Guns N' Roses - Watch You Bleed (2010) - Plot & Excerpts
This is a book for anyone interested in rock music. It gives a good insight into what happens when talented, young, disturbed people rise to fame quickly and don't know what to do with it.Having read Stephen Davis' book about Led Zeppelin, Hammer of The Gods, I was interested to see his take on this band. Davis pulls no punches. Davis has a way of turning up the descriptive dial when describing music often crossing over from being a fan of the music into describing a spiritual like connection with the music. This is something Davis also did with Hammer of the Gods and can be disturbing and sometimes frustrating until you stop to think that a band as intensely popular as Guns N Roses and Led Zeppelin were many of the fans of these bands felt a spiritual connection with those bands. The best things about this book is openening up the story and allowing it to spill out in all the facts and facets of it. The reader gets a better understanding of the reality of this band and it is glorious, horrifying and intensely interesting. I'm very conflicted about this book. The writing is mediocre-to-bad, the content sketchy and mostly available from the Behind the Music and various interviews (did he have any real sources or interviews?). There's some great anecdotes, but most fans will have heard them before and the ones I haven't I can't trust the author so that throws everything into doubt. He contradicts himself directly, often on the same page.Also, full disclosure, I've only read until Izzy leaves because after that is like X Files season 8 and 9 to me -- they don't exist. So, while we're talking about Izzy, while I don't think he gets his due in this book, at least the author seems to have some sense of how important he was rather than just Axl and Slash.(WRITE A EFFING BOOK ALREADY IZZY!!!)So yeah, I read this book for Izzy being snarky in interviews and hustling and just out-cooling everyone and it delivered that. And maybe I'm the only person who does actually care what the band was wearing at every show of their 87 tour, but again, you can still watch all those concerts. It's also one of the only books that has made me laugh on the train, out loud. So conflicted. I have many thoughts about this book and I doubt any of them are helpful to those considering reading it. Who knew I could have so many thoughts about this trash? Maybe that more of an endorsement than anything else I've said.Ok, take a moment to contemplate how great Izzy is.
What do You think about Guns N' Roses - Watch You Bleed (2010)?
I loved GnR so much as a teen, so obviously I must read this book.
—mickeymarcz
Could have told the story in about 100 pages less
—JLEE0120
