Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #342646 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Synopsis
A behind the scenes look at the making of the CD Rise Above: 24 black flag songs to benefit the West memphis Three and the subsequent world tour.

Customer Reviews

Broken Summers
The fourth and in my opinion best installment in Rollins' "Black Coffee Blues" series.
For the uninitiated these books contain excerpts from Rollins' tour diaries from all over the world. Rollins honest, hard working, funny and often very bleak personality is brought sharply into focus in these diaries.
This edition deals with chiefly the recording of and subsequent tour behind the "Rise Above" record. This was a charity album in aid of the West Memphis Three which contained Black Flag covers featuring vocals from Iggy Pop, Lemmy, Queens of the Stone Age and of course Rollins himself.
Rollins descriptions of the recording process is fasinating and one gets a real insight into just how big a music fan he really is.
For anyone with an interest in rock and roll this is the perfect initiation into the world of Rollins and Black Flag.

Total garbage
The writing, to put it mildly, is weak. The author's style is hardly any style at all, unless you can call watered-down and clichéd a "style." Even the very few moments of the story that threaten to become interesting are dealt with so clumsily and pretentiously that they devolve into the same witless and lackluster mess that surrounds them.



"I don't mind The Boss. I think he's an honest guy. I have some of his records, not all of them. I've met a couple of the E-Street guys, and they seem really cool."
Henry Rollins

"I forged myself out of a vacuum. I crawl along the highway on hacked off stumps year after year. Some wonder how and why. I never do." Rollins.

"I'm 36 and if I met a woman of my own age and married her, I'd also be marrying her former life, her past. It might be OK for some people - I don't want to judge it or anything - but it's not for me. It would destroy my creativity." Ha ha ha....garbage.


This poor book piles cliché upon cliché, and any claims its authors may make to its serving as a parable are undermined by the ludicrously compressed and melodramatic nature of Rollins odyssey. But be thankful it's not longer; at 130 pages, one may still derive some perverse pleasure from the silliness of it all.