The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band

Does this book count as a biography? It’s the tale of glam rock pioneer Motly Cru (I’m not going to bother looking up the HTML code for the umlauts), tracing the childhood and adolescence of each band member all the way through the formation of the group, their stellar success, their plummet into irrelevancy, and their eventual dissolution. It’s told in disjointed chapters penned most often by the four band members, but occasionally others like their manager. It gives the whole thing a pretty authentic feel, even if you’re constantly aware that it’s all been passed through a sieve of PR and probably altered to make things more dramatic. But in a way, that’s how life really is when viewed through the lens of memory –it’s foggy, distorted, and hardly ever lines up perfectly with anyone else’s recollection.

There are a few genuinely dramatic and touching chapters in the book, though, like the one where Tommy Lee laments his months in prison after assaulting his wife or when Vince Neil writes about watching his 4-year old daughter slowly die from cancer. I couldn’t even finish reading the latter because I got to it the night after Sam left with Geralyn for a visit to St. Louis. Most of the chapters, though, had me rolling my eyes at these decadent men living and acting like children and wondering “WHY OH WHY is everything falling apart? How could this be happening?” You know, when they’re taking drugs, drinking, cheating on their wives, leaving their families to go on tour, and resorting to business practices that a three-year old would find childish. Their angst is ridiculous and they are, by and large, obviously dumbasses and misfits.

Still, this is a pretty well written (I’m sure they had a ghost writer or at least ghost editor for parts) drama that pops along at a good pace and gives a lot of insight into at least some of what really happened. Well, probably happened.