Zero gravity

I interrupted my binge of 600-page accounts of the immediate run-up to the outbreak of the First World War (Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, and Max Hastings’ Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War) to read There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll, by Lisa Robinson.

I did that because someone on NPR interviewed Robinson, whom I’d never heard of, and I thought she might have an interesting story to tell. She wrote about pop music for various publications for more than 40 years.

About 20 pages into it I realized it was going to be mostly name-dropping and product placement, and so it was. The names include both the musicians she accompanied on tours—Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, the New York Dolls, Lady Gaga—and the hotels, clubs and restaurants she frequented on some publication or record company’s dime.

And she never mentioned her cassette recorder without reminding us it was a Sony.

It turns out that she didn’t so much cover pop musicians for all those years as she gossiped about them, which explains the non-substance of this memoir. I did think it rather rich that at one point she told a story about dealing with Motown Records founder Berry Gordy—how he wanted final say on what she wrote in a story about him and she got up on her high horse as “a journalist” and refused; and he came around. Because she was perfectly down with giving some of her pop friends that content control, and she was stretching the definition of “journalism” in applying it to the stuff she wrote.

Anyhow, I slogged all the way to the end, even though by page 20 she’d also become extremely tiresome and clearly hadn’t bothered with an editor. She was sloppy with some of her facts (such as inventing a county in England called Stratfordshire), and appears to have sworn a vow to never apply the objective case to "who". Oh—and no journalist would regularly write run-on paragraphs that stretch across two pages.

But if I could make it through [Steven—you remember, the Smiths?] Morrissey’s Autobiography, in which he jumped back and forth in verb tense for no discernable reason, and was clearly in love with the sound of his own cleverly-turned phrases, then I can do anything. Although he at least is familiar with "whom".

But I’m relieved to get back to Hastings and real writing.