Chris Rock Books

BajaBabe knows it all about Chris..Please listen to her review! Trust me! :) She know's it all about Chris!
Amy in CT
PS: Hi BB! Your review was great!

Interesting ,particularly the chapters about his beginnings. I also liked the song by song analysis which puts a new perspective on some songs.However,the author never mentions the numerous single-only/bonus tracks,which is a shame as many of them are easily as good as the album tracks (So lovely is the night,partly sung in Japanese is a gem among others)There are also some factual mistakes,Link Wray's Rumble is credited to Duane Eddy and Only the lonely by Sinatra is NOT the Orbison song.A list of the covers played live over the past 20 years would have been welcome as well.So,a very good introduction to Chris Isaak's world and music but a bit light for the long-time fan.

The first sentence in the first chapter of this book sets the tone for all that comes afterward. Straight away, the author gets his subject's birth date wrong. (For those unfortunate fans who suffered through this painful work of fiction, Chris Isaak was born on JUNE 26, 1956, not in July...)

Wishing not to be so negative as I continued to read, I tried to ignore the spelling and punctuation errors that riddle the book - that could easily be attributed to an inexperienced typesetter... But the errors in fact and history that permeate Mr. Reid's book simply render the entire effort worthless.

His research for this book is sloppy, at best, and he clearly is not at all familiar with Chris Isaak, his music, his fans, or the San Francisco music scene. He gets every aspect of his subject's life incorrect, from his blatantly wrong description of Chris' hometown of Stockton, CA, to his ridiculous assessment of the meaning behind each of Chris' songs. It's obvious, to even the most casual of fans, that this author hasn't a clue about his subject.

There are so many mistakes in this book; I'd need to write a book just to document them... Ridiculous, careless errors, like identifying the actor who won the role in the film "Something Wild" that Chris had been intended to play as "ROY Liotta..." (Again, it's "RAY Liotta...") Very simple to confirm, easy stuff to get right... But no, Reid, perhaps in his haste to release the book, just didn't do enough due diligence... Other errors? Reid's statement (on page 63) that Kenney Dale Johnson and Roly Salley "were judged to be too inexperienced to participate in the final recordings" of Chris' first album "Silvertone." Neither man had joined Chris' band at the time the first record was recorded - something Reid, himself noted earlier on page 57, from an interview with Kenney as he discussed meeting Chris for the first time: "When I first met him, he had most of his first record recorded." Clearly, Reid didn't bother to build a timeline chronicling the events of Chris' life, both major and minor, to see where events intersected or where more information might be needed. His ignorance with regard to the San Francisco Punk scene in the late 1970's, the ashes from which Chris and his new band emerged, is also completely laughable. His statement that The Avengers (the band Jimmy Wilsey formerly played first bass, then guitar for,) did not open the last show for the Sex Pistols at The Mabuhay Gardens... That now legendary show was at Winterland... and that fact took all of 10 minutes to confirm.

For what it's worth, an easy 95% of Reid's information came from Internet sources. (How do I know this? I researched every item listed in the book's bibliography - the vast majority of which came from the "San Francisco Days" site. What's left came from other online sources, and the few books listed in the bibliography are reference books on other topics - like the Leonard Gardner novel, "Fat City," from which Reid apparently culled all his erroneous details about Stockton...) Google "Chris Isaak" and you'll find all the same information the author used to write this book. What's more, you'll probably find that by reading those original articles, you'll gain a much more complete, far less opinionated picture of the guy.

This is a work of the US government and the authors do not receive any compensation from the sale of this article.