Rock N' Roll Supernova

Joe A. Crawford
Outskirts Press (2010)
ISBN 9781432761875
Reviewed by April Sullivan for Reader Views (12/10)


“Rock N' Roll Supernova” by Joe A. Crawford is the story of musician Buddy Carmichael, his rise to stardom, and his fall from grace. Buddy is a talented kid growing up in normal small town Michigan. His mom teaches him piano, his dad works at the hardware store, and they watch the Ed Sullivan show every Sunday night on TV. And like many kids of his era, The Beatles coming into his living room through that TV set changed his life. He started listening to rock n' roll and was desperate for a guitar. His dad bought him one and the rest was history.

Buddy ends up in New York City, then Los Angeles. He goes through a disco faze as back-up for Angel Dawn and then fronts his own band Hell’s Razor. This is all happening in the 1970s and 1980s and includes the typical sex, drugs, and hotel and instrument smashing that you expect of any young musician of the era.

This book is written through the voice of a reporter writing Buddy’s life story, but also through flashbacks into that life through the eyes of Buddy, his ex-wife, best friends, and old acquaintances through interviews by the reporter Stu. So, in essence, the book begins at the end.

This passage from Page 4 sets the tone:

“Jesus, Buddy, why? You had everything going for you, a hit record, sold out arena tour and all that went with it. Why try such a ridiculous stunt?”

“Why, that is the operative question, isn’t it? After all, why did Jim Morrison go to Paris and end up dead in a bathtub or for that matter, why did Janis fix herself with a potent dose of smack in that hotel room, all alone? Jimi, Janis, Jim, Elvis, Brian Jones, why did they have to go out the way they did? Who knows? Maybe the way to get at the heart of my why is to go back to the beginning, to when it all started.”

And so they did.

This book was intriguing for a few different reasons. The text on the back of the book is vague. At first I was expecting “Rock N' Roll Supernova” to be another typical “Buddy Holly” type early rock-n-roll story. Then I thought maybe it would be more of a 1990s era “Nirvana” type grunge or alternative rock story. But I was pleasantly surprised to find it was of the “Van Halen” and “Guns N' Roses” genre and time in musical history. That was unexpectedly different and very enjoyable.

Another interesting thing about this book was the fact that the author wrote out every lyric to every song by Buddy Carmichael. The last 150 pages of the book are all song lyrics. This is on top of the fact that many of these lyrics are already written out in full in the book in the passages where the song is being written or sung. It is as if Joe A. Crawford created the character of Buddy in full, including discography before writing the book.

Crawford writes with the knowledge of a musician and doesn’t dumb it down for the audience. He mentions keys or chord progressions that songs are in, and even though I don't know what that means, I appreciate the author writing it as if I do. “Rock N' Roll Supernova” is a smart book by a smart author.

 

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