Too many good books and not enough time to read them all so occasionally I will be posting reviews by kindred spirits whose taste and judgement can be relied upon implicitly. This week Pete Frame reviews :
The Twang Dynasty by Deke Leonard (Northdown Publishing)
A cornerstone of the Man band, Deke Leonard toured himself to exhaustion but had an amazing time doing it – as the first two hilarious chunks of his autobiography attest. This, his third book, is thinly disguised as a treatise on guitarists – but as they are all seen through Deke’s finely focused prismatics, we get new slants and perspectives, and tons of insight.
“Let me tell you about guitar players,” he starts. “We are driven by ego and vanity. We are shot through with avarice and cupidity. We have butterfly minds and vagabond hearts. We are petrified adolescents with insatiable appetites and unquenchable thirsts.”
He explores Burton, Berry, Clapton, Zappa, Beck, Cooder, etc, but more interesting to me (being a jaded old git) are his fascinating memoirs on eccentric mates like Dave Edmunds, Micky Gee, Richard Treece and Trevor Burton. His account of recording an album with Larry Wallis, Pete Thomas and Big George Webley had me hooting – as did his recollection of seeing the worshipful Quicksilver Messenger Service captured and brought down by Dino Valenti. “At centre stage stood a stocky man with dyed blue-black hair, wearing what appeared to be a black leather Babygro. He looked like a lady’s handbag.”
Deke is living proof that lavish pot consumption doesn’t always impair the memory or the ability to write incisively. He’s something of an acquired taste, of course, but he’s passionate, entertaining, perceptive, knowledgeable, irreverent, quirky – a natural born writer in the way that he was a natural born guitarist.
“I’ve heard it said by people who set great store by such things,” he writes, “that those born within the ambit of Sagittarius are predisposed toward playing the guitar. Jimi Hendrix was a Sagitarrian. So is Keith Richard. So am I. Do you think, maybe there’s something in the horoscopic mumbo-jumbo after all? Nah, I think the time of birth is determined by sperm counts, menstrual cycles, units of alcohol consumed, and bra-size. But that’s just the romantic in me.”
Get his first two books as well . . . they’re indispensable: ‘Rhinos, Winos and Lunatics’ and ‘Maybe I Should’ve Stayed In Bed’.
