Straight Life: The Story Of Art Pepper by Art Pepper, Laurie Pepper
|
List Price: Our Price: $15.17 You Save: $6.83 (31%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $9.99 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Straight Life: The Story Of Art Pepper
Book Review: A Troubled Life
Summary: 5 Stars
Straight Life is one of the most honest narratives I had ever read.This is an example to what alcohol and drugs can do to an individual.Art is & was one of the very finest Alto players that ever lived and thanks to his wife Laurie for her diligence and bravery to keep Art together, we have many fine recordings to enjoy .I also give Art credit for his honesty to give such an account.(VLS)Book Review: Best Jazz Bio ever published
Summary: 5 Stars
Straight from the heart, Art & Laurie Pepper chronicle one of the best Jazz Alto and Clarinet players of all time. Mind blowing, heart wrenching events that detail a life of misadventure, obsession and recovery. Thoroughly recommended.Book Review: A Masterpiece!
Summary: 5 Stars
Straight Life is at once an all revealing portrait of man and musician. The battle for sanity, sobriety and identity. There is a little bit of Art Pepper in all of us. I could not put the book down. Well worth re-reading.Book Review: Outstanding!!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a great read!! Laurie Pepper did an excellent job organizing and editing the autobiography of one of my favorite jazz artist.Book Review: Another junky story with jazz as a sub-text
Summary: 4 Stars
I discovered jazz music by listening to Willis Conover's jazz program on the Voice of America. But at midpoint in "Straight Life" I found myself wondering about the music that I'd been listening to all these years. To be sure, Art & Laurie Pepper have collected a telling and troublesome account of jazz music from just before WW II until Art Pepper's death in 1982. But it's the jazz musician Art Pepper's own words that provides the most troublesome stuff. Booze consumed his life as much as he consumed it. Soft drugs like marijuana lead to hard drugs like smack (heroin). Pepper even wrote a tune about smack. He recorded the tune on an album called "Smack Up" not too long before he got busted and ended up in San Quentin. Pepper felt so strongly about smack (according to a story he relates early on in the book) that it was the first thing he went looking for when he got out on his first parole. And his second. And then there are all the other people who are junkies or who become junkies because Pepper introduced them to the monkey on his own back. It's the same story, page after page, until I began wondering about the music that had led me to buy the book in the first place, and not because I was that innocent in the first place. I lived through the 60s and had seen my share ruined & curtailed lives. But page after page of smack and the resulting criminal process that supported it for Pepper was just a little too much. I kept waiting for someone to provide intervention. When that one person does show up in Art Pepper's life, he turns her on to cocaine. In the end, and even at the end of his life, the saxophonist who'd played with Stan Kenton and who'd worked in music clinics with high school kids couldn't find anything within himself to keep away from drugs. When Pepper's third wife and co-author, Laurie, tells him that the doctor is going to order some pain killers for his last moments, Art's last words were "It's about time." Time enough to look for the last fix, time enough to run out of time at the age of 57. Which is a time too damn soon in a life, a creative life, too sadly wasted. Reading "Straight Life" was enough to make me think about putting away the alto sax that my son had given me last Christmas. Not to mention the records & tapes (and later, CDs) that I'd collected since I first heard Willis Conover's voice and the music he played on the Voice of America all those years ago. That's because this book is not for the faint of heart. This is a very troubling book to read. Should you buy it? Yes, if you want to get to the belly of the beast, if you want to learn about the basest nature of the human ability to delude oneself, if you have enough guts to say "Enough!" Yes if you want to know about the music. But if you have the least twinge of pain from reading about drugs & sex & a man who simply couldn't look himself in the mirror and say "enough," find something else to read.