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New Book: Walk This Way: The Autobiography of Aerosmith by Aerosmith with Stephen Davis
A few weeks ago, I finished reading The Producer: John Hammond and The Soul of American Music by Dunstan Prial, which I thought was pretty fascinating. Hammond was a Vanderbilt descendant, so he came from a shit ton of money, but he had no interest in the typical old money activities that a young man of his background might have normally pursued in the 1920s and 1930s. Instead, he zeroed in on music and, more importantly, racial equality, sneaking to Harlem to see jazz from an early age. As a producer and a talent scout, he is responsible for discovering or giving big breaks to the likes of Billie Holliday, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, among many others. He had a knack for recognizing a star before that person was a star. On top of that, in the mid '30s, he convinced Goodman to integrate his band, which was unheard of at the time, and paved the way for future integration in the jazz world and, arguably, in American society in general. It is rare that one person can have such an influence on music, much less over the course of six decades and many different genres.
After wasting a few weeks playing craps, blackjack, and Angry Bird on my train rides, I decided I needed to start another book. I decided on Walk This Way: The Autobiography of Aerosmith by Aerosmith with Stephen Davis, which I started reading a couple days ago. It is kind of like The Dirt, in that it is told as a first-person oral narrative by multiple people, with various band members, friends, managers, and family members chipping in his or her own words. While I own nearly all of Aerosmith's albums and have been a fan for almost 30 years, I really don't know a ton about their history, other than that they used to do a lot of drugs. This book should fill me in on that and plenty of other details.
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