But we’ll get to that in just a little bit -or- Slash wrote a book?!

I doubt from a quick glance of my web server logs that anybody reads this weblog anymore. That’s alright, tho. I was really sick of writing it for awhile in 2006. And 2007. And, well, until recently. I think I was a bit illiterate for a period and that gross lack of input lead to a lack of output. Then, and more importantly, I had lots of things going on my life that made for great stories that I chose to keep to myself.

Quickly, then.

1. I got married last month.
2. We bought 38 bottles of wine on our honeymoon to Sonoma.
3. Over the past two years, we’re pretty sure that Emerson the Wonder Dog nearly died at least once. He’s fine at this time.
4. I’ve started making music again but this time on my own schedule.
5. I left Unix administration for engineering only to return to Unix administration last fall.
6. We stalked our local Toys ‘R’ Us until they got the Nintendo Wii in stock. The only thing more fun than buying the first one was buying the second one. We gave the first to my sister in law and the second, well, we haven’t opened the second one yet. But we will!
7. Our friend AW bought me the “Slash” biography for Christmas. KLP may have been jealous because her gift was the “Joy of Cooking”. At first I was really thrilled with this ironic gift.

Let’s talk about this Slash book. While I’m a sucker for pop culture, there are certain things I’m wont to avoid. At the top of that list is “rocker biographies”, mainly because:

• I’ve probably already heard everything I need to know about Ozzy Osbourne’s snorting of ants on VH-1’s Behind the Music.
• The stories lose their punch when written by a ghostwriter.
• I mean, really, even if he wrote the book himself, why would you expect anything even half decent from some guy who may have written a song called “Rattlesnake Shake”?

All this said, of course, meant that I ended up reading the Slash book. I think before I was going to put it on a bookshelf (so that people would visit the house and ask excellent questions like: “You have the SLASH BOOK?! DID YOU READ IT?!”) I thumbed through it if only to get a glance at what I was missing. Then I saw a picture of a young Slash riding a BMX bike. So I read a few pages. After reading about 50 pages I realized that I had committed myself to finishing this book.

So, dear reader, think of this blog entry as a public service announcement and its message is really simple:

Please don’t waste your time on the Slash book like I did mine. Instead do something more productive like hitting a rack of breakable dishes with a cast iron pan. You will thank me for this.

In case you need to know why, well, don’t say I didn’t warn you:

• The Slash book is really, really poorly written. You can kind of tell that Slash wrote a lot of it. I guess he gets a point or two for not clearly hiring a ghostwriter to do the dirty work but since the book is also lacking in insight or — as a reader I came to settle for as little as possible — even half-decent stories.
• Nothing in the Slash book is all that interesting. He seems like a pretty boring, aimless, lazy guy overall. I’m not really into the “drugs are cool” thing at all, so reading about Slash’s drug problem got really tedious after 5 or so pages. Unfortunately, he wrote about it for a large part of 300 pages.
• Slash was a little drunk or bored while writing this book. Often times he’d end a paragraph with the phrase “but we’ll get to that in just a little bit” and would never quite return to what he was “getting to”. This happened more as the book progressed.
• I theorized that this book may actually be Slash’s implementation of an elaborate drinking game by page 8 (every time you see the words intense, intensity, or bohemian you have to drink). By page 9 I was convinced (every time you see the phrase “I can’t imagine why” you have to drink). Slash’s use of the words intense, intensity, and bohemian was never ending. At some point, I kind of felt that he was beginning to interchange them.
• Slash’s story about how he got the nickname “Slash” was pretty boring overall. I expected something much, much cooler, like how he gained a reputation as an adept sharpened-toothbrush-fighter during his stay at the county jail. No such luck. Unfortunately, if I recall, his nickname came from “slashing” through the room, like at a party.
• I really wanted to hear some dirt about the GNR breakup, because after all, I’m still (not really) waiting for that Chinese Democracy album to come out.
• Outside of being a seemingly useless fellow, Slash seems to be humorless as well. Guys like Ozzy are funny and self-deprecating, even if only unintentionally, and this adds to their charm. Guys like Slash throw around words like “bohemian” for 400 pages until you’re left hoping that the next page you read contains the liner notes.
• It’s a miracle that GNR released one GNR album, must less two albums and an EP. Seriously, they really wasted lots of Geffen’s money.