Book Review

A very long time ago I went to college to learn to be a journalist, with rock as my main area of interest and visions of working for Rolling Stone or Spin dancing in my head. My first job offer when I graduated was with a French video equipment company writing marketing materials, however, and as time went on I got further and further off the path, that is until I started freelancing over the past couple years and then got this gig with JamsBio this past April and erased the intervening years, at least mentally.

Before that happened, however, I discovered a book that allowed me to live vicariously—the memoir of Jancee Dunn, a Jersey girl (like me) with a tightly knit family (like me), more or less my age, who never graduated college but worked for Rolling Stone interviewing rock stars for years and years, while never losing her wide-eyed sense of wonder at being allowed a glimpse into this world. Jancee Dunn is me in a parallel universe, our writing voices are very similar, and reading her reactions to the insane situations she’s been in over the years was like being there in person. Her strategy for getting reticent rock stars to talk is even the same as mine—butter up the drummer, who’s not used to getting attention, and then the singer and guitarist will get jealous and start talking.

Dunn alternates chapters about her wacky but loving family (her father was a very proud third generation employee of JC Penney and her parents actually named her after the store) with chapters about wacky but brilliant rock stars and other famous people. She bakes brownies with Dolly Parton, gets kissed on the lips by Barry White, and snarled at by John Lydon, all of which is truly laugh-out-loud funny. Jancee more or less successfully keeps her lives compartmentalized, which is also what I would have done if I were her, but the book is at its best when the two areas begin to bleed into each other and she loses control.

The chapter where she’s interviewing Scott Weiland and he uses his considerable charisma to try to convince her to get in a limousine with him and go find heroin is my favorite…she ends up locking herself in his bathroom and calling her sensible little sister, explaining the situation and begging her, “I know I shouldn’t do this but he’s so persuasive, talk me out of it!” Very funny, but very poignant, as is the conclusion of the book where she begins to feel like she’s too old to be a party girl, gets completely off track in her personal life, and then finds redemption through a guy a fortune teller tells her she’ll meet.

This book reads like an episodic novel, with clearly drawn characters and a loosely connected, but meaningful story arc. Any rock fan, male or female, will love it, and if you’ve actually been in the position to meet a lot of rock stars, the way I have, it will inspire you to get those memories down!

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