed David Bowie for a full 18 months, chronicling the Thin White Duke era.
Cameron Crowe (right) with Billy Crudup on the set of Almost Famous, a film based on his life as a teen rock journalist.
Neal Preston/Dreamworks/AAP
The most time I ever spent on tour with a band was four nights in the States, with Alice in Chains and Screaming Trees, but in the current age of Zoom and corporate press junkets, even this kind of trip seems unlikely now.
By 1978, Crowe’s time at Rolling Stone was coming to an end. The magazine had stopped printing his name on the cover, and had begun to replace his stories of classic rock icons with Chuck Young’s reports from the punk scene.
A failed attempt to move to New York with his older girlfriend added to Crowe’s predicament. Back in the San Diego family home, feeling all washed up at 21, he confronted the cost of swapping his carefree youth for the serious business of rock journalism.
“I’d jumped into the ocean of adulthood and ultimately got caught in a riptide,” he says. “I skipped adolescence. I’d traded it for a backstage pass.”
This sense of loss prompted Crowe to relive his senior year by going undercover for a book about high school students. Before publication, the story was optioned for a film with Crowe in charge of the screenplay, and despite its mixed reception, Fast Times at Ridgemont High established his new movie career.
Later, Crowe would draw on his encounters with musicians such as Gregg Allman and Jimmy Page for the award-winning Almost Famous, having cemented his role as writer-director with Jerry Maguire. Singles, Vanilla Sky and Aloha were to follow, among others.
Like Dando’s book, Crowe’s memoir is largely lighthearted, snippety and full of anecdotes. But apart from the hilarious tale of bringing Bob Marley’s marijuana seeds back from Jamaica, drug tales are mercifully not a feature.
Instead, Crowe’s family, particularly his mother, Alice, looms large throughout, upending the traditional rock'n'roll myth with a more heartfelt subtext. This includes the suicide of his 19-year-old sister, Cathy, to whom the book is dedicated.
Peppered with cheerleading messages from Alice, the book ends with a tender vignette of Crowe’s father that reinforces the reminder taped to a wall in the family home, beneath a photo of a hippy couple: “You Are Loved.”
If that’s not cool, I don’t know what is.
Punk rock and processing trauma
In her memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk, singer and feminist activist Kathleen Hanna, exemplifies cool by never even touching on it. Instead, she foregrounds political issues along with her personal story, in a book that demonstrates the cultural value of integrating collective and individual concerns into creative practice.
She also faces down some pretty terrifying demons from her past. Hanna had none of the middle-class privileges afforded to Crowe and Dando. She grew up in the suburbs of first Maryland, then Oregon with her mother, her violent, creepily transgressive stepfather and her troubled older sister, known throughout the book as Goodtimes.
A smart, sassy child who developed a passion for singing at the age of ten, Hanna went to Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington, where she established the roots of her career. Prompted by the traumatic ordeal of a friend, she volunteered at a rape relief and domestic violence centre, opened an art gallery with five other women, and found her way into the heart of the city’s thriving punk scene.
In 1990, inspired by all-girl trio Babes in Toyland, and her friend Kurt Cobain’s band Nirvana, Hanna joined forces with Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilson and Billy Karren to form feminist punk band, Bikini Kill. As the frontwoman, Hanna challenged the misogyny in the mosh pit by yelling, “Girls to the front!”, discussed feminist issues on stage, chased off hostile and aggressive intruders, and counselled victims of abuse after shows.
Kathleen Hanna was a pioneer of the Riot Grrrl movement.
Paul Hudson/Wikipedia, CC BY
Before long, Bikini Kill’s activism exploded into the Riot Grrrl movement, a loose, independent scene where girls empowered each other through music, bands and conversation. But sadly, most of the media was hellbent on a lurid misrepresention of Riot Grrrl, with male journalists trying to muscle in.
I know this from experience: at the time, I managed to gain the trust of some key Riot Grrrl players in the UK, to write a major two-part feature on the movement for the NME, then an influential music paper.
A male freelancer attempted to hijack my feature, my editor castigated me for not revealing the location of a secret Grrrl gig, and when my live review of British band Huggy Bear was published, my comments were ridiculed elsewhere in the paper.
This wasn’t the first time male colleagues had caused me to doubt the quality of my work, so when Hanna refused to deal with the press, I understood.
Eventually, a pernicious takeover from within the movement caused Hanna to cut ties with Riot Grrrl. An intense young woman called Susan was running Riot Grrrl Press with her friend, and the pair began demanding money from Bikini Kill for distributing the band’s donated zines, while creating increasingly sanctimonious material of their own.
In the end, Hanna feared Susan had become “an extreme example of identity politics gone wild”, but was careful not to scapegoat anyone for Riot Grrrl’s mounting issues. Instead, she examined her own contribution to the problems within the scene, in particular white privilege, and focused on learning more from the Black, Indigenous, and people of colour feminist community.
Despite internal difficulties and the media fiasco, Riot Grrrl remains a significant, if short-lived, chapter of female rock culture that inspires girls and women to this day. And Hanna’s political and ethical stance has continued to underpin her output with more recent projects, The Julie Ruin and Le Tigre.
Honesty, humour and humility are cool
Throughout her memoir, Hanna maintains a razor-sharp narrative tone. She is unafraid to delve into the more painful aspects of her life, including her own sexual assaults, the trauma of Cobain’s suicide, the time she was punched in the face by a jealous Courtney Love, the harsh judgment she endured for working as a stripper, and her excruciating battle with Lyme disease.
Kathleen Hanna with husband Adam Horowitz.
Andrew Gombert/AAP
She is also extremely funny, particularly when remembering her early passion for the Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz, now her husband, and becoming a mother to their son Julius.
But what really elevates Hanna’s book is the level of consciousness and self-awareness she employs towards both herself and others, especially when critiquing the overtly white bias of feminism, punk rock and Riot Grrrl.
Compared to the unquestioning white male privilege at the heart of rock'n'roll narratives such as Dando’s druggy ramblings and even Crowe’s tender, more vulnerable perspective, Hanna’s story of striving towards personal and cultural evolution is a clear and courageous winner. Hands down.
So what does it take to be cool? A lot more than drugs, rock'n'roll and pashing models in cars, for sure. It takes honesty, humour, consideration for others, humility and genuine self-awareness – and dare I say it, a semblance of maturity.
Being cool means earning your place at the front, and knowing who else deserves to be there with you.
Authors: Liz Evans, Adjunct Researcher, English and Writing, University of Tasmania
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