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Summary
Summary
"I am hopelessly divided between the dark and the good, the rebel and the saint, the sex maniac and the monk, the poet and the priest, the demagogue and the populist. Pen to paper, I've put it all down, every bit from the heart.
I'm going out on a limb here, so watch my back." --Billy Idol
An early architect of punk rock's sound, style, and fury, whose lip-curling sneer and fist-pumping persona vaulted him into pop's mainstream as one of MTV's first megastars, Billy Idol remains, to this day, a true rock 'n' roll icon.
Now, in his long-awaited autobiography, Dancing with Myself , Idol delivers an electric, searingly honest account of his journey to fame--from his early days as front man of the pioneering UK punk band Generation X to the decadent life atop the dance-rock kingdom he ruled--delivered with the same in-your-face attitude and fire his fans have embraced for decades. Beyond adding his uniquely qualified perspective to the story of the evolution of rock, Idol is a brash, lively chronicler of his own career.
A survivor's tale at its heart, this sometimes chilling and always riveting account of one man's creative drive joining forces with unbridled human desire is unmistakably literary in its character and brave in its sheer willingness to tell. With it, Billy Idol is destined to emerge as one of the great writers among his musical peers.
Author Notes
William Michael Albert Broad, known professionally as Billy Idol, was born in Middlesex, England on November 30, 1955. In 1975, he went to Sussex University to pursue an English degree, but left after one year to pursue his singing career.
He is a rock musician, songwriter and actor. He first achieved fame in the punk rock era as a member of the band Generation X and then became a soloist. He had numerous hit songs including Dancing with Myself, Rebel Yell, and White Wedding. His autobiography, Dancing with Myself, was released in 2014.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
New York Review of Books Review
TONE, IT'S ALL ABOUT TONE. If you're writing a book "with" a rock star - if you're crouched in a darkened room, that is, with your quill quivering, waiting for the legend slumped opposite you to ingest an amount of caffeine/nicotine sufficient to propel him through the charred drug-holes of his own memory - you've got to get the tone just right. Outside, the inevitable California afternoon blazes with cruel banality; inside, it's 2 a.m. forever. An ear rings, a synapse misfires. Your rock star begins to ramble. How true will you be to the tone of his talk, to his fractured anecdotal style with the woozy silences and the skeletal chuckles? Will you fix his grammar, trim his profanities, check his facts? He's just told a story that has no ending, no point - almost no beginning. Are his eyes even open? Impossible to tell through the dark glasses. You might have to make half of this up. So I commend David Ritz, co-author of Joe Perry's ROCKS: My Life in and Out of Aerosmith (Simon & Schuster, $27.99), for setting down in his book the following sentence: "A free-spirited woman with an affinity for unabashed sex and good coke may be seen as a gift from the heavens." Read it a second time, please. Tonally, everything about that line - from the denim-and-roach-clips vibe of "free-spirited woman" to the slight weirdness of "unabashed sex" to the heavy-lidded hauteur of "gift from the heavens" - feels right. Sounds right. Sounds like Joe Perry - or the Joe Perry of our imaginings, the chiseled guitar overlord, a rime of cocaine around the nostril, who in Aerosmith was the Richards to Steven Tyler's Jagger, the Patrick to his SpongeBob, the Dennett to his Dawkins. Unbeatable on their night - witty, slobbering, inventive, with stadium wallop and bar-band looseness - Aerosmith was massive in the '70s and then, less enjoyably, massive again in the '90s. In the sociology of rock, however, die-hard Aerosmith fans have remained something of an aggrieved underclass : How come their guys don't get the respect? "Rocks" partakes here and there of this sense of tribal pique - "Not then, not now, not ever would we win over the hearts of the New York critical elite" - although Perry is also disarmingly upfront about Aerosmith's lapses in quality control, or (as he calls it) "the decay of our artistry." What caused it? The life, the life. Their peak was their trough. We learn from "Rocks" that during the recording of the wretched (but very successful) 1977 album "Draw the Line," in a specially equipped former nunnery, Perry would wake up, sling back a double black Russian and start shooting. "Since I was usually the last one up, the popping of the .22 echoed through the halls and let everyone know I was awake." I worried at first about the tonal discrepancies in George Clinton's BROTHAS BE, YO LIKE GEORGE, AIN'T THAT FUNKIN' KINDA HARD ON YOU? A Memoir (Atria, $27) - audacious mouthful of a title - which was written "with" Ben Greenman. But then I stopped worrying. If it takes a paragraph or two of dutiful facts-based prose to get to the saltier stuff - "Detroit pimps wore store-bought suits. In New York, you couldn't be pimping and buy no goddamn store-bought suit" - then so be it. Besides, Clinton himself has always been a man of more than one voice. The gibbering Prospero behind the enchanted, polyvalent island of blackness that was the Parliament-Funkadelic collective, he was a commercial visionary and cultural virologist who did his work behind masks of non-sense. Can his book fail to be interesting? It cannot. In places "Brothas Be" recalls Charles Mingus's great jazz memoir, "Beneath the Underdog," with that same mixture of giddy artistic enterprise and hard, worldly game playing. Clinton and his musicians supplied the wildest and most dazzling acid rock of the early 70s, the squelchiest astro-funk of the late '70s, and then returned - sampled and postmodernized - as the rhythmic marrow of '90s West Coast hip-hop. Sly Stone was Clinton's great friend and drug buddy; finding himself low on supplies one night, he slipped a handwritten note under Clinton's hotel room door. "Knock knock, put a rock in a sock and sock it to me, doc. Signed, co-junkie for the funk." ("Like a song lyric," comments Clinton.) I finished "Brothas Be" with the sensation that I had been in touch with an indestructible intelligence, with a strain of humor so cosmically rarefied it had looped back on itself and become down-to-earth. Even when he's sitting on a kilo of cocaine, playing with the Mickey and Minnie Mouse marionettes that are hanging from his ceiling, putting money in their puppet hands ("Mickey had 2,000, Minnie had the same"), Clinton seems to know what he's doing. Here's how he launched the fragile-genius guitarist Eddie Hazel on the shattering 10-minute solo that was "Maggot Brain" (1971): "Before he started, I told him to play like his mother had died." The guitarist Scott Ian's memoir, I'M THE MAN: The Story of That Guy From Anthrax (Da Capo, $28.99), was written "with" Jon Wiederhorn, and for consistency of tone this one wins the prize. Of the so-called Big Four - the four champion bands to emerge from the thrash/ speed metal upheaval of the late '80s - New York's Anthrax was the secular option. Not for them the doomsday snarlings of Megadeth, the hell-precipitation of Slayer or the grim prophetic witness of Metallica: Anthrax's was materialist metal, demon-free, a closed system whose sonic signature was the dry chordal blare and backward-dragging downstroke of Ian's guitar. The voice of "I'm the Man" is jabby, gabby and metal-obsessed, and the book's most exhilarating passages are about metal itself - about the moment, for example, when the burgeoning thrash scene was something between a coterie of mutual influence and a Darwinian death race, and everyone suddenly needed a drummer who could play "double bass," superfast, with two kick-drum pedals. (Anthrax landed the master drummer Charlie Benante, who stormed his audition by proving himself physically capable of Accept's "Fast as a Shark," and whose shifting, gridlike patterns would help define the band.) Also interesting is Ian's account of the recording of Anthrax's 1987 breakthrough album, "Among the Living," with the veteran producer Eddie Kramer. The charts are booming with the enormous, frosted artificialities of Def Leppard, and Kramer-who has worked with Hendrix and Led Zeppelin-wants to lend Anthrax something of the sound du jour. So he gives them the full treatment, twiddles all the knobs, layering the mix with reverb and expanding it with delay-much to Ian's consternation. Ian demands less. Words are had, after which Kramer (in Ian's version) peevishly attempts "to make the record sound bad by yanking every bit of reverb and delay off everything." An untextured, bare-bones mix, horribly immediate. But Anthrax is delighted. "It sounded ... great, like we were getting pummeled in the chest." Band and audience have identical needs at this point: "The new music we had was undeniable and would hit people like a brick across the face. From experience, I knew metalheads love that feeling." Viv Albertine's CLOTHES CLOTHES CLOTHES MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC BOYS BOYS BOYS (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, $27.99) was written "with" nobody at all-which in this context, in this genre, counts almost as a political act. Albertine played guitar for the Slits, the fearless all-female unit that (among other things) opened for the Clash on the 1977 "White Riot" tour. She writes beautifully, in a dreamy, self-interrogating, pre-Internet continuous present, a kind of imagistic drift in which the pale antiheroes of London punk rock come and go like skinny-legged poems. On Sid Vicious: "Everything he does he takes as far as he can. He detaches himself from fear, remorse, caring about his safety or his looks and just becomes a vessel for other people's fantasies about him, like Paul Newman in 'Cool Hand Luke.'" The young punks having succeeded (amazingly) in making sex uncool, Albertine and Vicious lie back to back in bed, in chaste paranoia. "As the sun comes up, we edge closer and closer to each other in tiny little movements, hoping not to be detected. By the morning we're pressed hard against each other, back to back, stuck together with sweat, making as much physical contact as possible." The guitar druid Keith Levene, soon to invent a new guitar language with Public Image Ltd., is Albertine's musical mentor, rallying her from her "Guitar Depressions" ("He says he has them all the time, it happens when you stall in your learning") and applauding the untutored noises she is beginning to make-"humming, buzzing and fizzing like a wasp trapped in a jam jar." Johnny Thunders is coming over from New York, news of which is "like hearing Dracula is on his way to our shores in the hold of a ship." He does not disappoint: "He acts like he can barely stand up but his fingers glide up and down the guitar neck as easily as if he's running them through his hair." Albertine and Thunders kiss, and he breaks off to shout to a bandmate, "I felt something!" But there can be no love. "He's got no room for love, his heart is full of heroin." And then there are the punk rock women: the designer Vivienne Westwood; Chrissie Hynde, later of the Pretenders; hanging out at the attitudinal test tube that was the Sex clothing store. "Once when Vivienne asked Chrissie a question, Chrissie replied, 'Oh, I just go with the flow.' Vivienne thought that was unacceptable and wouldn't speak to her again for a year." And the volcanic Ari Up, dreads piled high, who became frontwoman of the Slits when she was 14 years old: "wonderful and terrible in equal measure." Growing up in the band, Ari is stabbed in two separate incidents and-like the rest of the women-regularly "attacked, spat at, sworn at and laughed at." Not quite like being in Aerosmith, then. Billy Idol also wrote his book by himself. "I contemplated deep, caliginous, silent thoughts that hinted of a darker America." Caliginous, eh? (Adj., misty; dim; obscure; dark.) That's what I'm talking about, DANCING WITH MYSELF (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, $28), like the man himself, is all over the place-now chatty ("Zowie was 16, blond and a bit of a scrubber"), now caliginous, now encrusted with sub-Jim Morrisonian lyricism: "Gone was time; gone was ambition. Dance with me, for I have lost the Lioness's embrace....The wedding feast is here, and I must tell of the forbidden journey where sanity is best lost." Well, if you must, you must. But I never expected to like Billy Idol, and after reading his book, oddly, I do. He's a genuine romantic, writing in a kind of overheated journalese about his London punk rock roots-"Our youth, desires and needs and the rush of energy engendered by the joining of like minds crested into a tidal wave of exploding passion"-and then falling head over heels for America: America, with its embraceable lions and its flowering landscapes of electro-rockabilly. His plentiful atrocities are penitently recounted, as when he wrecks a rented Jet Ski in the Thai resort of Pattaya and then flings $25,000 at the family that owns it. "The Jet Ski was their livelihood. Looking back, I feel just awful about it, but I was really too sick and stoned to fully appreciate the situation at the time." Of all these memoirs, "Dancing With Myself" was the only one that stimulated my envy-made me want to be Billy Idol for five minutes. "When he looks back," George Steiner wrote, "the critic sees a eunuch's shadow." When Billy looks back, he sees the shadow of a red-eyed priapic cyborg. On a Jet Ski. Should Neil Young have written his new book, SPECIAL DELUXE (Blue Rider, $32), "with" somebody? If you read his last book, "Waging Heavy Peace," you may well think so. Young writes not prose, exactly, so much as a sort of beatific pre-prose, with no editors for miles. He is a great artist, one of the greatest in rock 'n' roll, but his art is music. "In this book, I am looking at my relationship with cars over many years." With a writer (the journalist Scott Young) for a father, he reasons, "I could surely pull something together that would be of interest to somebody and potentially keep me busy for a while, which I really would appreciate." See what I mean? Guileless as an ear of corn. "Special Deluxe" is shorter than "Waging Heavy Peace," and there are fewer paragraphs where it sounds as if he's talking to his dog, but oh, the mind wanders-his and ours. Now and then he questions his great love for cars: "With cars, collecting and obsession walk a similar path. There is a fine line between the two and I was close to it. I was beginning to wonder about myself, but luckily for me, the feeling passed." Or again : "Around 1972,1 bought another car in L.A. I don't know what the heck got into me. I think I have a disease." About his childhood, he writes with stoned radiance-but then he writes about his adulthood with stoned radiance too. All I wanted to do was put the book down and hear "Blue, blue windows behind the stars,/Yellow moon on the rise...." By the end of "Special Deluxe," with climate change pressing upon him, Young is driving around in his Lincvolt-his revolutionary biomass-propelled hybrid 1959 Lincoln Continental. He frowns, he is purposeful; he's on a mission to reshape our consumption of fossil fuels. Can Neil Young stop global warming? I don't see why not. After these two almost unreadable books of his, I suspect there's something saintly about him. So in case nobody's made this joke before: Long may he run on cellulosic ethanol. JAMES PARKER is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Dancing with Myself PROLOGUE THEY SAY IF YOU HEAR THE BANG, YOU'RE STILL ALIVE By the morning of February 6, 1990, I'd been living on a fine edge for more than a decade, always courting disaster to experience the biggest high. I'd been living the deranged life. I felt so nihilistic, yet why hadn't I just tuned in and dropped out? Instead, I followed Jim Morrison's credo, the credo of Coleridge and, at one point, Wordsworth, the credo of self-discovery through self-destruction I so willfully subscribed to until this moment: Live every day as if it's your last, and one day you're sure to be right . On this fateful morning, I'm standing wide-awake at dawn in the living room of my house in Hollywood Hills, overlooking the Los Angeles basin that falls and stretches away toward the high-rising pillars of downtown. I haven't slept, still buzzing from the night's booze and illicit substances lingering in my bloodstream, staring at the view of the city beginning its early morning grumblings. Daylight unfolds and casts shadows within the elevation, as if God is slowly revealing his colors for the day from his paint box, the hues of brown and green of earth and foliage offset by the bleached white of the protruding rocks that hold my home in place on the hillside. Standing at my window, I hear sirens blaring in the distance. Some one wasn't so lucky , I think as I tune in to the rumble of cars ferrying tired and impatient commuters on the 101 freeway that winds through the Cahuenga Pass, the sound of a world slowly getting back in motion. The constant moan of the freeway echoes that of my tired and played-out soul. Just the night before, after almost two years of work, we put the aptly titled album Charmed Life to bed. I'm feeling some pressure, home early from the de rigueur studio party. I say that as if we threw one party to celebrate the completion of the album, but the truth is that the party went on for two years. Two years of never-ending booze, broads, and bikes, plus a steady diet of pot, cocaine, ecstasy, smack, opium, quaaludes, and reds. I passed out in so many clubs and woke up in the hospital so many times; there were incidents of returning to consciousness to find I was lying on my back, looking at some uniformly drab, gray hospital ceiling, cursing myself and thinking that I was next in line to die outside an L.A. nightclub or on some cold stone floor, surrounded by strangers and paparazzi. I've been taking GHB, a steroid, to help relieve symptoms of the fatigue that has been plaguing me and preventing me from working out and keeping my body in some semblance of good shape. If you take too much GHB, which I'm prone to do, it's like putting yourself in a temporary coma for three hours; to observers, it appears as if you are gone from this world. When we began recording in 1988, we promised each other we'd be cool and focused, and not wholly indulge in drugs and debauchery. But as weeks stretched into months, Fridays often finished early with "drop-time"--the moment we all took ecstasy. And then Friday soon became Thursday and so on, until all rules were taboo. We somehow managed to make music through the constant haze. It seemed like every few days I was recovering from yet another wild binge, and it took three days to feel "normal" again. The album proved to be slow going and the only way to feel any kind of relief from the pressure was to get blotto, avoid all human feelings, and reach back into the darkness once again. Somewhere in that darkness, I told myself, there was a secret of the universe or some hidden creative message to be found. We'd invite girls to come to the studio to listen to the music. Mixing business with pleasure seemed the best way to see if the new songs worked. We'd be snorting lines of cocaine, and then the girls would start dancing. Before long, they'd end up having sex with one or more of us on the studio floor. Once the party was in full swing, we walked around naked but for our biker boots and scarves. Boots and Scarves became the running theme. The girls loved it and got in on the act. It helped that we recruited them at the local strip bars; they felt comfortable naked. We had full-on orgies in those studios we inhabited for months. It was like a glorified sex club. We were all about instant gratification, lords of the fix. I'd like to think this was all in the name of song-searching: the sex and drugs amped up the music, the songs arriving in the midst of chaos, cigarettes stubbed out into plates of food, the bathroom floor covered with vomit, sweaty sex going on all over the studio as we tried out our guitar riffs and mixes. The sound of our mixes, turned up loud, drowned out the background noise of sucking and fucking. Songs must be written. The ideas must flow. The flow must go to one's most base desires. Without constraint. Now that it's all said and done, I feel exhausted and shattered. The keyed-up feeling that prevents me from sleeping is the result of the care and concern I put into making a record that will decide the course of my future. That's the sort of pressure I put on myself every time. Then there's the fact that the production costs have been astronomical; the need to keep the bandwagon rolling has drained my spirit and sapped my will. Months later, Charmed Life will go on to sell more than a million copies. The "Cradle of Love" single and video, directed by David Fincher, will both become massive hits. But I don't know this when I retreat to my home alone at 2 a.m., intending to get some rest after wrapping recording. The breakup of my relationship with my girlfriend, Perri, the mother of my son, Willem, has left me bereft, but finishing the album has been my only priority. "If the thing is pressed . . . Lee will surrender," Lincoln telegraphed Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox in 1865. And then: "Let the thing be pressed." That's a rock 'n' roll attitude. The difficult has to be faced straight-on and the result forged out of sweat and tears. That's where I take my inspiration. The wide-screen version of the last few years' tumultuous events plays in my subconscious and cannot be ignored. What can I do to keep away these blues that rack my thoughts and creep into my bones? It's a fine day, warming up, the sun burning off the morning smog. Still, I feel uneasy, dissatisfied in the pit of my stomach. With the album now finished, I'll have to take stock of life and contemplate the emptiness without Perri and Willem. The bike will blow away these post-album blues , I think. As I open the garage door, the chrome of my 1984 Harley-Davidson Wide Glide gleams with expectation, beckoning me. The L.A. traffic is thick and the warmth of the sun is fresh on my face, its glow spreading over my bare head. California has yet to pass legislation making the wearing of helmets compulsory, and I've always liked the feel of the wind in my hair. My bike clears its throat with a deep, purring growl. The gleaming black tank and chrome fixtures flash in the sharp, sacrosanct daylight. I've opted for all denim to match the blue-sky high. Excerpted from Dancing with Myself by Billy Idol All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Prologue: They Say If You Hear the Bang, You're Still Alive | p. 1 |
Part I London | |
1 I Let Out My First Rebel Yell | p. 9 |
2 England Swings Like a Pendulum Do | p. 16 |
3 Rock 'N' Roll High School: Long Hair, Flares, and Hash Tobacco Cigarettes | p. 28 |
4 Sucking in the '70s | p. 39 |
5 And Then There Was Punk | p. 50 |
6 In a Revolution, One Year Equals Five | p. 55 |
7 Generation X Marks the Spot: William Broad Becomes Billy Idol | p. 60 |
8 A Night at the Roxy | p. 70 |
9 Punk Comes of Age When the Two Sevens Clash | p. 78 |
10 Youth Youth Youth: Break On Through to the Other Side | p. 85 |
11 White Light, White Heat, White Riots | p. 88 |
12 Not Selling Out, But Buying In | p. 92 |
13 Bands Across the Ocean | p. 102 |
14 Ready Steady Go | p. 108 |
15 And I Guess that I Just Don't Know | p. 120 |
16 You Better Hang On to Yourself | p. 124 |
Part II New York City | |
17 A Rock 'N' Roll Conquistador Invades America and Burns His Boats Upon Arrival | p. 135 |
18 Making Mony Mony: A Left-Coast Fusion of Punk and Disco | p. 142 |
19 If You Can Make It Here | p. 149 |
20 Hot in the City: The Making of Solo Billy Idol | p. 153 |
21 Hollywood Daze and Tequila Nights | p. 160 |
22 I Want My MTV: Video Thrills the Radio Star | p. 170 |
23 Rebel Yell with a Cause | p. 177 |
24 A Change in Pace of Fantasy and Taste | p. 184 |
25 Everybody Must Get Rolling Stoned | p. 189 |
26 The Roar of the Lion and a Nonstop Global Orgy | p. 196 |
27 Just a Perfect Day | p. 202 |
28 King Death: An Aborted Film Project Signals the End of an Idol Maker | p. 210 |
29 Top of the World, Ma | p. 214 |
30 Return to Splendour | p. 224 |
31 The Luck of the Irish | p. 232 |
Part III Los Angeles | |
32 We Need a Miracle Joy, We Need a Rock and Roll Boy | p. 239 |
33 La Vie Enchanté | p. 245 |
34 City of Night | p. 249 |
35 Trouble with the Sweet Stuff | p. 253 |
36 Drunken, Stupid, & Naked | p. 257 |
37 I Bear a Charmed Life, Which Must Not Yield | p. 262 |
38 Hollywood Promises | p. 269 |
39 Have a Fuck on Me | p. 274 |
40 The Madam and the Preacher | p. 281 |
41 Mind Fire | p. 287 |
42 Bitter Pill | p. 293 |
43 My Road Is Long, It Lingers On | p. 298 |
Epilogue | p. 307 |
Acknowledgments | p. 313 |
Index | p. 315 |