Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead: Journeys into Fame and Madness
Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead: Journeys into Fame and Madness
You can tell a lot about somebody in a minute. If you choose the right minute. Here are 228 of them. Join Neil Strauss, “The Mike Tyson of interviewers,” (Dave Pirner, Soul Asylum), as he Makes Lady Gaga cry, tries to keep MÖtley CrÜe out of jail & gets kidnapped by Courtney Love Shoots guns with Ludacris, takes a ride with Neil Young & goes to church with Tom Cruise and his mother Spends the night with Trent Reznor, reads the mind of Britney Spears & finds religion with Stephen Colbert Gets picked on by Led Zeppelin, threatened by the mafia & serenaded by Leonard Cohen Picks up psychic clues with the CIA, diapers with Snoop Dog & prison survival tips from Rick James Goes drinking with Bruce Springsteen, dining with Gwen Stefani & hot t
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A Truely Enjoyable Read,
I’ve worked with major artists in both the music and film worlds for 20 years — but this book at 507 pages will take you around the block in far less time. I’m giving it as gifts to all my co-workers and friends this year.
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|Thank You, Neil Strauss!,
Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead will send you running to your iPod to re-discover music you haven’t listened to in years. The array of interview subjects that Neil Strauss tackles in this fast, tightly packed read is staggering: Brian Wilson, Motley Crue, LADY GAGA, Pete Townshend — where else are you going to find collected interviews with that group (FYI, it’s not all about Rock and Roll… He talks to Tom Cruise, for crying out loud…) Amazingly, in an age of PR, the celebrities interviewed seem to let their guard down for a hot second, and it’s like being in the room with them. This book is why they put a lid on toilet tanks. Highly recommend. When’s the sequel???
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|The secrets of a good life,
It occurs to me while reading this book that Neil Strauss has met a lot of people. Over 3,000 close encounters of the celebrity kind. Andy Warhol said; “Everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame.” Not everyone gets more than 15 minutes, but thankfully most of those that do merit inclusion here, the permanent wavers. Presented in the form of dialogue. A veritable who’s who of our cultural icons.
And, if you’re a writer for the Rolling Stone, that’s a tremendous entree into the rarefied world we all know perhaps not intimately, and would like to enter. Imagine being able to meet your idol.
Even a short encounter encounter can turn into an adventure, if you’re hanging out with Motley Crue, and two band members get marched away in handcuffs, or the wife of a bluesman who cannot distinguish between perception and reality makes a ridiculous accusation, and the police get called. Maybe Tom Cruise will take you under his wing and explain Scientology, or perhaps Courtney Love uses you as her personal pin cushion.
Recently Strauss won the prestigious James Joyce Award, and I find the narrative technique of dialoguing with shorter than usual scenes, often cut at a point of great interest, cross cutting to a new interview adventure within the same theme, snipping and stacking the metaphors, to be fascinating and innovative, and having learned hypnosis strangely hypnotic. Many subjects, one thread. Some nested loops, some not. I am sure many writers will be using this style as a template, even some PUAs.
Beatling o’er the bass, a Starr drummer, those guys who gather no moss, Pinball Wizards, Crocodile Rockers, climbing Plant’s Stairway. Ozzy to Orlando. Bloom’s flowering self doubt. Cruise control or lack thereof. Life after Love, how Ali Khan fawns fan mania, and puts his fans in trance, how dangerous it can be to perform music in certain parts of the world. Cher and cockroaches. Eight years to make a famous song, and many songwriters to make it number one. Mindreading with Britney. Success, excess, demon wrestling. Checking outrageous facts. Cockblocking copy editors. Some still haven’t found what they’re looking for. Sometimes you just want a girl who will sit on a bottle. So out of joint. So. In the joint. All of life is here. Even aliens. Don’t ask. Not everyone successfully wrestles their demons.
The one thing that I felt lacking was the Index. I wanted to look up Ali Khan again, p331. Almost no one mentioned in the book is mentioned in the Index. I suggest you highlight or bookmark what you may wish to refer to again.
Sometime ago, I looked up the most sampled artists. Rick James was one of the top 3, along with Parliament eg.Mothership Connection, and was famously sampled by MC Hammer. I found the Rick James vignettes fascinating, how drugs influence every decision he makes,an excellent and somewhat poignant peek into the murky mind of an addict.
This would make a great coffee table book. I read the epilogue several times. The secrets of a good life. Derive your self esteem from within not from other people’s opinions. If you are like me you may have some attention deficient friends, and this book with its short vignettes provides great talking points. You may also find yourself googling some of the more memorable yet less familiar names. As far as other Strauss books go, I recommend The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, if you don’t already have it, with its faux black leather binding, and a red string bookmark, it’s the bible of seduction. The closer you look the more you can see its principles at work here.
If you wish to explore further I recommend you get Cialdini’s Influence because that influenced a number of strategies in The Game such as the false time constraint, aka the limited time offer which you probably receive in your email every few days. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials)It’s the bible on influence. I hope you feound this review helpful.
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