Rock biography audio book

• Unchained

• The Eddie Van Halen Story
• By: Paul Brannigan
• Narrated by: Mike Lenz
• Length: 8 hrs and 50 mins
• Unabridged

• Overall

• Performance

• Story

From the moment their hugely influential 1978 debut landed, Van Halen set a high bar for the rock 'n' roll lifestyle, creating an entirely new style of post-'60s hard rock and becoming the quintessential rock band of the 1980s. But the high-flying success was fraught with difficulty, as Eddie struggled with alcohol and drug addiction while simultaneously battling David Lee Roth over the musical direction of the band, eventually taking the band in an entirely new direction with Sammy Hagar and scaling new heights, before that iteration of Van Halen disintegrated.

• 3 out of 5 stars

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• By Mike on 02-01-22

So many CBGB-era punk memoirs out there, but Richard Hell’s is unique — poetic yet never pompous, bemused without corny punch lines. As a 17-year-old Kentucky kid, he runs off to NYC to be a poet, but ends up a rock & roller. “‘Sacred monster’ is definitely the job description,” Hell writes. “Being a pop star, a front person, takes indestructible certainty of one’s own irresistibility. That’s the monster part.” He depicts his music comrades — Tom Verlaine, Robert Quine, Patti Smith, Lester Bangs — and all the girls he’s loved before. (Hell was the punk Leonard Cohen in that department.) He quips about his popularity with critics, “because they were predisposed to favor noise, intellect, and failure.” In the final scene, he runs into his old nemesis Verlaine for the first time in years — flipping through the dollar bins outside the Strand Books

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