Book review in
The New York Times:
Definitely Not a Groupie, but Always With the BandLisa Robinson’s Rock ’n’ Roll Life in ‘There Goes Gravity’Hannah ThomsonAPRIL 29, 2014
By DWIGHT GARNER
There are a pair of sentences on the first page of Lisa Robinson’s memoir, “There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll,” that make you think her book is going to be a gift, in a Nora Ephron meets Chrissie Hynde sort of way.
“I will always remember 1973 as the year that Eugene from Cinandre ruined my summer because he cut my hair too short,” Ms. Robinson writes. “That summer, I also met Mick Jagger for the first time.” O.K., I thought to myself, I’m in.
In 1973 Ms. Robinson was a young writer for Creem magazine and the British weekly New Musical Express. She met Mr. Jagger at an Eric Clapton concert. He walked over to mock her obsession with rock fashion. In a campy voice, Mr. Jagger said, “
Jimmy Page was wearing a pink satin jacket.” Ms. Robinson replied by telling him that his sequined shoes were tacky.
Ms. Robinson seemed to be everywhere in the rock world of the 1970s and ’80s, often as the only woman in a roomful of boys. (“Male musicians in a band are always called ‘the boys,’ ” she explains. “Men who are now well into their 60s — some in their 70s — when they are on tour, are referred to as ‘the boys.’ ”)
She wrote for, or was an editor at, several early rock magazines. She understood fashion and was an eye-popping presence herself. She liked flared jeans and halter tops and huge sunglasses and rarely went to sleep before 4 a.m. She traveled with the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin on tour; she spent a vast number of nights wedged into clubs like CBGB and Max’s Kansas City. She carried a tape recorder that was nearly always clicked on.
Ms. Robinson wasn’t a rock critic, one of those “boys who had ambitions to become the next Norman Mailer,” as she puts it. She wrote gossip columns; she did interviews. She was a press liaison for the Stones while writing about them herself. “ ‘Conflict of interest’ was not a concept in the rock press at that time,” she says. She got up close because bands weren’t worried about her. “I was with them to get a story,” she says about going on tour with Led Zeppelin, “not to judge.”
She writes that she didn’t sleep with her subjects (she was married) and rarely, if ever, took drugs, but she was definitely, to borrow part of the title of Pamela Des Barres’s excellent memoir about being a groupie, with the band.
Ms. Robinson later became a music columnist for The New York Post, and is now a contributing editor for Vanity Fair. “There Goes Gravity” is her attempt to put her busy life into context, to tell some good stories, to speak about being a rare female journalist in rock’s early period. She gets some of this done. But “There Goes Gravity” is an oddly desultory book, often a joyless data dump, padded with long quotations from stale interviews.
Part of the problem — it’s hard to put this delicately — is that Ms. Robinson isn’t an especially careful writer. The clichés sometimes come two to a sentence: “The entire MainMan staff was living the high life — lavish hotel suites, catering, plenty of drugs — and traveling hither and yon.” She tends to declare the most obvious things about performers (“Bono had a charismatic stage presence”) and to miss why they matter to so many people.
By the end of this volume, she’s begun to ramble. About eating cheeseburgers with Eminem, Ms. Robinson says: “I then went off on a tangent about how it makes perfect sense that I don’t like to fly. If you can’t even get a cheeseburger the way you order it, I asked, how are we supposed to expect that airplane pilots know what the hell they’re doing?”
Ms. Robinson frequently reminds us how much time she’s spent with musicians. On Patti Smith: “I must have hundreds of hours of tape.” On John Lennon: “We talked that day for hours.” On the rapper Proof: “Proof and I talked for several hours that day.” She is clearly an insider. She introduced, she tells us, David Bowie to Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, and Ray Davies of the Kinks and Chrissie Hynde, who would later become a couple.
Yet you rarely feel you are getting a privileged look at these people. About traveling with bands like the Stones, she declares, “If you’re not having sex with someone on a tour, or participating in the drugs, you really are on a different tour than everyone else.” There’s a remoteness to much of this material, and Ms. Robinson seems remote from her earlier self.
This memoir has its small joys, for sure. The author confronts Keith Richards over his infamous allegation that Mick Jagger has a small penis. Ms. Robinson once lent Mr. Jagger a pair of sheer bikini underpants, in which he was photographed by Annie Leibovitz. Ms. Robinson tells Mr. Richards that Mr. Jagger “actually has quite a big one.” He replies, “Mine’s bigger.”
She is shrewd on Michael Jackson’s breathy public voice and his more commanding private one. She knew all the early rock critics and was certain Richard Meltzer was going to be the famous one, not Lester Bangs. (“Death can do that for a career.”) Her descriptions of parties can be droll: “Uri Geller was there, bending spoons.”
She is deft on the hierarchy of backstage passes. Among her friends is Fran Lebowitz, who sometimes pitched in on headline ideas for magazines Ms. Robinson wrote for. Among Ms. Lebowitz’s were: “Average White Band — I’ll Say.”
When Ms. Robinson interviews a rock star, she tells us, she sets up not one but three cassette recorders. No technical malfunction is going to thwart one of her sessions. In “There Goes Gravity,” it becomes clear she has it all on tape. You wish she’d gotten more on the page.
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