Why I love music memoirs

From Elton John’s nappies to Morris Day bickering with Prince:

The best thing I can say for the Grammys — arguably the televised awards show that’s least representative of the quality of the art it purports to celebrate — is that watching the Grammys has become an annual reminder of how little music we share. We don’t all hear the same songs. We don’t all recognize the same musicians. We don’t even buy music anymore. Which is why artists tour all the time now, their vacations are splashed across social media accounts and selling-out to corporations no longer carries a stigma.

Their currency is no longer their music but themselves, their reputations, their failures, their schedules, their lifestyles, their personal tragedies, their self-doubt — their stories.

It’s why, in the past few months alone, I have learned that Elton John wears an adult diaper onstage and during his 2017 Las Vegas residency, while “walking across the stage, basking in the crowd’s applause and punching the air, I was also, unbeknown to the audience, copiously urinating.” Or that Alicia Keys doesn’t get along with her dad and refers to him as “Craig.” Or that Liz Phair, harboring a sore throat, once tried to blow off a Chicago holiday show then settled for faking her way through a Jason Mraz duet.

Remember the old music video for “Last Christmas” by Wham!? Production was a drunken bacchanal, leading to naked steeplechase through the halls of a Swiss hotel.

I know this because, judging simply by the sheer volume of pop star autobiographies recently released or arriving shortly, we live in the golden age of the music memoir.

And really, the last thing they often want to write about is music.

Not that I’m entirely complaining. Phair’s “Horror Stories” (Random House, $28) barely addresses the origins of her early ’90s indie landmark, “Exile in Guyville,” famously a song-by-song response to misogyny in the

Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main St.” But it does recount sexual harassment during an office job at a “prominent Chicago advertising agency,” then tells of another summer job, at Ravinia, where she was pantsed in the kitchen by adult male prep cooks.

The best music memoirs are not so different from superhero origins. You’re a witness at the reinvention. But rather than gamma rays, the spark is a Dizzy Gillespie album (Flea), The Band’s “Music from Big Pink” (Elton John) or a Green Day concert (Tegan and Sara). You get a sense of what it felt like to cower then roar, to be that shy schoolboy who later summons the self-possession it takes to sing before 20,000 nightly, anywhere on Earth. Literary fame wasn’t in the cards; these authors were more likely to fail English and get detention. But now they have the lives that writers of more mundane existences — which is the majority of writers — would kill for. They are living the dream.

I have a weakness for these books. I go for autobiographies of musicians. Way, way too often. I read a lot of them. Even bad ones. Especially bad ones. There are a lot of bad ones. Whenever I tell people this, they look at me as if I were committing myself to sensory deprivation. Which, in a way, you are when you mainline music memoirs. See, I would never use “mainline” unless I was under the influence of autobiographies often full of drugs and “written” by pop stars. My brain operates differently while reading them. Their rhythms become my rhythms. I’m all in for the ascent and relatable parts; by the time success curdles into decadence, I’m hooked.

So I waste a lot of time wading through muck before I strike gold, yet without my addiction to these books, I wouldn’t understand life inside the Rolling Stones’ bubble (Keith Richard’s smart 2010 book “Life”); how it feels to be the most-disliked member of the Wu-Tang Clan (U-God’s touching “Raw” from 2018); the value of keeping your mouth shut as a member of Judas Priest (K.K. Downing’s “Heavy Nights”); or being married to Phil Spector (Ronnie Spector’s harrowing 1990 memoir “Be My Baby”). “Running With the Devil” from 2017 isn’t quite a musician memoir; it’s by Noel E. Monk, former manager of Van Halen, who paints an image of entitlement so ugly, you yearn for levity — such as that time, backstage at the Aragon in Chicago in 1978, while opening for Journey, Eddie Van Halen hit Steve Perry with so much guacamole the Journey leader began to cry.

Bad behavior is always a plus. The downside is that, in many of these books, redemption and recovery becomes a drag for a reader, and sometimes the artist. Which is one reason why Elton John’s excellent “Me” (Henry Holt, $30) — the best of the latest wave of music memoirs — flows so effortlessly: He’s deliciously upfront about addiction, and even better on the difficulty of recovering when you’ve spent decades surrounded by a culture of enablers. He regards his crazy world for what it is. He checks into rehab in 1990 — at Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, Ill., of all places — then quickly realizes he hasn’t operated a washing machine since the ’60s. He flips out and insists he’s being treated differently. He writes:

“That afternoon in Chicago, I stormed out of the meeting, went back to my room, packed by bag and left. I got as far as the pavement outside. I sat down on a bench with my suitcase and burst into tears. I could easily make some phone calls and get out of here but where was I going to go? Back to London? To do what? Sit around in a dressing gown covered in puke, doing coke and watching porn all day?”

A handful of pages later, Gianni Versace is imploring him to spend $100 million on a tablecloth sewed by nuns. It’s that kind of book, revealing because he never pretends to settle into ordinary life.