Product Description

Bill Bruford once called the godfather of progressive-rock drumming has been at the top of his profession for four decades, playing with Yes, King Crimson, Genesis, Earthworks, and many more. This is his memoir of life at the heart of prog rock, art rock, and modern jazz. It is an honest, entertaining, well-written account of life on the road and in the studio rubbing shoulders with the famous, the less famous, and the infamous, and creating an impressive tally of great music. A rock musician with the temperament of a classical musician who became a jazz musician, Bruford defies all the clichés about drummers. He says: You write what you have to write, you play what you have to play, because you can t sleep at night. If you can sleep at night, you shouldn t be doing this anyway. From time to time, at polite dinner parties, someone will ask Bill what he does. He replies that he is a musician. Yes, but what do you really do? retorts the enquirer. This unusual, funny, and insightful music memoir answers the question.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8883 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Review
Bill Brufords autobiography is a frequently hilarious recounting of his long life in progressive rock and jazz. Defying every drummer joke you ve ever heard, he writes successfully from inside the music . - David Fricke: Rolling Stone: March 19 2009

Bruford's autobiography not only provides a humorous insight into the daily detail of a successful musician's life but also grapples with the big existential issues of what it takes to be an artist of any sort in the modern world . - David Sinclair: The Guardian April 11 2009

...the text is intimate, clever, concise, and witty a bit like Bill s drumming . - Will Romano: Modern Drummer June 2009

Professorial in its remit and written with a bone-dry wit and an authoritative elegance that will be the envy of many far more high- profile cultural commentators, this might just end up becoming one of the best-informed, most informative textbooks of its time - Marco Rossi: Shindig: April 2009

An engaging and dryly witty style that makes for an easy, can't-put-it-down read...This book addresses matters anecdotal, technical, practical, emotional and philosophical with style, panache and élan . - John Kelman: All about Jazz: March 2009

Head and shoulders above the majority of books in its class.' - Jeff Miers: Buffalo News: March 24 2009

Bruford is a literate biographer and honest . - Steven Rosen: Curled up With a Good Book: March 2009

Its frank, cynical, very amusing, inspiring, thought provoking and highly recommended . -Brent Keefe: Drummer magazine: April 2009

Bill Brufords The Autobiography is one of the most original books you ll ever come across, penned by a man that some would still label a rock star . - Adam Garrie: USA Progressive Music.com: March 2009

The most extraordinary autobiography Ive ever read on music . - David Etheridge: Performing Musician: April 2009

This is an intelligent, articulate and sensitive book . - Andy Robson: Jazzwise Magazine: April 2009

...a terrific autobiography . - Geoff Nicholls: Rhythm: April 2009

His insight is keen, his stories compelling . - Vintage Guitar: June 2009

Bill Brufords story is not just for drummers. It is for all artists, musicians, music lovers, or anyone who wonders what it s really like to spend your life trying to make the music you love . --Neil Peart, Rush, May 2009

An extended treatise on the nature of music itself; not just his place in the pantheon, not just the manifold trials, tribulations and emotional upheavals of the working musician in a marginal genre, but the very essence...Professorial in its remit and written with a bone-dry wit and an authoritative elegance that will be the envy of many far more high-profile cultural commentators. --May 2009

'Frank, cynical, very amusing, inspiring, thought provoking and highly recommended.' 5/5 stars --Drummer Magazine, March 2009

"An extended treatise on the nature of music itself; not just his place in the pantheon, not just the manifold trials, tribulations and emotional upheavals of the working musician in a marginal genre, but the very essence...Professorial in its remit and written with a bone-dry wit and an authoritative elegance that will be the envy of many far more high-profile cultural commentators."
--Shindig Magazine, April 2009

'Frank, cynical, very amusing, inspiring, thought provoking and highly recommended.' 5/5 stars --Drummer Magazine, March 2009

Review
"An extended treatise on the nature of music itself; not just his place in the pantheon, not just the manifold trials, tribulations and emotional upheavals of the working musician in a marginal genre, but the very essence...Professorial in its remit and written with a bone-dry wit and an authoritative elegance that will be the envy of many far more high-profile cultural commentators."

About the Author
Bill Bruford's professional musical career began in 1968. He was a guiding light in the British Art Rock movement, recording and touring internationally with Yes and King Crimson from 1968-74. Since then he has worked with many other artists, including Gong, National Health, Genesis and U.K., as well as leading his own bands Bruford and Earthworks.

Customer Reviews

Very much one of a kind
This is possibly the best rock autobiography I have ever read.

Erudite, articulate and well-informed, Bruford's prose is in many ways an extension of his drumming - smart, sharp and possessing of a wicked sense of humour. His tales of frustration at the jobbing musician's lot, and the apparently perennial inscrutability of Robert Fripp, are wryly funny, his clinical dissection of Yes is laugh out loud funny - but still through this you are left in little doubt that whilst there have been lows, there is an awful lot of warmth and respect for his fellow travellers - very few axes are ground, and the writing lacks the sour tone that can occasionally be found in Peter Banks' autobiog, for example. Or most of Neil Peart's written work.

Where this books really takes off, is his descriptions of the end of his performing career, and it's here that the book takes on a tone of gentle melancholy. Exhibiting a side to his character that is almost entirely absent from his interviews (and you'll see why after reading this), one feels for the strains and world-weariness of a man who is almost the classic antithesis of received wisdom defining a popular musician.

I can't recommend this highly enough - anyone with a passing interest in the more esoteric music of the 1970's, the economies of scale of the UK jazz scene, or the inner workings of one of popular music's more honest and intelligent exponents, will find this a fine read

Excellent
I do thoroughly agree with the previous reviewer on this one. This is a deeply thoughtful and moving book, full of intelligent insights into the life of a working musician, the inside machinery of the music industry, the place popular music occupies in our world, etc. It's certainly much more than an autobiography: though we are offered some memorable and deeply funny accounts of life in the road and in the studio with Yes and the "Mighty Crim" (his view of Fripp manages to be both considerate, balanced, ironic and outright hilarious, all at once), the strength of this volume lies in that it offers nothing less than a Poetics of music. Sounds pretentious, I know, but it's all done with subtlety, intelligence and a sense of humour which (believe me) very few writers, let alone literary critics, actually possess: his ideas on creativity have an urgency and immediacy about them which is both disarming and memorable. Bruford has though hard and long about music, its place in the world, and, more importantly, his own relationship with music in the course of time. And this is where the book really takes off, as it were: the sad and painful account of his increasing (and crippling) self-awareness at the drum stool, of the sense of mounting exhaustion which has clouded these last years of his working life, is beautifully told and infuses the final pages of this book with a pervading melancholy. There is no false humility here, but deep honesty and a disarming frankness. Actually, being somebody who grew listening to early Yes and King Crimson (up to "Three of a Perfect Pair), but who has been with Bruford all the way up to his most recent Earthwork offerings, I think this book is a beautiful, if a bit melancholy, way of rounding up a musical career notorious for its variety, adventurousness and creativity. This book is a must for anybody interested not only in music but in how the arts in general can make something happen out there.

essential purchase
Anyone who plays an instrument of any kind or plays in a gigging band should read this heartfelt, perceptive, funny and moving book. The only downside is that you will find it impossible to recount any more drummer jokes to your band members after such an erudite expose of the music biz. In fact most rock guitarists, ironically, will probably need a dictionary to hand for several of the passages contained in this book.
Stevie G (Rock guitarist)