The dark side of influential musicians

Just finished a terrific collection of rock profiles by Nick Kent titled "The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music."

I read a lot of music books -- at least one at any given time -- and had heard of Kent's work over the year. But for some reason I'd never given him a look, until I snagged a free chapter of "The Dark Stuff" on my Kindle.

My bad for waiting so long to read his work. It was originally published in 1994, with a revised edition released in 2002. It's loaded with long, detailed profiles on music figures big and small, but all highly influential in their own right.

"Dark Stuff" starts out with a long multi-chapter profile of Brian Wilson that tears the cover off the brilliant sheen on those Beach Boys classics that raised the bar on songwriting and changed the face of music production. The combination of an abusive father, too many drugs and the pressure of setting the bar for rock music in the mid- to late 1960s sent Wilson from the top of the world to the saddest of mental circumstances in just a few short years.

The "Dark" in the book title is the common theme: these profiles for the most part aren't of straight-laced musicians, but of tortured souls with deeply rooted addictions or medical imbalances of extreme forms. Jerry Lee, Roky Erickson, Syd Barrett, Brian Jones, Lou Reed, Shane McGowan, Izzy Stradlin, and on and on. Only Elvis Costello and, to a lesser degree, Morrissey, come across as remotely normal.

All are examined in great detail and depth, and from perspectives far from the press releases that too many publications use as a crutch these days. But what makes the profiles so invigorating is Kent lived his own addictions, and includes passages where he joins his sources in taking the drug of choice. Can you imagine journalists these days having that luxury?

Drugs aside, Kent does have his standards, and shows his disgust for those addicts who can't control themselves.He basically applauds Sid Vicious's suicide in a a gut-wrenching ending to a profile titled "Sid Vicious -- the Exploding Dim-Wit." Kent describes how Vicious committed suicide via overdose, not long after getting out of prison for stabbing his girlfriend Nancy Spungen to death while both were in a drug haze. Sid and Nancy, misfits to the end, were meant to be together.

"But then, when you break it down, decomposing was their greatest achievement. A mere seven hours after expiring, Nancy Spungen was already smelling of death. It takes up to 48 hours before the putrefying odour commences in the corpses of the old. At the age of twenty, both had wasted themselves beyond belief. Let them rot."

Wow.