Music writer and editor Yuval Taylor’s been involved with some high-minded books in his career. As a senior editor at Chicago Review Press, the local nonfiction house whose umbrella includes the music and film imprint A Cappella and the Lawrence Hill Press line of titles in African-American issues, he’s shepherded to publication a collection of slave narratives, an anthology of Frederick Douglass’s writings, and the English translation of the Portuguese title Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music That Seduced the World. His own new book, due out next February from Norton, is a collaboration with British writer and musician Hugh Barker called Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music.
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There are many different kinds of authenticity in the music world, though, and Taylor isn’t only interested in musicians. Last year Chicago Review reissued I’m With the Band–Pamela Des Barres’s classic memoir of her life as a groupie and consort of the likes of Jim Morrison and Keith Moon. I remember it being passed around promiscuously when it came out in 1987, a seedy paperback full of juicy details about Mick Jagger’s tongue and Jimmy Page’s whips. Nowadays, with 20 years of feminism, cultural studies, and pop memoir to support it, the same book feels very different. Des Barres’s vivid prose and frank romanticism read like a letter from a long-gone bohemia, from an Anais Nin who doesn’t bother with poetic euphemisms; Des Barres herself emerges as a much more compelling character than anyone she slept with.
Taylor says it was a sample chapter from the new book, on Tura Satana’s affair with Elvis, that grabbed him. “Satana later starred in Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill! And had an affair with Tony Bennett too, but the chapter focuses on how she taught Elvis how to French kiss and give head, and how Elvis wanted to marry her. I found it very engaging indeed.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Mireya Acierto.
